He felt empty. Rainey caught his mood. “Not liking much of what you see,” he said.
Faulk shook his head and sighed.
“This is not a good time, is it,” the older man went on. “A bad time for all of us.”
“Yeah.”
“And of course you have to go with your gut when it comes to picking a place to live.”
“You remind me of my father,” Faulk told him. He hadn’t known he would say it.
“Hope that’s a good thing. Is he still with us?”
“Yes. Very healthy. A little touch of gout now and then and some trouble with peripheral vision. He lives in Little Rock.”
“My mother’s got trouble with that. The peripheral vision thing. Still going strong, though. Ninety-two and sharp as a tack. She said something to me this week — stopped me. We’d been talking about it all, you know, and she said — I mean she was smiling, but I think she was half serious — said things get so bad and ugly all around you, everything changing for the worse as you age, that you don’t hate so much the idea of going.”
They were standing in the center of a large square living room with freshly polished hardwood flooring. An arched entrance opened into a freshly remodeled kitchen.
“Good light here with these windows,” said Rainey.
“I should probably have waited until my fiancée could be with me,” Faulk told him. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, but it’ll be good to have an idea, anyway.”
“This is very nice.”
“I had a place just like this once. Raised three girls in it. Theresa, Coleen, and Marilyn.”
“My mother’s name was Marilyn.”
“Good name. I picked that one.”
Faulk imagined him as a young man. “Do they live close?”
“Not too far away.” Rainey sighed. “One’s in Chicago, and two’re in Nashville. I get to see them pretty often. Them and the grandkids. I’ve got nine grandkids. Each of my girls has three boys.” He smiled. “I tell them it’s a baseball team.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“I’m afraid they’ll all end up as part of a platoon, now.”
Faulk nodded. “Bad,” he said.
“Should we take a look at the upstairs?”
“I’ll keep it in mind. Might be a little big for just two. Can we look at the ones in High Point?”
They walked out and got into their separate cars. Faulk looked back at the house, with its porch and the forsythia lining the left side of the front yard. Mr. Rainey pulled away slowly, and they went on down to the end of the street, toward Poplar Avenue.
Following the real-estate agent, Faulk thought of his father. He did not put the radio on. It was hard to feel himself in his own age, almost fifty. The road ahead was blue, baking in the sunlight, an end-of-summer day in Memphis, Tennessee, in the United States, and a war had begun. He had seen in the news that religious fanaticism was the one motive being advanced most by observers (there were already acts of violence against mosques and shrines), and it came to him that just now he felt detached from it all. He was driving around Memphis looking for a house and a neighborhood, anticipating life with a new, young wife, and when he thought of her he felt excitement, even gladness. Yet there was something faintly reflexive about that, too.
At High Point Terrace, Mr. Rainey showed him a couple of houses, and then they came to one on Swan Ridge, where the key in the lockbox was the wrong one. Faulk liked the look of the house and the yard, and Mr. Rainey tried calling his office. But he had to leave for another appointment. The two men arranged to meet later in the morning.
Faulk drove back to his apartment, opened a can of ravioli, heated it, and ate, and then called his father.
“Glad you’re home,” the old man said. “I talked to Clara and she said you were on your way.”
“I’d have called when I got here, but it’s been crazy.”
“Your girlfriend get home okay?” This was simply his way of speaking.
“I pick her up late this afternoon.”
“You find a place yet?”
“I think maybe I have.”
“You figured out what you’re gonna do, now that the church thing is over?”
“Dad.”
“Just curious. I don’t mean anything by it.”
“You make it sound like some phase I was going through.”
“Well,” the old man grumbled. “No sense giving all your money to the phone company.”
“Right,” Faulk answered with an old sense of being held at an emotional remove.
“Make a trip out here, why don’t you, now that you’re not a priest anymore.”
“That sounds like now you’ll be able to tolerate me, since I’m a layman.”
The old man sighed. “I meant now that you’re more free to travel. Come on, boy. Quit interpreting everything I say. I’d like you to drive over to see us.”
“We’ll do that. You coming to our wedding?”
“If we can. When is it?”
“Early next month.”
“Give me some notice.”
“This is it.”
“You want to give me a definite date, Son?”
“I will. Of course. Promise.”
Faulk sat with the phone at his ear, picturing the old man in his television room leaning back in the easy chair amid all the law books he never looked in anymore, with a movie paused on the VCR, anxious to get off the line.
“Not everything I say is intended as a criticism,” Leander said.
Faulk apologized, meaning it.
“Just sometimes,” said the old man with a cheerless little snickering sound.
“Right,” Faulk said. “Well, I’m home.”
“Good.”
“I’ll call you when it’s set.”
As long as he could remember, a barrier had existed between them. Periodic conflict about religion kept flaring up in the house, and according to the old man, Faulk was more his mother’s child. Marilyn Dealey Faulk was quite austere in observance, while Leander had, as she said of him, no covenant with anything but the hours of the day. From Faulk’s earliest memories they quarreled about the discrepancy. The old man would say that Marilyn’s pietistic attitudes and habits never kept her from feeling murderous resentment over some real or imagined slight. According to him, she was only interested in those superficial elements of Christian living that permitted the slaughters and terrors of the world to continue, all in the name of God. Onward, Christian soldiers. He would whistle the old hymn, just to needle her.
Marilyn never flagged in espousing the age-old, Bible-haunted tenets that had traveled down the generations from culture to culture; she was very strong in her belief.