The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs Read online

  Seeking a laugh, Gid had just finished mimicking an announcer’s voice to say, “Abel Campbell, Esquire, Attorney-at-Law. Putting the ‘diss’ in dysfunction for over fifty years.”

  They snorted, but drew up short when their sisters entered and ClairBell said tearfully, “Daddy wants to see you boys.”

  At first the brothers feared they’d been overheard. This was an old feeling: The Judge knew all, saw all, his the radiant All-Seeing Eye of Providence that gilded his Masonic ring’s ruby.

  Powering through a hangover, Gid uncapped his coffee cup and swirled the dregs, peering at the pattern as if to read the future. “What does he want?”

  It was Super Bowl Sunday, Packers vs. Steelers, and what Gid wanted was to get ready for the party he’d planned in the game room in Jesse’s barn. He’d already thawed five pounds of ground venison laced with beef fat, stocked spirit as well as herbal provisions, and now he needed to head to the market for chili powder and two #10 cans of pinto beans. As a statement of the contempt he held for government and a sign of his outlaw sense of irony, he’d worn his stolen Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms ball cap, but in the lobby when he passed the statue of Bob Dole, native son and his father’s law school classmate, and saw the old warhorse’s withered arm cast strong and whole and healed in bronze for eternity, he had thought again. Sudden shame at his own lack of sacrifice for any cause larger than dirty blues, good weed, and cold tallboys led him to remove the cap, which he tucked in his bomber jacket pocket. Now he put it back on as armor to face his father. Already Jesse had hung his black Resistol on the rack so he wouldn’t be sentenced to the electric chair for the crime of wearing a hat indoors. Gid would be the one to fry, but Gid had already decided he didn’t care. It was his damn hat and his damn head.

  “Any idea what it’s about?” Jesse asked ClairBell. He feared another of the Judge’s confusing potlatches, the contradictory behests that set the brothers and sisters squabbling. Over nothing more than stuff, most of it dinged-up. Bottom of the line on everything except for a few prizes. Of the machine hulks overgrown with bindweed and wild buckwheat rusting in the salvage yard behind the machine shop, he liked to joke that his father had created his own private Great Depression. Of the few genuinely valuable items, his father had made gifts of the same full-quill ostrich dress boots to two sons and a brother, the same Kubota tractor and its implements to one brother, one son (himself), and one son-in-law. He’d promised the same Henry .30-30 rifle to two grandsons, a nephew, and a perfect goddamned stranger who had come to help him straighten out the snafu he’d made of Dish Network. Jesse worried that the Kubota he actually wanted would again be used as a chit in the endless give-and-take-back of his father’s forgetful last years. Jesse’s claim on the tractor was strong—he boarded horses and farmed fifteen acres in truck—but ClairBell was famously grabby, buzzarding over the inventory of their parents’ possessions. She had her eye fixed on the Henry for one of her sons, the boots for another, and the Kubota and its nine shop-made implements for Randy.

  ClairBell pinched her nose with a tissue and blew gustily. “Brothers, he’s saying his good-byes. He knows it’s the end.” She broke into tears, turning to Jesse to weep into the collar of his sheepskin barn coat.

  Jesse patted her back, his mind on the way the Judge ruled the roost and how the rest of the family flushed at every strut and crow. Their mother’s way was to submit to his will, with rare but terrible instances of revolt. Despite Doro’s education and the distance that should have inoculated her, their eldest sister mostly played dumb. She would smile sweetly when their father made his grandiose claims—“I’ve piloted every plane the army ever made”—because it was safer to pretend he was joking than to risk an argument for which the outcome was ordained, the loser certified. Jesse and Gid made do by staying downwind, and with their bull sessions. And probably, Jesse reckoned, with the drug and alcohol problems that plagued them. When he was sober, Billy would sometimes write their father rift-mending letters, saying how he’d always looked up to him. These letters were met with polite but strained thanks, for the Judge eschewed sentiment, especially when expressed in a gush, and so Billy had given up. It wasn’t that his children didn’t love him—they did, and it could be fairly said that his daughters had elevated him to a stature reserved for folk heroes and his sons had reasons to admire his accomplishments—it was that he was next to impossible to get along with. Even their long-dead brother, Nick, had left a journal detailing his rage at being continually one-upped by the old man. Only sturdy little ClairBell approached him on his own terms, standing up to him snout to snout like a stiff-legged yap dog, fighting him bark for bark.

  And only ClairBell showed her feelings, Jesse thought as she sniffled on. Because their father hated emotional outbursts, to avoid displays of feeling or even direct statements thereof they’d learned to hide themselves away to brood or exult in silence. ClairBell wore her moods fearlessly, the way she wore her yard-sale caftans. Today’s rig-out was red with black silhouettes of bears and moose and pine trees, and today’s feelings, Jesse would bet the Kubota and all nine shop-made goddamned implements, were (1) thrill at the deathbed drama, for ClairBell loved nothing better than spectacle, (2) sorrow at the old man’s decline, for she was his pet, (3) resolve to stage an eleventh-hour full-court press for the carved Morris chair she’d long campaigned for, and (4) a nose out of joint at Doro for blowing into town to hog the medical limelight when it was she, ClairBell, who claimed to be a trained nurse. Doro had once been married to Doctor Bob, who before the failure of his health had practiced at this very hospital. For this reason the doctors deferred to her, gave updates to her, and this singed ClairBell’s feathers; she had told the fiction of her medical training so often that she had come to believe it herself, even when reminded that her claim was based on a six-week stint as a nursing home psych aide, playing Yahtzee with stroked-out patients. Lately she’d been floating another whopper that she was EMT-certified but that there was some mix-up with the paperwork and this was why she didn’t actually have the piece of paper. This was typical ClairBell—another lie standing at the ready when the first was debunked. Jesse sighed. All of them were messed up and the fault could be laid at the Judge’s door.

  His boots were still wet from his dawn trek to crack the ice in the stock tank, and he wriggled his toes to gin up his circulation. Gid should have done the chore. The deal was that for providing living quarters now that Gid had returned from New Mexico Jesse would get some help with the horses. So far Gid’s contribution had been to stock the barn’s fridge with Budweiser, stash a Red Man pouch filled with pot under a saddle stand, and station himself in front of the game room television in a burn-pocked La-Z-Boy, presumably to keep the recliner from sprouting legs and walking off.

  At last ClairBell broke away to check her image in the vending machine’s glass and to rummage in her satchel for a tissue. “Ask him yourselves what it’s about,” she snapped as she dabbed at a clump of mascara. “Do I look like a fortune teller?”

  Jesse blinked. ClairBell’s moods could spin like Linda Blair’s head.

  Gid made a show of eyeballing her festive outfit and putting a finger to his chin in an attitude of comic pondering. “Now that you mention it…”

  “Stuff it, Gideous,” snapped ClairBell. “Is that rotgut I smell on your breath?” She huffed onto a pleather chair. “I wouldn’t go lighting any matches.” Encouraged by laughter from Jesse and Doro, she went on. “Speaking of matches, how about Gid’s breath and buffalo flatus?”

  Gid had to laugh. With her North Woods getup and her silver-gray hair done up in a curlicue wiglet their sister looked like a little plump Mrs. Santa with the berserker gaze of Cruella de Vil. He snickered at the image but composed himself when their mother returned from her trip to the ladies’ room.

  Fiddling with the hasp of her pocketbook in a nervous pick-click, Hattie smiled at her sons. “Your father wants a word with you.” She pick-clicked again, but soon he
r mind had moved past her husband and onto their missing boy, Billy, lame and cold and sick out in the blizzard on what might be the day of his father’s death. She wished she had bought a calling card for the new phone she’d bought for him. Then she remembered he’d lost the phone. She wondered if maybe she should front him some more money to replace the phone, which he’d left at … oh, somewhere she couldn’t get straight, his tale of losing it was so confusing. She would have to conceal the purchase from Abel, as usual, by using the secret bank account she’d set up for emergencies like these. That was: if Abel lived. The thought occurred to her that if he died she could help Billy with no interference, no lectures, but she quickly banished it. God forbid, God forbid. She would happily stay caught between her husband and her son until kingdom come if it meant keeping the peace. Blessed are the peacemakers, long habit supplied, for they shall be called the children of God. Pick-click went her fingers on the pocketbook hasp.

  The brothers left the waiting room. Neither had an idea of what the old man would say. Maybe, Jesse thought, he would give them some last instructions. Take care of their mother, sell the house, auction the contents of his bursting machine barn and shop, thanks, keep the change. What he hoped to hear was apology, a confession that their father had been a tyrant, a blowhard, a know-it-all, and that he had broken his sons as surely as if he’d beaten them with his basswood Indian club.

  * * *

  The night before, in an episode of hospital psychosis, Abel had torn out his IV and tried to yank out his NG tube. “Sundowning,” the doctor had told Doro, who kept track of medical developments on her iPhone. “Hospital psychosis. He’s seeing shadow people.” The night nurses, veteran corpsmen of Iraq and Afghanistan, had to bulldog him.

  Secured in a Posey, Abel hectored them about his constitutional rights until he nodded off. Now, waiting for his sons to enter, he drowsed his way upward out of Ativan. Distant voices seemed to play like blurred music, a static crackle, and in the snowy reception of his mind he determined that when the boys arrived he would tell them … something. He closed his eyes and gave his efforts to arranging his speech.

  He loved the silken song of syntax, the warp and weft of rhetoric, language and its turns, and he tried at first to array his thoughts into the elegant forms of case law. For a time, unbidden, the bloodthirsty oath of Freemasonry played in his mind: I most solemnly and sincerely promise and swear … binding myself under no less penalty than that of having my throat cut from ear to ear, my tongue torn out by its roots, and buried in the sands of the sea, at low water mark, where the tide ebbs and flows twice in twenty-four hours, etc.

  His sons were at odds with him for reasons long distilled: at everything he set his hand to he’d been an ace. A crack shot, an electronics and radio whiz, he’d mastered control of vehicles wheeled, tracked, winged, bladed, and hulled. He sculpted in stone, forged in iron. He’d landed trophy fish in the Dry Tortugas, skinned rabbits and deer, once an elk in Montana, once a bear near Hudson Bay. All game he dressed out and consumed, wasting not. He could butcher a steer. Scald a hog. Name in Latin the insects, grasses, trees, and reptiles of the Great Plains. He’d fought a war, guided the setup of a radio tower on Saipan. He was at home in the limitless geography of space. Quantum mechanics, hydraulics, firearms, particle physics—name a subject and he kept himself informed. He had a prodigious memory. But foremost among his strengths was his command of language, which he could wield as balm or cudgel. Too often, he knew, it had been the latter. When his sons took issue with something he said, with the force of a juggernaut he laid waste to their logic, brought them low, the battlefield strewn with shards of their pride while he prevailed lord of all things, silently hated what he was doing, but couldn’t make himself stop. For the boys to be healed of their bitterness, he decided, he would have to speak humbly. To try one last time to talk past his own outsized ego, of which he was well aware and which topped his long list of regrets, to tell them he loved them and ask their forgiveness.

  As boys Jesse and Gid had understood that their father meant to teach them how to be men, but decades of failure had weakened their willingness to learn from a man who appeared to think they could do little right. They took his lessons as insults and repaid him in kind. Even if he survived—he was Evel Knievel, Houdini; he might—in the dementia that had been worsening for years he was on his way out. He’d already gone past his time as a capable mechanic, and they’d drawn guilty pleasure from the signs of his slowdown, cutting each other looks when he’d wrongly accused them of grand larceny because he was convinced that Jesse and Gid, as they cleaned up a flood of sewage caused by his own jackleg plumbing repair, had suctioned up three gold coins from his homemade floor safe, which consisted of a Hills Bros. coffee can set in cement and secured with a dime-store padlock that any fool with a hacksaw could breach. The coins had been found later, just where he’d hidden them, stashed between the floor joists in his ham shack. Machinery once fine was now a wrack of wrongheaded repairs, the house on the creek a hazard of jury-rigged wiring, of carpentry patches so crude it looked as if a child had played hammer-and-saw. Good angle iron and argon arc welding wire: mangled to fashion contraptions of harebrained design and dubious use. Vintage ham radio gear cannibalized for parts and, from the look of the strewn tubes and gizmos, by squirrels. Over his three-acre domain fluttered Post-it notes in his shaky scrawl, all headed with legalese. Know all men by these presents that my electronic gear is to be sold to Dish Vance, who will not cheat seller of said gear. Or, To all to whom these presents shall come: Let Fred Epps get his hands on a single one of these guns, you’ll answer to my glowering ghost.

  Some of the notes brought them almost to pity. One Post-it, timed and dated 2:28 A.M., October 10, 2009, read: My dearest bride Hattie, I may have accidentally swallowed a hearing aid battery. If by morning I have ceased to draw breath, look no further than this for the cause. But the impulse to pity would be dashed by: I have hidden six Krugerrands in a place known only to me. Should I forget the location, a clue can be found in the Latin name of the sharp-shinned hawk and said name will spur recollection by me and no one else. All he had once known and ached not to forget—lists of stars and constellations, sheaves of runic pages in Morse code, handwritten catalogues of the Greek alphabet and the Dewey Decimal System and WWII radio relay phonetics—everywhere on foolscap left over from his years on the municipal bench was littered the desperate evidence of a once brilliant mind off its rails.

  The men entered his room. “Hello, Dad,” said Jesse. Awkwardly, Gid patted Abel’s knee.

  “Same side of the bed, if you would,” Abel said weakly. He waited while they drew up chairs. “At ease, men,” he said, a nod to the drill commands he’d used when they were boys, an appeal, he hoped, to nostalgia. He reached for their hands, but neither seemed to notice and he had to say, “Give me your hands, boys.” When they gave them, he gripped tightly.

  Only to shake it had Jesse recently held this hand. Now the feel of it, even taped and tethered as it was to the IV bag, sent a flare to his memory. This hand had shot out to stay him in the days before seat belts when the old man would take them on the wild careens he called Rough Rides, had held him onto the first Honda 50, covered his smaller one to turn the wrench to fit the bigger sprocket, set him in his first shotgun stance, taught him how to crack a breech, skin a rabbit, tie a bowline and bight, fashion a hangman’s noose.

  Though less sentimental than his brother, Gid was moved as well. He’d had less of his father, for good or for ill, and the few times he’d felt the hand it had been raised in anger over some stupidity he’d committed, but now the grip was different. Chastened, needful, human, weak.

  Their father fixed his gaze on them, as though for field inspection. Finally, he said, “Gideon, hat!”

  With a show of irritation Gid removed his ATF cap and put it back in his jacket pocket.

  Satisfied, Abel began, “Long ago I decreed that I would precede your mother in death and I intend to honor my
word.” He waited in vain for them to grin at his high diction, at the way humility allowed him to poke fun at himself.

  Ears belonging to other men might have heard his mock-heroic tone and self-deprecating humor, but his sons’ could not. Jesse swallowed hard. Galled by high-flying language almost as much as he was by the old man’s perpetual arrogance, he wanted to get up and leave. His father lay shrunken and small in the bed, a green plastic tube running into one nostril, his whiskered chin jutting like a battered old barn tom’s, yet even now he was issuing edicts. Jesse took away his hand and tried to catch Gid’s eye, but Gid was looking away, wishing he could pull out his flask. He, too, had released their father’s hand.

  Hit a man when he’s down, Abel thought, and he couldn’t stop his face from crumpling, couldn’t stay his mouth from stretching into a grimace. So this was the way. All he’d wanted was for them to look up to him, to understand what he had done on their behalf. To teach them, to save them some of the trouble he’d had, so they would be able to stave off the feelings of failure he knew would assail them, their being sons of his. He knew all too well how that felt. For a time he couldn’t speak for the thickening in his throat. “Boys,” he said finally. “I’m going. This is the end. Will you have no mercy on me?”

  Jesse drew in a breath, letting it out slowly to give himself time to think. This was vintage Judge Dad, the question posed in a way that made it impossible to answer, a courtroom gambit. Was the correct response “Yes, I will have no mercy on you” or “No, I will not have no mercy on you”?

  Three needs made war in Jesse, the need for his father’s approval, the need to forgive him, and the need to protect his own heart, left too often unguarded and open to blows. As a boy he’d become Abel’s hope, Nick being unfit for rough and tumble because of his heart defect. For Jesse, who’d been a natural at mechanics and speed sports, Abel had bought motorcycles, entered him in time trials and enduros and motocross races. When Jesse earned National Novice status at the age of seventeen, he entered races at Madison Square Garden and the Astrodome, where he did well but never won, always bottoming out in the last lap for one reason or another. “The will to fail,” the Judge had told him, shaking his head. “Son, you have the will to fail.”