“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“You’re leaving.”
“And you’re rushing.” Hero sat up and stared out into the thicket, cross-legged, tearing at the grass. She didn’t sound upset, but the playfulness was lost into the silence. “Maybe coming here was a mistake.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, maybe we aren’t ready for this. Me. Maybe I’m not ready.”
I didn’t want to ask if this was about Geoffrey, but I felt fairly certain it had to be. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be rejected by your father, the man who’d believed he was your father for your entire life. Val had insisted that the two of them had been very close and very similar. Two peas.
“We don’t have to do this all at once,” I conceded. “Maybe we’re just trying too hard. We have time.”
“Matthew,” she said suddenly, the use of my name sounding so odd coming out of the blue. I may never have heard the word from her mouth before. It carried a desperate and ominous urgency, a plea to stop before we went too far. “I think we should consider the possibility that this may be all there is. And maybe it’s fine to just leave it at that.”
She laid bare the artifice of our relationship. Two people, bound together by a faith in something we couldn’t begin to understand, who perhaps had no business being together at all. I was trying to be a father to her, but I could never fill that role as I imagined it. Twelve years had passed, and that time belonged to another person. There was no reclaiming it. But I was her father still. Somehow, we had to make this work.
“Maybe,” I said, just as we saw the dark sheet of rain fold across the dense forest. “Don’t give up on me yet, though.”
“I didn’t say I had.”
With the arrival of August, the storms had begun to roll through, swift and overwhelming and threatening. You could set your watch by them; they never varied, punching through the thick afternoon at four, rumbling deep to the core and shading out the sun. The intermittent flashes, the occasional strike of lightning. As the winds kicked up and the horizon began to darken, everyone started taking cover, setting up in their usual seats. We settled by the large front window. The evangelists sprinted about with uncharacteristic and unbecoming panic beneath nature’s wrath. Down the block at the senior center, the elderly wheeled indoors onto glass-enclosed porches and lined up by the sill in rows as always to watch the show.
When the rains began to fall, they came in scattered, heavy dollops, along with clipped gusts that rattled branches. Limbs whined under the stress. By the time it was a full-on downpour, puddles and streams ran inches deep everywhere. A knot of boys raced out in shorts, over their mothers’ yells and the steady rumble of thunder, carrying large squares of cardboard. As the ditches and streets filled, they were surfing across the sheen, running hard and jumping onto their sagging boards, flying headfirst into grass and gravel, young blood mixing with the mud and the water and the cheers.
eight
At a church thrift store, Hero purchased an old guidebook of the county for 25 cents, which she then used to set up a series of excursions for the two of us: an antique car museum, the longest-running continuous outdoor flea market, the Woolworth’s Civil Rights Memorial Lunch Counter—though the Woolworth’s itself had long since been bought out, and in its place a Waffle House had moved in. (Hero ordered the grits.) After a nonstop barrage of these trips, I thought we’d seen everything there was to see. Then one evening she said she wanted to go visit a graveyard.
“Did you know that we have a family mausoleum? Apparently, someone was a pretty big deal and had the money in the end to prove it.”
“I didn’t know. I thought we were all buried in the plot out back.”
“Apparently there are also monuments to war heroes. A few moderately famous but impoverished writers. Maybe even the unmarked grave of a rock star.” She insisted that we go at dusk. “To set the right mood.”
“What mood would that be?” I asked
“Solemn. Reverent. Junk like that.”
“Couldn’t we just go in daylight?” I asked.
“Why? Aren’t you a little old to be scared of the dark?”
“I just thought it might be more productive if we could see.”
Dusk it was to be, though, since I was still fairly pliable to her whims. I grabbed flashlights, much as Hero found this, as she put it, “infantilizing.” I complimented her on her vocabulary and loaded up the truck. Our destination stood at the northernmost border of town, and Hero had chosen it, she said, particularly because her guidebook had indicated that some Napoleonic general had been buried there after having retired to the quaint isolation of America following the final exile to St. Helena. Dead French generals, she assured me, were a passion of hers.
The light was failing as we drove, a night-flowering vine streaking by our windows in a ray of blue as we raced down the highway. We were passing through the outskirts of town, the fringe that bordered the vast tracks of swampland. New subdivisions were just beginning to branch out here, where a new breed of ambitious developers had begun dredging the bogs and crafting man-made lakes and waterways, with pre-stocked fishponds and boat docks. This wasn’t the fastest route to our destination, but I preferred this way because it was so empty, still rugged and mostly untouched by the capital’s rapidly expanding population. We’d see one or two cars out here in total, maybe an occasional farmhouse, and not a heck of a lot else.
When we arrived at the cemetery, it appeared deserted. A mist was gathering, weaving in and out of the twisted oaks and the dangling moss. The low, rusted fence served more as border than barricade, as evidenced by the scattered collections of beer cans, condoms and toilet tissue.
“We’re not the first people here.” I said lightly.
“Disrespectful.”
“They’re dead,” I said. “I doubt they care.”
Hero frowned. “The drunk hicks. They don’t respect themselves.”
“May I remind you, I am one of those hicks.”
“No,” she said, “as a matter of fact, you may not.”
Our family mausoleum stood crumbling on a hill in the center of the graveyard, towering over the low tombstones—granite and sandstone and alabaster. I took a step closer, reached up to touch the old weathered stone. It was cold, nearly like ice, and I felt that creeping dread of death run up my arm.
“The name above the door says Wultz-Schmitt,” I pointed out.
“We don’t have any Wultz-Schmitts in the family? Hmmm. My mistake.”
Hero drifted out among the low stones and stood in what appeared to be an empty section of the field, starting at something obscured by the crawling vine.
“This one, on the other hand, is pretty interesting,” she said. “Take a look.”
It was a cement rectangle set in the ground, like a plaque. I leaned down and pulled away the weeds that had grown over it. The name—GARRETT JAMES LONGMAN—was fading, but you could easily still make out the short inscription beneath: May God Have Mercy On His Soul.
“He was young,” I said, observing the dates. “Just twenty.”
“Wonder what made him a killer,” Hero said.
“A killer?” I looked over the gravestone but didn’t see any other mark. “Where does it say that?”
“Didn’t I mention?” she said. “We’re standing in Murderer’s Row. This is where they bury all the bodies of the people that get executed for capital crimes, the bodies no one wants. That’s what the guidebook says, anyway. Hanging.