“Gee, why could that be? Oh, now I remember — my wife died on this day a couple years ago.”
There was a momentary silence on the other end of the line. “I know, Dad. So did my mom.”
“Well, you seem to have had an easier time getting over it.” My tone was sharper than I meant it to be.
“What is that supposed to mean? Is that some kind of accusation?”
“No. Just an observation. You don’t seem to be especially grief-stricken.”
I heard a deep intake of breath, then a long, forced exhalation. “You are way over the line here. I loved Mom. A lot. And when she died, it hurt like hell; sometimes it still does. But you know what, Dad? I cried a lot, and then I faced the fact that she had died, and I decided to carry on with my life. You, on the other hand, seem determined to make some sort of crusade out of wallowing in your grief — you carry it like a cross, you wear it like a crown of thorns, some self-inflicted stigmata. And anybody who doesn’t get down there and wallow with you, you think their grief just isn’t quite up to the mark, so maybe their love for her didn’t measure up, either. And when you do that, Dad, you alienate yourself from the people who love you and wish you well and want you to be happy again.”
“I’ll be happy again when the time comes.”
“No, you won’t. Because you resist it. It’s like some perverse challenge to you — seeing how long you can milk your misery and loneliness.”
“And this conversation’s supposed to be cheering me up?”
“I didn’t start this; you did. Come on, Dad, admit it — you’re hiding from life. You bury yourself in your work, and you immerse yourself in your grief. And those two things are all you do anymore.”
“My work is very demanding.”
“So demanding you don’t have time to call or see your son and your grandkids? So demanding you don’t have time to go out to dinner? When’s the last time you had a sit-down dinner with a woman? Or with a man? With me, for that matter?”
“It’s hard to see you. It hurts.”
“And why is that, Dad?”
If I were telling the truth, I would have said to my son, “Because I blame us both for her death. I blame myself and I blame you, whose birth was so hard on her reproductive system.” But I was not telling the truth — I could not tell him that truth — so what I said was, “You remind me too much of her.”
“Why can’t you take some comfort in that — in the fact that a part of her lives on in me?” I didn’t even attempt an answer. “Hell, if you still can’t handle an evening with me, at least see somebody. Preferably a therapist, but anybody would be better than nobody. I bet you haven’t had a social engagement since the funeral.”
It was true, I hadn’t, but I didn’t want my son reminding me of it.
“Look, Jeff, I appreciate your concern for my social life, but I’m fine. I’m a grown-up, and I can manage that quite well on my own.” It was a transparent lie, so I blustered as I served it up.
“So are you seeing anybody yet?”
“As if that’s any of your business?”
“There, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. You’re not, and you’re not even willing to acknowledge it. Jesus, Dad, you’re still in your prime — sort of — and you’re intelligent and energetic and full of amazing stories. Women would beat a path to your door, if you’d let them. But you’re so supremely sad, so militantly morose, it’s like an electric force field surrounding you. It shuts everybody out. Including me.”
“Jeff, I’m not trying to shut you out.”
“You sure could have fooled me. This is the fourth time in a row I’ve been the one to dial the phone, and the first thing you say is how you can’t talk long. Hell, I can’t even remember the last time I saw you. You’d think we lived on the other side of the damn world, not the other side of Knoxville.”
Four times — could that be right? When had I seen him last? “I’m sorry. I am. I’m doing the best I can.”
“Well, do better!” he shot back. It felt like a dentist had just drilled into a nerve.
“And how do you suggest I do that, Jeff?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have any quick fixes for heartbreak. If I did, I’d be a zillionaire advice guru with a bestseller and a TV talk show. But it’s been two years now. Besides missing my dead mother, I miss my living father, and my boys miss their grandpa. Mom died, and I really hate that. She wasn’t my wife, so I don’t know what it’s like to lose a spouse. But she’s dead. We’re not, and you’re not. So quit acting like it.”
Blood pounded in my temples, and my vision swam. I stared dumbly at the receiver, then moved it slowly toward the cradle.
“Dad? Dad!” His voice was growing fainter. “Dad, don’t hang up on me. Please, don’t hang up.”
God forgive me, I hung up.
And then I sat, alone in my empty kitchen — a place more unnerving to me than the morgue — and wondered: How had this happened? How had my family — once my greatest joy — become my greatest sorrow? Kathleen had nearly died to give me Jeff, yet here I was treating him like a curse instead of a gift. She would be heartbroken if she could see it, I knew, but despite my shame, I seemed incapable of opening my heart to our son.
After Kathleen’s death, some well-meaning friend had given me a copy of The Prophet, a book of essays by Kahlil Gibran. I had never opened it. Now, for the first time, I pried it out of the bookcase and opened it to a chapter marked by a purple ribbon. It was headed “On Joy and Sorrow.”
Trembling, I read: “When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight…. They are inseparable. Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.”
I thought of Jeff, and the difficulty we’d had conceiving him, and our gratitude when he, too, survived the difficult birth. He and she — both, together — had been my delight, and I hadn’t found a way to separate him from the sorrow that slammed into me when she died.
“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain,” read another line.
If that’s true, I thought, I must be making room for one hell of a lot of joy.
CHAPTER 15
I was half an hour early for Billy Ray Ledbetter’s exhumation, even though the cemetery, in Morgan County, lay forty two-lane miles northwest of Knoxville, perched on the edge of the Cumberland Mountains.
People in Cooke County tapped the Appalachians for ginseng and moonshine and marijuana. People in the Cumberlands — including the county seat, the unfortunately named Wartburg — ripped open the mountains themselves, raking low-grade coal from strip mines and bench mines, leaving the ridgetops mutilated and the streams choked with debris and acid.
Billy Ray had worked a wildcat mine — an illegal, unlicensed one — until the Office of Surface Mining had found it and shut it down. After that, he mined food stamps and disability checks for whatever he could, spending most of what he got in the county’s windowless cinder-block roadhouses. It was in one of them that he and his friend Eddie Meacham had squared off against half a dozen badass bikers. Unfortunately for Meacham, Billy Ray survived his stomping for eighteen days — until the day, in fact, Billy Ray hitched a ride into Knoxville to ask Eddie to take him to a hospital. He never made it there alive, according to Eddie, because upon staggering into Meacham’s apartment, he promptly keeled over, crashed into a glass-topped coffee table, and expired. That, at least, was the story Meacham was telling, and that was the story Burt DeVriess hoped the exhumation and examination would corroborate.