“You’re leaving me.”
“You can come with me.”
“I have to take care of little Ben.”
“I’ll take both of you to Uncle Walton’s. Tonight. He’s willing to have you.”
“Dee isn’t willing, you know that.”
“You stop drinking she might have you.”
“I can’t do that, Danny.”
“All right, don’t do it. You can stay here, but I’m going.”
Her face leaned into the ice pack. She set the ice pack down on Danny’s bed. She uncorked the bottle of sherry. “You can’t go. You’re all I have. I lost your father. Now I’m losing you.”
He had lost his mother a long time ago. He remembered her, how she was before Slade, with her hair in rollers then like now. It was that way when the telephone rang, while she put on her uniform, fixed her face. She asked Danny to answer the telephone please. He remembered the telephone on the wall, something brown and thick then, a blotch on the wall like a silverfish against the blistered paint and loose plaster, yet thinking maybe he’d hear something good like winning the lottery, like getting rich, like his mother not having to work anymore but his father maybe he should work, be a lineman, but not in bad weather, he thought, work part-time, not on a hot line, he thought, just be up there in your chariot looking proud and tall and good.
It was Tom Brown, his father’s foreman. I would like to speak to your mother, please.
Not his mother but Tom Brown in his mind. A tall man who kept his back straight. His father used to do him but not to his face. Striding in from the kitchen, his father stuck out his Tom Brown jaw. He looked up at the ceiling fixture, the way Tom Brown looked up at a spot where a transformer would be hoisted up, or up at the crossbeam not yet in place, the bright wire not yet tied in to the glossy new spool insulators, or looked down to the spot on the ground where the new pole would go, the hole not dug, the posthole diggers unused yet, the cant hooks not yet clawing the pine, the pikes not biting wood yet. His father would stretch his lips in imitation of Tom Brown’s distended grin. Here’s where the work is boys, his father would say Tom Brown would say. That’s all Tom Brown ever says, his father would say.
His mother was standing close to him. “You’ll be hearing from me. I’ll be all right,” he said.
He leaned out to kiss his mother’s lips. She kissed him goodbye, she held him close. This is goodbye, this is it.
Little Ben in the passenger seat, his white face set, was waiting for him in the car. “I’m coming with you, Danny.”
“You can’t come with me,” Danny said. He was going where Ben couldn’t follow him, already knowing he would have to pay, already seeing the time he would do like a long road without an end.
The View from My Father’s Window
My father, Paul Creel, isn’t the man he used to be, hasn’t been since he’s had the brain tumor. Mama says he’s deteriorated, and I have to say I agree with her. In the photograph on their dresser they’re in their church clothes, holding hands. He’s wearing the double-breasted dark blue suit he used to wear to church. Mama’s wearing her favorite church dress, sky-blue silk with white polka dots—a little tight on her now. Too many pounds in the wrong places, she says, but she still wears that dress to church.
Mama’s feeding him Gerber’s baby food. She dips a spoon into the jar, concentrating her gaze without changing her smile on the spoon sliding over to his open mouth. She wraps the jar in aluminum foil so he won’t know it’s baby food. One time my wife, Sandy, made the mistake of telling him what he was eating. He wouldn’t let Mama feed him that night; he wasn’t having any baby food. Mama spoons out chicken and dumplings, coaxing the stuff past his lower lip. We’re having chicken and dumplings for dinner, Pauley. That used to be one of his favorite meals. Chicken and dumplings, collard greens, corn on the cob, a quart of iced tea to wash it down, you better believe he could put it away.
Mama has him in a diaper when the Reverend Hatcher comes to pray for him. We can’t keep him from pulling the blanket off. The Reverend Hatcher is sitting beside the bed. He takes my father’s right hand in his big ham hands patting it like he was patting a dog if he had one but he doesn’t. He won’t look at the diaper.
My father turns over on one side, that he’s able to do. He cups his chin in his hand, stretching toes out on one stretched out foot, his toenails so long they’re hooking. Pay no attention, Mama whispers, he’s deteriorating, so I try not to. The Reverend Hatcher can’t get up out of his chair. The Reverend Hatcher’s white shirt, it’s stuck to the ladder-back chair.
My father was an enlisted man in World War Two. On the living room wall we have a map of France and western Germany showing his unit’s movements, in dotted red ink, a Third Army patch and his unit insignia superimposed, and a photograph of him in summer khakis and garrison cap.
He told me this story about the war, just after I turned sixteen. He had me learning to drive; he took me down the road a ways and made me keep at it until the gears stopped grinding and I got the hang of it. Then we went to the Dairy Delight in town and he bought me a banana split. I saw him filling up his side of the booth and remembered the photograph of him in the living room, a skinny kid like myself then, and that made me ask him about the war. He said you wouldn’t want to know about it. Then he said—here’s something I think you should know about—and lit up a Camel and started in.
He had a buddy, Denny Maxwell. He told me what had happened to Denny Maxwell. That was in November of 1944, in the fighting in the Hurtgen Forest. It was cold in the Hurtgen Forest. In the mornings they’d have to thaw out their socks, try doing that in a foxhole. He and Denny were on patrol one morning and up ahead they saw a farm house. There weren’t any Germans around. Denny Maxwell was freezing his tail off so he decided he was going to go to that farm house and get warm no matter what. The farm house sat in an open field edged with woods, but that didn’t bother Denny Maxwell. “He told me the bullet that had his name on it hadn’t been made yet.” Denny Maxwell wanted my father to go with him, but my father wasn’t about to do that. He said he didn’t want to be a target. So Denny Maxwell went out there himself and the Germans opened up on him from the woods. He must have had a dozen bullets in him and every one had his name on it.
“You remember Denny Maxwell, Wayne,” my father said to me, grinding his Camel out in a Dairy Delight ashtray, “when you’re about to do something stupid.”
I’ve been married to Sandy for seventeen years. We’ve had a pretty good life together. We have a teenage son, Wayne Jr., who so far has stayed out of trouble. We have good jobs, a good income between us. I’m still parts manager at Fuller Ford and Sandy’s still teaching English at Beauregard High.
My father worked at Uniroyal for thirty years. Before that he worked at the mill hauling cotton bales on a fork lift. He got laid off when the mill closed down, but lucky for him—lucky for me he’d say—he got on at Uniroyal. At Uniroyal, he had job security, and benefits, a pension, a group medical plan, the only bad thing about his job was, toward the end anyway, before he retired, they kept changing shifts on him. He’d work day shift part of the week, then they’d switch him over to the swing shift. That, he used to tell us, can get old pretty quick. He’d tell Mama he ought to quit, take a little less in his retirement package.
I remember him in his blue suit, Mama unfolding her napkin, laying it primly in her lap, her hair gray even then. There’d be this silence when my father said he wanted to quit, fried chicken, fried catfish in front of us, yams, black-eyed peas put on hold while my father studied Mama’s dubious face, knowing always what answer he was going to