The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Read online

  Outside, darkness had fallen. Sleet sanded the windows. Jesse left his father and went to stand in the doorway of the waiting room. None of the others noticed him. His mother, drained and gray but seated for what seemed the first time since they’d brought the old man in two nights before, as calm as she ever was without Billy in her field of vision, rested her delicate, stocking-clad feet on a chair. Doro spoke quietly into her phone, from the sound of things trying to make an airline agent understand that she needed to postpone her flight. A tearful ClairBell, a box of tissues before her, sat at a table with two tearful young women, diagnosing with great feeling and persuasive authority their father’s illness. Gid was long gone, but even in his absence, if Jesse took the long view, here they all were, unchanged.

  He made his way down the darkened hallway to the lobby where Bob Dole stood watch in bronze. The clichéd phrase his father had so disdained came to him—the greatest generation—but he couldn’t summon his usual bitterness. Down marble steps worn smooth he went toward the exit doors and out into the night.

  On the hospital grounds an unkempt man in a tattered Army field parka, homeless, Jesse guessed, stabbed with a sharpened stick at cigarette butts in the snowdrifts and collected them in a red Marlboro box. He looked toward Jesse in a shaggy, sidelong glance, not meeting his gaze. Hurriedly, Jesse shook two Camels from his pack and handed them to the man, who mumbled his thanks and shambled away.

  Jesse walked across the driveway to stand on a knoll overlooking the snow-covered parking lot, its sodium vapor lights casting the covered cars and trucks in an orange glow. A Checker cab made its way slowly up the winding drive toward the main hospital and stopped at the front doors. For a long time the cab idled, as though the fare were in dispute or some other problem had come up, but finally the back door opened and a figure blundered out, nearly pitching forward. Caught by a cane thrust into a snow bank, the figure came into view: Billy, his sick, sweet, doomed brother, come out on this frigid night to pay his respects to their father. Jesse was too far away to call out to him, and even if he hadn’t been, he was emptied out, with no more room for feeling, not pity or sorrow or even love.

  The cab pulled into a handicapped spot to wait while Billy started up the sidewalk, on his way to the ICU waiting room, where, if history ran true, he would put the touch on their mother for return cab fare. Jesse watched his brother’s pained progress, willing him not to fall, in which case he would sprint across the snow to help. But on Billy went and when he neared the building’s steps the man in the field parka stepped forward and in an act that was surely compassion offered his arm to help. He guided Billy up the steps and held open the door. In the snow-blurred night his brother’s voice rang out in its familiar exaggerated sociability, “I thank you, sir.” An ache rose in Jesse’s throat, along with a prickling sensation behind his eyes. However jaunty and brave the face his brother showed the world, it was the effort he made to be kind that was heroic.

  Jesse stood for a long minute on the knoll, looking up into the swirling storm, and then he turned around to walk back the way he’d come, heading for his truck. Snowflakes, a spangled flurry in the orange light, had sifted already into his tracks so he could hardly see the path he’d made.

  Five

  Hattie felt herself marching along a downward path, falling into rank with her husband and her son as their situations grew worse. After Abel came home from the hospital the long prairie winter settled in, day after frigid day, and it seemed that things picked up where they’d left off, like a knitting project laid aside and then returned to after a period of neglect. She could hardly tell a stitch had been dropped. She had expected to lose Abel, and now she felt an uneasy sense of reprieve, and also a feeling that she was recovering from an illness herself. Death felt closer than it had before, her own mortality was often on her mind. Billy was tumbling down another chute, and she worried about him. She prayed she would outlive him. Who would care for him if she weren’t able to? Not Abel, not Doro or ClairBell. Forget about the boys. The icy roads kept her from driving up to check on him as much as she wanted to. It had been a siege of a winter, one of the worst yet. Getting old was—yes, she would say it—hell.

  And then finally on a day in early April there came a mild south wind that carried the scent of crocus blooms. Through the warming night the ice dams on the Big Slough thawed, in the morning the first robins, antic in their hunt for worms, hopped in the south yard, and her dormant spirit stirred once again to meet the season’s turn. She had awakened with a snippet from Wordsworth on her lips, Trailing clouds of glory do we come/ From God, who is our home. Since her days at teacher’s college, Wordsworth had been her favorite, and many a troubled night, after playing out her store of psalms and hymns in the vain hope of sleep, she had wandered among his stanzas, marveling that mere words could ease her mind. Now, with the return of the familiar phrase, she divined a desire, deeply held though only dimly realized, until the understanding broke on her like spring itself that she must see her girlhood home once more before she died.

  She couldn’t go alone. She no longer trusted her driving, not for the ninety crow-flight miles west toward the Red Hills country of her youth, to the Davies homestead. Abel still careered about in his Dodge Dakota, his decades on the municipal bench having immunized him against deputy and officer and even shame, but since his last hospitalization and given what she’d seen of his judgment, Hattie refused to ride with him. He was unsafe at any speed. As a passenger he was worse. He commandeered the air vents, the windows, the radio. He criticized her driving, he sprang pop quizzes—“How many car lengths required between vehicles under rainy conditions?” And his directions! “In seven-tenths of a mile you will come to a crossroads at which point you will bear east until the road curves south-southwest at an eighty-degree angle.” Or “Travel along the hypotenuse of a triangle that, were it to be laid over a map, would link the towns of Winfield, Wellington, and Rock.” He would hijack the day, stopping at construction sites to marvel at big equipment or jaw with any foreman or earthmover operator he could scare up.

  He was best left at home in his backroom den, where in his sheepskin-cushioned recliner he could flip between reruns of Nova and Victory at Sea. Sometimes she heard him back there trying to mimic the cattle auctioneer on RFD-TV, or intoning fragments of Kansas case law, or declaiming “Invictus” with the stresses and pauses he’d used to win an eighth-grade elocution contest. “Out of the night that covers me,/ Black as the pit from pole to pole,/ I thank whatever gods may be/ For my unconquerable soul” she would hear from the room. From time to time the master of his fate/captain of his soul would shuffle into her kitchen, bathrobe belt trailing, to ask where she’d hidden the saltshaker or in which hymn could be found the line that went “Here I raise my Ebenezer.”

  Years before, when he was hale, he’d sculpted a two-ton Easter Island head out of Colorado limestone and winched it into place as a door guard for his Holy of Holies, his machine barn, and named it Ebenezer, this being the rock raised by Samuel to show how far, with God’s help, the Israelites had come. A stone of forbearance it was, and this irked Hattie. Abel knew many biblical passages by heart—when he was a boy his parents had set him on the horsehair sofa and read him the Old Testament cover to cover—but he’d been a skeptic for decades and in their marriage Hattie, a constant believer, was the official keeper of scripture. And who was he to set such a stone? Which of the two of them, she’d like to know, had truly shown forbearance?

  For a traveling companion, she would have chosen Billy. They would have laughed and chatted and sung old hymns and the songs from Man of La Mancha and Les Misérables that he loved and the hours would have flown. Her billfold would be a good deal lighter, but so would her heart. But then she remembered that Billy was at a low point. He’d been living in a basement apartment off Waco Street, a dingy, cramped space with bare bulbs. The few times he’d come home to ask for money he looked thinner, his eyes hooded and dark. She worried about his illnes
s—his T-cell count, his viral load, numbers she didn’t understand but nevertheless placed stock in—and she worried about his drug use. Methadone was supposed to help, but she wasn’t sure it had. He was in constant pain because of his degenerating hip joints. She worried about him always, the groove in her brain well worn, but it was a curious thing: out of sight was, more and more as she grew older, out of mind. Too, with Billy out of the picture, she and Abel got along better; Billy was a sore spot in their marriage. Abel was apt to grouse and grumble if they crossed paths. A few weeks before, he’d accused Billy of lifting a bottle of painkillers he kept on hand for an old back injury. Billy denied it. The upshot was that Abel had banished him from the house once again, an exile that, like others before it, lasted only a few days before Hattie let him back in.

  Reluctantly she left the subject of Billy and worked her way up the age ladder of her offspring. Gideon was camped out in Jesse’s barn until he got back on his feet, so he was close by, but he’d be a bad bet as a companion. His politics—whatever they were—had grown dark. ClairBell called him the Unabomber.

  ClairBell. Hattie lost no time at all eliminating her younger daughter, who at the moment her mother dismissed her as a possibility was lounging pajama-clad and couch-bound, watching Jerry Springer and eating Ferrara Red Hots by the handful, her recent Vicodin dose having given her a villainous headache and a sugar jones. ClairBell had an elephant’s memory for slights, always accusing Hattie of playing favorites. She was jealous of her siblings. Even before the trip got under way there was bound to be a dramatic recitation of Hattie’s every crime against fairness. And her shocking questions. “How long since you and Daddy had sex?” No, not ClairBell.

  Her sweet Jesse. Well, sweet sometimes, but a trip with him might be a trial. You never knew the mood he’d be in. She’d thought he’d finally gotten over the aging barrel racer and rodeo queen, Patsy Gaddy by name, who for several years had broken his heart on a regular basis. ClairBell had told her Patsy was still ensconced in Jesse’s spare room and had sworn Hattie to secrecy, but she wasn’t sure this was true. Abel had once said that at the Cafe ClairBell you never knew if truth was on the menu or if she was slinging hash. Still, Patsy or no Patsy, Jesse was a brooder, and it was always a guessing game to figure out which particular burr had lodged under his saddle.

  Nick, her firstborn boy, was dead, buried with his head in gauze some forty years before when sepsis from a sick tooth shot through a system weakened by a heroin habit and his inborn heart defect. But she never left his name off the roll call. Maybe, from the other realm, he heard her. She wasn’t sure. Neither was she sure he was in heaven—chances weren’t good—but if love and prayers could boost a soul to everlasting life, hers would have given him at least a nudge. She knew it was probably wrong, but she’d worked out a theory that sometimes allowances were made. Nick hadn’t been a bad boy, just lost and hurt. Another idea she’d worked out was that if in the world to come you were reunited with those you loved, then at least Nick might make a temporary appearance on her account.

  This left Doro, who at the moment Hattie’s thoughts turned to her was browsing at Anthropologie on Boylston Street. She’d just seen some majolica cups, thinking they would be perfect for her mother’s sunflower-yellow kitchen, and this made her realize it had been a few months since she’d been home to the plains. She missed the wheat fields and the cattle and the cottonwoods, the cowboys and the Indians, the shallow brown creeks, the prairie, the very air but not the politics at all, but more than anything she missed her mother. She resolved to make a trip home soon.

  Doro had lived for a long time in the east, and this was a sorrow to Hattie, for her eldest girl was nearest her in temperament. They had a spiritual connection. Not ESP or anything like that, but a mother-daughter wooh-wooh they sometimes talked about, giggling, half believing. A connection Hattie’d never felt with ClairBell. Although her daughters shared the straight silver hair of Abel’s side of the family—a loose, pencil-fastened chignon for Doro and a Pebbles Flintstone topknot for ClairBell—and a tendency inherited from Hattie’s side to pack on weight in the caboose, they were as different as sisters could be. Doro read poetry and essays and fiction; if she read at all, ClairBell skimmed the Penny Power. Doro worked for a college and wrote western novels under a pen name. ClairBell had wanted to be a nurse, but the plan had derailed because of poor grades and so she’d done temp work here and there—driving the Head Start bus, answering phones at a call center for Shepler’s. Doro kept her own counsel unless asked. ClairBell dispensed pronouncements from a harum-scarum store of advice she gleaned from Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil and Dr. Laura and then mangled past recognition. Doro loved music and art. Though some of her tastes struck Hattie as a little hoity-toity, at least poetry and nature were important to her, at least she looked toward a deeper world. ClairBell lived for bingo and blackjack and yard sales. And the awful things that sometimes came out of her mouth … but why go on? Slowly, slyly, a plan came over Hattie. It wasn’t in her to tell an outright lie, but she was not above a subterfuge that might seem innocent: she resolved to wait for a visit and take the trip with Doro, keep the plan from ClairBell. And of course if Billy happened to call ahead of time, why, they could zip up to town and fetch him in no time at all and he could come along for the ride. With Billy and Doro, the trip could be a lark. They were like-minded. The three of them could talk about books and music and religion and even politics. They were bent the same way on most things, though Hattie continued to vote the straight Republican ticket out of habit, except for 2008, when she staged a revolt against Abel to cast her vote for Obama. They could spend the day and not have one disagreement. With this in mind, she began to plan for the arrival of her eldest daughter, who usually came in spring to smell the Russian olive trees, which bloomed in middle May.

  And so as the starkness of winter fell away and bright weather came on, Hattie grew excited. Daily in her mind she traveled two counties over to the open range, to the rugged countryside of buttes and mesas red with iron oxide, of sand draws and salt cedar and the beautiful red Medicine River. In her imagination she climbed rills to breathe the air of her youth, fashioned pretty nosegays of magenta poppy mallow, entered a bower under an elm where she and her cousin Eugene had played house, egg crates nailed to the tree for cabinets, broken crockery for cups and plates, a bed of straw covered with a saddle blanket. She was the mother and Eugene was the father and theirs was the ideal marriage. In the leafy playhouse, order ruled. At Ding-dong, morning! Eugene woke up and dutifully did his chores. He didn’t argue with her about heaven—he was happy to believe what she believed. If she told him to say the blessing over the supper table, he obeyed. “Mighty tasty,” he would say after a meal of mulberries and cracked wheat, dabbing his mouth with a catalpa leaf. At play-night they lay side by side and if she told him to hold her hand, he would do so, snoring honk-shoo, honk-shoo until Ding-dong, morning! came again. As each day passed, her desire to see the old place grew like a bud within her, flashed, and she smiled to think of Wordsworth, upon her inward eye.

  From time to time as she waited for Doro’s arrival the call to honesty overtook her and she considered telling Abel about her desire. Twice she’d gone as far as to walk down the hall toward his lair, intending to unburden herself. But each time when she saw him dozing in front of the television she drew herself up short. He would find reasons her trip was a bad idea and go to work on her until she forgot why she wanted to go in the first place. She would broach the subject later. There was no sense bearding the lion in his den, at least not yet.

  At last Doro arrived and Hattie had only the welcome-home dinner to get through before she could take her eldest aside, enlist her support, and spring her plan. Gathered around the table were her husband, herself, Doro, Jesse, ClairBell and her husband, Randy, and the unquiet ghosts of countless awkward family dinners past when all of the assembled vied, as they always had, for Abel’s favor. He was the sun around which their lesser planets circle
d, the god they hoped to please. He was still the Little King.

  According to long habit, Hattie said grace, careful not to veer from the rhetorical formula Abel insisted on and any variation from which caused pained muttering. ACTS—Adoration, Contrition, Thanksgiving, Supplication. This from the man who refused to lead his family in prayer, forcing Hattie into the awkward position of either blessing her own hands for preparing the meal or leaving out the phrase altogether. The man who spent his spare time poking holes in people’s faith and lived to catch a person in a theological blind alley. A surge of pique caused her to flush. Her heart hammered. She picked up the meat platter and passed it first to Abel. He served himself and then passed it on. Her hands shook as she passed the peas and then sent the cauliflower dish around.

  Many years before, after the first five children had left home and Billy was out in San Francisco catching his death of the new plague, she’d tried to tell her husband a half-truth. This event, never mentioned in Abel’s presence for it galled him still, concerned the death of his lap-dog, a grandchild-terrorizing black-and-white Chihuahua–rat terrier mix named Toodles who had come to them after Nick died, a stray brought home by Billy. In her early years Toodles had been a favorite, but with age she’d grown mean-tempered, and before long no one but Abel could get close without risking a nasty bite. His was the only blood she hadn’t drawn. ClairBell called her Toadles, for the way she trotted after Abel, her docked tail wriggling obsequiously, and for her stumpy little body. Abel repaid the dog’s devotion with kind words, table scraps, and a patience he extended to no other being. Under his care Toodles grew fat as a football.

  When Abel came home from the law office, he greeted the dog first. At the table, he used her as intermediary. “Toodles thinks the potatoes need more salt,” or “Toodles prefers butter on her roast beef sandwich.”