Into the Web (13 page)

I spent the next hour reading in the chair beside the window, glancing out occasionally to observe the withered garden my father had planted, then abandoned. Several years before, he’d gathered my mother’s clothes
and burned them in a pile as ragged and disordered as his marriage. I’d watched him as he’d poked the smoldering mound with a crooked stick. I would not have given him another year of life back then, but he’d staggered on, as if determined to prove just how little nourishment his soul required. If that were true, then I wondered if this same bleak goal might be my true inheritance, not my father’s withered garden, nor his worthless house, but the grim feat of showing just how little a man needed to survive.

He was waiting by the car when I came out at ten sharp. He’d changed his appearance slightly since breakfast, added black shoes to the ensemble, not exactly polished, but wiped with a wet cloth. He’d changed his tie so that it now hung like a thin red snake, its arrowhead tail dangling a full three inches above his belt buckle. A heart-shaped tie clasp held it in place, the one part of his attire I’d never seen before.

“Well?” he asked as he got to his feet. “Do I look good enough to go courting?”

“It’s a funeral,” I reminded him. “Not a dance.”

He shrugged. “In Waylord them two gets mixed together.” He turned toward the stairs, his gaze suddenly caught on the old brown Ford he’d driven for the past twelve years, a dusty relic whose odometer topped a hundred thousand cheerless miles.

“Would you prefer to drive?” I asked as I stepped up beside him.

“Naw,” he said. “Naw,” he repeated. “You better do it.

I guess my driving days is over.” It was the first time I’d
heard him actually give in to the fact of his imminent dependency.

As we headed along the valley roads, my father kept his eyes fixed straight ahead, hardly giving a second glance to the world he’d lived in for so many years. He paid no attention to the farmhouses we swept by, nor the fields and woods that surrounded them.

A mile or so up the road, we passed the house where Archie had done it. A large metal mailbox proclaimed that the Tompkins family now occupied the spacious rooms through which the Kelloggs had once moved with such certainty that they were safe, protected by law and social standing and friends in high places, never imagining that it could all be blown away in a few murderous seconds.

There were children in the yard as we drove by, a little boy and girl, the boy around eight years old, the girl no more than six. They were darting playfully over the neatly cut grass, kicking at a red-striped ball, crying excitedly as the ball hurled toward the road.
Get it, get it, get it.

My father glanced at them as we drifted by, and for a moment seemed to see Christmas holly curled around the black mailbox, snow begin to fall softly as it had that night. He released a ragged breath, then turned away, locking his eyes on the road ahead.

He didn’t appear to take note of anything else until we turned onto the red clay roads that twined upward, finally reached Bishop’s Gap, then moved ever higher into the hills. At that point his gaze began to shift about, noting this house or that one, a dell here, a stream there. From time to time he even went so far as to make a
comment about the long-past resident of some ramshackle farmhouse. “Old Man Stuckley used to live there,” he’d say, or “Maude Cowper kept bees over yonder. She always brought a jar of honeycomb when she went visiting.”

When we reached the old mining road, I nodded and said, “Down there’s where we found Clayton Spivey.”

We drove on awhile in silence, then my father said, “Did you ever find out much about him, Roy?”

“Just that he was lonely,” I answered. “No wife or kids. Not even any friends.”

“Never found no balance.”

“Balance?”

“Something my daddy used to tell me,” my father said. “That’s a point where things seem about as good as they can get. When there ain’t nothing weighing too heavy on the wrong side of things. That’s what we should look for, he said, this here balance.”

I glanced over to him. “Did you ever find it?”

He lowered his eyes slightly. “Never even got close,” he said. “According to the radio, they’re having the funeral at the Holiness Church. Same church Betty’s husband went to. Buford was his name. A helpless little feller, Betty said. But nice enough.”

I wanted to say nothing, ask no further question, but my need to explore this old corner of my father’s life lit the very candle I thought I’d snuffed out.

“You must have known her pretty well, then,” I said. “For her to tell you something like that. About her husband. What he was like. Something so … intimate.”

My father caught the hint of an insinuation in my tone, but dismissed it.

“Marriage don’t close a woman’s mouth, Roy. Or nothing else, for that matter. If you’d ever been married, you’d know that. Anyway, I never screwed Betty Cutler, if that’s what you’re getting at. We was never nothing more than friends. You think just ’Cause we talked, we had to be screwing?”

“I have no way of knowing.”

He eyed me closely, hit the mark. “You ain’t never been friends with a woman, have you, Roy? Just friends, and nothing else?”

The answer pained me, but I gave it anyway. “No, not really.”

“How about men? You got any buddies out there in California?”

I remembered the rawboned men who’d stood in ragged circles about town, the way they’d parted to receive my father with a clap on the shoulders or a mute, respectful nod, these pulpwood haulers and timbermen I’d seen as little more than work-animals in their dusty overalls and floppy hats. More than anything, I’d wanted to avoid the crude manual labor that had defined their lives. But did some part of me also want to be like them? For they’d had an easy way with one another, as well as a deep competence with physical things. They could tear apart and reassemble engines, mend roofs, build sheds and fences, and I knew that they could truly respect only other men who could do the same.

“Just people I work with,” I admitted. “I wouldn’t call them … buddies.”

My father didn’t say it outright, but I knew what he was thinking. That no matter how unbalanced his life had been, it had never been so bereft as mine, solitary,
friendless, a teacher of children who were not my own, surrounded by interchangeable acquaintances, a life lived by the sea, among strangers, in a world where blood was truly no thicker than water.

“Must be mighty nice out there in California, then,” he said. “If you can like it without a friend.”

“I don’t like it,” I told him, speaking with a sudden surprising candor. “It’s just where I ended up.”

My father’s gaze turned toward me. “Well, the house is yours if you ever want to come back to Kingdom County.”

I shook my head. “I won’t be coming back to Kingdom County.”

“Sell it, then,” he said dryly, without the slightest hint of sentiment for the old place. “Won’t bring much, but ain’t nobody else to give it to.”

There were only a few people inside the church, all of them gathered in the first few pews, staring at Juanita’s plain wooden coffin, the handful of wildflowers, stems tied with a white ribbon, that rested on top of it. Betty Cutler sat in the front pew, her gray hair wound into a bun and neatly pinned behind her head. Lila sat beside her in a plain black dress.

My father and I took seats at the back of the church, listened as the preacher said the usual things. After that, a straggling line of people moved down the center aisle, Lila in the lead, holding her mother close at her side.

She caught sight of me as she neared the back of the church, nodded, then moved by, guiding her mother down the front stairs and out to the cemetery.

“Lila’s still mighty pretty, ain’t she?” my father whispered.

“Yes, she is.”

A final prayer was offered at the graveside, then the coffin was lowered into the ground. Lila and her mother stood together, watching silently as the brown casket sank slowly into the earth. Then Lila bent forward, grasped a crust of dry sod, and tossed it into the grave.

Through it all my father held his gaze on Betty Cutler, almost wistfully, as I noticed, the past pouring over him like a glistening falls.

Lila took her mother’s arm and led her over to where we stood.

“Hi, Roy,” she said. “Hello, Mr. Slater.”

“I was sorry to hear about Juanita,” my father said. “How-do, Betty.”

Mrs. Cutler squinted. “Who’s that?”

“It’s Jesse,” my father answered. “Jesse Slater.”

She looked as if she’d been hit by a ray of light. “Well, I’m born again.”

My father smiled. “How’d you like to take a little stroll, Betty?” he asked, his voice so bright and youthful, I glimpsed the vibrant young man he must once have been.

Mrs. Cutler gave no answer, but my father must have caught something in her gaze, for he stepped over briskly, took her arm, tucked it beneath his own, and drew her away from Lila and me. For a moment I watched them silently, helplessly, in admiration of my father’s way with a woman, how firm his stride was, how sure his touch, with what ease he’d drawn Betty Cutler back into the circle of his affection.

“Roy?”

It was Lila’s voice, and the sound of it was like a trumpet in my mind.

“I didn’t expect to see you again,” she said.

“My father wanted to come to Juanita’s funeral,” I told her.

“He knew Juanita?”

“Not very well. He said he came because he wanted to see your mother. Tell her good-bye.”

Lila glanced out over the cemetery to where my father and Betty Cutler had come to a halt at a small stone near the gnarled trunk of a dogwood.

“Your father always seemed so nice,” she said. “So gentle.”

We watched the old man as he knelt slowly, brushed his hand across the top of the squat gray stone, then peered up at Lila’s mother, who turned away.

“He’s not gentle. Just old and sick.”

A cloud moved across Lila’s face. For a moment, she struggled to keep silent, struggled so hard that when the words finally broke from her, I’d expected them to hit like small exploding shells. But they fell softly instead. “What’s the matter, Roy? You seem so …”

My father’s judgment burst resentfully from my mouth. “Pitiful?”

She looked as surprised by the word as the bitter tone with which I’d pronounced it.

“No, not pitiful,” she said. “Alone.”

I released a brittle laugh. “Well, that’s certainly true.” Then, before she could say more, I added, “I didn’t want that much, you know. When I was a kid. It strikes me sometimes just how little I wanted.” The words flooded
out now. “I guess I must have seemed ambitious to you. Full of big ideas. Go to college. All that. But I really didn’t want that much, Lila. Just a simple life. Nothing great, nothing grand. Just a simple life.”

Lila started to speak, but I lifted my hand.

“A family,” I blurted out, my tone unexpectedly wounded. “Kids.”

She stared at me with a terrible stillness. “Maybe I wanted that too,” she said. “But I couldn’t, Roy, because I knew—” She stopped suddenly.

“Knew what?”

I could see something rising in her, a long-caged animal clawing to get out.

“That it couldn’t be, Roy,” she said. “Not after the murders.”

“After the murders.”

Three days after the murders, I’d driven to Lila’s house. By then Archie was dead and I’d come to tell her about the funeral, expecting her to join me at my brother’s grave. But Betty Cutler had met me at the door, told me that Lila had fallen ill, that she was sleeping, that I should stay away for another few days or so. Her final words rang in my ears:
She’ll be all right in time.

“What did the murders have to do with us?” I asked.

She lifted her hand. “I can’t bear this, Roy,” she said.

“Did you think that I—”

“I can’t, Roy,” she repeated, then, like someone broken on the wheel, she turned and walked away.

I
mentioned nothing of what had happened between Lila and me as I drove my father back down the mountain road a few minutes later. Instead, I brooded mutely, playing the scene over and over in my head, the way Lila had turned away from me.

My father watched me silently, his own mood growing steadily darker, the lightness that had touched him earlier in the day now leeching away like something fading in the sun.

After a time, he drew a pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket. “There ain’t much left of Betty.”

“People get old.”

“It ain’t just that.” He lit the cigarette, waved out the match. “She’s weighed down by how things turned out for Lila.”

“What did she tell you about Lila?”

He blew a column of smoke from the corner of his mouth. “Just that nothing ever worked out for her. I told her, I said, Well, Betty, fact is you can’t do nothing about what happens to your kids. You git the kids you git, and that’s what you end up with.”

Meaning, of course, that he had ended up with me, a card dealt to him facedown.

“That works both ways, of course,” I said curtly. “You don’t pick your parents either.”

He didn’t respond, and in the following silence the old isolation slowly descended upon him, so that he finally assumed the stricken appearance I hadn’t seen since the night following Archie’s funeral. A rage had roared through him for days by then, one that had finally dissolved into a solitary muteness, so that he’d ceased railing against my mother and me, against Horace Kellogg and Gloria, the “puny little thing” who’d caused it all. Finally, at sunrise, he’d poured himself a whiskey, the only drink I’d ever seen him take, and sat, sipping it silently, the darkness in his eyes draining light from the dawning air.

The same isolation gripped him now.

“Pore old Betty,” he said. “She had a good heart. Helped me with this girl I knew once. We was going to run off. Me and this girl. Betty was gonna pick her up and bring her back up to Waylord.” He drew in a long breath, his eyes sweeping over to the granite precipice known locally as Dawson Rock. “Waited for her right around here, as a matter of fact. But her old man got wind of it somehow. I shouldn’t have waited like I done. When I seen she wasn’t coming, I should have gone and
got her and took her away. Would have saved a world of trouble if I’d done that.”