What I Came to Tell You

by Tommy Hays

  As Clay helped him pick up and rake around his mother’s plot, Grover remembered the funeral. It had been a clear warm Saturday in early April. The warmest day they’d had so far. Jonquils and bright pink and red azaleas had been in bloom throughout the cemetery. Riverside was so crowded with mourners that people had to park all along Edgemont Road and walk several blocks to the grave. Many were teachers, others were families and students who had gotten to know Grover’s mother during the fifteen years she’d been at Claxton. Some students were now grown men and women and had families of their own. In all the years they’d lived next to the cemetery, never had Grover seen such a crowd. At the center of what must’ve been hundreds of people, Grover and Sudie sat with their father under a tent with other close friends and family.

  The urn with their mother’s ashes sat on a small pedestal above a neat square hole Jessie had dug. Sudie sat next to Grover, her face about to crumble as it had crumbled so many times that week. She clutched the tiny silver cylinder attached to a necklace that hung around her neck. Grover had stuffed his in his pocket. Nancy, the Buddhist priest, a friendly woman with warm green eyes and very short gray hair, had given them the cylinders before the funeral, telling them they contained a sprinkling of their mother’s ashes.

  During the ceremony Grover worked the Rubik’s cube Jessie had given him, and Sudie leaned against their father and petted Biscuit, who, in the middle of the ceremony, had somehow threaded his way through the crowd and appeared beside Sudie’s chair. Nancy spoke for a while, talking about what a kind, generous and patient person Caroline Johnston had been. Grover guessed that was true. But Nancy didn’t say anything about how unreasonably strict their mother could be, never letting them watch TV on a week night, not letting them leave the table till they’d eaten all their vegetables or not letting them go anywhere till their rooms were picked up. She didn’t mention anything about how every now and then their mother would lose it and scream at them, like whenever Sudie and he argued about whose turn it was to do the dishes or when they left dirty clothes or dirty dishes in the middle of their rooms. Mostly she’d been a good mother. Mostly she’d been a good wife. Mostly she’d been a good counselor. But listening to Nancy praise his mother, Grover felt he was hearing about someone he only vaguely recognized.

  “Bamboo sends out these things they call rhizomes underneath the ground,” Clay said as they finished raking up the grave. “Which is how come it spreads so easy.”

  “Rhizomes?” Grover asked. Every now and then the Bamboo Forest sent out shoots underneath the fence that miraculously sprouted up several yards into the cemetery. Jessie often had to cut them back. Sometimes Grover would notice a new green shoot sprouting right out of a grave itself.

  As they were heading out of the cemetery, the boys passed Jessie, who had a wheelbarrow too. His was piled with broken tree branches that had fallen in last night’s storm.

  “Thanks for straightening up Mama’s grave,” Grover said.

  Jessie stopped. “I haven’t been over there today, and Matthew’d said he was planning to take today off, so I don’t know who it could’ve been.”

  Grover thought about the weaving and the toolbox his father had found this morning. He looked back in the direction of his mother’s grave and felt a tingle travel up his spine.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ALL THAT’S LEFT

  Thomas Wolfe eyed Grover from across the kitchen, the writer’s pale moon of a face floating in the middle of his father’s apron. His father poured batter into a waffle iron and closed it, the batter hissing. The apron had been a fund-raising attempt. On the apron, Wolfe frowned, his hair uncombed, his eyes dark and tired like he’d been up all night writing. Not a very appetizing picture. Grover hadn’t been surprised their father had been stuck with a closet full of them.

  It was Monday morning, over a week since the terrible night their father had lost it, and he’d started making breakfast for them again. He had been leaving Grover and Sudie to eat Cheerios, Wheat Chex or instant oatmeal. Now he was back in the kitchen. Grover had never appreciated their father’s breakfasts as much as he did now. Big stacks of pancakes and link sausages; French toast sprinkled with powdered sugar; homemade whole wheat biscuits with scrambled eggs, bacon and grits.

  “Order up.” Their father placed before them plates of Belgian waffles, swimming in syrup and butter. He filled their glasses with milk, poured himself a cup of coffee, then sat down with his own plate of waffles.

  There’d been a general sigh of relief in the house. On most afternoons now their father let Grover and Sudie walk home after school instead of having them come to his office. This gave Grover more time in the Bamboo Forest. Their father stayed pretty late at the office. And after supper, he still made business calls, trying to get support for the Wolfe house, but he didn’t sound as desperate or angry.

  Another new thing. Every night, after about an hour of making calls, their father would get Sudie and Grover to sit with him and watch a little TV, something their mother never would’ve allowed on a school night. They’d watch Nature or Nova or History Detectives.

  Last night they’d been watching Antiques Roadshow. The program was set in Savannah, Georgia. A man had brought in a face jug—a big pottery jug with a face on it—bug eyes, wide grinning mouth and big ears that were handles. Grover had never seen anything like it, and started thinking how he might make one out of creek clay. Grover and Sudie and their father started guessing how much it was worth.

  The expert, a pretty woman with long black hair that sort of reminded Grover of Emma Lee, pointed out features on the jug with a little wooden pointer. The more she described it, the more Grover could tell it was something special.

  “A thousand dollars,” their father said.

  “Two thousand!” Sudie blurted.

  “Ten thousand!” Grover shouted, just before the expert said, “And I would insure this for fifteen thousand!”

  “All right!” Grover said, raising his fist. Then he suddenly stopped.

  “Grover,” their father said, “are you okay?”

  He nodded but didn’t say anything, and he sat watching the rest of the show in silence.

  That night he couldn’t sleep. He’d forgotten his mother, and while watching Antiques Roadshow of all things! What kind of ungrateful son would forget about his mother who’d only died months ago? How many other times during the day did he not think about her? Although he hadn’t wanted to admit it to himself, for some time he’d noticed he hadn’t been thinking about her as much. Which made him wonder if she still thought about him, wherever she was. Was that what death was—everybody forgetting everybody?

  He lay there with his iPod, listening to All Things Must Pass. He’d listened to the album all the way through. Not knowing what else to do he turned on his reading lamp and reached for the copy of Look Homeward, Angel he kept on the bottom of his nightstand. He blew the dust off the cover and opened to the first page. He’d only read a few pages when there was a knock at his door and his father came in.

  “You’re reading?” His father tilted the cover so he could read the title. “You gotta be kidding me!”

  “Puts me right to sleep,” Grover said.

  “Look Homeward, Angel as sedative,” his father said. “That’s a marketing idea I hadn’t thought of. Why can’t you sleep?”

  “Don’t know,” Grover said, setting the book facedown on his lap.

  “Bad for the binding.” His father gently took the book, folded a Kleenex to mark Grover’s place, then closed it and set it back on Grover’s lap. “Is something bothering you?”

  Grover shrugged. He wasn’t used to his father asking about anything other than his grades. Their mother had been the one to ask questions. A little too many questions. She’d ask him how his day had been or what he’d done in class or what he was working on in the Bamboo Forest. Pretty normal-seeming questions. He knew she asked not so much for the answers as to measure how he was feeling. Her questions were lik
e the probes they sent to Mars to analyze what the planet was made of.

  “Miss Snyder called,” his father said.

  Grover sat up. “What’d she want?” he asked, his heart beating faster.

  “To encourage you to come see her,” he said. “She thought it might help you feel better.”

  There was that word, feel.

  Grover crossed his arms and looked straight ahead.

  “Nobody’s going to make you,” his father said.

  Grover looked at him out of the corner of his eye.

  “We thought it might be a good idea to talk to someone,” his father said.

  We thought! His father and Miss Snyder had talked enough to become a we?

  “I don’t want to see her.”

  His father walked to the window. Just enough light from Grover’s lamp spilled out into the side yard to highlight the green ribs of the Bamboo Forest. His father rubbed his forehead. “If your mother was here …”

  Outside, the wind rustled the bamboo.

  “I don’t think about her as much,” Grover said.

  His father turned back to him.

  “Sometimes I don’t even feel all that sad,” Grover said.

  His father sat on the bed beside him. “It’s okay to feel better.”

  “It’s not okay to forget her,” Grover said, sounding angry, but he wasn’t sure who he was angry with.

  “When your mother was alive, did you think of her all the time?”

  “No.”

  “That didn’t mean she wasn’t there, did it?”

  “But now remembering her is all that’s left,” Grover said.

  “Is it?” his father asked, but it didn’t sound like he expected Grover to answer. More like he was asking himself the question.

  “What about you?” Grover asked. “Are you forgetting her?”

  His father wrapped his hands around his knee and leaned back. By this time of night, he always looked like he needed another shave. He had bags under his eyes and there was a softness in his face that made him look older. “If you’re asking do I feel better some days, I do. Other days I miss her so bad I can hardly bring myself to get out of bed in the morning.”

  Grover remembered seeing his father cry on the porch that night after he’d torn up his workshop. It was one thing to have a father who was cranky and stormed around the house, a father he could be good and mad at. It was another thing to have a father whose voice shook, who even cried. It embarrassed Grover, and he didn’t know what to say or do. His father sat on Grover’s bed for a while. Grover couldn’t remember the last time his father had sat with him.

  Grover zipped up his coat and ducked into its collar, trying to cut the wind. It was early November and the weather was freezing, the coldest morning Asheville had had so far this year. The wind burned his cheeks. Sudie, who read the weather in the paper every morning, said it would be twenty-one degrees this morning. “The wind makes it feel like below zero,” Sudie said, pulling her scarf up around her face.

  They stared with envy whenever a car passed. “Lucky dogs,” Sudie muttered as she waved to friends who waved from the toastiness of their Volvo station wagon.

  Their father had started them back walking to school. Grover, Sudie and their parents used to walk the several blocks to Isaac Claxton, and then their father would cross over into downtown and walk a few more blocks to the Wolfe house. After the accident, their father had driven them. He hadn’t seemed to have the energy to get everyone ready, including himself, soon enough to walk. But Grover guessed the main reason their father drove was because of how their mother had died. If Sudie or Grover just walked down Edgemont, their father always looked them in the eye and said, “Watch out for cars.”

  As they passed the Bamboo Forest, Grover checked for new stakes. He did this every morning. His father had helped him pull up all the stakes, which wasn’t easy. More and more, working in the Bamboo Forest made Grover feel part of something bigger. More and more he felt like, as weird as it sounded, he was working with the place itself. The bamboo sections practically laid themselves into grids, tree branches wove themselves between the bamboo sections and leaves arranged themselves into patterns. Nature was the artist and he its assistant.

  Several blocks from school, the Roundtrees’ van passed them. The brake lights came on, and they pulled over to the curb. Clay rolled down his window. “Y’all want a ride?!”

  It was the first time Grover’d noticed the American flag decal and the Support Our Troops sticker on their bumper.

  “Hop in,” Leila said.

  “You have room?” their father asked, which made Grover and Sudie look at each other. Hadn’t he just finished telling them walking was good for them?

  Clay climbed out of the car and opened the sliding back door, revealing Emma Lee, who looked up from a book. Clay climbed into the very back seat and Sudie climbed in next to him. Their father took Clay’s seat up front next to Leila. Grover climbed in, shut the van door and slid in next to Emma Lee, who glanced up at him, then went back to reading her book.

  “Look what I made.” Clay held up a Cheerios box with rubber bands strung across an open hole in the side. “Emma Lee helped me with it last night.” He strummed it.

  “Let me try,” Sudie said.

  He held it out to her.

  Emma Lee seemed deep into her book. At first Grover and Emma Lee hadn’t talked much after that morning when she’d taken him down to the Bamboo Forest to find his father, the morning after his father had torn up his workshop. Grover had felt uncomfortable around her. She’d observed his family at its worst.

  One day on the playground Emma Lee had sat down beside him when he was working his Rubik’s cube and, out of the blue, said, “The war changed our daddy. He’d always been real sweet. Never spanked us, never hardly raised his voice. The last time he came home on leave we didn’t know him. He hollered at us and threw things and sprained Mama’s wrist and gave her a black eye. She’d just finished the paperwork to file for divorce the day we heard.” Since then Grover hadn’t felt as weird around her.

  “You better come see it before time runs out.” Grover’s father was talking to Leila.

  “Asheville wouldn’t be Asheville without the Thomas Wolfe house,” Leila said. “It’s a major landmark.”

  “That’s what I keep telling commissioners,” his father said.

  “And what do they say?”

  “They say if it’s such a major landmark, why are attendance numbers so low?”

  “Maybe we could come over some afternoon,” Leila said, looking in the rearview mirror at Emma Lee and Clay.

  “Sure,” Emma Lee said.

  “Emma Lee and Clay could walk over with Grover and Sudie after school one day,” their father said.

  “It’s Jessie’s assistant.” Sudie was looking out the window at Matthew walking along Montford with his backpack, sipping from a Bean Streets cup.

  “I’m glad Jessie hired him,” their father said.

  “You know him?” Leila asked.

  “He’s a history student from the college,” their father said flatly. “I gave him a little help with a research project a couple of years ago. Last spring he had sort of a breakdown and dropped out. But he’s back now and re-enrolled.” He looked out the window at Matthew.

  “You don’t sound too crazy about him,” Leila said.

  “Oh, he’s okay,” their father said. “Jessie’s right to give him work.”

  They rode along in silence for a minute, then Leila started in telling a story about a girl who’d delivered her baby at the hospital yesterday. The girl had never told the father she was pregnant with their baby. “The poor boy never figured it out till last night in the middle of eating pizza at Frank’s she looked up at him and told him her water had broken. The next thing he knew they were at the hospital and she was giving birth to a nine-pound boy.”

  “Was she heavy in the first place?” Clay asked, strumming his Cheerios box.

  �
��Skinny as a rail,” Leila said.

  “How could he not know?” their father said.

  “He said he figured she’d been stopping by the Krispy Kreme a little too often.”

  His father laughed a big laugh that seemed to come from deep down in him. It caught Grover off guard. He remembered a night a couple of years ago when his father was driving them back from El Chapala, their favorite Mexican restaurant across town. Grover had been sitting in the back with his sister, and up front his father and mother were talking about something. Suddenly, their father burst out laughing, then their mother started laughing. They both laughed so hard, their father finally had to pull over. It was at times like those that Grover was reminded how much of a couple his parents really were, making him feel excluded and safe at the same time.

  CHAPTER NINE

  WAIT UP

  After being dropped off in front of the school, Sudie and Grover started up the Claxton steps with Emma Lee and Clay. Miss Snyder happened to walk in at the same time, and Grover held open the big door for her. She smiled at him, and, remembering she wanted to see him, he looked away.

  The whole rest of the day Miss Snyder was everywhere. When he was in the library, she was at the desk talking to the librarian. In the cafeteria, she was in the line ahead of him. Later in the day, when he was delivering something to the office, she was walking up the hall toward him. That afternoon when Sudie and Grover stopped by Bean Streets for hot chocolate and a game of checkers, Grover looked up and saw her standing over them.

  Sudie jumped up and hugged her. She was always hugging Miss Snyder and her teachers whenever she saw them out in public.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever beaten Sudie at checkers,” Miss Snyder said.

  “You haven’t,” Sudie said, sitting back down across from her brother.