Long Drive Home

by Will Allison

  The trouble between Cal and my mother started when she came down with rheumatic fever. She was seven years old, and the doctor said she’d be crippled for life if her heart wasn’t given sufficient time to heal. He ordered six weeks bed rest. She was not to get up at all—Cal and Josie would feed her, bathe her, change her clothes, even take her to the bathroom.

  That was 1954, the summer Cal tore down the old barn and built a new one. One of the farmhands, Willie Jones, used to ferry my mother around on his shoulders while she was sick. Sometimes he’d set her on a blanket under the chinaberry tree so she could watch the barn rising in the field. The chief carpenter, Old Man Carey, carried a bar of Octagon soap in his pocket, and with the help of Cal’s binoculars, she’d study the way he soaped each nail before driving it into the boards of hard, green oak.

  One afternoon, my mother got restless. She couldn’t lie in bed examining her arrowheads one minute longer. Sneaking downstairs, she bumped into Josie coming inside with a basket of laundry. Normally, Josie was in charge of discipline, but this was such a serious offense that she summoned Cal from the fields. He carried my mother back upstairs, held her in the air by her wrists, and beat her with his belt, determined that his daughter would not end up a cripple. My mother was so upset she stopped speaking to him, even though that meant wetting the bed while she waited for Josie to return from market. At the time, Cal tried not to trouble himself much about the whole episode. He was sure she’d forgive him when she was older, when she could see he’d done it for her own good.

  Labor Day came and went, and still Lyle worked on the house. His final project was to paint the exterior, a huge job that involved scraping off the old paint, repairing broken clapboards, sanding the wood, treating it with a mixture of linseed oil and turpentine, and then finally priming and painting. He hired a third man, but even with the extra help, the job took longer than expected. They worked every day, six days a week, starting at dawn. Sometimes they attached floodlights to the scaffolding and worked into the evening. I begged him to slow down, but Cal was pushing him to finish. “What am I supposed to do?” Lyle said. “He wants it done yesterday.”

  I’d taken the semester off to stay home full-time with Cal. His spells had worsened, and he was growing more anxious by the day. I reminded him that treatment had gotten a lot better since the Colonel’s time, that some doctors even believed a cure was near, but it was clear he just wanted to get it over with. After my golf lesson, he often had me drive him to the cemetery, where he stood at the graves of my mother and Josie, telling them, I imagined, that he’d be with them soon.

  It was late September when Lyle finally sealed the last bucket of paint and dismantled the scaffolding. That afternoon, my grandfather was to meet with his attorney to finalize his will. As the two of us stood in the yard admiring the house, I told him he should leave the farm to his sister, who lived out West. “The house, the land, whatever,” I said. “I don’t want it.” He fixed me with a fierce look: There I was, the one person who mattered to him, making things even harder. But I didn’t care. He was hurting me, and I wanted him to know it. He told me he and Josie had worked all their lives to make sure my mother would be taken care of once they were gone. “You’re her daughter,” he said, “so like it or not, it’s all coming to you.”

  When the lawyer arrived, I slipped into Cal’s workshop, pocketed the pill bottle from his tackle box, and told him I needed to run some errands. My plan was to see Dr. Miller and tell him what Cal intended to do, but after an hour in the parking lot at the VA, staring at the pill bottle on my dashboard, I lost my nerve imagining the look on Cal’s face if he found out I betrayed him to a doctor. I spent the rest of the day driving around with a pint of vodka between my knees, eventually making my way out to Lexington, across the dam to Irmo, and then up Highway 5 toward White Rock. I wanted to see the little lake house where I’d lived with my parents before my mother’s accident. I hadn’t been there in years, and at first I thought I’d made a wrong turn in the shadowy dusk. But it turned out the house was gone, as were the other cottages that had once dotted the shore, and in their place stood a row of condominiums overlooking the lake. Also gone was our rickety dock. Now five new docks pointed like fingers into the cove, each one ringed by expensive-looking sailboats.

  By then, of course, it had begun to rain. For weeks I’d been praying for a storm, rain being the only thing that would have slowed Lyle’s crew, but the late summer sky had stayed clear and blue. Lights shone in a couple of the condos; figuring the weather would keep people inside, I took a seat at the end of a dock, letting my feet dangle in the water. Across the lake, lightning speared the sky.

  My mother’s accident happened on the day after the Fourth of July. The night before, she and my father had hosted their annual cookout, a big bash that involved a bonfire, several coolers of Schlitz, roman candles, and loud music from the eight-track player in my father’s Firebird, which he parked near the lake’s edge. While the grown-ups drank and danced the shag, I wandered along the moonlit bank until I found myself staring up at a neighbor’s tree house. On a sagging platform that jutted out over the water, I sat watching the party, indistinct figures moving in the firelight. It had been maybe ten minutes when my mother noticed I was missing. After she checked the house, she stood at the end of the dock and called my name. There was real fear in her voice, and it sent a shiver through me. I climbed down and ran to her as fast as I could, calling out all the way, I’m coming, I’m coming.

  When I was done with the vodka, I tossed the bottle into the lake, along with my grandfather’s pills. By then it was late, almost ten, and the drizzle had turned to a downpour. I hardly noticed. On the way into town, I rolled down the windows and hit ninety miles an hour, the highway tightening around me like a tunnel as raindrops pelted the windshield. It’s a miracle I made it to Lyle’s.

  “Where’ve you been?” he said, answering the door in his boxers.

  “Nowhere.” I wrung water from my shirt. “Out for a drive.”

  He fetched a towel while I slipped off my sandals and emptied the soggy contents of my pockets onto his kitchen counter. He was not happy about my going AWOL. He’d been calling the farm all day, and when nobody answered, he’d driven out to check on us. He found my grandfather sitting out front with a pitcher of bloody marys, waiting. He had his days mixed up; he thought it was Friday.

  “That’s my grandfather,” I said. “Knows he wants a drink even if he doesn’t know the day.” I opened the refrigerator and helped myself to a beer as Lyle went on about how embarrassed Cal had been when he realized his mistake.

  “I’m just glad he was okay,” Lyle said. “I mean, at first I was almost afraid to go out there.”

  I had to roll my eyes at that. “If you’re so afraid of him dying, why don’t you get off your ass and do something?”

  Lyle got up from the table and went into the bedroom to find some dry clothes. He was not going to fight with a drunk. “It’s been a blast,” I said, taking another swallow of beer and putting my sandals back on, but my keys were gone. Lyle had them, and he wouldn’t give them back. “I don’t think driving is a good idea,” he said. When it finally sank in that he was serious, I locked him out of the bedroom and told him to sleep on the sofa. Then I lay in his bed, staring at the shadow of his feet beneath the door and waiting for him to come get me. I wanted him to pick the lock, climb the fire escape, kick down the door, stop at nothing. But he just stood there knocking and asking me to open up, and eventually he went away. I heard him rummaging through the closet, getting blankets and a pillow. I couldn’t believe he would give up so easily. I was sure he’d be back, but after a few minutes, the light clicked off.

  My mother loved water-skiing and swimming in the ocean and horseback riding, but most of all she loved to race stock cars. Before I was born, she was a two-time track champion in the hobby division at Columbia Speedway, the only lady driver among men who hated racing against a woman and hated losing to one even
more. Cal told me she’d always liked driving fast, even before she got her license. Back then he owned an old delivery truck he’d modified to haul silage. In the fields along the edge of the swamp, he grew corn for his cows. He’d cut the corn while it was still green and pack it into a bunker silo, then cover it with a sheet of plastic until it fermented, at which point he’d drain the runoff into silage troughs that ran to the cattle lot at the back of the dairy building.

  But first the corn had to be hauled up to the silo, a job my mother volunteered for as soon as she was able to reach the truck’s clutch. Even driving full-tilt with the windows down, it was sweltering work, the piedmont sun beating down on the cab until the steering wheel burned her fingers. One day when the mercury hit 102, my mother decided she’d had enough: she convinced a farmhand to help her take off the driver’s-side door, claiming it was Cal’s idea. They left it leaning against the milk house. My grandfather said it was a wonder she didn’t kill herself that day, no seatbelt and no door, nothing but her grip on the wheel to keep her from flying into the air. The sight of her barreling like a madwoman up out of the swamp scared him so badly that he never let her drive the truck again. In fact, even after she got her license, he wouldn’t let her drive the family Plymouth unless he was with her. My mother only made things worse when she borrowed the Plymouth and took her friends for a joyride that ended in a ditch along Bluff Road. Still, she would not be denied a car. As soon as she graduated from high school, she took a job in the parts department of the local Ford dealership, moved out, and bought herself an old convertible. Within a few years, she talked her boyfriend into getting her a race car, a ’62 Fairlane, and began to make a name for herself at the track. Several times she invited Cal to come see her race, but she was still his little girl, and he could not bring himself to go.

  The morning after I stole my grandfather’s sleeping pills, I found my keys in Lyle’s desk and snuck out while he was in the shower. Cal was already up when I got home. He came out of the bathroom holding his ivory-handled straight edge, his face half covered in shaving cream.

  “You’re bleeding,” I said.

  He dabbed his throat, smeared red between his fingers, winked at me. “Think a man could slit his own throat?”

  I decided to hide the razor first chance I got—that, his shotgun shells, his hunting knife, whatever I could find. In the kitchen, I was getting a glass of tomato juice and some Tylenol when Cal appeared in galoshes, a fleck of tissue stuck to his Adam’s apple. He said it was too wet for golf, that we should hunt arrowheads instead, and I agreed, thinking this might be our last time. The rain had finally stopped. Beyond the dairy building, the fog was just starting to lift, and the land smelled as rich as it had in my childhood, in the long-ago days when Cal used to spot arrowheads from high on the tractor as he dressed the fields. He’d taught me the best time to find them was after a storm, when the points gleamed white in the dark soil. We started at the barn and worked our way toward the bluff. Cal was in high spirits. He didn’t mention Lyle’s embarrassing visit the day before, nor did he comment on what poor shape I was in, wincing against the daylight, clinging to a thermos of coffee. Now that the house was done, he said, he wanted to celebrate by taking Lyle and me out to dinner.

  “Ah,” I said. “The Last Supper.”

  “Sure,” he said. “We could do the lamb and leavened bread. But actually I was thinking fried shrimp and hush puppies at Captain’s Calabash.”

  “Okay.” I kept walking, wishing away the pain behind my eyes. We’d almost reached the bluff when he cleared his throat and asked me if, by the way, I wouldn’t mind putting back his pills.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I threw them in the lake.”

  He considered this as we turned and started back toward the barn. The sun had finally burned through the clouds, and wisps of steam were rising like ghosts from the wet earth. Behind us, at the edge of the swamp, crows cawed among the cypress and loblolly pines.

  “You think I’m making a mistake,” he said.

  I held my breath and tried to focus on the muddy furrow at my feet. This was the first time he’d asked me point-blank what I thought. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just know I don’t want you to do it.”

  Cal looked like he’d been expecting as much. He sighed a tired sigh and said he didn’t want anybody having to take care of him. He’d been through all that with his father, and he wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

  “What if I want to take care of you?”

  He knelt to pick up what looked to be a small quartz arrowhead, my question too ridiculous to answer, but as he wiped mud from the stone with his thumb, I kept after him, saying that I didn’t see the hurry and that he should wait until he was truly sick, and besides, what ever happened to making the most of what you had left? Didn’t he want to be with me as long as he could? He gave me a disapproving gaze, a look I imagine my mother saw a lot of.

  “The only reason the Colonel didn’t shoot his lights out is because he forgot to. That’s not going to happen to me.”

  “Then why don’t you let me help?” This was an idea that had been in the back of my mind for years, but until now I’d had the sense to keep it there. With a grunt, Cal hauled himself to his feet and sized me up, trying to decide if I really thought I was serious. At the moment, I suppose I did. “I could give you the pills myself,” I said. “When the time comes.”

  This got him laughing, which turned into coughing, which reminded him of the crumpled pack of Winstons in his shirt pocket. He lit one up and played along. “And when would that be?”

  I unscrewed the thermos and sipped lukewarm coffee. This question was, of course, the reason I’d always kept the idea to myself, all the answers I could think of—when he could no longer remember his own name, no longer dress himself, no longer feed himself—being so arbitrary as to seem absurd, because how could I ever really know when his life was no longer worth living?

  “You tell me,” I said.

  He couldn’t help smiling at that, too, but it was a sad smile that didn’t last—and I could see I was getting to him. After all those years wishing he’d done better by my mother, all those years trying not to make the same mistakes with me, now it came down to this: Would he or would he not abandon me? I understood that I was using his love for me like a crowbar, trying to pry a promise out of him by making one I’d never keep, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Don’t you care how I feel?”

  “Of course I do.” There was no longer irony in his voice, only resignation. He exhaled smoke, stared across the fields. “Okay. We’ll do it your way.”

  “Okay?” I said. “You mean it?”

  “What’d I just say?” He finished examining the stone and passed it to me with a shrug. It might have been a chipped spear point, or it might have just been a piece of quartz—neither of us could tell, but I put it in my pocket and carried it home.

  Captain’s Calabash was no five-star affair, but my grandfather was old-fashioned, and going out to dinner with him meant dressing up even if most of the other patrons were in jeans. He wore his favorite seersucker suit, and I wore a blue cocktail dress I’d bought for rush. On the answering-machine message Cal left for Lyle, he advised him to look sharp as well, but Lyle didn’t call back. He didn’t return my call, either, the breathless message I’d left telling him about Cal’s change of heart. That surprised me—I figured he’d race over as soon as he got the news—but I wasn’t going to let Lyle’s absence spoil our dinner.

  My grandfather was another story. “What’s keeping Lyle?” he said, checking his watch. “Think he got my call?” We were sitting in a corner booth beneath a mounted swordfish, picking at an appetizer plate of steamed clams. So far, the evening didn’t feel like much of a celebration. Cal had shown little interest in anything except his wine. All day, I’d been trying to cheer him up. I wanted to believe I hadn’t talked him into anything, that in the end, he was just like anyone else, in no hurry to die; I wanted to believe he was no more able to
let go of me than I was of him. “You and Lyle,” he said, “you aren’t fighting?” I refilled his glass and tried to change the subject, talking about things we might do now that the house was finished. Cal just nodded along as I suggested a week at the beach, a trip to California to see his sister. It wasn’t until Lyle rolled into the restaurant at six-thirty, full of apologies, that Cal finally perked up. Lyle explained he’d been out shopping for a suit, then hustled around town looking for a tailor who could do alterations on the spot.

  “Didn’t find one,” he said, wiggling his arms inside the long sleeves of his jacket.

  “You look fine,” Cal said.

  “For a circus clown,” I added, but Lyle was in too good a mood to take offense. You could tell a weight had been lifted from his shoulders: The end of his work hadn’t meant the end of Cal after all. Once we placed our orders, Cal excused himself to go to the bathroom. Lyle turned to me.

  “Well?”

  I feigned interest in the swordfish. “I guess he realized he was being selfish. Not that you’d ever have told him so.”

  “So the stranger who showed up at my apartment last night,” Lyle said, “she’s still with us?”

  “You should wash your sheets,” I said. “They still smell like turpentine. And you shouldn’t have let me sleep alone.”

  He picked up a cocktail napkin and waved it like a white flag. “Ten-four. Won’t happen again.”

  I wasn’t going to let him off so easily, but he looked like he meant it, and when Cal came out of the bathroom and smiled at the sight of us together, I couldn’t stay mad. The night turned into a celebration after all. We ended up with more food than three people could possibly eat—baskets of hush puppies and popcorn shrimp, platters of broiled oysters, scallops, flounder. Cal was in top form, ordering a bottle of champagne and flirting with the waitresses even more than usual. He brought up my idea of spending a week at the beach and declared that all three of us should go. “I’ve got a friend with a house at Surfside,” he said. “We’ll rent a boat, do some crabbing.” Watching him preside over the table, seeing him in such an expansive mood, I knew I’d done the right thing. We’d still have months together, maybe years.