My father was running after my mother. He caught up to her just as she got to the rear of the Olds. She looked down at Mr. Timms and then put her hands to her face. Her shoulders heaved. My father took her by those shoulders as if to hold them still.
He turned back toward me and his eyes were wild. “Don’t come over here.” He was shouting, though I was only a few feet away from him. “Whatever you do, don’t.”
My mother twisted around and pressed her face into the collar of his shirt. She beat against his chest with her fists, and he let her do that until she was all wrung out. Then he wrapped her up in his arms, and as I watched him holding her, I understood that Mr. Timms was dead, that Bill had killed him, and now the world would be a different place for all of us.
My father wanted to pass it off as a hunting accident, but Bill said no, we’d call it exactly what it was.
“I’m not going to ask Roger to carry a lie,” he said. “I may not be much, but I know what’s right and what’s not.”
“You?” my mother said. “You don’t know anything.”
“At least I’ll own up to what I’ve done.”
A hickory nut dropped from a tree and hit the top of the Olds with a bang. Then everything was quiet. Just the mourning doves somewhere in the distance and a squirrel chattering and the leaves stirring in the wind.
My father said, “And what did you do, Bill? Do you intend to tell me that you meant to kill him?”
Said Bill, “I just wanted him to shut up.”
My mother pushed away from my father and went running off into the woods, trying to get away, I imagine, from what we were all going to have to face. Bill had shot her lover and killed him, and all of this had happened while Connie was listening to the radio at her house, and soon she would have to know about it.
My mother stumbled over a fallen branch and went down on her hands and knees. She fell over onto her side and lay there in the dead leaves and the dirt, and she pulled her knees up toward her chest, as if she were going to sleep — as if she’d never get up from that spot.
“I used to know you,” my father said to Bill.
Bill nodded. Then he set his jaw and looked off into the distance for an instant. He swallowed hard. “Well, I’m not that person now.” There was a crack in his voice. “And I won’t be ever again.” He looked at my father again, and his voice got steady. “It wasn’t your fault, R.T. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. My life got taken to hell a long time ago, but I’m by God not about to ruin Roger’s.”
After that, there was nothing left to do but to pick my mother up from the ground.
“My purse,” she said.
She said it was still on the front seat of the Olds, and before my father had a chance to stop me, I went to the car and I opened the passenger side door. The purse, that woven straw box purse with the strawberries and the white blooms on it. I picked it up by its thin handle. I resisted the urge to peer out the driver’s side window to see what a man who’d been shot with a twelve-gauge might look like. I didn’t want that picture in my head. I was just a kid, but I knew enough about the future to know I didn’t need that. So I concentrated on the purse. I carried it to my mother, and then the four of us started back through the woods so we could drive into town and call the sheriff. I rode in the bed of the El Camino, so whatever got said in the cab was outside my hearing. I wasn’t concerned with it anyway. I was thinking about Connie, and how she was an orphan now, and how unfair it was for me to know that before she did.
My mother was the one who told her. While Bill was on the phone confessing to the sheriff exactly what had he’d done down that oil lease road — I’ve killed Harold Timms — my mother went next door and pounded on the frame of the screen until the radio music stopped and Connie came to see what the fuss was all about.
I watched from the window of my bedroom. My father was sitting on our porch steps. Soon Bill would come out and sit beside him, and after a while I’d hear my father say, “I should have walked out on this a long time ago. Then it wouldn’t have been yours to deal with.” Bill let a few seconds go by, and then he said in a flat, worn-out voice, “R.T., I think I’ve been looking for something like this ever since I got out of the army and came back to the world.” He’d go on in letters that came first from the county jail and then Vandalia Prison in the months to come about how he’d gotten out of Vietnam, but he hadn’t been able to let loose of the rage that filled him. If it hadn’t been Harold Timms, he wrote, it would’ve been someone else. I was just pissed off, R.T. I wanted someone to have to pay for something. I guess that’s the best I can put it.
That Sunday I watched my mother reach out her hand to Connie as if she were about to touch her face. The she said, “Honey, can I come inside?”
Connie had on cutoffs with frayed threads dangling down and a white T-shirt. She had cotton balls between her toes. She’d been painting her toenails a bright red, and it made me wonder how she imagined her life being the next day and the next one after that — if she was thinking that she was glad to be rid of me so she could have a boyfriend she wouldn’t have to sneak around to see. However she saw her life unfolding, she didn’t know that my mother was there to let her know that it was all going to be different now.
“It’s about your daddy,” my mother said, and then she stepped inside the house, and I couldn’t hear any more.
I couldn’t watch that silent house and the little shaded porch with the wooden swing bolted to the ceiling. So many nights I’d seen Connie in that swing and heard her singing to herself. All those love songs that were popular then: “Let’s Stay Together,” “Precious and Few,” “Puppy Love.” She was a girl without a mother, and I was a boy who felt abandoned, so it was easy for us to love each other. But I knew Connie wanted a boyfriend she could show off, parade around with on Friday and Saturday nights, maybe go to a movie at the Avalon Theater in Phillipsport and later drive out to the Dairy Queen to see who was sitting around on the hoods of their cars before heading to the state park or the gravel pits for that alone time in the car, that baby-oh-baby time, secretly hoping that some of the other kids would happen by, so come Monday there would be talk all over school. That was the sort of gossip she wanted to be part of — the kind that said you were part of the cool crowd — not the kind I could give her, the kind filled with shame.
Soon the sheriff’s car pulled into my driveway, and I heard Bill say, “Well, I guess this is it.”
I went to the other window of my bedroom, the one that looked out over the front yard, and I saw my father and Bill get up from where they were sitting and walk across the grass to meet the sheriff, a tall, lumbering man with a dark mustache.
“I’m going to have to take you in,” I heard the sheriff say to Bill. “I’ve got deputies headed down to that oil lease road.”
“I’m ready,” said Bill.
And like that he got into the back seat of the sheriff’s car, and then it was just my father and me and my mother and Connie, whom we would watch over until her grandparents could arrive from Indianapolis to see to her.
“Go over and sit with Connie,” my mother told me when she came back to our house that afternoon. “I want to talk to your father.”
What they said to each other when they were alone, I don’t know. I only know that later that night he packed a bag and got into his Galaxie and drove off to find a motel in Phillipsport until he could locate a more satisfactory arrangement. My mother told me all of this later.