Even that had taken months.
They made it through five more towns north of Gilead, then it was the long ride south, back to the motel they’d been using for home base. Clarence took the wheel and Will took the map, looking over what tomorrow might bring. More of the same, that was obvious, only the route would change.
“One day,” Clarence said, “every town in the western half of this map is going to have a red dot next to it. Have you ever thought about what then?”
“For you and me, you mean?”
“For Mom. If she even makes it to then. Except she probably won’t.”
“You mean just lie to her? Tell her we found something even though we didn’t?”
“If it gives her some peace, finally, would that be so bad?”
“I see what you did there,” Will said. “The next square you advance to after that is, okay, now that we’ve established lying as an acceptable option, why not lie to her now and save ourselves all that future trouble.”
“I never said that.”
“It was coming. Don’t tell me it wasn’t,” Will said. “I keep telling you that you can bail any time you want. This doesn’t have to be a two-man project. It never did.”
Maybe not, but to Clarence it had always felt that way. No argument that he wasn’t superstitious was as persuasive as the conviction that as soon as he let Will do this on his own, their mom would mourn a vanished son, too.
It had begun when his brother was nineteen, a college sophomore who’d enjoyed just one year of Daytona Beach debauchery before deciding he’d rather spend spring break in Kansas. Mother’s Day was coming in a few weeks, and his idealistic kid brother could think of no better gift to give theirs than the answers she’d craved for decades.
Just like that, huh? Sure. Why not.
You didn’t let an earnestly headstrong nineteen-year-old do something like this on his own. No telling who he might run into, and his 4.0 grade average didn’t mean he couldn’t be stupid when smart mattered most. Elderly Klansmen and their ilk still protected killings half a century old, and there was an uneasy sense they weren’t dealing with anything quite so prosaic here.
That first year, Clarence had been counting on the enormity of the task to discourage him, and had never been so wrong about anything in his life. Spring breaks turned into career-era vacations, one year became six, and whatever happened to Will Senior remained as much a mystery as ever. And Clarence still couldn’t shake the feeling that, without him, his brother would meet his own bad end.
More than once, he thought of the man in the photo, the grandfather who was two decades younger than their father was now, and wanted to hear it from the man’s tobacco-seared lips: Would he even want this for them?
Go on, live your own lives and quit trying to reconstruct mine, he imagined Will Senior telling them. Have that kid you keep telling your wife you’ll get around to.
Just like that, huh?
What is it, son, you think you’ve got to wait until after you get me figured out before you do it? You think you’ll be doing the same thing to your kids that I did to mine by coming out here to the world’s breadbasket?
Something like that.
In that case, maybe you need to get clearer on your priorities.
Easy for you to say, old man. I’m the one you left cleaning up your fifty-year-old mess.
Willard never had a comeback to that one. He never even tried.
As they drove, the sun sank low, lower, the plains and the gentle hills thickening with shadows that reached for their car from the west. Everywhere you looked, it was nothing but wheat and the road that ran through it like a path through a forest. He pointed to the last remnants of some lost homestead, an ancient barn whose bones had bent, the entire structure weathered to a silvery gray, sagging in on itself and leaning like a cripple as if to wait for the good strong breeze that would finally end its struggle.
“I keep thinking I’d like to come back here with a truck one day and tear one of these down,” he said. “For the wood.”
Back in his real life, he and his wife owned a frame shop. One of these wrecks could give birth to a lot of frames. It appealed, that whole life cycle thing about new life springing from decay.
“Rustic never goes out of style,” he said.
Will looked up from the map, reoriented to where they were and what he was talking about, and shook his head. “I think they should stay standing.”
“They’re barely standing as it is. That’s kind of the point.”
His brother went dreamy, pensive. “They’re like monuments to some other time. You just want to knock them down and rip them apart? For what, somebody’s wall?”
“Is there any reason wood rot and fungus should get first dibs?”
“You recognize the irony, I hope. You tear down a perfectly picturesque real barn to saw it apart and nail it around a picture of one. That’s always seemed like a special kind of hubris to me.”
“Also known as recycling,” Clarence said. “I thought you were big on that.”
Will grumbled and went back to the map, and Clarence took the exchange as one for his win column. His brother’s problem? It was as if the weight of his name had infected him with nostalgia for an era he’d never experienced and could never have tolerated. He didn’t have the stomach for it. Farms, at a glance, may have looked as if they were bursting with life, but ultimately they all led to something’s death.
And whatever rotted out here would rot alone.
It was the same the next day, and the day after that, and it was easy to imagine that Kansas was Purgatory in disguise. They’d actually died in a car crash in Missouri, and their sins would keep them on an endless road for decades of penance, except Will was going to move on a lot sooner than Clarence would.
Shortly after dusk, they returned for their final night in the latest motel they’d been using as home base. The strategy had emerged during their first trip. Rather than checking into a new place to sleep each night, they opted to settle for a few days at some central crossroads, from which they could branch out in any of several directions.
Sometimes you had to cling to whatever illusion of stability you could.
As Clarence showered off the August road sweat, Will got on the phone with their mother to tell her of the day’s journey — the places they’d stopped, the people they’d spoken to — and what tomorrow would bring. What made him the perfect son made him a perfectly terrible brother. It wasn’t just from out here that he called home every day. He called home 365 days a year. There was no keeping up with that. You’d think he would run out of new things to say, but he always found more.
He’s the daughter they always hoped I’d be, Dina had whispered in Clarence’s ear last Christmas, after just enough wine, and neither of them could stop snickering.
“Say hi to Mom,” Will ordered, and pushed the phone at him while he was still toweling off from the shower.
Clarence took it and dug to find a few topics that Will wouldn’t have covered already, and it was okay, it really was. He reminded himself there would come a day when he wouldn’t have this chance and would regret every awkward moment he’d been less than enthusiastic about taking the phone. Myelofibrosis, it was called; a bone-marrow defect. There was no coming back from it. She had two years left, if she was lucky, just long enough to trick himself into thinking it wasn’t really going to happen, that grieving was still decades in the future.
Then they swapped places, and while Will took his turn in the shower, Clarence cracked open his laptop to see if their latest ads had drawn any responses. Craigslist, local classifieds, weekly shoppers . . . for years they’d been sprinkling such outlets with some variation of the following: