by Lee Martin
“Might as well,” Bill said, and off we went.
Marathon Oil had a lease road running through those woods, and that’s where we came upon the car—Mr.Timms’s Olds 98—nosed deep into the shade of the hickories and oaks and ash trees and sweetgums.
A flash of my mother’s red sundress caught my eye first—just a quick glimpse of red as she came around the front of the Olds—and then, just like that, the whole picture came into view: the dark green Olds with road dust coating the top of the rear bumper, the gold of Mr. Timms’s Ban-Lon pullover shirt, the bright red of my mother’s sundress. She walked a few steps behind the car, back down the oil lease road, before Mr. Timms caught up to her. He took her by her arm and turned her around to face him. He put his arms around her, and she put her arms around him, and they held each other there in the woods on that road where they thought no one could see.
“There’s Mom,” I said, and as soon as I said it, I wished I hadn’t.
When I saw her with Mr. Timms, I found the sight so strange and yet somehow familiar, mixed up as it was with what I felt about Connie, that I couldn’t help but say what I did.
I imagine my father would have eventually spotted them, and what took place next would still have happened, but even now I can’t stop myself from believing that if I’d kept my mouth shut, perhaps we would have veered away from that oil lease road and Bill and my father never would have seen what I did. I can’t keep myself from thinking that maybe there was that one chance that we would have gone on, maybe found some squirrels, maybe not, and then driven back into town, and our lives would have gone on the way they’d been moving all summer. Maybe there was that one possibility of grace that I cost us. There’s Mom, I said, and Bill and my father stopped.
We were hidden in the woods, maybe fifty yards away, and my mother and Mr. Timms had no idea we were there.
My father said to me, in a very quiet, very calm voice, “Go back to the car, Roger.”
But I didn’t move. I was afraid that if I did, my mother and Mr. Timms would hear my footsteps over the twigs and hickory nut husks. The thought of my mother’s face turning in my direction, her eyes meeting mine, was more than I could stand, because what Bill and my father didn’t know was that one day that summer my mother said to me, “You like Connie, don’t you?”
We were alone in the house. My father was at the courthouse in Phillipsport. It was a hot, still afternoon with storm clouds gathering in the west. Soon there’d be a little breeze kick up—enough to stir the wind chimes my mother had hanging outside the back door, the ones I’d brought her from my class trip to McCormick’s Creek State Park. They’re pinecones, she said when she saw the chimes. Little gold pinecones, she said, and even now, whenever I want to feel kindly toward her, all I have to do is call up the memory of how she held the chimes and blew on them to set those pinecones to tinkling.
I’d just come in from mowing the yard and, when my mother asked me that question about Connie, I was about to take a drink of grape Kool-Aid. I stopped with the glass halfway to my mouth, and then I set it down on the kitchen counter.
Soon the thunder would start, at first a low rumble in the distance, and eventually the lightning would come and the sky would open up, but for the time being it was as if there wasn’t a breath of air. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table writing out a grocery list on one of my father’s notepads that had his name stamped at the top—ROGER THOMAS JORDAN, PHILLIPS COUNTY TAX ASSESSOR, She hadn’t made much progress. EGGS, she’d written. MILK. Then she’d stopped and the rest of the notepage was covered with her name, written in her beautiful hand again and again. ANNIE, ANNIE, ANNIE.
“I mean, you really like her,” she said. “It’s all right to like someone that way, Roger.” She looked up at me, then, and there was such a sadness in her eyes. I’ve never been able to get the memory of that moment out of my head. “It’s the way I felt about your father,” she said, and then she ripped the sheet of paper from the pad and wadded it up in her hand.
Somehow I knew that what she was telling me, with all that talk about Connie, was that she and Mr. Timms didn’t like each other in quite the same way, that what they had between them was very different from what had brought my father and her together. I think she was telling me that if she’d had her druthers she would have felt that way about Mr. Timms—she would have liked him, and he would have liked her—but this thing between them was something very different. It was something born out of loneliness and desperation. I want to believe she was trying to tell me that what Connie and I had was special and that she wished it would last.
“You know I’m an old woman, don’t you?” she finally said to me.
She was forty-one that summer. If she were alive today, she’d be seventy-nine. I like to think she’d have become an elegant woman, well suited to her age, happy with what she had left in life. That Sunday, when she clung to Mr. Timms in the woods, no one knew she’d only live ten more years, or that my father, who divorced her, would come to the hospital and sit by her bed and hold her hand as she was dying. “You’re not that old,” I told her.
She looked at me, shaking her head, her lips turned up in a sad grin. “Oh, honey,” she said. “You just wait.”
So there we were that Sunday, Bill and my father and me, and my father said again, “Roger, go back to the car.”
When I still wouldn’t move, he said, “We should all go back. We should go home.”
That’s when Bill said, “Jesus Christ.”
Then he was tromping through the woods toward that lease road, where my mother raised her head and pushed away from Mr. Timms and saw that they weren’t alone.
“I don’t know who you think you are,” Bill said when he got to where they were standing. “How can you live with yourself? And you, Annie.” Here Bill shook his head, took a long breath and let it out. “I thought you were better than this.”
There comes a moment when all that’s been denied rises up and leaves you raw and trembling. That’s what I was learning that day as I stood there, listening to Bill’s loud voice ringing through the trees.
Now, I find myself wishing again and again that it would have been possible for me to tell him something that would have made a difference. Something about how broken we were. Something about how a time comes when it’s best to just walk away, even if it means leaving behind someone you swore you’d love the rest of your life. Maybe we thought we could save ourselves, but it was too late.
Although I felt all this inside me, I couldn’t find anything to say that would matter. Even now I can’t put it into words. I can only remember the way it felt in the woods in the moments after Bill shouldered his twelve-gauge, and I knew that all of us were about to move from this world into another one that would hold us the rest of our days.
Bill said to Mr. Timms, “Get into your car. Go home.” He motioned to the Olds 98 with the barrel of his twelve-gauge. “You’ve got a daughter,” he said. “Can’t you try to be a decent man for her sake? Go on now. This is over. Annie’s coming with us.”
“Bill, calm down,” my mother said. “You should take care.”
“Don’t tell me that,” said Bill. “Not you. Not the way you’ve been whoring around. R.T. might not know how to handle you, but by God I think I do.”
My father was moving, then, his long legs striding quickly through the woods. I remembered that winter night when he’d put his hand on my shoulder and we’d watched the snow come down. The beauty of it all amazed him. It’s like we’re in a picture, he said. I knew he wasn’t made for such ugliness as was upon him now, and I couldn’t bear to see him walking toward it. I didn’t know anything to do but to follow him.
“Bill, let’s go.” He rested his hand on my uncle’s shoulder just the way he had mine. “Put that shotgun down.” He was talking in a quiet voice, but I could hear the fear in it. “I mean it, Bill. We need to go.”
My mother looked at me then, and she was ashamed. “Oh, Roger,” she said. “You
hadn’t ought to be here.”
“Bill,” my father said, “listen to me.”
“Better do what he says, Bill.” Mr. Timms had his hands in the pockets of his blue and red plaid golf pants, standing there in a way that told me he felt positive my uncle was bluffing. “I can make things plenty rough for you,” he said. “I can see to it you lose your job.”
“I’ve put up with enough shit from you, Harold.” Bill shook free from my father’s hand. “I’m not going to put up with any more of it.”
That’s when Mr. Timms said to my mother, “Annie, tell him. Tell R.T. what’s what.”
My mother couldn’t speak. She looked at Mr. Timms, and then at my father. From where I stood beside him, I could see she was afraid. Her eyes were wet, and there was just the slightest tremor at the corner of her mouth.
“Annie?” my father said.
“Go on, Annie,” said Mr. Timms. “Tell him what we’ve decided.”
Bill stepped closer to him. He pressed the barrel of the twelve-gauge into the soft spot beneath Mr. Timms’s chin, and Mr. Timms tilted his head, trying to get free from the nick of the bead sight.
“You’re not deciding anything.” Bill walked Mr. Timms backward, away from my mother along the driver’s side of the Olds until they were out of the lease road and off in the woods. “If anyone’s running this show, it’s me.”
I should tell you that Bill was a violent man, but I can’t because the truth was, prior to that moment in the woods, he wasn’t. He was my uncle, my father’s younger brother, who had done his stint as a grunt in Vietnam and come home, seemingly no worse for the experience. He had his job with the railroad and that little box house on South Street not far from the Uptown Café, where he ate breakfast every morning before heading to work. He kept a pot of wave petunias on each side of the front steps of his house. Some evenings, I’d go driving by, and he’d be outside with his watering can. He’d have on a pair of khaki shorts and his old Army shirt with the sleeves cut out. He’d throw up his arm, his fingers in the vee of a peace sign, and I’d think, there he is, the happiest man alive. Whatever he carried inside him was a secret to me.
“I don’t know what got into him,” my father would say, time and time again over the years. “I guess it was like he said. He’d just had enough.”
Enough of Harold Timms and the way he shoved him around on the job. Enough of the fact that Mr. Timms thought he could take another man’s wife and not have to answer for it. Enough of his gold Ban-Lon shirt, and his flashy plaid golf pants, and that Olds 98. Enough of things we had no way of knowing about as he tried his best to live a regular life in the aftermath of whatever he’d gone through in Vietnam. Enough.
So when Mr. Timms said what he did—“I’m going to tell you something, Bill. And, R.T., I want you to listen to this, too.”—Bill pulled back on the hammer of that twelve-gauge.
“Don’t talk,” he said to Mr. Timms. “Don’t say another word.”
The squirrels were chattering high up in the hickory trees. The sun was splintering through the branches. In the distance, a mourning dove was calling for rain. A little wind had come up, and it was cooler there in the woods. I thought for a moment that everything would be all right. Bill backed away from Mr. Timms, and he let his arms relax, the twelve-gauge now held crosswise at his waist. He came back to the lease road, walking backward until he cleared the Olds and was standing a couple of feet from its rear end.
Mr. Timms followed him, stopping finally about midway down the side of the car. I could see his head and shoulders above the roof. He said, “R.T., Annie doesn’t love you. She loves me, and we aim to have a life together.”
“I told you to shut up.” Bill’s voice was loud and shaking. “I gave you fair warning.”
But Mr. Timms went on. “She hasn’t loved you in a long time. She’s just stayed with you for the sake of the boy.” Here, he pointed at me. “And I know what you’ve been doing with my Connie. I saw you… we saw you, your mother and me, Saturday night, two lovebirds on a blanket over there at your grandparents’ farm. I want you to leave Connie alone. She’s told you, hasn’t she? She’s only fifteen, for Christ’s sake. She’s too young to be laying in the dark with a boy.”
“I love her,” I said, and though I said it in a quiet voice, I could tell right away I’d spoken with force.
I knew that because for a good while, no one said a thing. They were stunned—struck dumb because in the midst of all this ugliness, a boy had spoken his heart and reminded them all of what it was to be young and smitten with the first stirrings of something sweet and pure.
Then my mother said, “Oh, honey.”
And my father said, “We should all just leave now before this gets out of hand.”
“Hell,” said Mr. Timms. He laughed, throwing back his head, his mouth open so wide I could see a single gold molar. “You love her?” he said. “You don’t know what love is. You just love your pecker.”
He took a few steps toward us, and Bill shouldered that twelve-gauge again and said, “You better stop. I swear, Harold. I won’t let you drag Roger into this.”
“Oh, he’s in it, all right.” Mr. Timms took two more steps—he was at the rear of the Olds now, about to step out into the open. He stopped walking and rested his hand on the trunk. “Well, at least there’s one man in your family.” He laughed again, only this time there was no joy in it. Then his eyes narrowed, and he said, “Son, you must have inherited your mother’s hot blood.”
The blast from the twelve-gauge was sudden and explosive. The back glass of the Olds shattered, blown backward onto the bench seat. For a moment, that’s all I could take in—how there was a loud crack and then the glass came apart in more little pieces than anyone would ever be able to count.
Then my mother called Mr. Timms’s name. “Harold.” She was moving past me, toward the Olds. “Harold. Oh, God.”
It all came into focus for me then—Mr. Timms on the ground, his torso hidden alongside the Olds. I could see his feet and the white loafers he wore, the ones with gold buckles, and I understood that Bill had shot him.
My father was running after my mother. He caught up to her just as she got to the rear of the Olds. She looked down at Mr. Timms and put her hands to her face. Her shoulders heaved. My father took her by those shoulders as if to hold them still.
He turned back toward me and his eyes were wild. “Don’t come over here.” He was shouting though I was only a few feet away. “Whatever you do, don’t.”
My mother twisted around and pressed her face into the collar of his shirt. She beat against his chest with her fists, and he let her do that until she was all wrung out. Then he wrapped her up in his arms, and as I watched him holding her, I understood that Mr. Timms was dead, that Bill had killed him, and now the world would be a different place for all of us.
My father wanted to pass it off as a hunting accident, but Bill said no, we’d call it exactly what it was.
“I’m not going to ask Roger to carry a lie,” he said. “I may not be much, but I know what’s right and what’s not.”
“You?” my mother said. “You don’t know anything.”
“At least I’ll own up to what I’ve done.”
A hickory nut dropped from a tree and hit the top of the Olds with a bang. Then everything was quiet. Just the mourning doves somewhere in the distance and a squirrel chattering and the leaves stirring in the wind.
My father said, “And what did you do, Bill? Do you intend to tell me that you meant to kill him?”
Said Bill, “I just wanted him to shut up.”
My mother pushed away from my father and went running off into the woods, trying to get away, I imagine, from what we were all going to have to face. Bill had shot her lover and killed him, and all of this had happened while Connie was listening to the radio at her house, and soon she would have to know about it.
My mother stumbled over a fallen branch and went down on her hands and knees. She fell over onto her s
ide and lay there in the dead leaves and the dirt, and she pulled her knees up toward her chest, as if she were going to sleep, as if she’d never get up from that spot.
“I used to know you,” my father said to Bill.
Bill nodded. Then he set his jaw and looked off into the distance for an instant. He swallowed hard. “Well, I’m not that person now.” There was a crack in his voice. “And I won’t be ever again.” He looked at my father again and his voice got steady. “It wasn’t your fault, R.T. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. My life got taken to hell a long time ago.”
After that, there was nothing left to do but to pick my mother up from the ground.
“My purse,” she said.
It was still on the front seat of the Olds. Before my father had a chance to stop me, I went to the car and opened the passenger door. The purse, that woven straw box purse with the strawberries and the white blooms on it. I picked it up by its thin handle. I resisted the urge to peer out the driver’s side window to see what a man who’d been shot with a twelve-gauge might look like. I didn’t want that picture in my head. I was just a kid, but I knew enough to know I didn’t need that. So I concentrated on the purse. I carried it to my mother, and then the four of us started back to town to call the sheriff. I rode in the bed of the El Camino, so whatever got said in the cab was outside my hearing. I wasn’t concerned with it anyway. I was thinking about Connie, and how she was an orphan now, and how unfair it was for me to know that before she did.
My mother was the one who told her. While Bill was on the phone confessing to the sheriff exactly what had he’d done down that oil lease road, my mother went next door and pounded on the frame of the screen until the radio music stopped and Connie came to see what the fuss was all about.
I watched from the window of my bedroom. My father was sitting on our porch steps. Soon, Bill would come out and sit beside him, and after a while, I’d hear my father say, “I should have walked out on this a long time ago. Then it wouldn’t have been yours to deal with.”