by S. A. Hunt
My father’s agent saw it too, and I expect he also saw the weird feathery quill that Sawyer was carrying, some sort of ridiculous ostrich-feather pen. He was also carrying a little camcorder, a GoPro. He was actually filming the funeral.
“You know what they’re gonna want,” Bayard had said on the phone. “What do you think about it?”
“I think I’m in big trouble,” I had replied, which was the absolute truth.
Winton stood beside the girl. To my alarm, his voice was confident. “Thank you, Judy.”
Judith continued. It struck me that she looked rather old to be wearing such an elaborate costume; she had to have been in her thirties or early forties. “But once it caught on, it burned like wildfire. What this petition requested was that continuing authorship of the Fire and Fiddle series be passed onto another writer, one particularly familiar with Mr. Brigham, as well as his style and subject matter. That writer would of course be Mr. Sidney Ross Brigham, his only son, a notable author and artist in his own right.”
I experienced something not unlike being sprayed in the face with gasoline mid-cigarette. As soon as her scripted speech finished, everyone turned to admire my now-crimson face. I managed to smile, although I suppose it might have more resembled the snarl of a cornered timber wolf.
“Mr. Brigham?” Judith indicated, and as I rose from my seat, I felt like a helium balloon slipping a toddler’s grip. I approached the podium through a chaos of applause, feeling a bit lightheaded, shaking their hands when I got there.
Sawyer leaned toward the podium, tugging the mike closer to his face. “We feel that your father would have wanted you to finish his magnum opus, and we as fans of his work hereby request authorship to be passed down to his son, so that the series can end on a proper note. Or, perhaps, even continue if need be.”
If need be? I was beginning to feel like a virgin sacrifice on his royal bamboo sedan being carried up the mountain to be offered to the tribal volcano god. Sawyer Winton held up the ostrich feather like a trophy goose and thrust it in my direction. I resisted the crazy urge to stick it in his throat like Nicholson’s Joker and accepted it, taking Judith’s place behind the mike.
As she turned to leave, her broadsword scabbard bumped one of the full-length candlesticks standing next to the casket and set it metronoming. I slid into place and grabbed the candle, settling it before it could fall over into the fake spray of flowers around Ed’s casket and start an open-casket cremation. I could just see the headlines in tomorrow’s paper.
“Hello, everybody,” I said, way too close to the microphone. My muffled voice erupted from the speakers flanking the dais. “First, I would like to thank you all for coming. From what I understand, my father loved all of his fans from the bottom of his heart and put every drop of blood, sweat, and tears he had into telling his stories for you guys.
“Second, I’m going to admit that I’m no good at public speaking whatsoever, and I have a very limited imagination, so in lieu of a visual aid to help me with my stage fright, I’m going to have to ask all of you to remove your clothing.”
No one laughed. My face felt like I’d been bobbing for ice cubes.
“I’ve actually been following the progress of the petition since not long after its inception,” I said, “—and I am deeply moved by your dedication to my father’s life’s work.”
I turned and glanced into the coffin behind me. My father lay face-up in the box, against his lifelong wishes, his hands pressed around the handle of a quicksilver broadsword, his eyes closed (thank the stars), dressed in an incongruous white robe. I realized with disconnected bemusement—and a vague horror—that he looked like Gandalf Lebowski, ready for entombment in the catacombs of a bowling alley.
I faced the crowd again, biting my lips to keep from laughing at my own imagination.
Ahh, the Inappropriate Laugh.
Most of them were looking at me with sympathy except for my mother, who I was glad had the restraint to keep from hurling her purse and sensible shoes across the room at my face. I took a second to gaze at the floor and compose myself again. “However, I regret that I must inform you: I was not remotely as familiar with his fantasy series as you, his eternal fans.
“Some of you may be aware that I was very young when my parents separated, and although he was awarded visitation custody, I did not see my father very much at all. Indeed, after a couple of years, my mother Caroline had to move up north for business, and I only saw my father Ed on holidays,” I said, staring down at the novel on the podium.
“Which I don’t suppose inconvenienced him very much, because after the move, the few times I ever spoke to him was when I sought him out myself. I’m not sure that he was aware of my birthday at all, nor did he acknowledge me on Christmas. Or Easter. Or Thanksgiving. Or Yom Kippur. Or even Kwanzaa. He didn’t even come to my Army graduation or come see me when I got home from deployment.”
The resentment made me brave. My voice seemed to carry farther than it had before, rolling out of me on wheels greased by bitter memories. “In fact, I’m not one-hundred-percent sure that my existence registered in Edward Brigham’s mind at all after 1986,” I said with a shallow sigh, opening the book. On the title page, my father had written To Judy Raske — To The Bounds of Behest and Beyond!
“So, I must admit that I may not be the most suitable replacement. I am deeply, deeply sorry that I must tell you that I have to decline the inheritance of E. R. Brigham’s series The Fiddle and The Fire.”
The entire gathering seemed to freeze in time, and each of the one hundred or more people I could see from the podium bore the expression of the proverbial “deer in the headlights”. I flinched at the sight of the near-instant transformation of the hundred-odd people before me from bereaved mourners to astounded lynch mob.
It’s also when I noticed the cameraman and his news correspondent standing next to him, standing in the back of the chapel, nestled in amongst the other attendees, ready and waiting to make sure the revolution would be televised.
The longer I studied their shock waiting for pitchforks and torches, the darker their faces got, until they were all murmuring to each other and glaring at me as if I’d changed the formula for Coca-Cola. This entire vignette, by the way, seemed to stretch on for three hours, but it in fact persisted a mere twenty-five seconds.
“Really?” asked Judith, her eyes wide and bright in the window-filtered afternoon sun.
“That—kinda sucks,” said Sawyer, and I watched the joy drain out of his face. The mild satisfaction I was feeling at cracking his boy-band confidence faltered, and the result of my insolence pierced me to my core.
“Look,” I said, sighing, “I apologize for the reaction, everybody. I really do. My father and I just really weren’t on the best of terms to put it mildly, and I don’t know a whole lot about his series. I read some of the first book when I was in the Army, but with work and everything over there, I never really got into it. And after that, well—I pretty much missed the boat, I think.”
Bayard got up and joined us on the dais. “We knew this was coming,” he whispered to me, cupping the microphone with one bear-paw hand, leaning into my face, filling my nostrils with his coffee breath.
I could see my own honey-colored cornered-wolf expression in the reflection of his 70’s bicolor glasses. It struck me that he looked like Hunter S. Thompson if Thompson was thirty pounds heavier and given to picking out ties to wear to Olive Garden.
“And you have no idea just how much this is going to blow up if you agree to step into your father’s shoes,” he was saying. “This could be the next big thing with this Comic-Con crowd. To that end, I’ve been working on a little something in my spare time. A little deal. Something to sweeten the pot.”
“What would that be?” I asked. “Max, you know I’m an artist first. I haven’t written anything worth a crap in ages other than that ghostwriter project, for the climber guy that got stuck in the Colorado mountains a couple years ago. I got a couple gra
phic novels and advertising jobs on the table.”
“HBO wanted to talk about doing a Fiddle TV series before your father passed. Nerf wants to license foam swords and dart revolvers. I’m even getting word of a video game. Of course, you would only see a fraction of it—but this all would make your residuals from Bear With Me look like hobo change.”
I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Sawyer, and his eyes were like scalpel blades. “I’ve read some of your stuff, man. You’re not as bad as you think you are.”
I studied Bayard’s rubbery face and considered his intel, then stared down at the ostrich feather until the world around me faded to gray.
Once I’d had enough of pretending to think about it, I looked over to Sawyer and Judy, staring straight into Sawyer’s camcorder, and said loud enough for the microphone to catch, “You know, they say you can do anything if you put your mind to it. Let me sleep on it, okay? Let me catch up on the series, and I’ll see where we can go from there.”
They both grinned. A few people in the funeral party applauded softly. I scanned the people before me and saw quite a few more beaming faces than just a few minutes prior. Even the teenagers that looked like they woke up in a cave and came straight to the funeral were glowing.
Sawyer leaned into the mike and said, “We won the battle, guys. Here’s hoping we win the war!”
I smiled back at them. Their enthusiasm was infectious—I felt a little excited to be part of this. And then the enormity of the task before me came rushing back in a blast wave of fear.
Ravens and Writing Desks
AFTER THE VIEWING, I STOOD alone at the side of my father’s coffin, looking down at his aged body with a growing sense of sadness that threatened to eat at my edges. Conflicting emotions warred with each other.
Regret, at never bothering to get to know him better, at never closing that gap he created himself. Anger, at myself, for just writing him off as a reclusive hack. Anger at him for disappearing from my life until now. Satisfaction at having an opportunity for achieving something wonderful thrust onto me.
A cool, hollow void where a great weeping sorrow should have been at losing my father.
“I don’t think for a moment that talent is genetic,” I told the man in the coffin. “I’m no writer! At least not the kind of writer that twenty thousand people sign a petition over. I am definitely not my father’s son. What the hell am I going to do?”
My father said nothing, of course. The broadsword he clutched in his spotted hands gleamed bright, blinding bright, in the dusty light of the octagon window in the back wall where the slopes of the roof met. I turned around to what I thought was an empty viewing room and Bayard was standing there with his hands in the pockets of his suit jacket.
He stepped toward me and hugged me out of sympathy. I surprised myself by being grateful for it. He took off his rose-colored Thompson glasses and hung them by one stem from the collar of his shirt, and regarded me with ancient eyes. The ponderous bags under his watery hound-dog eyes made him look thirty years older.
“When I was a kid,” Bayard said, with a vague, wistful smile, “I came walking out of the town library and saw something big and black in the grass next to the sidewalk. I went to go see what it was and it turned out to be a raven, lying there on his back, looking up at me and cawing. I guess it got hit by a passing car and knocked onto the median.
“Well, that big dumb bird let me pick him up and carry him home. He had a busted wing and a broken leg. My dad, he was a doctor, he had a little clinic in Ohio, he helped me put splints on that raven.”
I smirked in spite of myself. “Does this story have a point?”
Bayard took a box of Camels out of his pocket and started packing them against the palm of his hand. “Walk outside with me.”
We hung out in the funeral home carport. Golden rays of sunlight filtered through the filthy washrag clouds and lit up the green leaves of the dogwoods flanking the driveway. The listless hiss and roar of oblivious traffic passing on the street down the hill was soothing in its detachment.
The literary agent lit a cigarette, took a deep draw, and blew the smoke across the carport in a thin stream. “A couple months later, that fat-assed raven was one hundred percent back to health. I didn’t want to, but my dad made me take him outside and let him go.
“No matter what I did, he absolutely would not leave. I shook the shit out of that dumb bird trying to get him off my arm. He knew he had a good thing and he didn’t want to leave. I took him out every day that week trying to let him go and he refused to do it.”
I gave him a Clint Eastwood squint from the corner of my eye and folded my arms. “Are you about to tell me that that bird never forgot how to fly and if I just believe in myself and quit resting on my laurels expecting the world to hand me a living, I can fly too?”
“A few days later he got ahold of my brother and tore him up, so my dad had to take him out and shoot him,” Bayard said, flicking his ashes onto the carport floor. “I’m telling you that if you don’t start flying, I’m going to shoot you.”
I laughed and he took a deadpan drag off the unfiltered Camel.
“Those things will kill you,” I said.
“World War II didn’t kill my dad, and neither did Camels, and if my wife couldn’t do it, this Camel ain’t gonna do it either.”
We stood there a minute, listening to the traffic. “I always wondered how Carl got that scar on his neck.”
“Well, now you know. So what are you gonna do, Ross?”
At that point, it hit me that over the course of my life, I’d probably seen more of this man than I had my own father. The idea stunned me. I managed to say, “Not sure. I guess write the damn book.”
“Attaboy. What made you change your mind?”
“Those people’s faces.”
“Very commendable. You sure it wasn’t the money?”
“No. Maybe that Winton guy’s right. Maybe I’m not so bad. Maybe I can do it. I don’t owe them anything, but...what kind of guy would I be if I didn’t even try?”
“It wasn’t the fame? Not even a little bit?”
“No. I just don’t—well, I guess I don’t really want to let them down after all.”
“You’re a damned liar.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, smirking at him. “Maybe the fame. Just a little bit.”
“Attaboy.”
_______
My mom, Bayard, and I were the last ones to leave—or at least I thought we were. On the way out, I passed the doorway into a little kitchenette and spotted Sawyer Winton sitting at the table inside, drinking a cup of coffee, his camera off and lying on the table.
As soon as he saw me, he spoke up, “Hey, Mr. Brigham!” and started to get out of his chair.
I told my companions I would be out in a minute and ducked into the little break room. “Don’t get up, Sawyer,” I said, settling into a chair myself. “And you can call me Ross.”
“Okay...Ross,” said Sawyer, sitting back down. But when he saw the expression on my face, he tensed up again. We sat there for a long moment like this, staring at each other. He pretended to fiddle with the camera, turning it on, and put it back down at an angle that captured both of us. No doubt some sort of documentation, experience footage, for YouTube.
At long last, Sawyer blurted, instead of whatever he had meant to discuss with me, “...What? What is it?”
“I’m a wee bit pissed,” I said. “What possessed you two to bring up the petition in the middle of my father’s viewing? Call me up in front of my dead dad and put me on the spot in front of my mother and God and everybody? That reporter? Did you both lose your minds? What the hell, dude.”
“Yeah,” he said, looking down at the table as he picked his fingernails. “I guess that wasn’t the most tactful thing to do, yeah, maybe. I guess I just thought something like that deserved some kind of—I don’t know, ceremonial feel, you know? A couple of the others thought it was kinda bad form, too. I’m sorry, Mr. Brigham.”
“Well...I know you meant well.”
I let the moment linger for emphasis, then added, “So what did you want to talk about?”
“I just wanted to thank you for considering the book, and to let you know that I’m always available if you have any questions about the lore and canon of the series. I’ve been a lifelong fan ever since I read the first book when I was in third grade. I’m gonna be in town a couple days visiting with a few of the other fans while I’m here.”
“Third grade, huh?” I said, taking out my cellphone. “What’s your cellphone number?”
As I entered his number into my contacts list, Sawyer said, “My teacher, Mrs. Kirby, was reading it, gave it to me when she was done with it. I finished it in like, a week or two, and she was so impressed and stuff that she went out and bought me my own copy of the second one as soon as it came out, later that year.”
“That’s cool.”
“Look, uhh...Ross,” said Sawyer, taking something out of his jacket. It was an elderly, dog-eared copy of my father’s second book, The Cape and The Castle. The pages were yellowed, the art on the paperback’s cover was faded by time and sun, gone green-blue. The picture of my father on the back depicted a much younger man, his hair and beard lush and dark.
“I...I know...you didn’t really have a good relationship with your dad. And I know you couldn’t give two damns about his novels. My dad died in a car accident and left me and my mother when I was seven, so I can understand, maybe. You just sit in your room and you think and think and think and you just wanna know—you just wanna know why, right?”
I studied my hands as they rested on the table in front of me, and glanced over at the accusatory eye of the GoPro camera.
“This series is what kept me company, man. You said you didn’t see much of your dad. Well, I never saw my dad ever again,” Sawyer said. “I would lie up at night reading your dad’s books until I got sleepy. Then for Christmas one year, my mom bought me the audiobook for the third book in the series. You know, the one Sam Elliott did in ‘95.