“The family agreed not to talk about it. We all wanted Ray to move on.” His lips tightened. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“Who was she?” I said.
“Sophie Jones. Indigent. Her family had busted up — laziness and liquor. Let that be a lesson, hm? We all knew her, everyone in town. Gave her money and food.”
The car bumped over ruts in the road.
“She had a room at the poor farm, up near Lawton, but she liked to sleep in town, in the library or the theater. Better heating. Sheriff’d always chase her out. For years, the movie house had a broken back door. Wouldn’t always lock. That’s how she came to be there the night of the fire.”
“What happened to her?” I asked, already guessing the answer.
“Trapped in her seat — probably drunk, more than a little crazy, that’s usually the way she was. Took a couple of days to identify the body. No family to claim her. No one, really, to mourn her passing. God had put her out of her misery. That’s what I told Sheriff Stevenson when I talked to him on Ray’s behalf. Ray was just a boy, it was an accident, I said — foolish, yes, he shouldn’t have been smoking or drawing — but not malicious. Finally, Stevenson agreed and dropped the whole thing.”
I tried to remember my father’s version of the story: the jacket, the scarf, the woman’s shoes in the ashes. I could only imagine, now, a child’s shoe — the slipper of Kathy Smithers, the garage mechanic’s daughter, hit by lightning, sleek, pink, crackling with red electric sparks. The fire in Earth’s belly, fire from the sky, snuffing all our worldly failures.
“Ray could never leave it behind him,” my grandfather said. “I told him, ‘Turn to God. There’s your salvation.’ He wouldn’t do it. Hard-headed kid.”
No. Instead he’d turned to my mother — to the promise of romance; that too (as he might have put it) had gone up in smoke.
“Twenty-three fifty,” my grandfather said. “A beautiful piece of work.”
I put the lid on the box.
“So. Your mother tells me you’re attending Southern Methodist in the fall,” he said.
“Yes sir.”
He looked at me, eagerly. “It pleases me to hear you’ve chosen a church-based university.” I’d picked the school so I could stay in Dallas with some of my friends.
He stared at the wrought-iron cemetery arch as our car slid under it. Rusty angels embraced at its peak. “Are you considering the ministry, by any chance?”
The question, unexpected, stumped me. My faith had never been rock-hard (Dad had seen to that). I hadn’t prayed in years.
“Do you remember, we talked about this once when you were younger?”
“Yes sir.”
“Have you given it any more thought?”
“Well …” I had an urge to leap from the car. “Maybe,” I said, hoping this would finish our discussion.
“It would honor me to see you follow my path, Kelly.”
I nodded.
“If you were to … well, I needn’t dwell on it. Let’s just say it would go a long way toward easing my disappointment. You’d be doing the family proud. What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your mother and I want you to be a success, son. You know that, don’t you? Not just in worldly terms. In matters of the soul. Do you understand?”
I said I did. I nearly blurted, “Success? Can I have your Duffy’s charge card?” He patted my knee.
The gravesite appeared to me humiliatingly small. A sand trap Dad would never pitch out of. “Goodbye, you old duffer,” I whispered, and dropped a rose onto the casket.
Three months later, my mother married her politician. “If elected governor,” he promised reporters the day he announced his candidacy, “I’ll see to it that every man, woman, and child in Oklahoma has comprehensive health care. And to put my money where my mouth is, I’ve already donated twenty thousand dollars for a new obstetrics wing of Sacred Heart Hospital.”
Mom’s touch. A good one.
He’d flown B-29s in the Second World War. His patriotism virtually guaranteed him the election. A success; a mover and shaker; not a man hounded by “moral lassitude” or lost in the rubble of doubt. No wistful, blind romance for Mom. She’d made a prudent choice this time, no apologies.
“‘God’s grace’?” she said to me at the wedding reception, at a lull in the festivities, when I told her Grandfather Darnell’s story about Dad. She was winded from dancing, and we were both standing by the punch bowl. “It wasn’t God’s grace got your dad off the hook when he burned that place down. It was my daddy’s money.”
I poured myself a drink. Someone had spiked the punch and I was feeling wobbly. “I thought he didn’t know you then,” I said. “I thought he met you afterwards, in the hospital.”
“That’s right.” She waved at one of her sisters. “But my father knew everyone in the state of Oklahoma. He understood that’s how you get ahead in business. And he made a point of knowing clerics, like your Grandfather Darnell. Quickest way into a community, he used to say, is through its preachers. So Grandfather Darnell knew who to call when he needed help.”
“What did he do, your dad?” I spilled some punch on my pants.
“Paid off the theater owners and Sheriff Stevenson so they’d keep it quiet about Old Lady Jones. In return, Grandfather Darnell began lobbying the town fathers, trying to get a Duffy’s store there. It took ten years or more, but it finally paid off, as Daddy knew it would. He was a patient man.”
Her new husband was toasting his best man now. Each word clear, precise. Correct.
“No wonder Dad felt hemmed in by the Kellys,” I said.
“They got him out of a jam.”
“Yeah, and they never let him forget it.”
The band started up again. “May I have this dance, son? You look charming tonight. You could be a real lady-killer, if you’d give yourself half a chance. Confidence, eh?” She slipped her hand into mine. I stood stiffly. “Kelly,” she said. “Please be happy for me. You and me. We both deserve to be happy for a change.”
“I’m happy,” I said. I knew I sounded angry.
“Just because I’m with John now, don’t he shy. If you ever need to talk — ”
“Right,” I said, and led her, decisively, onto the dance floor.
Headlights sweep centerfield. Dust and smoke flitter in the air. Through the haze I can’t see the golfers on the driving range, but I hear them cackling over muffed shots.
Sharon waves at me. Clay carries Cassie to their car. “Thanks for joining us,” he tells me. “It was good to see you.”
A mother calls to her child.
“You too,” I say, feeling shy again — shyer than I’ve felt in years — awful, uncertain. My knees are weak.
“Give us a call.”
“I will.”
I catch Sharon’s eye — she’s trying not to cry — then walk away, and keep walking, into a life that will never be the same again.
One night, about a month after Mom’s wedding, after my last business class of the day, I went to a cheap movie on campus: a grisly horror show. All the dead men in the world had come back to life.
In one small town, corpses converged on a shopping center. A man in fatigues, the movie’s hero, positioned himself on the roof of a furniture store with an automatic rifle. Down below, the creatures broke a plateglass window. One of them bit, with remarkable, cool efficiency, into a saleslady’s sexy bare shoulder.
“Shit, man,” said a bubba beside me, a no-neck freshman, frightened but trying not to show it. “Don’t mess with the dead, eh?”
“No choice,” I said, rubbing my arm.
“What’s that?”
“The dead will always be with us. And that, friend, is the sermon for the night, amen.”
He looked at me, puzzled, a little angry (“Smart-ass,” he whispered), and left me alone after that.