What I Came to Tell You

by Tommy Hays

“What a fascinating concept,” the newswoman said. “How on earth did you come up with such an idea, Commissioner?”

  Mr. Lunsford looked at Jessie as if he was too stunned to talk. But then he turned to the microphone and said, “It just came to me.”

  The mayor said a few more things and then the interview was over. As soon as the camera lights went off, the commissioner sort of collapsed like a balloon losing air. He glared at Jessie and seemed about to say something, but then all the people who’d been watching the interview came up to shake the commissioner’s hand and pat him on the back and more than one of them said, You have my vote next year.

  Grover watched as the men with the orange vests loaded their chain saws and Weed Eaters and sling blades back onto their trucks. Grover felt a hand on his shoulder. Mr. Sluder leaned over and said under his breath, “Between you and me, this is one job I don’t mind leaving unfinished.” He climbed into his pickup truck and pulled away, and the rest of the big trucks followed him.

  As Grover watched them drive off, it finally hit him. The Bamboo Forest wasn’t going to be cut down. He felt a rush of air and light, like a door had been flung open somewhere inside him, a door that had been closed so tight for so long that he’d forgotten it was there.

  Sudie grabbed Grover’s hands and was jumping up and down. “I can’t believe it!”

  Grover couldn’t help laughing.

  “I’d like to show y’all something,” Jessie said to the newswoman and the cameraman. “Do you have a minute?” Jessie motioned for Sudie and Grover to follow them. Sudie started after them but Grover stayed where he was. It was all he could do to try and comprehend what had just happened. The Bamboo Forest was about to be cut down, then it wasn’t. Something was about to be dead, then it wasn’t. How could that be? That’s when he noticed that Jessie was leading the newswoman in the direction of his weavings.

  “Why’s he showing her my work?” Grover asked Mira, who happened to be standing beside him.

  “Grover,” Mira said, “your weavings aren’t a secret anymore.” She nodded toward the Bamboo Forest, where a long line of children and adults waited to walk through the hallway of tapestries. “Hey, where are you going?”

  Feeling too much, Grover walked out of the Bamboo Forest and headed up the street. He passed by the parked school buses and the news van and all the cars lining both sides of the street. Even as he got farther up the street, he could still hear the crowd. It sounded like a huge party being held in the Bamboo Forest. Grover never felt comfortable at parties.

  He turned in at the Riverside gates and walked along a path, his hands stuck deep in his coat pockets. What had just happened? Jessie had saved the Bamboo Forest. That was pretty clear. Grover couldn’t have been more relieved. But what was the uneasy feel underneath it all?

  Instead of heading for his mother’s grave, Grover stopped in front of Thomas Wolfe’s headstone.

  “Feels so strange,” Grover said to the writer’s headstone. “All this attention.”

  Grover sat down on the little wall that enclosed the Wolfe family plot. He needed to think. He was of course glad that the men hadn’t cut down the Bamboo Forest. Still, something gnawed at him. He didn’t mind family and friends looking at his weavings or even his teachers really, but having half of Asheville walk around in the Bamboo Forest looking at his work was unnerving, even kind of painful. Something private that had been between him and the bamboo was not his anymore. His weavings and the world he’d created them in had gotten away from him.

  Crows cawed from a nearby hemlock, and a breeze swayed its shaggy limbs. Grover sat there for he wasn’t sure how long. After a while, the murmur of the crowd softened. Car doors banged shut out in the street and then the ground shook as buses headed back to Claxton. People were leaving but they were taking something with them. He realized now what Jessie must have known for some time: The only way to save the Bamboo Forest had been to lose it.

  That night, Grover had trouble sleeping. He kept going over all that had happened in the Bamboo Forest. It was too much, so he slipped out of bed, dressed, grabbed his flashlights and his toolbox, tiptoed through the dark house, opened the door very quietly and headed out to the Bamboo Forest. But as he walked toward it, he noticed light flitting through the bamboo, and for a moment his heart stopped. A fire! He ran, but as he neared the bamboo he realized it wasn’t a fire but a flashlight. He slowed and, moving as quietly as he could, stepped into the hallway of tapestries. Light glowed from around the curved hallway. For a moment he didn’t recognize the man in a coat, shining a flashlight on a tapestry, was his own father. His father studied the tapestry, then walked up to it and gently ran his hand over it.

  His father saw him. He looked almost embarrassed, as if Grover had caught him at something. “What are you doing out here?” his father asked.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Grover said, walking up beside him. “Thought I might do a little work.” He set down his toolbox.

  “An eventful day,” his father said. He shined the flashlight on the next tapestry. “These weavings of yours are really quite remarkable.” His father sounded as if he was seeing them for the first time, and in all the years Grover had been making things, never had he seen his father pay this kind of attention to anything he’d made.

  “So much to notice,” his father said as they walked along the hallway, looking at each one by his father’s flashlight. There was something about seeing them in the dark out here with his father that gave Grover a whole new appreciation of his weavings. Already, they felt like they’d been done by someone else.

  “So intricate,” his father said, stopping in front of another one. “The more you look, the more you see.”

  As they came to the end of the hall Grover sighed and looked around him. “I can’t believe Jessie was able to save this place.”

  His father frowned. “Jessie didn’t save it. You did.”

  “Me?” Grover said.

  His father pointed the flashlight beam along the hallway of tapestries. “If it wasn’t for your artwork, no one would’ve ever understood the importance of the Bamboo Forest. No one would’ve understood what can grow out of a place like this.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Grover that he’d played any part in saving the Bamboo Forest. Earlier today, as all the students and teachers and neighbors and friends had filed through this hallway, he’d felt like a bystander, a helpless bystander at that. The idea that his weavings might’ve helped save this place cast a new light on all the years he’d been coming out here, driven by nothing more than the urge to put things together. Without Grover understanding quite how, his work had taken on a life of its own.

  A siren started up in the distance, a dog barked somewhere and the bamboo rustled with the breeze. Standing there with his father, Grover felt he’d moved to the center of something. His mind, which had been racing in so many directions all day, was suddenly still.

  His father yawned. “I better hit the hay. You staying out here to work a little?” Grover couldn’t help yawning himself and as he did, a welcome wave of exhaustion came over him. “I’ll come with you,” he said. After all, he reminded himself, the Bamboo Forest will be here tomorrow.

  The next day, Grover rolled the wheelbarrow to the cemetery to clear off the remnants of the tapestries he’d carried over to their mother’s grave these many months. Mostly what was left were the bamboo frames, which seemed to be pretty much intact. He had the idea that he could recycle them and weave in new green leaves in the spring. He’d loaded up the wheelbarrow and was on his way out of the cemetery. But when he passed by the Wolfe plot, he noticed a letter propped against Thomas Wolfe’s headstone. Seeing no one around, he picked up the note. It was addressed to Mr. Thomas Wolfe and it was sealed. He paused. The notes weren’t usually sealed, which made him think it was private and he started to set it back down. But before he knew what he was doing, he tore open the letter. Written in blocked and shaky print, it said,

  Dear Mr. Wolfe—Clar
a, my wife of fifty-two years, died a few weeks ago. She loved your books. She read them and reread them every few years like she was revisiting a close friend. She tried to get me to read them but I was never a big reader. Even so, now that she’s gone I’ve been reading Look Homeward, Angel. It’s slow going but sometimes I’ll come across a comment Clara scribbled in the margins, and it’ll be like hearing her voice. She’s buried nearby. I thought you’d want to know you have an admirer in the neighborhood.

  Gratefully,

  Paul Fallon

  “Reading someone else’s mail?”

  Grover whirled around and found Matthew standing there.

  “I’d say you have a pretty high startle response,” Matthew said, pushing his wire-rim glasses up on his nose.

  “I thought you were gone.” Grover’s heart pounded as he stuck the letter back in the envelope and leaned it against Wolfe’s headstone. He felt irritated, even angry. He picked up the wheelbarrow and started walking quickly toward the entrance.

  “I came by to tell you something,” Matthew said, walking along beside him.

  Grover didn’t slow down. He didn’t want to hear whatever Matthew had to tell him. Every time this guy opened his mouth Grover’s world was turned upside down.

  “You aren’t to blame for what happened to your mother,” Matthew said.

  Grover stopped the wheelbarrow. “Because you are?”

  “No,” Matthew said.

  “Then who’s to blame?”

  “I was in the middle of a history exam last week,” he said. “One essay question was ‘Who was responsible for dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima?’ At first I thought how could that be an essay question? It was a two-word answer—Harry Truman. But then I got to thinking that the pilots and crew of the Enola Gay actually dropped the bomb. Or you could blame Einstein for writing Roosevelt about the possibility of such a bomb in the first place. Or you could blame Oppenheimer or the guys at Oak Ridge. Or you could blame the American people, who didn’t want more GIs dying on foreign soil. Or you could even argue that the Japanese brought it on themselves. You could argue that all of humanity dropped that bomb. You could say everybody was to blame. Or …” He looked at Grover with his eyebrows raised. “… you could say that nobody was to blame.”

  “I don’t see what the atomic bomb has to do with who killed my mother,” Grover said.

  “When terrible things happen we want to blame somebody, even if that somebody is us. But what if nobody is to blame?”

  “Somebody definitely dropped the atom bomb,” Grover said.

  “Maybe so,” Matthew said. “But does that mean they’re to blame?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Grover started pushing the wheelbarrow. A big flock of crows flew over them, veered away to a corner of the cemetery, landing high in a hemlock, making a loud ruckus as if unsettled by something.

  Grover and Matthew passed a few family plots, and stopped in front of a new headstone that Matthew nodded to.

  CLARA NORTON FALLON

  MARCH 10, 1935 – NOVEMBER 29, 2011

  The letter writer’s wife. She’d died just a few weeks ago.

  “What I came to tell you is this,” Matthew said. “Sometimes things just happen.”

  “Maybe you just want to feel better,” Grover said.

  “Is that a bad thing to want?” Matthew asked.

  They walked out the cemetery gates, where a faded gray Honda Civic wagon sat parked. The car was crammed with boxes and clothes and piles of what must’ve been history books.

  “I thought you said you’d stopped driving?” Grover asked.

  “Until I figured out that nobody else was going to get me to where I needed to go.”

  A thought occurred to Grover. “Was this the car that …?” He touched the hood.

  Matthew sighed, held his hand out to Grover and said, “So long.”

  Grover looked at Matthew’s hand but couldn’t bring himself to shake it.

  “I don’t blame you,” Matthew said, then got in his car and started it, the muffler rattling. He was backing up when all of the sudden Grover ran after him, banging on the driver’s-side window. Matthew stopped the car and rolled down his window.

  Grover looked at him. “So long.”

  Matthew pushed his glasses up on his nose and nodded.

  Grover watched the car rattle down the street. Even after Matthew had driven out of sight, his words hung in the cold air, taking real form, so that Grover could read them as clearly as if they’d been etched into a headstone. Sometimes things just happen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  BE THAT WAY

  It was the last day of school before Christmas holidays. Grover had delivered some reports to the main office for Mrs. Caswell, and on his way back, Miss Snyder waved him into her office and handed him an article she’d cut out of the Citizen-Times. “I figured you couldn’t have too many copies,” she said. “I thought they did a great job.”

  As part of the big segment about Mr. Lunsford donating the land for the park, the TV people had done a tiny bit on Grover and his weavings. Then the Citizen-Times had sent out a reporter and a photographer and run a big two-page article with color pictures. In the past couple of days a lot of people had come by to see his weavings. At first he didn’t like being interrupted, but as more people came by, he became kind of used to it. The more people looked at his weavings, the more it felt like the weavings weren’t his anymore, like they belonged to everybody who came to see them. What he figured out was that the only weaving that really mattered to him was the weaving he was working on at the moment.

  “I have something else for you,” Miss Snyder said. She went to the wall behind her desk, took down his mother’s calendar and handed it to him. He flipped through the pages, looking at Van Gogh’s paintings and his mother’s neat pencil handwriting.

  “How are you doing?” Miss Snyder asked.

  “Okay,” he said. The Starry Night was the picture for December. He always loved that painting; all the circles of light against the dark made it feel alive. “It’ll be our first Christmas without her,” he was surprised to hear himself say.

  Miss Snyder didn’t say anything for a little bit. “What will that be like?”

  “Hard,” Grover said, “at least for Sudie.”

  He felt her looking at him.

  He sighed and said, “Hard for me too.”

  They talked a while longer and toward the end of their conversation Miss Snyder handed him a little card with her name and cell phone number on it. “If Sudie or you need anything over the holidays or you just want to talk, give me a call.”

  “Okay,” he said, knowing this was something Miss Snyder probably didn’t do for most kids. He put the card in his pocket and started to walk out, but then he turned around and, hardly knowing what he was doing, hugged her. Then feeling his face flush, he picked up the calendar and the article and walked quickly down the hall, not turning around when she called him to wish him a merry Christmas.

  He walked back toward his classroom in a daze. What was that all about? Since when did he go around hugging counselors? He walked into his classroom and sat down at his desk in a daze.

  “Be that way,” said a familiar voice. “Don’t say a word.”

  Grover whirled around and for a minute thought he was seeing things, because there, right back in her old desk, was Emma Lee.

  Grover and Sudie had planned to meet their father at the Wolfe house to celebrate the end of school, and they talked Clay and Emma Lee into coming with them. As they walked up Montford, Clay explained that the Roundtrees were moving back to Asheville. He said that Emma Lee and he and even their grandmother had been saying to their mother that they should move back, and Leila had seemed to be thinking about it. “But after that night when we all went to Bean Streets after the Christmas Waltz, and Mama and your daddy didn’t hardly talk, and Grover walked out and your daddy went after him …”

  “What was that about any
way?” Emma Lee asked Grover. “All of the sudden you just got up and left.”

  “Anyhow,” Clay said, “after that night at Bean Streets, Mama seemed dead set on not moving back. But your daddy started calling.”

  “He called every night at ten o’clock on the dot,” Emma Lee said.

  Grover remembered hearing his father on the phone in the kitchen with the door closed. He’d thought he was making work phone calls, although he remembered thinking he was calling people pretty late. He also remembered thinking how his father laughed more than he usually did when he made work calls. But then he’d been laughing more in general, since Mr. Lunsford had stopped threatening to close the Wolfe house.

  “At first Mama and your daddy hardly said a word,” Clay said. “But your daddy kept calling and each time Mama got off the phone, she seemed a little better. Then one morning last week she said we were moving back.”

  As they passed Reader’s Corner, Byron rapped on the window and waved at them. She pointed to the article she’d taped to the window. There were several photos, including one of Grover and Sudie standing in front of the biggest weaving.

  “Hey, we read that,” Emma Lee said. “You’re famous!” She elbowed Grover.

  They’d walked a little farther up Montford, and as they passed Videolife, the clerk with the pointy beard came out. “Your weavings blew my mind,” he said to Sudie and Grover. He handed Sudie a little wrapped package. “Merry Christmas.”

  Sudie being Sudie, she immediately unwrapped it. “Fantastic Mr. Fox!”

  The sight of the DVD sent Grover’s heart racing. Maybe this was the very copy of the movie their mother had been on her way to pick up. The very copy Grover himself should’ve picked up the day before.

  “We don’t have any money with us,” Grover said to the clerk.

  “It’s a gift,” the clerk said.

  “But …”

  “Please,” Sudie said. “Can’t we keep it?”

  “We over-ordered copies,” the clerk said. Then he leaned over and, lowering his voice, said to Grover, “I was working here the day your mother was hit. I was the one who answered the phone when your father called, asking if your mother had come in yet. Your mother and I used to have long talks about movies. She had excellent taste.”