But late at night, trying to sort through it all, I wind up thinking about my father, about an afternoon when I picked up a rock in his studio while he was mixing his oils. The rock was pretty, and I was studying its irregular shapes in the light. “Nothing special,” he told me. “Just sandstone.” He explained to me that one billion new grains of sand form on earth every second. Flakes of chipped stone, saltated in rivers. We can thank the wind and desert basins — atmospheric and geographical accidents, random luck — for the fact that we’re not all buried up to our necks.
Now, his words linger when I think of Cassie, of Sharon and Clay’s marriage.
Random luck.
Irregular shapes.
Thank the wind.
“Say it!”
“Mercy!”
Dad spent most of the month after my high school graduation in the Kellys’ cabin on the river. Mom agreed to let him stay there as long as he wanted; she was busy in Oklahoma City tending to the Duffy’s empire and getting her picture in the papers.
She’d begun appearing at Bricktown restaurants with a handsome up-and-comer, a potential gubernatorial candidate. He was tall and blond, and I hated him, just from his photos. We’d never met. I hadn’t visited Mom since she’d left us in Dallas.
While Dad vacationed in the woods, I stayed behind to be with my friends — we’d be splitting up soon for college — but one Saturday I drove up to see him. He’d taken his Cutlass and left me the old Mustang, urging me to tune it up before I headed out. I didn’t (Mom never serviced the car either — “too busy,” she’d say, flitting off to a fund-raiser — another of my parents’ many flash points), and I made the trip just fine. When I arrived he was stacking firewood on the cabin’s front porch. He looked pale and thin to me, his hair grayer than I’d remembered. We sat by the river, sipping warm canned beer.
He was dusty and unshaven, like the farmers in the fields around my grandfather’s church.
“Are you going to swing through the city on your way back to Texas? See your mother?” he asked. He spoke of her cautiously, as if the energy of his words — any unintentional emphasis — might jar her from his mind.
“Haven’t decided,” I said. “She’s hanging out now with that GOP geek.”
He laughed. “Rich damn duffers. They own the whole state.” He pulled a cigarette pack from his pocket. “My friends died in Europe so America could fall into the hands of these lousy sharks who turn right around and sell us out to Germany and Japan anyway. Isn’t that a kick in the ass? Is your mother happy?”
“Beats me.”
The subject of Mom made him fade. We listened to the water through the trees. I sipped my beer, stymied by our shyness — our melancholy — and idly poked a spider with a stick. It swiveled on whiskery legs. Dad pulled a nine iron from the trunk of his car and walked away from me, to plunk a few old balls into the weeds. He stirred up bees, squirrels, a couple of garter snakes, lazy and long.
Inside the cabin, I saw he’d been painting. I loved the warm smells of the turpentine and the oils — always had — but the new work was gray and black and white. On the easel, half-finished, a portrait of Charlie Chaplin. He gripped a rose.
I knew this pose: it was the famous scene from the end of City Lights, when Charlie’s true love, a blind girl who’s just had her sight restored by a miraculous operation, can see him now for what he really is — not a classy, wealthy man, as he’d led her to believe, but a bum.
Dad lit a Coleman lantern. He didn’t say a word about the painting.
I’d planned to stay with him three or four days, but it was plain to me his charged silences were going to drive me crazy. I could handle them at home: I had TV there to distract me, and my friends were always dropping by. But here, with only crickets and the occasional calls of an owl to break the monotony, I couldn’t escape his sadness. It wrapped him up — his red, watery eyes, his trembling lips. He was Boris Karloff’s mummy, stale, barely breathing.
He’d developed a facial twitch, a little pull of the mouth. A rash of hair circled his chin. His stomach growled, even after we ate. A systematic revolt of the body. I couldn’t stand to witness it.
So I fished with him for a day, then told him I needed to head on back. I had a lot to do this summer, before college started in the fall. I’d been accepted at SMU, in Dallas, but I planned to move out of his house and into a dorm.
“All right. I’ll be home in a couple of weeks,” he said. We stood stiffly in a field, near a bare patch of rock: raggedy, dark, accidental. He waved his pitching wedge. He lopped off a sunflower’s head. “Mow the lawn.”
“I will. Are you sure you’ve got everything you need here? You doing okay?”
He scratched the top of his head, where his hair was thinnest. “I miss your mom,” he said softly.
I glanced away, at the cabin. “I know,” I said. I moved to give him a hug. His arm cramped; he couldn’t control it. We bumped each other awkwardly.
I didn’t get far. A radiator hose popped on the highway, so I pulled into a roadside garage. The mechanic held a trouble light underneath my hood. Old acne scars lined his face, heavy crosshatching like you’ll find on certain savings bonds. He was as silent as my father.
I wasn’t a big baseball fan, but I knew a little lingo from Dad; it was, I thought, a safe topic. I asked the mechanic who he thought would win the pennant. “You got the wrong fellow for sports, mister,” he said. He switched on an old army radio on a shelf behind a torn-up V-8 engine. A Baptist evangelist, as vigorous and gravelly as Grandfather Darnell, said we were heading for Hell.
A yellowed newspaper clipping fluttered on a cork board by the radio. An eight-year-old named Kathy Smithers had been struck by lightning near the river and killed. I glanced again at the fix-it guy. The name “Smithers” was sewn onto the breast pocket of his workshirt. I couldn’t see a date on the paper, but the color and its stiffness made it seem at least a few years old.
The man tinkered with my car with an earnestness Grandfather Darnell would have dismissed: “Excessive attachment to the business of this world.”
Back in Dallas, when my mother called with the news, I tried to pin the time frame in my head. As well as I could figure, the cabin had burned while I was standing there reading that death notice as the grim mechanic, Smithers, replaced my hose.
I’d been not two miles from the spot, and I’d driven home, knowing nothing.
He’d doused the place with turpentine, then used a cigarette. It had taken less than twenty minutes for the cabin to collapse into a sticky mass of ashes.
I heard that one of the volunteer firemen on the scene, a high school kid, had managed to save a pair of shoes, a couple of brushes, and part of a large gray canvas: the Little Tramp’s hopeful smile.
Before the funeral, my mother sat with me in my grandfather’s church. She looked younger than she used to. I wondered if she’d had a facelift, if she’d highlighted her hair for all the newspaper photographers who followed her around now. Maybe she was just more relaxed in her new life than she’d ever been. More at ease.
Her dress was black but stylish, just below the knee. She touched my cheek. We’d already acknowledged the tragedy. Now she was giving me a pep talk. “Kelly, you’re a strong young man, you’ve got to put this thing behind you. You’ll be starting fresh in the fall. There’ll be exciting teachers and fraternity parties, and you’re bound to meet some girls. You’re going to get over this shyness, aren’t you?”