“Fuck, I didn’t see you.”
Tilly—the puzzle, the elusive creature—stirred and came awake in the chair in the dark corner. “I thought you were coming with the boy,” he said.
“Yeah,” Elroy said listlessly.
“Did I misunderstand?”
“Yeah, it didn’t work out, you know?”
Tilly’s conniving dog, Mavis, appeared behind the glass door that opened onto the patio. She scratched at the pane and looked in at the old man with her ears back and her eyes gaping, like, I know I can’t come in, but I’m a stupid bitch, and can I come in?
Tilly got up from his corner and hobbled to the door, holding a magazine. “What is it exactly I know?” he asked.
“Just, it didn’t work out. He looks like me though, these days. A fucking miracle, right? You expect them to follow you in the face, but then you don’t think they do, until they get to a certain age, and then you see it.”
Tilly slid open the door, bent, rolled the magazine, and offered it to the dog, who did not really want to come in; she wanted Tilly to come out. She seized the magazine passionately in her jaws. Tilly began thereby to drag her inside, and she to draw him toward the dark. Once her forepaws touched the carpet, she knew she would lose this contest and shrieked and ran off.
Elroy went to the fridge, which contained only expired Tex-Mex condiments. “What happened to my baloney?” he said.
“I ate it,” the old man said.
“No way,” Elroy said, stricken. “You did, really?”
“Elroy, it’s my house. I eat the food here. You ate up everything else I had, even the pears. Go to the store and get yourself something.”
“Aw, man, I’d have to go all the way to White Rock.” Elroy turned to address the old man’s stocking feet, the left one wedged like a trowel: he had lost three toes in Vietnam. Elroy said, “You’re supposed to be my dad.”
* * *
• • •
AT SUNUP, as Tilly was leaving to eat his breakfast at a diner in town, Elroy awoke on the sofa and asked Tilly to get him something to eat down by the labs. He rummaged in his pants pockets—he had slept in his clothes—and discovered a crumpled mass of bills, which he handed drowsily to the old man.
Tilly picked out a piece of blue-green paper decorated with an oak tree. “What in the world is this?” he asked.
“That’s a whatchamacall. A lat. Five lats—where’d all my real money go?” he asked, sitting up. He thought a moment.
“What do you want, a burrito? I’ll get it for you,” Tilly said, clicking the leash around the jubilant dog’s neck. Wherever Tilly went, Mavis came along.
“I’ll pay you back.”
Tilly approached the couch, where Elroy lay cramped and crooked, and reached toward him, whereupon Elroy shrank, furtive as a wolf. Tilly folded the money that had no value here and tucked it in the breast pocket of Elroy’s shirt.
Elroy’s afflicted eyes itched. “I don’t deserve it,” he said.
“Who told you that you had to deserve it?” Tilly asked.
Part One
The Old Man
1
Tilly told people he came from Davenport, Iowa. His birth and baptism certificates both listed a family address in Davenport at 14 Greeley Street. If it were ever objected that contemporaneous maps list no such street anywhere in that city, he would have said the street was a right of way through a clump of shacks on the floodplain; mail didn’t arrive there. The certificates showed he was born to one Ida Elizabeth Tilly, age twenty, father not named, on November 14, 1948. His Marine Corps separation papers listed the same date but in 1947. Otherwise all his important papers agreed.
In reality, no such person as this Ida Tilly ever lived. The person who would become Dwight Elliot Tilly was born not in 1948 or ’47 but in 1950. Not in the city of Davenport but on a farm of 278 acres in the prairie north of there, nearest the town of Calamus. Not to Ida Tilly but to Annie Frade, age forty-six, and Potter Frade, age fifty-three.
The Frades had married only a year before, each for the first time. A mixed marriage of a Catholic and a Presbyterian. Each awoke the morning after the wedding certain they had done the thing wrong. Most of what they knew, they knew from livestock. Whatever far-fetched hopes either might have had at their ages that a child might result from their efforts, they were too embarrassed to say.
She bore the unlikely boy in the Frade parlor, with pages of the Quad-County Advertiser spread all over the rug. Potter Frade, practiced in calving, delivered him and wiped him with dish towels and painted his navel with iodine. Annie looked him over and found nothing the matter with him and gave him her breast, and he nursed, wrestling the air. He was angry and strong. If he were a calf he would already have been walking. But he was more a vegetable seed, left over in the autumn garden, that survived the snow and sprouted on its own in the spring. They called him the Volunteer. Later, they called him Vollie. His true name they never used.
Funny the documents should have given him Davenport for a home. Of Davenport his mother never spoke except to curse it. No one prospered there but financiers and chiropractors. Even the Mississippi was crooked in Davenport. She did not drink the tap water there. Frades and Marquettes, her own people, didn’t come from Davenport as foals didn’t come from sows.
The Frades only went to Davenport to pay their mortgages, of which they had several. Annie drove; Potter’s eyes were dimming already. Vollie stood atop his father’s lap inspecting the road while Potter gripped the yoke of the boy’s shirt and braced him with an arm around the belly, nuzzling him and teaching him the family names of the properties they passed. All their debts his father paid in person. He enlisted Annie as a reader of contracts and bills. When a piece of paper required his signing, he drew a cypher of sturdy lines and curves, a mark that looked nothing like the words “Potter Frade” but was a phrase of some kind, the only one he ever taught himself to make. Tilly never forgot the mark and could have made a convincing copy of it in a flash: his hand remembered it like a piano melody. But he never knew its origin.
This was its origin. His father, as a boy of six, had sat in the Flat Rock Presbyterian Church tracing the letters stamped in gold foil on the back of a hymnal: God Is Love, it said, but the boy Potter didn’t know. A half century of work having swollen and twisted the hand, the signature now no longer resembled the phrase he had begun by copying. Instead you saw the runic mark of old Potter Frade. It meant, We Will Pay.
* * *
• • •
A WINTER MORNING.
All three Frades lowered their heads over breakfast—applesauce, side pork, toast, fried eggs, marmalade, milk, sour cream coffee cake, coffee. Annie Frade gave thanks for God’s grace and for the Volunteer. Vollie gave thanks for his pocket comb and, when pressed, for the cake. Potter Frade’s eyes clenched with inward attention. His old neck and old head, fringed in silver hair, protruded from his old jacket, the head stony and shining like a rubbed nickel. He said, For their heifers on the meadow, for Annie, for the boy, for their disc harrow, for his knees.
Vollie ate everything on his plate and walked two miles along the icy white gravel shoulders of farm roads to the clapboard schoolhouse. Miss Travers the teacher called the roll. Four students were absent. All present students, age six to fourteen, stood with hands over hearts and pledged allegiance to the flag of the republic. At lunchtime under the jungle gym, Carleen the Quaker girl shared with Vollie a block of fudge from her lunch bucket and he the ham sandwich from his. A black car came through the noontime winter mud and slush of the road. Mr. Strieg, the superintendent, climbed out and hastily gimped into the school, swinging under him the kneeless, war-shot, famous wooden leg. When Carleen wasn’t looking, Vollie turned his face to the dark clouds and gave thanks to God for all our knees—for his father’s, for Carleen’s, especially for the knee of Mr. Strieg’s other leg, which worked.
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br /> Shortly, Miss Travers came out and blew the whistle. The children gathered into the schoolroom. The superintendent handed each a page of blue instructions still damp from a mimeograph machine. Everybody went immediately home. They were not to walk in groups or pairs.
Vollie found his silverhead father in the barn and handed him the mimeograph. His father looked toward it awhile, not quite at it, and smiled and folded it twice and stuck it in the bib pocket of his coveralls, and that was when Vollie for the first time guessed his father couldn’t read. Later, at supper, rummaging in the pocket, the old man brought out the mimeograph and passed it to the boy’s mother, who, lacking her glasses, held it at arm’s length over the table.
Something was wrong.
His mother immediately stripped him right there in the kitchen. She ran him a bath. She told him to scrub himself well and hustled away with his clothes.
Vollie bathed, he dried himself, he climbed the stairs to his room, where the glass of the only window seemed to contain an unusual orange and blue flickering. He approached it and looked down over the snowbound nighttime fields.
What he witnessed there, the dreadful rite, penetrated the depths of his consciousness, impressed its shape upon his innermost being, and promptly vanished: by the next morning, he would never again recall what he had seen or that he had seen it. But the impression it made would harden with time, and the meaning he took from the impression, which remained with him as a feeling at once of perfect fear and perfect peace, came to seem self-evident, and probably true of everyone.
Out in the yard, he saw himself on fire.
His father stood over a steel can. Flames leapt from it. He held an iron poker at the end of which hung the burning figure, dangling by the yoke of his shirt at the very place his father would grip him when they drove. Flames shot from the sleeves, the collar. Vollie watched as his legs too were set ablaze; the ashy pants floated in the heat. His mother came out with his school shoes and threw them likewise in the fire.
Vollie stood upstairs at the window in his underwear, engulfed by a fear that was the god of all previous fears, encompassing them, compounding them into the perfect fear that was being realized right now: his father and mother were burning him alive. Black smoke, the remnant of him, rose and dispersed into the nothing of night sky. Dark—forever and absolute.
And yet.
And yet, if Vollie himself had just been turned to nothing out there, what was this limbed creature inside the house that watched it all and shivered with cold and still hungered for supper?
His self was a “who” who had burned away in the flames; but the creature was a “what” that could endure even this. The self that had seemed all of him was only a part; it could be shed and left behind.
A gust shook the house, rattling the window. Cold touched his body thrillingly everywhere.
The god of all fears had left the room. The creature had outlasted him.
* * *
• • •
AS HE GREW OLDER, the events of the days surrounding the fire he’d seen would come back to him in flashes: the breakfast, the walk, the unfolding of the mimeograph that he would later learn had alerted his mother to an outbreak of meningitis in the school and the precautions they must take against it.
None of these flickers would stay with him long, but one. A vision he endured within the fever that overcame him in the subsequent days. Here and there across the years, it was the memory not of the fire but of this fever vision that returned to him, shocking him with the promise of perfect freedom, but blinding him to what the freedom would cost.
He showed no symptoms of infection until two days later. He came in the house midmorning red-faced after hog feeding and was ordered to the parlor for piano practice. Minutes later his scales were no longer audible in the kitchen, and his mother found him asleep with his burning head on the keys.
He lay in bed a week. His coveralls hung from the old hook in the closet door. His mother and father were there in the room somewhere. His brain pounded. A doctor came and went away. The coveralls, hanging upright and unpersoned by him, meant he had become a ghost. He smelled boiled chicken and onions and found his father hovering over the bed with a spoon of steaming broth and his mother prizing open his jaws. The slight raising of his head from the pillow felt to him as though his neck was being broken. A priest came. By candlelight amid Latin murmuring, the priest touched with oil Vollie’s eyelids, ears, lips, nostrils, the palms of his hands, and the soles of his feet. He came awake in dry sheets and slept again. He came awake in sopping sheets and slept once more, and then the vision commenced.
Moon on the orchard. Somewhere, a hog crying. The deep cold creek in the meadow. He approached the creek wild with thirst and lowered his burning head to the flowing surface that warped the face he saw in it. He saw the anguish in the face. He knew the face to be his. Then he understood the anguish not to be within the burning head itself but in the face he saw. He knew he must overcome his resistance to the cold and press the face through the surface of the water, whereby the face would be extinguished, together with its anguish, but the head would survive with the body and the rest of him. He understood the cries of the hog were in fact his own cries. Hands from somewhere pressed him toward the water. Summoning his nerve, he plunged his face through the surface.
Immediately the face and its anguish were gone. The freedom from the torture of the face was sweet relief. He gave in to the hands he felt pressing on him and fell into the creek entirely—and the body was seized with frigid alarm.
At that moment, he came to in the bright bathroom of his home, naked in the water of an ice bath. His father was dumping snow in the water from a tin pail. His mother held him down in the rusted tub.
Then he passed out again into the vision-world, the truer realm beneath the surface of the creek on the meadow. Cold and hidden and unreachable and right, submerged in what seemed his true element. Swimming in a time out of time, free of any self.
When he came to again, he was wearing flannel pajamas in his own bed amid dry sheets. He sat up a little and found a plate of soup crackers on the small table by the bed and ate one of them. The bones of his neck could turn a little now. He lay still with his eyes closed remembering his vision. Someone came in and touched his forehead and neck. From the smell on the hands of bag balm and gasoline, he recognized his father checking on the fever that had begun to subside. Vollie might have said aloud that he was better now, but he did not yet want to depart from his vision.
* * *
• • •
HE LOVED HIS MOTHER. Even as a teenager he would get up and go to whatever room of the small house she was in, and they would both stay in the room without needing to speak a word, doing whatever they were doing.
He loved his old father. He coveted what the man knew. A tacit understanding existed between them that they would have less time than other families, and his father must show him everything without delay, and Vollie must pay attention or it would be lost, what his father knew, the knowledge uniquely his, the old world in the old mind.
All the same, from early on he believed he had come too late for them, like a houseguest whose arrival wakes us from sleep. The arms that lifted him couldn’t sustain his weight for long. He had come unnaturally late and represented an unnatural burden. Nature would eventually free them from it, but how? He would be cast off. Nature would find a time, an instrument.
* * *
• • •
WHEN THEY HAD MONEY after expenses, they went to Davenport and Potter Frade made his mark and signed the money over to the bank that owned their mortgages. He could have bought the Dressler property when Dressler retired, but he paid down debt instead. He could have demolished the derelict barn from which tin roof sheets flew off in windstorms and he could have bought the timbers and siding to build a new barn, but instead he sent Vollie up to the roof of the existing bar
n with a pop-rivet gun and a bucket of tar. Casey Reese up the road fell from his hayloft and broke his back. The swampy parcel of his large pasture came up separately for sale. Vollie would have quit his job chicken catching for a season and would have laid new drain tile through the pasture by himself—he understood his father’s old knees were too feeble to lay tile anymore—and they could have fed twenty more head of cattle, but his father said no.
Vollie said, “You’ll cancel that debt if it kills you.”
“That’s right,” his father said.
“What if it kills me?”
“Nobody ever got killed waiting to build a barn.”
“I never see our money,” Vollie said and spat on the meadow they were manuring.
“Look around you,” his father said. “Right here’s where the money is.”
A meadow, a heap of a barn, a pasture, a ditch covered with asparagus ferns, two hundred acres of shorn stalks awaiting the snow.
* * *
• • •
AT AGE SEVENTEEN, Vollie Frade propped his bicycle on a phone pole and approached the casement glass door of the Clinton County Savings & Loan with his conscience in knots and his wicked money in his jacket. The money was not wicked in itself, it became so as he brought it to the teller’s window and stood filling out the application for an account in his own name. Money, unlike underclothes, belonged to one’s family and not to oneself, yet here he stood printing both the family name and the true first name no one ever used, which befit the occasion since who was this bastard preparing to do this closefisted thing?
The Volunteer Page 3