I was not much for prayer, though as admitted, I did sometimes give it a try, but my reason for regularly visiting the graves of my mother and father was to think about them. I felt that so long as I did this, they continued to exist in some way and of course I still loved them. So many people did likewise that it must have been instinctive. Contrary to appearances or the sort of representation such activity might get in books or movies, we did not stand before the final resting places of our parents eaten up with lugubrious and undifferentiated piety. What we did was try to figure out who they were and what they were doing together. I doubted anyone was deterred by realizing we’d never get to the bottom of it, that their lives and our inquiries would travel on parallel courses until no one remained to pursue the matter. But all this flower tending at the cemetery seemed to help a lot of people with their sadness, as though death was a jeweled bower through which you skipped on your way to glory.
The woman I found at the graves of Cody and Clarice turned out to be Cody’s mother. I thought I’d breeze by with a few absorbing glances, wiggling my fishing rod absently, but just as I passed, she said firmly, “Hey.” A pair of picnic chairs faced the headstones. “Have a seat.” I looked again at the direction in which I had been arbitrarily traveling, as though I had other business than passing this way. But I sat down and learned that the woman, who looked to be about my own age, was named Deanne. She seemed slightly mature for the clever T-shirt she wore: “Make Awkward Sexual Advances, Not War.” Or the open-toed shoes and the tiny stone in her nostril.
Staring at the words “Cody” and “Clarice” cut in stone as I sat with Deanne felt like entrapment, not helped by Deanne’s saying, “I know you.”
“Do you? Maybe you’ve seen me come to look after my folks’ graves.”
“I’ve seen you when you come over here for a look.” Deanne was quite tall, as tall as me, and had becoming gray streaks in her thick dark hair. She might have been fifty. She wore some kind of insulated jacket over a black turtleneck shirt and Carhartt work pants with a loop for a hammer above her right thigh. She lit a cigarette and left it hanging from her mouth as she talked. “Naw, there’s more to it. You were at Cody’s funeral. You’re the doctor?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“You were there.”
“I was.”
She took away the cigarette. “I don’t want details.”
“Of course not.”
“My only child. My boy. I don’t know what the matter with him was. Do you?”
“I wish I knew.” I promised myself to give no hint of what a vicious little bastard Cody was. “There’s nothing stranger than our own children.”
“Do you have kids?”
“No.”
“Then why did you say that?”
“Well, I—”
“That’s a doctor’s job, isn’t it? To have some half-assed comment on every aspect of life.”
Since it was she who was suffering, I simply agreed. “That does seem to end up being part of our job. I’m not surprised you’ve seen right through it.”
“I wish I hadn’t. I wouldn’t mind being comforted. Even if it’s phony. I’ve got a great big hole right in the middle of me. Smoke?”
“No. Thanks.”
“I didn’t mean to show bad manners.” She gestured weakly toward her son’s headstone with the cigarette. “Deal like this doesn’t help your manners. To have good manners, you have to give a shit, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, sometimes I do. Depends. Obviously I didn’t do the greatest job in the world with Cody, but I didn’t mean for it to be like that. I loved him with all my heart. He didn’t know who his dad was, that didn’t help. I wasn’t a whore, I was single. It’s not the same thing. But them other kids, their moms, it might have been they was jealous.” She ground the cigarette out in the dirt and ran her finger around the inside of the turtleneck.
“Crazy.”
“I mean, I know who was starting it. I went to PTA and read their attitudes. Once I figured it out, I went after the husbands, and believe me they was ready. I only did it for the boy. I was on a mission. Those moms, they brought it on themselves. Which I should of never did. Everything got worse for Cody. I guess the facts show he had it in for women. Wise commentary, please.”
“I think you’ve already said it.”
“I ain’t said shit. Why don’t you fill in the blanks? You’re the doctor. Where’s the bullshit when you need it?”
I could have skipped the bullshit, also known as wise counsel, and told her how I urged her son on. I could have said, “Good riddance,” but I didn’t have the guts. Furthermore, this conversation had acquired a squeamish intimacy. But I was at the scene, and she knew that: couldn’t change it. I did try asking her where she worked. She said, “I don’t.”
“Oh.”
“I’m a homemaker.” With this, she began to laugh, loudly and at length. “I married one of the husbands. The ex lives alone. My husband thinks it’s a good deal. He writes ‘thank you’ on every alimony check.”
It began to dawn on me that it was possible Deanne could handle the truth. If I told her the truth, maybe I could change my plea to not guilty, yet I was unsure that I could do it. When she found out my part in her son’s death, I would face her at last: I would be shriven. I would begin to pay for my sins.
I tried the idea four days later. I had a meeting with Throckmorton scheduled for late afternoon, and I was milling around doing errands, paying bills, walking to the post office. I spent an hour reading magazines while a chip was removed from the windshield of my increasingly unreliable Oldsmobile 88. Jays and pigeons were getting all the bird food I put out, so I bought a special feeder for thistle seed that would serve the smaller birds, the finches, titmice, white- and rufous-crowned sparrows, wrens, and nuthatches that had been run off by the bruisers who sprayed sunflower shells around my lawn. I installed a bracket intended for hanging plants above deer level but in sight of my bedroom, hung the feeder, went over to Boyer Street and knocked on Deanne’s door. Her husband answered, and I was surprised to see that it was the owner of the grain elevator, Jerry Perkins, who I knew slightly but cordially. “Jerry,” I said, making no secret of my surprise. He smiled and drew the door back invitingly.
“Come in, come in,” he said. “Deanne said she’d seen you.”
I was in the hallway, the door closed behind me, before I learned Deanne was out. Jerry was a warm and forceful guy and before I could arrange to come back, he had me out on his enclosed back porch drinking coffee and admiring his own arrangements for feeding birds and his heated birdbath for winter. “That sucks them in more than the feed ’long about January.” Jerry was such a big, powerful brute, bulging in his blue dashboard overalls, that his enthusiasm for birds seemed remarkable. His widow’s peak of close-cropped red hair and his big hands made everything he said emphatic.
“What a coincidence,” I said. “I’ve just bought a hundred pounds of Nijer seed. It’s in the backseat of my car.”
“They’ll go right through it. That’s about all the company you have, isn’t it?”
“Pretty quiet.”
“Think you’ll get off?”
“I don’t know.”
“I assume you’re innocent.”
I laughed mirthlessly. “I’m waiting to find out.”
“You’re waiting to find out?”