The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Page 24

  Abel perked up. “The little Allis Chalmers?” He took a seat at the counter. “Maybe I’ll change my mind.” He looked at Hattie and Doro over his glasses. “If nobody minds.”

  Dutifully, Doro laughed.

  From the sink Hattie said, “I’d like it if you went with me, Abel.”

  He smiled, brought down a palm on the countertop. “Then say no more. It shall be done.”

  Hattie and Doro shared a look. He was in a good mood; with any luck it would be one of his better days.

  By afternoon the skies cleared and a pleasant breeze came up. ClairBell had specified three o’clock, but people began arriving at her place shortly after noon, and by two o’clock the long front lane was two deep in parked cars. Uncle Big Bill stationed his truck on the county road in order to direct overflow into the pasture. Doro drove her rental out early in order to help set up, and by the time Hattie, carrying a yellow Tupperware bowl filled with potato salad, and Abel, leaning on his cane, arrived that afternoon, the party was in full swing.

  ClairBell was pleased with the way things turned out. Streamers on a line that ran from the purple martin house to the yard light pole fluttered in the wind. The pool sparkled aquamarine. Her new red market umbrellas shaded the tables around the patio and paper lanterns bobbed from shepherd’s crooks planted here and there. She hadn’t been able to rustle up a horse, but no matter. She’d sent Randy to Walmart to buy two big trampolines, and now nieces and nephews and grandchildren bounced with abandon. She’d scotched her idea about the Eliot chair. It was too fraught a reminder of the abortive family council and as well it wouldn’t do to call attention to it. Her claim on it, though still her secret—she hadn’t told a soul except for Randy—was strong enough to hold, and she would defend it to the death if need be. Plus, she’d knocked herself out making this party; anyone could see that. Who could begrudge her the chair? Maybe, she thought, this would be a good day to tell her siblings that it had been given to her. That would put her mark on it. Seal it for good. There was no need to mention it again to her father. It was a done deal.

  Four generations of Campbells and Eliots, Davieses and Hensleys gathered on lawn chairs and blankets. They milled in visiting clumps around the tables that held the potluck offerings. Cakes and pies and casseroles, platters of homegrown tomatoes and sweet corn, all the favorites from family reunions past—Aunt Sammie’s pink angel food loaf cake, studded with walnuts and cherries, the Eliot family’s burnt-sugar cake, the Ennis corn casserole, zucchini bread, macaroni salad, pickles, olives, chowchow, hand-cranked peach ice cream. To ward off imposters, ClairBell had placed an embargo on the baked beans of others, and she’d put together a hundred-year-floodplain batch—double brown sugar, extra molasses, two pounds of applewood-smoked bacon—in her Nesco roaster. She’d decided against fried chicken and instead was serving ribs and brisket, hamburgers and hot dogs. The huge sheet cake she’d ordered was in place on the center table, concealed in its box, which she had taped closed and further tented with sheet after sheet of foil so it would be a surprise. Everything was ready. She had tried to get a head count but people kept moving around. She thought there might be a hundred.

  The elders congregated in lawn chairs in the shade of a catalpa, a breeze from a box fan riffling their cloud-white hair. Occasionally one or the other of them threw back a head and gave out with the Campbell laugh as they told stories patinaed with age and telling. Uncle Big Bill and doddery Aunt Jewel, Uncle Joe and Aunt Nadine, lonely Uncle Ed, married four times and each time a dud, the widow Aunt Grace. In the center sat her father and from the look of his satisfied, easy posture, and the fact that his was one of the laughs she heard raised, he was happy.

  When she went upstairs to find a bathing suit for someone who’d forgotten to bring one, she looked out the back window at the party spread below. The kids in the pool and on the tramps, the old folks in their chairs, the tables, the lanterns, smoke from the grill, the line of coolers. Out near the rise some of the cousins gathered around Randy’s tractor. Gideon stood off to the side, his arms crossed, his ATF ball cap drawn forward so that his eyes were hooded. So far he was on good behavior, though he sometimes disappeared over the hill to a stand of cedars. He’d brought along his guitar, and she’d heard him singing in his Neil Young voice about lying in a burned-out basement with the full moon in his eyes. Jesse had called from the road. He’d be late but he’d be there. Down in the kitchen Doro and her gang of cousins had set themselves up, calling themselves the Marthas and gabbing about whatever the four priss-pots gabbed about. Hair dye, Botox, boob jobs—who knew? Maybe clothes. She wouldn’t know; she had never been part of their circle. But in the interest of peace she set this old wound aside. All of this, this glorious day, was because of her, and everyone knew it. People thanked her left and right and she was Queen for a Day. And her biggest worry hadn’t come to pass. No one had heard from Billy.

  * * *

  Billy had every intention of being at the party. He loved a gathering, especially when it was his family. He’d had a rough week and he needed something to look forward to. After he left his mother and sister on whatever day that was he’d gone … well, he couldn’t remember exactly where he’d gone and how he’d gotten there … but the upshot was that he had scored some extra methadone. And plenty of it, thanks to the windfall cash his mother and sister had slipped him.

  Later that night when he tried to get into his apartment he discovered he didn’t have his keys and so he’d had to knock on Haskell’s door, which was a big mistake. Haskell had yelled at him and Billy yelled back and then out of nowhere and for no reason Haskell clocked him, hard. But after that Haskell threw the key into the courtyard so at least Billy was able to get inside and go to bed. He holed up for a while, waiting for his bruised jaw to feel better. It was a good thing he had the extra methadone. Things had a way of working out, he reflected.

  He was looking forward to going to ClairBell’s. He loved it when his brothers and sisters got to clowning around, when they got loud, they got silly, and he would laugh until his belly ached and his cheeks hurt. They would cease to be parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, they would cease to be the tired old fogues they’d become, and they would go back to the way they were when they were young, before the long siege of grief that set in after Nick died, back when he was their golden one, their Boysie.

  Each had a different kind of wit. Doro’s ran to silliness and wordplay. Sometimes she spun out of control into the ridiculous, but occasionally she spooled off a golden riff. Nick had been a satirist, inclined to irony, but no one spoke of this now. Jesse told homespun tales of the cowboys and drunks and drywall apes he worked with, his laconic delivery spaced by artful pauses that had listeners thinking the story had ended. But then Jesse would pick up the tale again, twirling the story in a lazy lariat circle. ClairBell was bawdy and comic, antic, colorful, a natural mimic. She was the quickest and the most cutting. She reminded him of Roseanne Barr; she had the same growly, crackling sharpness. Gideon loved to tell shaggy-dog stories, putting an iconoclastic spin on things so you never knew where his sympathies, if he had any, lay. He wrote sad-sack laments that he sang in his high lonesome voice. Billy’s favorite was, “You drank her wine, you ate her cheese, and now you’ve got her-pees.” Billy’s stock in trade was a story of his own well-known pretensions. Like Doro, he got carried away into silliness, but he loved to tell “The Teacup of the Aga Khan,” a tale about the porcelain demitasse he had stolen from the Harbor Club because that worthy, whom Billy had waited on, had sipped from it. He would have them all rolling.

  Hattie didn’t participate. She saw her children as cynics and smart alecks, not to mention she couldn’t tell a joke if her life depended on it. She’d tried to breed their father’s wild streak out of them with Bible verses and her dry English humor, but her side’s mildness and understatement and devotion didn’t take, or took only spottily—in Doro’s conciliatory nature, in Jesse’s reticence, maybe in Gid’s haunted hermit b
ehavior, in ClairBell’s … well, nowhere at all in ClairBell, she was a mad Campbell/Eliot hybrid. Abel was a storyteller, but he preferred an audience of cronies and so he took a backseat when the brothers and sisters went at it.

  Billy never felt more himself than when he was in the middle of family noise, and he’d planned a grand entrance, guaranteed to make a splash and start the party off on a comic foot, no matter that the guest list had on it more than a few family members—especially among the elders—who believed that he was a walking spokesmodel for sin. They also loved him, he knew, and over the course of his life they’d probably sent up more prayers on his behalf than could be counted. Depending on how he looked at it, their prayers had either worked or they hadn’t. And sin or not-sin, it was hardly their business. It was God’s, if He should care to meddle in such things. Billy believed that He did not trouble much with sin, that He was a creator god who didn’t intervene to punish or reward. As for Jesus, Billy had long ago worked out an answer that allowed him to hold two ideas at the same time, his love for the redeeming Christ his mother taught him and the prevailing prejudice held by most churches: if his was sin, it could be redeemed, and if divine forgiveness depended on contrition, he’d been contrite in one way or another every single minute of his adult life.

  A friend had a vintage convertible Mercedes and Billy saw himself arriving in style, a rooster tail of dust spinning behind them on ClairBell’s dirt road. The pal wasn’t a romantic interest but he could be talked into tooling down to the gathering on the promise of barbecue and a few doses of THC. Billy was looking forward to seeing everyone, but for the past week he seemed to keep losing track of time. When Saturday night rolled around and he remembered that the party was the next day, he realized he had nothing to wear.

  He knew the look he wanted. He wanted it to appear that he had just breezed in from the Hamptons—either in tennis whites or some Ralph Lauren, a pink shirt, maybe. Or if he could find a straw boater and a string tie he’d go Gay Nineties and wouldn’t that be a hoot? He was well aware of the silliness of showing up for a prairie barbecue in such getups, but that was part of the fun. He would carry it off and be charming. He prided himself on his ability to poke fun at himself before anyone else had a chance.

  Once he realized he needed an outfit, he set out on the long walk to the Goodwill. To be safe, he used his walker. He’d been feeling wobbly all week. When he arrived, he found the store closed. A look at the clock on the corner of Broadway and Waco told him that somehow it had gotten to be midnight. It was dark outside, so this meant it wasn’t noon, he deduced. As he made his way back to his apartment, he was careful to walk in the nearly deserted street to keep his walker from catching on the crumbling sidewalks and buckled curbs, and so he didn’t hear the car coming up behind him until just before it struck him.

  * * *

  On the party went, afternoon fading to dusk. After the meal, which he couldn’t eat, though he tasted his daughter’s sugar-coma baked beans for old times’ sake, Abel made his way through the crowd to Randy’s barn to inspect the tractor, the 1959 Allis Chalmers his son-in-law was restoring.

  Feeling the need to get away from gab and small talk, endless questions about his farm and what his sons were doing and blah-blah-blah and everything except what was actually on his mind, which was Patsy and what he should do about her, when and how to let her go, Jesse had walked out that way himself. He found his father sitting on the tractor’s front wheel, hands folded over the cane between his knees, holding forth about the tractor’s specifications to a group of cousins. The men listened respectfully, but Jesse could tell by their stiff faces and lowered eyes—or at least he thought their eyes were lowered, maybe they were just looking at the ground—they were humoring the old man.

  “You see,” he was instructing them, “your tie rod cylinders are held together by four rods. Cost less than a welded cylinder and they’re easier to fix. For your welded cylinder, the fixed end is welded in place. Stronger. Lasts longer. Better for a high-pressure operation. You’ve got an open system here, by the way. More common before 1960.”

  When he caught sight of Jesse he drew up short. He gave a smile Jesse didn’t know how to take, and for a minute Jesse feared he’d walked into a trap. But his father seemed as earnest and unguarded as he’d been back in the winter when he’d told him about Jeff.

  “Gentlemen, here’s the real expert,” his father said. “Son, what do you think? Which system do you favor? Open or closed?”

  The listeners shifted their attention Jesse’s way and widened their circle to make room. His father’s question was simple, a nothing-question, and the answer didn’t really matter, but his father had made the move to build him up. Jesse’s impulse was to step back, to deny that he knew anything, to rebuff his father’s gesture and leave him hanging. He’d almost done so when his better nature—or maybe, he thought later, his Higher Power—overtook him, and he answered the question straight, explaining the difference between systems in the way his father once had explained it to him, outlining the benefits of each. “So I’d say it depends on the nature of the job. Wouldn’t you say so, Dad?”

  They were small things, answering kindness with kindness, yielding the floor, letting his father have the last word, but they seemed to make the old man happy.

  Abel grinned at the other men, his brother, his nephews, his nieces’ husbands. “Have you met my son?”

  The others passed it off as though Uncle Abe was making one of his jokes, but Jesse saw the lapse. His father’s mind had just made one of its hairpin turns, traveling from clarity to blur in no time at all.

  Jesse went to stand beside his father. He put his arm across his shoulders and turned him toward the house. “Mom wants you for something,” he said.

  “Oh, she does, does she?” Abel replied amiably, and then summoned from distant memory a line from Emerson. “‘When duty whispers low, thou must, the youth replies, I can.’”

  Walking slowly, Jesse took his father’s elbow and guided him back to the catalpa tree where the others sat.

  As he went back out toward the barn, from a stand of cedars came the smell of cigarette smoke—Gid sequestered in his secret He-Man Woman-Haters hideout. Jesse didn’t want to put himself anywhere near a beer cooler, but he was drawn to maybe the only other person who would understand what had just happened. He found Gid sprawled in a camp chair, cigs and lighter in one pocket of the webbed cup holder, a tallboy in the other. His feet rested on an orange Igloo cooler. Gid reached behind him for a second folding chair and shook it open. “Take a load off, brother.”

  Jesse took the chair, set it up, and sat.

  Gid field-stripped his cigarette and ground the butt into the grass. He put the filter in the chair’s mesh pocket. “Looks like I’m the only drinker in the place,” he said. He jerked his head toward the gathering. “Bunch of holy rollers.”

  “Yeah,” Jesse said, shaking his head, “they’re pretty bad.” He glanced at Gid to see if he’d laugh but apparently the sarcasm was lost on his brother. Most of their family, on both sides, led sane, serene, productive lives, free of addictions and the wild whatever-it-was that had afflicted his.

  Out on the prairie a coyote howled. In return an owl hooted from the hedgerow.

  “I was thinking about quitting,” Gid said, apropos of nothing. “And then I decided it’d be better if I’d quit thinking.” He tipped his can Jesse’s way and grinned. “Plenty more where this came from.”

  Jesse shook his head. “I’m good.”

  “Much Pepsi in there, too.” Gid took his feet off the cooler’s lid and opened it.

  Most of the ice had melted and the cans floated free. Jesse fished in the frigid water for a can of something-not-beer. He selected a Sprite and popped the top, seeing how slowly he could release the gas.

  Gid rested his head and looked up at the sky, now turning orange with the setting sun. “You think we’ll ever get over it?”

  “The Judge?”

 
Gid laughed. “Well, him, yeah. But I meant booze.”

  Jesse took a long pull. It was peaceful in Gid’s arbor. From time to time they heard bursts of laughter. Shrieks from the diehards still in the pool playing Aqua Bull, a game in which a kid would jump onto a plastic oil drum floating under the diving board and try to stay on as long as possible, which was usually a hot second. “Not likely,” Jesse said.

  “What’s not likely?” Gid’s voice was slurring, guttural, as if his tongue had swollen.

  Classic drunk voice, Jesse thought, and it made him feel two things at once, nostalgia and disgust. “What you asked me,” Jesse said patiently. “If I thought we’d ever get over booze?”

  “Oh. Oh, yeah. Didn’t think so.” Gid raised his can to clink with his brother’s. He was in his cups and he was feeling sentimental. “I love you, man,” Gid said.

  His brother was down for the count, Jesse knew. There were all the signs, the unfocused gaze, the numbed speech, the sloppy emotion. He felt a rush of pity. For Gid, for Patsy, for himself, for anyone who had to fight the awful fight. He had been there, he knew how his brother felt, and he knew that the drunken love that was overflowing in Gid, for all its sloppiness, was as genuine as any other love and maybe more, for it contained all the forgiveness stone-cold soberness couldn’t quite muster. “I love you, too,” Jesse said, knowing Gid would keep repeating the words until he returned the favor. “But when this is over I’m driving you home.”

  Gid attempted a level gaze. “You have every right, sir.”

  Jesse drew back. The way Gid said this had sounded just like their father. Clipped, reasonable, matter-of-fact, on the edge of a challenge, the complexity of tone that was Abel’s.

  Gid had heard it, too. “Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, hell no.”