by Lee Martin
My mother finally sat down beside her and took her up in her arms. “You sweet girl,” my mother kept saying, rocking Connie back and forth. “You sweet, sweet girl.”
Mr. Timms was in the bedroom with Mrs. Timms, and from time to time I heard a thud and I imagined that he was banging his fist into the wall. “Go see about him,” my mother said to my father. After a while, I heard his and Mr. Timms’s voices coming from the bedroom. “Oh, Jesus,” Mr. Timms said, and I heard my father say, “We’re right here, Harold.”
Then finally my father came out of the room, and without a word he went outside. Soon I heard the scrape of a shovel, and, when I looked out the Timmses’ front window, I saw my father clearing the sidewalk and the steps up onto the porch. He kept at it, digging out the driveway. “The ambulance was coming,” he told me once we were back in our own house. “I didn’t know what else to do but to clear a path.”
In the weather, it took a good while, but finally the ambulance was there, its swirling red lights flashing over the house. The paramedics took Mrs. Timms out on a gurney, and later we learned that she’d died because of a bad heart. “Who’d have thought?” my mother said. She told us that it made it plain how quickly we could go. “If you want something, you better grab it,” she said. “You never know if you’ll have another chance.”
After Bill and my father finished with the Galaxie that Sunday in August, they decided to go squirrel hunting. Bill called for me, and I got up from the bed and went outside to see what he wanted.
“Grab your .410,” he told me. “We’re going after bushytails.”
I looked toward my father. He was putting down the hood of the Galaxie, and he said, “How ’bout that, Roger? It’s just the three of us here, anyway. Just the three bulls. What say we get out and roam around a little? Shoot a few squirrels, have a little boy time.”
That summer, he’d been trying extra hard with me, imagining, perhaps, that he and my mother were close to being finished, and once they were, he’d want to have me on his side. The problem was he’d never been the kind of har-de-har-har man that Bill was, and any attempt on my father’s part to be friendly with me came across as forced and left me feeling uncomfortable.
We should have been talking about my mother and the fact that our family was on the verge of coming apart. We should have considered what was causing that to happen and what we might be able to do to stop it. Instead, my father was puffing himself up, getting all wink-wink, palsy-wowsy, pretending there wasn’t a thing wrong. It was just a summer Sunday and we were going hunting. Men out with their shotguns. A part of me thought that if my father were truly a man, this thing between my mother and Mr. Timms wouldn’t be going on and Connie and I would still be sweet on each other. I wouldn’t be living in the shadow of my mother’s indiscretion and my father’s inability to do anything about it. As wrong as it was, I found myself giving him the blame, thinking there was something about him—a lack of heart, or courage, or by-God-you-won’t—that made my mother do what she did.
So when he made that big show about the three bulls going off to have some boy time, I got a little fed up with the way we kept acting like we were charmed when, really, we weren’t at all. We were gossip. We were the family folks could feel sorry for or judge. Either way, our lives weren’t ours anymore. We belonged to the town and its prying eyes and clucking tongues. I was tired of that. I wanted my father to finally acknowledge it.
So I said, “Where’d Mom go?”
She’d slipped out of the house after dinner. We’d gone to services at the First Christian as usual and then come home to the meal she’d prepared. Bill came by and had coconut cream pie and coffee with us. Then he and my father went out to work on the Galaxie. I lay on my bed and heard Mr. Timms fire up his Olds. He honked his horn as he went up the street, and Bill said to my father, “There he goes.”
From my bedroom, I could hear my mother singing along with the radio next door. She had a pretty singing voice, and as I listened to her, I couldn’t help but think how happy she sounded. Soon I heard our screen door creak open and then slap against the jamb. I sat up and leaned over to look out the window. She had on a red summer dress with a halter top and a pleated skirt. Her bare shoulders were shiny in the sunlight. She carried a box purse made from woven straw. It had strawberries and white blooms on it, and she held the handle and swung it back and forth as she walked. Her shoes, a pair of strappy sandals, slapped over the sidewalk. Her curls bounced against her bare back.
She turned back once and waved at my father and Bill. “Going fishin’, boys,” she said, and then walked on up the street.
Now, as I waited for my father to answer my question, I saw the slightest grimace around his lips.
“She went visiting,” he said.
I wouldn’t let him off that easily. “Visiting who?”
Bill was wiping off his hands with a red shop rag. “Get your gun, hotshot.” He threw the rag into my face and gave me a hard look that told me to shut up and fall into line. “Chop-chop, buddy boy. I mean it. Right now.”
It was a quiet ride down into the country. Bill drove his El Camino, and the three of us crowded onto the bench seat. I was crammed in between Bill and my father. Our guns, my .410 and my father’s and Bill’s twelve-gauges, were cased and stowed behind us in the bed. “Damned hot,” Bill said.
We were on the blacktop south of town, and the fields were flashing by, the corn stunted along the fence rows, the ground cracked from lack of rain.
“No good for the crops,” my father said, and it went like that for quite a while. Just a thing said here and there. The windows were down and the hot air was rushing in, and it was hard to carry on a conversation, but I knew, even if we’d been cruising along in air-conditioned quiet, no one would have felt much like talking.
That was unusual for Bill, because he generally had something to say and he wasn’t afraid to say it. He was a different sort of man than my father. He was blustery and hot-tempered, but fun-loving, too. He was always pulling a prank on someone and then looking so doggone happy about it that everyone forgave him. He was a trackman on the section gang, and one day his trickster ways finally caught up with him. He pulled a joke on Mr. Timms, stuffed five cigarette loads into one of his cigars, and when Mr. Timms put a lighter to it, the cigar exploded and frayed at its end. Mr. Timms, startled, jumped back, slipped on the rail, and fell onto the slope of the gravel bed.
He was all right, just shaken and bruised, but he was pissed off, too. “I don’t have to ask who did that,” he said, staring right at Bill. “Some people are ignorant. That’s all that needs to be said about that.”
What Bill didn’t know—or if he’d ever known, had no reason to recall—was that day was the anniversary of Jean Timms’s death. “Now how was I to know that?” Bill asked my father later. “He’s got it in for me now. You can by God know that for sure.”
True enough, Bill had spent the rest of winter and on into spring and now summer suffering the brunt of Mr. Timms’s anger. “Any shit job you can think of,” Bill had said to my father while they were working on the Galaxie. “You can bet I’m the one who’ll get it. I’ve just about had enough.” Bill blamed this all on my father. “R.T., if you just told him you know what’s what between him and Annie, maybe then he’d ease off. He likes to think he’s a decent man. Let him know he’s a phony, R.T., and he’ll be more humble.”
My father wasn’t made for such a thing. As we went on down the blacktop in the El Camino, I took note again of that Timex he was wearing—the face so big on that delicate wrist—and I found myself thinking, he doesn’t have the heart. I’m ashamed of that thought now, considering everything that was about to happen—things I still can’t get straight enough to suit me.
Bill and my father owned eighty acres in Lukin Township just off the County Line Road. The farm had belonged to my grandparents, but my grandfather was dead and my grandmother was living in a nursing home. She’d deeded the place to Bill and my fath
er, and they leased it out to a tenant farmer. Often, on Sunday afternoons, they came down to give the place a looksee. The home place, they always called it. Sometimes, like the day I’m recalling, they brought their shotguns.
We uncased our guns and started out. We skirted the old chicken house and the clump of horse weeds taller than the roof.
“Should’ve brought a hoe to cut those down,” Bill said.
“Next time,” said my father.
We walked single file along the edge of the field that came up to the chicken house and the patch of ground my grandparents had always used for their vegetable garden. The tenant farmer had plowed up the field and sowed it in soybeans once he’d cut the wheat. The bean plants were already reaching toward knee-high. We had to crowd up into the foxtail growing along the wire fence to keep from tromping the beans. The leaves on the plants in that outer row brushed against my legs.
“Sowing fencerow to fencerow, ain’t he?” Bill said.
He was in the lead, and my father was right behind him. “Using all he can,” he said. “Getting everything he can get.”
A little air stirred the bean plants. A covey of quail got up from the fencerow, their wings a loud whirring and clacking that startled me. Bill got his twelve-gauge to his shoulder, but already the covey was banking over the tree line.
“Damn, I should have been ready,” Bill said.
“Out of season,” my father reminded him.
“Who would’ve known?” Bill lowered the twelve-gauge and cradled it. “Just you and me and Roger out here. Far as I can see, there’s no one else around.”
The sky didn’t have a cloud in it, just the contrail from an invisible jet stretching out little by little. I thought about Connie—wondered what she was doing, wondered if she’d really meant it when she told me we were through. Some nights that summer, we’d driven down to the farm so we could be alone and out of sight. I had a ’63 Impala I’d bought with the money I’d saved working hay crews since I was thirteen and the last two summers on a Christmas tree farm west of Goldengate. Connie sat close on the bench seat when she rode with me, her hand on my thigh.
Our routine was she’d go for a walk in the evening. I’d hear her screen door slap shut, and I’d see her going on up the sidewalk. She’d have on a pair of Levi’s and one of the halter tops she favored that summer, her breasts loose beneath it, a blue or red or white bow tied under her hair at her neck and another sash tied at the small of her back, the tails of that bow trailing down over the waist of her jeans and bouncing with the roll of her hips. She’d walk out Locust Street to the City Park at the edge of town and wait for me in one of the dugouts at the baseball field. I always gave my horn a honk when I took the last curve out of town, and, when I pulled in behind the concession stand, she’d be there, ready to open the passenger door and slide across that bench seat and kiss me.
I had a blanket in the trunk of the Impala, and at the farm, we spread it out on the grass and lay next to each other and waited for the stars to come out. It got so dark out there in the country, and under all those stars we said the things that were most on our minds, the things we could barely stand to face when they were in front of us in the daylight.
Connie said she missed her mother, and sometimes she cried a little and I held her hand and didn’t say a word.
One night she said, “Why doesn’t your mother love your father?”
I told her I didn’t know, which was the truth. I’ve had years to think about what the trouble between them might have been, but I’ve never been able to say it was this or that. Maybe it was my father’s caution. Maybe my mother grew tired of the careful way he lived his life. One evening, when they were hosting a pinochle party for a few couples they knew from church, my father kept underbidding his hands. Finally, my mother said, “Oh, for Pete’s sake, R.T. Live a little.” Little things like that have come back to me as time has gone on, but I can’t say for certain they mean anything.
One thing I remember keeps me up at night, and that’s the event I told Connie about on the Saturday night before the Sunday when she told me she couldn’t see me anymore and later Bill and my father and I were moving into the woods with our shotguns. It may have been the story that spooked her, that made her believe what we were doing was ill-fated and could never come to a good end.
I said to her, “Last night, I heard him beg her to stop.”
My mother and father talking stirred me from sleep in the middle of the night. I don’t know how long they’d been at it, trying to keep their voices low so I wouldn’t hear, but by the time I was awake, they were beyond that point. They weren’t thinking about anything except what had brought them to where they stood—in the midst of an ugliness they could no longer deny or ignore.
My father said, “Please, Annie. I’ve always tried my best to give you a good life, to give us a good life…” His voice trailed off and then I heard a noise I couldn’t at first identify as anything that might come from a human being. A groan, a growl, a whimper at the end. In the silence that followed, I remember thinking, that’s my father. “Annie,” he finally said. “You’ve got to stop this. If you don’t…”
His voice left him, then—swallowed up, I imagine, by the terror he felt over the prospect of a life without her.
“You want a divorce,” my mother said after a time. “Is that it?”
My father was weeping now. I could hear that. “Annie,” he said in a breathless, shaking voice. “I want you to love me.”
For a good while, there was only the sound of him trying to choke down his sobs and get his breath.
Then my mother said, in a gentle voice I’ve always tried to remember for what it was, the voice of a woman who’d found her way to trouble and didn’t know how to get out: “I’m here.” She said, “R.T., shh. Listen to me.” I like to think that she touched him, then—touched his face or his hand, maybe even put her arms around his neck and pressed him to her. “I’m right here,” she said again. “That’s the most you should wish.”
Connie hadn’t asked for this story. We’d only been lying on the blanket, looking up at the stars, not saying much of anything, just enjoying being close to each other in the dark, and I’d felt safe telling her what I’d overheard. I was sixteen. She was my first love. She was the only person I could tell.
What did I know, then, about the ties that bind one person to another? I had to live through what was waiting for me that Sunday to know anything about love at all.
“My father’s the cause of that.” Connie sat up on the blanket. She crossed her arms over her stomach and started rocking back and forth. “He should have left your mother alone.”
“She made a choice,” I said. “It wasn’t just him.”
For a good while, Connie didn’t say anything. Then in a whisper she said, “Yes, they both made their choices.”
Just then, a set of headlights came down the lane. They lit up the gravel roadbed and spread out over the fencerows. They came so far that they shined on the wire fencing around the farmhouse yard. I could hear the engine idling and the faint sound of the car radio. The tires crunched over the gravel as the car rolled forward an inch or two. Then it stopped.
I knew whoever was in that car was looking at the grille of my Impala. Those headlights had caught the chrome. Whoever was in that car knew now they weren’t the only ones who’d come down that lane, and they were trying to decide what to do.
Connie was still sitting up on the blanket. We were on the grass to the left of the Impala, about even with the trunk, and just barely out of the glare of the headlights.
“Roger,” she said, and I could tell she was scared.
I reached up and put my hand on the small of her back, felt the heat of her skin. “It’s okay,” I said. “Everything’s okay.”
It seemed like the car in the lane would sit there forever, the driver unable to decide whether to keep coming. A drop of sweat slid down Connie’s back and onto my hand. Then somewhere nearby a screech owl
started its trill, a call that seemed to come from the other side of the living, and I felt my heart pounding in my chest.
“Oh, God,” said Connie.
Then the car in the lane started backing up. It backed all the way to the end, where it swung out and pointed itself north. I watched the red taillights, and what I didn’t tell Connie, though maybe she knew this on her own, was that those long vertical rows of lights, set wide apart, were the taillights of an Olds 98 like her father’s.
“Whoever that was, they’re gone,” I said.
I let my hand fall to the bow of her halter top. I started to untie it, but she slapped my hand away.
“That was spooky,” she said. “That car. C’mon. Let’s go.”
In my mind now, the image of the two of us walking toward my Impala and driving back to town is forever tied up with the picture of me stepping into the woods that Sunday with Bill and my father.
We waited and waited around a stand of hickory trees where we’d seen husks on the ground, and though from time to time we heard a squirrel chattering in the tree mast high above us, we could never get a clear shot, and after too much time keeping quiet, Bill finally said, “Fuck it. I’m done.”
He was all for heading back to town, but my father said, “Let’s walk on over to the end of the next field and see if there’s any better hunting in Kepper’s Woods. We’re here. We might as well.”
Jean Timms had been a Kepper before she married Mr. Timms, and those woods had been in her family longer than I could imagine. I didn’t know any of that on that Sunday; Kepper’s Woods was just a name to me, like Higgins Corner or McVeigh Bottoms—places marked by the names of families, the history of whom I had no reason to know.
Surely my father knew about Jean Timms and Kepper’s Woods. I wonder now whether he had any thought at all of what he might find there.