The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Read online

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  For GMS, who willed it

  Spiritus contra spiritum

  Carl Jung, letter to Bill W.

  One

  Even a hundred years past the town’s founding a visitor to Amicus might guess it had been laid out by rival drunks. A flatland hamlet between the Chisholm Trail and the Santa Fe tracks, the place had no true center but was an array of storefront concerns and modest houses ranging over the six square miles that lay within its boundaries. A fitting figure for her family, Hattie Campbell sometimes thought, especially on days when she was torn among conflicting desires, by her husband and six children vying for attention or love or favor or whatever prize it struck their unfathomable fancies to vie for.

  In this way had grown their helter-skelter prairie town. A stretch of melon field would open onto an outcropping of peeling clapboard bungalows and these would give way to a stand of cottonwoods. A mile or so away, past the Farmers and Drovers Bank, another clutch of houses, only a bit tidier, would appear, and then a stunted peach orchard, and then a pump jack dowsing crude oil up from bedrock. Yet another mile from these you’d come upon the grain elevator, the hardware store, and the water tower, so leak-prone that in a big wind water would sheet out like a gusher from a derrick. From the roadside billboard depicting the whitest of white hands clasped in hearty greeting and the words “Welcome to Amicus,” it was a good hour’s walk to the bermed-up boxcar that served as the civic tornado shelter. On the western edge of town the land opened up and the Great Plains began their slow rise toward the Rockies.

  Haphazard and down on its heels as the place was, her family had prospered here, and Hattie liked it fine. Her husband, Abel, ran his law practice out of a low-roofed adobe building that had first been the land office and then a pool hall and punchboard dive. During Prohibition the structure, because of its thick walls, had been put into service as the jail. After repeal it was turned into a Phillips 66. This, too, she thought, was a fitting figure, at least where it concerned her husband, a man in whom the law was ever at odds. When Abel bought the building he had the gas pumps and the buried storage tanks removed. Out of wrought-iron rod he welded the letters L-A-W O-F-F-I-C-E, hung them over the arched doorway, and set up shop for what would be a long and satisfying practice. In later years he sat as town judge, a post that called for settling ordinance matters, presiding over civil disputes, and deciding fault in traffic offenses. Hattie was on the library board and served as treasurer for the Amicus Garden Club. She joined the women of Dorcas Circle in charitable works, played the piano for the First Presbyterian Sunday School, and sometimes led a lesson for the youth.

  The Campbells were known and respected, and she had been proud of this, but in the past few years, with Abel’s retirement and the rise of the next generation, she’d begun to fear that their standing was slipping. No one had said anything outright, but from time to time she saw a crooked look pass across the face of someone she was meeting for the first time. “I’m Hannah Campbell,” she would say, using her softer given name to keep from having to utter the flat-sounding rattle that was the name she went by, but almost before she could add, “but call me Hattie,” there’d be that flicker, that shadow. The Campbell name had once meant respectability and a certain stature, but lately she wasn’t sure exactly what it had come to mean. Scofflaw, maybe. Wayward. Something not very good.

  Often she shook her head in despair—or as close to despair as she ever came, which amounted to a sinking sense of bewilderment—at her children and their problems. Public intoxication (all four sons), drug offenses (three of them), DUIs (three), firearms violations (one son), speeding tickets (no firm count, as their father would fix their tickets), habitual lawsuits and embarrassing public confrontations (one daughter), foreclosures (same daughter, two sons), divorces (all of them, even Doro the good daughter), and the periodic estrangements that came if anyone mentioned their offenses. From the boys and the girls alike—those who were still alive were baby boomers past the early stirrings of middle age—the trouble she and Abel endured with all but one of their six offspring was almost biblical, and it was clear the felling blow would be dealt by Billy, the baby, now in his middle forties and wearing every misspent year.

  For over two decades her youngest had lived under a sentence that had once meant death, positive for the terrible virus that left his immune system in ruin and would lead, in less time than any of them suspected, to his end. Many times during the ordeal that was his adult life, on any given night, he’d feared he might not last until morning, but of course he had. He was a firebird, his sister Doro liked to say, a phoenix. After every close call he went on living, sometimes in better shape than before, at least for a while. But eventually he would relapse. Those who loved him more or less coped, and Billy himself endured his fate with a shifting array of denial, humility, gallows humor, despair, and hope, but from time to time things could get dicey, for in addition to his precarious health he was an addict.

  Painkillers, black tar, methadone, drink—any substance at hand. Cough syrup, cigarettes, codeine, cocaine. On a lean day even candy. He favored gigantic chocolate bars with high sugar alcohol content, and he claimed when his choices were limited, five big Butterfingers could at least give him a right smart buzz. From the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous he’d learned about the use of sugar to quell cravings, but he suspected his appetite for the huge bars probably wasn’t what Bill W. had in mind.

  Hattie adored him, and she lay awake nights worrying that when she died—she was in her late eighties—there would be no one to care for him. His never-ending needs and habits had driven away all his old friends and most of his family. He lied, he stole, he worked angles. That he committed these acts with a loving heart and an infectiously bright spirit did nothing to diminish the seriousness of his crimes, but his habitual ebullience made it easier for her to overlook many of his offenses and to believe they were merely stumbling blocks on a path that would straighten out at any minute. But lately, even she had to admit that things were getting worse.

  “He’s flat killing you,” her daughter ClairBell said. Had said on more than one occasion. ClairBell was known for stretching facts to the fraying point, but in this case she was probably right. Hattie had suffered a heart attack a few years before, a silent heart attack she’d thought at first was indigestion from the short ribs she’d barbecued for dinner or maybe gallbladder distress from the months-old peanut brittle she’d found when she was cleaning out the holiday cupboard. Thrifty to the marrow, she hated to see her good homemade candy go to waste, and so she’d stood there eating it, piece by sticky, stale piece. Later that night she’d had a bout of chest pain, for which she blamed the candy. She didn’t get around to looking into her condition until three weeks after the event, too late for a stent. Too late for anything other than to marvel that the infarction hadn’t killed her outright. An artery was ninety percent b
locked.

  Daughter of pioneers and ranchers, she kept going, weaker than before and with a new little throat-clearing cough that reminded those close to her of what she’d been through, but determined to carry out her mission of easing Billy’s way through the world, for she believed the Almighty had spared her for that purpose.

  Caring for Abel in his dotage had taken a toll on her energy. On her nerves as well. Her husband had never been easy. He was what people used to call a man’s man, but even this description didn’t go the distance. He was a grab bag of contradictions, a dervish of crossed purposes. A sensitive, swaggering, foolhardy rakehell, a perfectionist, a savant, a daredevil with a penchant for recklessness, intolerant of incompetence, especially his own. How many times had she heard him mutter to himself when he did something that didn’t measure up to his exacting standards, “Stupid, stupid, stupid”? But he was far from it. The man knew everything under the sun. If he didn’t know the answer to a question, he would make one up, bluffing like a cardsharp to keep from having to say he didn’t know. His poker face was legendary, and even after sixty-two years of marriage he could fool her. Maybe it was true that she was easily fooled, but still. Half the time his humor went over her head, and often she couldn’t tell if he was joking or serious. “Oh, the tragedy of the literal mind,” he would say, simply to madden her.

  Sometimes he was a stubborn old crotchet with strong opinions and precise specifications for the right way to do certain things—a ripe tomato must be sliced a quarter of an inch thick and the abomination that was Miracle Whip must under no circumstances be permitted in whiffing distance of a BLT, which should be made with butter and never margarine—but other times he was an affable jokester, a generous host and party wit, a hail-fellow-well-met. A midnight lover whose hands … oh, she blushed just remembering. But whether he was Genghis Khan or the Miller of the Dee or the Sheik of Araby, you never knew which of these he’d wake up as. And lately he seemed to be getting even more erratic. She needed no more stress—that much she was certain of. Billy was nothing but stress, his brothers and sisters told her for the umptieth time after an awful birthday celebration, Abel’s eighty-ninth.

  For the event, Billy had taken the crosstown bus from his boardinghouse in the city, the county seat some miles north, to the bus stop nearest Amicus. In her pale blue twelve-year-old Skylark, Hattie had gone to pick him up. On the way home he had talked her into stopping at the phone store and out of the ninety-five dollars she had concealed, against such a possibility, in her pocketbook’s secret compartment. The deviation from her schedule as well as the confusing cash transaction Billy brokered—he could talk so fast!—had rattled her. In the past few years her thinking, it seemed, had slowed. She was frazzled by the time the other family members arrived for the birthday dinner.

  The eldest at sixty, Doro had flown home from Boston, where she lived a life as far removed from the goings-on in Amicus as a librarian’s from a rodeo clown’s. By day she was an associate dean of students at a tiny liberal-arts college. By night and under a pen name she was a writer of western novels. She remained unmarried even thirty years after divorcing her doctor husband, and this caused Hattie to worry. Was her eldest too hard to please? Too modern? A feminist? She was certainly not a lesbian; there were her three grown children as proof.

  Late as usual, son Jesse pulled his Silverado into the driveway just as dinner was called. Despite the home-to-work restriction on his driver’s license stemming from a DUI a few years back when he was still a roaring drunk, and his general testiness when faced with a social obligation that required him to take off his hat, he had chanced the two miles from his farm, a boarding stable and drywall operation in the bend of the Big Slough where it flowed into the Ark River. Jesse and his father had a strained relationship resulting from Abel’s ongoing campaign to improve him. That the evening’s occasion was his father’s birthday was grounds sufficient to cause Jesse to kick the truck’s front tire before he entered the big stone ranch house.

  ClairBell and her new husband, Randy Billups, had driven over from their country place in their white Coupe de Ville. Randy suffered from a polio injury that left him with a limp and a brace, but he managed to work as a mechanical engineer to keep a roof over the heads of ClairBell and her grown sons and a backyard swimming pool under her buoyant body. As to whether Randy was a saint or a dupe, the jury was out, though his kindness and the affection in which the family held him—the man could manage their bristly ClairBell—would billet him with the saints. Hattie liked him very much, and often she had envied her daughter’s luck. What might marriage be like with a mild-tempered man?

  All the Campbells save Gideon, who was living off the grid in a straw bale hut in the Sangre de Cristos and hadn’t been heard from for months, were gathered around the table. Toward the end of the meal, after the birthday song was sung by Hattie, Doro, and ClairBell and mumbled by Jesse, as the birthday cake was served, Billy began to monopolize the talk. Walleyed with morphine and Retrovir, he rambled from subject to non sequitur subject, and in the middle of a monologue about the correct way to say that one was sick to one’s stomach—Billy insisted that “nauseated” was preferable to “nauseous”—he had fallen asleep, his forehead coming to rest in his plate of devil’s food cake.

  Jolted awake by a poke from ClairBell and called by his father to account for himself, Billy laid the blame for his drowsiness on his prescription medicines. He outlined the pills he required, their effects, and why no one should trouble to wake him if at the dinner table he nodded off. Even if he wobbled or swayed. Or breathed like Darth Vader. Not even if he drooled. Why no one should shush him if he talked too grandly. “Or too longly.” Billy tittered at his lunatic adverb, but no one else laughed.

  “Oh, honey. How many did you take?” Hattie fretted, tucking a salt-and-pepper curl back into her French twist. Her tight permanent wave had gone bushy with the heat and exertion of preparing the birthday roast, and she worried that her head, because of the way she’d bobby-pinned her hair at the back, looked like half a blown-out dandelion. “If only you’d watch how many you take…”

  Muttered Abel, balling his napkin, “Oh, for crying out loud.” He pushed back his chair and rose to full height, which now that he was an old man and had shrunk—his last VA hospital physical measured him at only five and a half feet—did not have the effect he’d hoped for. To make up for his lack of presence he made his voice gruff and inserted an epithet, “Happy dang-blasted birthday to me.”

  “Papa, sit down and eat your cake,” ClairBell said, reaching over to tug at his hand. ClairBell alone could upbraid her father, and from her and her alone would he accept blandishments. Had anyone else told him to sit down or tried to cajole him, there would have been hell to pay. Hattie had long ago given up trying to manage him. He could not be managed. He resisted even the subtlest handling. Hints, pointed looks, coming sideways at him—none of these methods had worked. Not once. If he was in a balky mood there was no hope; he was a mule, a man-size lump of tar on a log with its arms crossed and its chin set.

  His sisters had once told Hattie that when Abel was young they’d nicknamed him the Little King, after the ermine-robe-trailing monarch in the funny papers who insisted on having his way. Abel was the firstborn boy after a run of daughters and his parents had favored him. As a child he was a spoiled-rotten customer. A very bad hat, the sisters told her, a stinker. He pouted. He threw heroic fits over nothing, a nickel slug, say, or a licorice jellybean or a half-empty bottle of flat root beer. They shook their heads; how the Little King had become a second lieutenant in the United States Army, a war veteran, an attorney-at-law and officer of the court, a respected member of society, they would never understand. As a boy he had heeded no rules but his own. Now, at ClairBell’s word and another tug at his hand, the officer of the court sat down meekly, but taking care to affect a look that would promote the impression that sitting down had been his own most excellent and reasonable intention.

 
Insulted by his family’s scrutiny, Billy wiped his forehead of cake crumbs and got up from the table. He set a staggering course toward the bedroom wing. He meant to dramatize his angry departure with a flounce followed by a head toss, but his body—he was no taller than Abel and much slighter—would not oblige. His attempt to storm off looked like a crazed dance, a spasm.

  Only ClairBell laughed at his failed display. Jesse and Doro sat silently, hoping that with Billy’s departure the meal could resume, that their father would calm down and their mother would be spared the storm they feared was brewing.

  “Go to your room,” Abel barked needlessly after Billy, forgetting that his son didn’t live at home but uptown in an apartment, forgetting he was forty-six.

  “Bark!” shouted Billy, unchained by the pharmacological storm in his system. “Bark, bark, bark!”

  Hattie fled the table and took refuge in the living room. If only Abel wouldn’t bait him! If only he would be kind! If only Billy would watch his tone.

  Abel rose from the table. Prepared to stand up for himself against his wife’s constant judgment of the way he dealt with his son, he went after her at a rapid hobble. He planned to tell her there were limits and then to outline precisely what those limits were.

  Seeing this and feeling protective of his mother, Billy changed his coordinates and lurched after his parents.

  Bracing for an altercation between father and brother, both parties known for blowtorch tongues and no fear of heat, especially if blame was the name of the game and Hattie was the prize, Doro and Jesse and ClairBell brought up the rear.

  Randy Billups had learned from blistering experience to keep his opinions to himself when the Campbells squared off, and so he pulled up a stool at the kitchen counter and settled in with a toothpick and the Auto Weekly.