by Torey Hayden
There was a small pause. I looked over at him. ‘What about the other one?’
He turned his head in my direction. ‘What other one?’
‘You know. The one you and I were going to build. Before everything happened.’
‘Oh, that one.’ He shrugged. ‘We never did get very far. All we had really were the mirrors and lenses.’
‘What did you do with them?’
‘They’re in a box under my bed.’
Again, a pause. Paul picked up one of the dog leashes and swung it around.
‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking maybe I’ll sell those too. I told that guy from Dodge City that I had them, and he sounded sort of interested. I might as well. They’re just taking up room. And I can always use the money.’
‘But if we don’t build that telescope and you’ve sold the other one, you won’t have any,’ I replied, thinking not only of the hours of fun we had had together stargazing but also of all the volumes of notes and observations Paul had made over the years. He had started watching the skies when he was twelve and had charted the stars on almost every clear night since. ‘You’re going to lose track of where everything is in the sky, if you quit watching.’
Still swinging the leash, he studied its motion. Finally, he let it drop between his hands. ‘Yeah, but… I mean, I couldn’t have done it at college anyway, could I? There won’t be the time. And they wouldn’t let you set up a telescope anyplace interesting. Besides, somebody’d probably just rip it off, and then where would I be? A lot of bucks poorer.’ He picked up the leash, coiled it and put it between us on the bench. ‘What the hell. It was just kid stuff anyhow.’
We were only yards away from the playground part of the park, and there was a little girl climbing up the slide. She was very young, hardly more than a toddler, and when she got to the top of the slide, she was afraid to come down. The grandfatherly man who was with her stood at the bottom of the slide and attempted to talk her into trying. His voice was coaxing but embroidered with impatience.
Paul and I sat without talking. Minutes went by. Paul whistled one of the dogs back from the edge of the road.
‘What are you going to do with all that money from the telescope?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know.’
One of the dogs came running over to us. Even though it was fully grown, it had a floppy-puppy gait, and that goofy, gleeful expression of joy that is so endearing in Labradors.
‘You want to come with me?’ I asked. ‘If you sold the lenses and mirrors too that’d probably be enough money.’
‘What do you mean? To Wales?’
‘Yeah,’ I said and grinned. ‘It’d be a blast. We could have a really good time, the two of us, just bumming around.’
There was a slight smile on his lips, and I knew he was considering it. The smile never quite faded. He lay his hand on my thigh.
‘Why don’t you?’ I urged.
Finally, a sigh, and he shook his head. ‘I can’t.’
‘Why not? Your folks wouldn’t care.’
‘They would. My dad would. He’d think I was screwing around with his money.’
‘But it’s your money.’
‘Well, so he’d think I was screwing around with my money then. Same thing. Just as bad. Actually, probably worse, because it’d make him believe he was right about me and the way I do things. Besides,’ he said, ‘I have that computer course in Fort Hayes, remember?’
‘Stick the stupid computer course, Paul. You can do that some other time.’
He didn’t respond immediately. The one dog remained near us, and Paul rumpled the fur around its collar with his hand. Looking over to see what had become of the little girl and the man, I noticed them by the swings. I wondered how the conflict on the slide had been resolved. I hadn’t been watching.
‘The thing is,’ Paul said, ‘I really need that course. Like I was saying, I got to know computing to be any good at statistics, and this is my chance to get a head start.’
‘You’re really getting serious about this statistics stuff, aren’t you?’
He shrugged. ‘Well, you got to get serious some time, haven’t you? There’s about ten million other people out there trying to get good jobs, and the only way I’m going to make it is to not goof around and wreck my chances.’
I looked away.
He sighed. Kicking the dirt under the bench with the toe of his shoes, he sighed again. ‘Things change, Les,’ he said softly. ‘I’m beginning to understand that. Things got to change. You got to grow up. I couldn’t keep playing Star Wars for ever. If I learned anything this spring, it’s been that. The telescope and stuff, they were good fun, but they weren’t the real world. The stars are still going to be up there. They don’t need me watching them to keep them in their places. They’ll go on without me.’
As he spoke, I sat motionless beside him. The sunlight was very, very warm. On my hair, on my shoulders, on my legs. Perspiration soaked into my shirt under my arms. I stared at the ground and lost awareness of what else was going on around us in the park.
Paul was still talking, but even he faded. What overtook my thoughts was his reference to Star Wars. It pulled me unexpectedly back to that very first night we had dated, when he took me out to Ladder Creek. I was walking through the barren landscape, through the bitter, cold January darkness while he told me that he shot rats on the creek bank and pretended that he was Luke Skywalker, trying to save the freedom of the universe by hitting the Death Star. And I remember thinking, What kind of first-rate idiot have I uncovered here?
I turned my head to look at him. He was a very ordinary-looking person. Brown hair, hazel eyes, T-shirt, jeans, running shoes. He had his hands clasped, elbows resting on his knees. He was studying his knuckles. Suddenly, I wanted to touch him. I wanted to reach over and touch him and bring him back to the way we had been that first night on Ladder Creek. Or in the wayside park in Eads, Colorado, when we had fumbled in the dark. We didn’t fumble any more, and as I sat there in the sunlight, I wished sadly that we still did.
‘What I’ll do is give you my mom’s new address,’ he was saying, ‘and then as soon as I know where I’m staying in Fort Hayes, I’ll write her. And then you write from Wales when you know where you’ll be at. And then when I get to Ohio State, I’ll write and tell you what my new address is there.’
I didn’t speak. I couldn’t speak. I was still half-trapped in January darkness, and what was in my mind was that for all his trying, Paul had failed to hit the Death Star.
Then came the last night. My backpack was full and settled by the front door. My travelling clothes were ironed and waiting to be put on first thing in the morning. The airline tickets lay ready on the table in the kitchen.
After supper that evening my father and I sat together on the front step. He was still wearing his work shirt and had rolled the sleeves up. When he came home from work, he seldom showered and changed as he had before, so there was always a smell of oil and sweat about him. It was an odour evocative of hard, masculine work, not unpleasant but different from the friendly smells of Lifebuoy soap and flannel shirts I had been used to.
‘You will be careful, won’t you?’ he said to me. I was running a finger over the rough surface of the concrete step. ‘It is a foreign county. Just because they speak English there, don’t forget. It is a foreign country.’
‘You keep telling me.’
‘Well, I want you to be careful.’
‘I will. I said I would be and I will.’
‘Well …’ he said.
There was silence then, pregnant with unsaid things. I rested my elbows on my knees and my chin on my hands and gazed out over the street. The neighbourhood was alive with the noise of summer, sound after sound layered on top of one another. In the street was one of Mrs Beckerman’s cats, rolling in the dust. It was black and white and a lot skinnier than she was. I watched it and had to restrain myself from going over to pet it.
‘I hope you understand,�
� my father said, ‘that no matter where you go, no matter how far away, you’re always going to wake up in the morning and find you’re still Lesley O’Malley. You’ll never change that fact.’
‘I’m not trying to change it, Dad. I already know that.’
‘Knowing it and understanding it are two different things.’
Again the silence. My father was also watching the cat. I felt crawly with excitement about leaving in the morning, and yet I was thinking back in some nearly obscured part of my mind that if he told me not to go, I wouldn’t.
Megan materialized and sat down on my father’s other side. She was barefoot. She looked like some wild thing you see in those illustrated fantasy books, with her long, long straight hair and her thin, rangy limbs. Her knees were scabbed. Her legs were already turning brown in the late spring heat. Without looking at her I could still see her in my peripheral vision, and I was struck then by that untamed, atavistic quality she always had about her. I’d never been that way, never in all my life. I’d always been the tame one, responsible and ordinary.
‘I’m sorry,’ Dad said to me. ‘I’m sorry things turned out like they have for you, Lessie. I’m sorry whatever it was, the burden or the expectations or whatever, has been so heavy. I wish we could have been a better family.’
‘Dad, let’s not talk about it, OK?’
There was movement in his body as he readjusted himself on the step.
Chin on my hands still, I watched the cat, which continued to roll languidly in the warm dust. The roar of canned laughter wafted through the Beckermans’ open window, and I raised my head to see the flicker of their television set. Somewhere, children were shouting. Megan reached down and scratched her leg.
Mr Reilly next door started up his lawn mower in the back of the house. Megan picked up a blade of grass from beside the step. She put it between her thumbs and tried to make it whistle. She couldn’t. She tried again. My father reached a hand over to stop her. She dropped the blade, and I saw the concrete go damp around it from her saliva.
The cat rose and, with a shimmy of its coat, shook the loose dust off.
‘I ran away once,’ my father said softly. ‘Did I ever tell you about that?’
‘I’m not running away, Dad.’
‘My father wanted me to be a priest.’ Elbows on his knees, he clasped his hands together. ‘It’s the way they did things in those days. The way they did them in Ireland, I guess. He remembered Ireland sometimes. At least he thought he did. Anyway, according to him, the first son became the heir. The second son became a priest.’
There was a pause. I turned my head slightly to see his face without looking directly at him.
‘I used to read to him from the Bible. His eyes were going. Even then, he couldn’t really see to read. Or maybe he just couldn’t read very well. I don’t know. I never did. So, I read to him. From Psalms. Always Psalms. He never wanted to hear anything else.’
Megan slid closer to him. She lay her head against his arm, and he touched her hair. With one hand he worked his fingers into it and pulled the strands out, the way he used to do with Mama’s hair when she put her head in his lap.
‘I remember them bringing him in that day,’ my father was saying. ‘Mother had gone down to Marconi’s. I was out in the cabbages, hoeing. And keeping an eye on Mickey. Mick was maybe two or three then. The two men from up at Oak Grange brought him in. Bill and Tupper, I think their names were. Or maybe it was Tucker. Bill and Tucker. They were carrying my father between them. His arm … it was hanging like this. Loose, you know, hanging down, and all I saw was the blood on his shirt. And they took him into the parlour.
‘I told them not to. Mother always kept the parlour done up nice. For when Father MacCauley came around. Or Mrs Mavis Jones. I told Bill and Tucker that and that Mother’d whip me if I let them get blood on the parlour floor.’
My father paused. He had Megan clasped tenderly against him, his hand still entwined in her hair. She sat, examining her thumbnail, her expression far away.
‘He slapped me, Bill did, across the mouth with the back of his hand. Hard enough to hurt. He said, “Boy, now we can’t get him up the stairs like this. We can’t take him up to the bedroom, so we’re leaving him here.” And they laid him on the settee in the parlour and he dripped blood all over Mother’s Persian rug.
‘They left then. I guess. I can’t remember exactly. Maybe they went to get the doctor. We didn’t have a phone in those days, and I guess Bill and Tucker must have gone for him.
‘I remember thinking Father was dying. I knew that. I remember Mickey was crying, and I didn’t know what to do. I just stood and watched the blood spread on the rug. It seemed like hours.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s funny. What I remember most was that the house was cool. I was barefoot and my feet were cold. It was the middle of July. They’d been haying, and it was terribly hot down in the pasture. But the parlour was cold. I remember that, remember thinking that while I was watching him.
‘And he said to me, “You are a useless boy, standing there.” So I went to get the Bible for him. To read to him. I sat down on the rug beside him and started to read the 23rd Psalm and he said, no, to read Psalm 103. “As for a man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.” That’s what he wanted to hear. And when I was done reading, he said to me, “You will go into the priesthood. You belong to the Church.”
‘I said I would. I was scared to bits. I was thirteen and I knew he was going to die there on the settee in the parlour. So I said yes, I’d become a priest. And he said, “Promise me that. Put your hand on the Bible and promise me.” And I did. Of course, I did. He was my father.’
Silence. Megan, still against him, was chewing her fingernails. In spite of all the sounds around us, I could hear the almost rhythmic clipping of her teeth against her nail.
I raised my head and looked out across the street. We were surrounded in a deep, summer warmth. It was not the kind of heat to make you sweat, but dry and soothing, like a well-heated room in winter.
Megan shifted her weight. ‘Is that when you ran away, Daddy? When your father died?’
He shook his head. ‘No. No, actually I didn’t run away for a long time after that. But it was because of that. Because I had promised him and your grandmother and I knew I never could be a priest.’
Megan looked up.
‘I ran away when I was eighteen. The day I turned eighteen. That’s how old you had to be to join the army without your parents’ consent. So, the day I turned eighteen, I simply left the farm and joined up.’
‘But your birthday’s in January,’ I said. ‘I thought you graduated from high school first.’
‘No.’
That was news to me. I glanced over at him.
‘No,’ he said again. ‘I got a diploma eventually. An equivalency diploma after the war. But I never finished high school. All they cared about in the army was that you were old enough. So when I was, I signed up.’
Chin on his knuckles, he gazed at the street. The black-and-white cat was perched on the curb, washing itself.
‘I loved the Church,’ he said, his voice soft. ‘That’s what Mother could never understand, how I was able to love the Church so much and then leave it. I never could explain it to her, so that she’d understand.’
He smiled over at me. ‘Then I met your mama and that’s all there was to it. First your mama, then you, then Meggie. And I never looked back.’
‘Did you ever regret it?’ I asked. ‘Not being a priest, I mean. Did you ever regret marrying Mama instead?’
‘No.’
I sat. Slightly apart from my father and my sister, I kept my knees drawn up, my arms resting on them. The air around us was heavy with the smell of cut grass from the Reillys’ yard. A variety-show host’s voice droned from the television across the street. But the road itself was empty. Even the cat had gone. Absently, I wondere
d what had happened to all those street games kids used to play on summer evenings when I was little.
Beyond the Beckermans’ house, beyond the house behind theirs, the plains were visible. They stretched away into the blackness of an approaching thunderstorm, but the storm was so distant that all I could see of it was the occasional arc of lightning. The thunder was still inaudible, and the clouds had so far failed to deepen the twilight.
‘If that happened to you,’ I said, ‘then you must be able to understand why I have to go.’
‘I suppose I can,’ my father replied. ‘But what I really understand now is how my mother must have felt.’
Chapter Thirty
When I awoke there was a girl sitting on the seat opposite. She was holding a fat baby of indeterminate age and sex. While the train was crossing the flat, industrialized heart of England, I’d fallen asleep, and except for an occasional prod from the conductor to show my ticket, nothing had disturbed my dreamless, almost drugged, slumber. The train had gone far over the border into Wales before I woke. When and where the girl with the baby had boarded, I didn’t know.
Blearily, I sat up, rubbed my eyes and peered out the window. All was grey. Mountains rose up on the left-hand side of the train. They were bulky and lumpish looking, like defeated prizefighters in poorly knit sweaters. Swollen by the mist, they clumped off into the distance until they blended with the clouds. On the other side of the train was the Irish Sea, only a matter of yards from the track. Troubled and restless, it too stretched as far as the eye could see until there was no distinction between sea and sky.
‘On holiday then?’ the girl asked me.
I had intended to go back to sleep. The travelling, the time-zone changes, the sudden foreignness were all taking their toll. I was starting to drop off to sleep every time I had a few spare moments. But I’d had to sit up and shift the backpack so that I could stretch out my legs. This movement she apparently interpreted as consciousness on my part.