A Place to Call Home (43 page)

Now I knew the only secret that mattered, the secret that had always made a simple homecoming for him and Matthew impossible.

Matthew was my brother’s son.

When I was ten and Roan fifteen, during the spring when he lived at the farm, there was a huge work party one weekend to restore the Delaney covered bridge. Great-Grandfather Thurman Delaney built the bridge after the Civil War to replace a ferry barge he’d operated; it became a proud monument connecting the rutted wagon road that ran from Dunderry to Gainesville. Delaney Bridge Road was the first road paved as part of a local WPA project in the 1930s, and the bridge was shored up with iron beams then, but by the time I was a girl the bolts had rusted through and the beams showered big, red-brown flakes into the river with the slightest vibration.

The old bridge, a hundred years old then, was a quaint eyesore rather than a crossing point over the Slow Forks River east of town. The state highway department had rerouted the road a few years earlier and built a new steel-and-concrete bridge upstream; the old wooden bridge shed rotten shingles on the rooftops of every car that drove through.

But when the highway department planned to tear the bridge down, a coalition of Delaneys bought it along with five acres of cornfields on either side and, in the way Delaneys have of consecrating their own history, decided to make the bridge the centerpiece for a county park.

Over the long Memorial Day weekend in May, dozens of Delaney kin descended on the site with tools and materials. The event quickly bloomed into a three-day festival complete with picnics, ad-lib entertainment from the family bluegrass musicians, an outdoor church service on Sunday morning, and the wonderful cacophony of unleashed Delaney cousins running wild in every direction from morning until dark.

Roan wouldn’t admit to being anything but a hired hand; he approached the weekend as part of his work chores for Daddy and as always kept to himself while I circled from my cousins’ orbit on regular swoops to bring him food and talk to him, which earned him snickers from the men. When I finally understood that I was embarrassing him, I kept a morose distance.

Josh came home from college for the weekend. I think Brady went to Tennessee to visit a girlfriend. But not Josh—he took solemn pride in attending to family duties. People were proud of his attitude.

I remembered Roan and Josh sitting astride the bridge’s shabby peaked roof, ripping the frayed shingles as if they were performing an autopsy on the spine of some long, large animal. I remembered Josh’s red hair highlighted against the brilliant autumn hills above the river valley and Roan’s thin, dark contrast to my oldest brother’s ruddy maturity.
I wanted to be up there with them and might have tried to wrangle it if every Delaney matron in the county, Mama first and foremost, wouldn’t have snatched me by the hair the instant I set foot on a ladder.

Uncle Pete chainsawed fresh timbers with a team of men that included Daddy, my Maloney uncles, and Uncle Eldon. People wandered out from town to work and party with us; no one could do anything interesting in Dunderry without it having a drawstring effect; besides, half the families in the county could be counted as Delaney relatives by blood or marriage.

There was a general murmur of shock and embarrassment when Sally McClendon appeared at the edge of the picnic tables. She had Matthew in tow; he was about three years old then, fair-haired and quiet. Sally had ratted her blond hair up on top and in huge curls down her back; in full Maybelline raccoon-eyes and tight jeans with a spangled T-shirt, she made me think of a tall, dried-out imitation of Dolly Parton. She stood there, a beacon of shame and notoriety, clutching Matthew by the hand.

“Well, our personal whore and her poor little get are here.” Aunt Irene snorted. “I guess it’s a full celebration now.”

Grandmother Elizabeth, ensconced queenlike in a lawn chair set in the bed of a flatbed lumber truck, hooked Mama with the head of her cane. “Remove that creature,” Grandmother ordered. “She’s come to flaunt herself.”

“Delaneys,” Great-Gran Alice hooted from her chair next to Grandmother Elizabeth’s. “Blood will tell. Why, Elizabeth, that little ragtailed baby boy may grow up to look just like your Pete. Go and give him a kiss.”

Grandmother Elizabeth moaned, draping a hand over her eyes. “Either that child and his awful mother leave the premises or I do.”

“Hop down and take off,” Great-Gran retorted.

“It’d be a sin not to offer food to a baby,” I piped up, and I thought Mama would strangle me.

“You budge and I’ll tie your fanny to a post,” Mama said. “I’ll take care of this problem.” She bowled through the crowd, her sisters left behind with Aunt Irene marshaling a grunt-mouthed choir of dismay. Uncle Pete turned from his work, saw Sally and Matthew, cursed loudly enough for everyone to hear, then set his chain saw down and disappeared below the slope of the riverbank, pulling a silver flask from his back pocket.

I glanced up from the immediate melodrama and saw Josh staring at Sally from the bridge’s roof; Roan handed him a double-clawed crowbar and Josh fumbled it. The bar fell between the exposed rafters, bounced off the head of Robert Kehoe, a cousin who had been ripping boards from the bridge’s floor, then fell through a hole into the river.

Everyone looked up at Josh then, startled but without any sinister concern; it was just curious that capable Josh Maloney, college honor student, fraternity president, and Vietnam veteran, had made a careless error. A contingent hurried to help Robert, who was clutching a bloody streak across his forehead, and Daddy called up to Josh, “Pay attention, son.” Roan, of course, sat frozen with grim, hyperalert defensiveness, afraid someone might blame him for handing the crowbar to Josh in the first place.

Josh scrubbed a hand over his mouth as if he’d gone spitless and never took his eyes off Sally and her son. Sally stared back at him. I’ll never forget the look she gave him—accusing, mean, and helpless. She picked Matthew up, face forward, and held him in the air toward my brother, like a proffered sacrifice. Then she flung him atop one hip and trudged off toward her ancient, duct-taped sedan, with Mama striding along after her making gestures of grudging welcome toward the tables heavy with food. Sally ignored her and drove away.

Josh came down from the roof, jumped into the river, and hunted in the waist-high water beneath the bridge until he retrieved the crowbar. He staggered onto the bank, soaking
wet, climbed back up to the roof, and never said a word to anyone.

The memory came back with terrible clarity now.

And finally made sense.

Roan and I had given up twenty years because he’d protected, hidden, and raised
Josh’s
son. The stakes were much higher than I’d ever suspected. No wonder Roan had always believed he couldn’t bring Matthew back. No wonder he was secretive.

We went to our room early that night, then sat on the edge of the bathtub with the faucet turned on. We were both a little paranoid about being overheard. I stared at the photograph.

Josh was posed in his army uniform beside Daddy and Grandpa Joseph, standing rigidly in the front yard, so young—twenty-two, twenty-three—with a forced smile and hard eyes—the Maloneys’ patriotic veterans, three generations, World War II, Korea, Vietnam. My grandfather had fought enemy soldiers in a noble cause; my father had served honorably, dutifully, without ever setting foot on a foreign battlefield; but Josh had been sent to the other side of the world to police a human sewer of brothels and bars and opium dens and had come home with a brand of cynicism that fed on scraps of self-disgust. Sally must have been either a transition or a confirmation for him.

As a young man, he and Matthew looked so much alike.

Roan spoke, his voice low and empty. “I’m sorry I kept the truth from you, but I had to know if Matthew would pass for a Delaney. If he would pass your scrutiny. Now I know. He won’t fool anyone.”

“You’re sure about Josh, aren’t you?”

“Sally told me when I moved in with her. She wanted me to know why she left town. She thought Daisy was going to tell your folks the truth out of meanness after my old man—”

“I remember. What did she say about Josh? Don’t be delicate about it. Tell me exactly.”

“Josh would pick her up on the road north of Murphy’s Feed Mill. Throw a couple of blankets in the back of one of the farm trucks, park in the woods. Use her, pay her, take her back to the mill road, let her out. She said he barely spoke to her.”

“Oh, God. He probably treated her the way he learned to treat bar girls in Saigon.”

“Probably. She said he only met her out there a few times. Then he just stopped. Never used her again. It was as if it never happened. She was scared to admit she’d ever been with him. Being with your Uncle Pete was one thing. Nobody expected much from him. But being with your brother—and having a baby by him—she thought your family’d take the baby and chase her out of town if they knew. And believe it or not, she really did love Matthew. No matter how she looked or what she said, she wanted to keep him.”

I crumpled the picture and threw it aside. “Mama and Daddy could forgive Josh for fathering a child with her but not for being a coward who turned his back on his responsibility.”

“They were able to look the other way when they thought Matthew was Pete’s baby,” Roan noted quietly.

“You want to argue over degrees of righteousness?”

He cupped a hand around the back of my neck and pulled me to him for a rough, apologetic kiss. I leaned against him wearily and exhaled. “You know what the circumstances were. Mama wanted the family to adopt Matthew, but it was complicated. Would you have approved if they’d dragged Sally into court and taken her baby? You say she loved Matthew. Then she didn’t deserve to have him taken away by so-called decent folk. What she needed was help and you were the only one who gave her that.”

“All right, peep. All right. But here’s the problem
we’ve got to handle—you didn’t have to look hard today to see the resemblance.”

“Josh
knew
Matthew was his,” I hissed. “I’m convinced he
knew.
”

Roan hesitated. Then, with defeat, “That day at the Delaney bridge—”

“You remember that, too!”

“I’ve thought about it over the years. Josh didn’t want Matthew. It was obvious. That’s why I never doubted that I was right to keep him. And I thought everybody in the family saw how strange Josh was around Sally and her baby that day. I thought other people saw the truth but still didn’t do anything about it. It’s what convinced me Matthew wouldn’t get a fair shake if I brought him home.”

I snatched my cane like a club and hit a pillow Roan had placed on the toilet seat for me to prop my leg on. I pounded the pillow, barely missing my own leg, until Roan’s hands closed around my wrists. “I could kill Josh! How could he let our uncle take the blame? How could he ignore
his own son
? He’s the reason you had no choice.”

“I still don’t have many choices, peep.”

“
I know
. The family’s going to find out about Matthew sooner or later. What we have to do is
manage
the process.”

Roan uttered a dark sound of amusement. “Maloneys,” he said grimly, gazing at the ceiling as if trying to imagine something. “Maloneys being managed.”

“It’s not impossible. People might comment on the resemblance, but that won’t matter. It’ll just be talk.”

“Just talk. I can’t believe you dismiss it that way.” Roan looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Your brother will know it’s not
just talk.
”

“If he didn’t admit anything twenty years ago, he probably won’t admit it now.” I paused, grinding my hands together. “I’ll deal with Josh.”

I didn’t want anybody ambushed. I didn’t want the wrong things said in surprise; I didn’t want to take Matthew blindly into the situation; and for Mama and Daddy’s
sake I didn’t want them to meet a stranger and suddenly, with him in the flesh staring at them, be told that he was not only Matthew but that Roan had found him, raised him, hidden him, and learned the truth about his parentage from Sally years ago. That they were looking at their grandson.

I told Roan I thought I should speak to Josh first. Yell, scream, get it out of my system. Learn what he intended to do about Matthew. Be prepared for him to deny his involvement or reject his responsibility. Then arrange for Matthew to meet him with Roan and me along for support. Let Matthew scream and yell, if need be, let him hear it straight from Josh what Josh felt about him.

But I thought about Amanda and felt sick about the dilemma. Her troubled relationship with Josh would be even worse; what little girl could hold up under the news that her papa had abandoned an earlier child, that she had a half brother she’d never heard of before?

I would simply start with Josh and hope for the best. “This is something between Josh and me,” I said in a low voice. “Just us first.”

Roan moved to sit in front of me on the bathroom floor, his expression harder than I’d ever seen it. “It’s my business, too, peep,” he warned very softly. “If your brother doesn’t do the right thing by Matthew, I’ll hurt him, Claire. I swear to God I’ll make him pay.”

That was chilling. “So what would you rather do? Tell Matthew the truth right now and have him take off for Dunderry, mad as hell, confronting everybody with no warning? You want to do it that way? To him? To my parents? To Grandma Dottie? To Amanda?”

“No. Of course not. Jesus. I don’t know what’s best.”

“We can ease him into it. Just get him there, get everybody warmed up to Matthew and Tweet and vice versa, and deal with Josh on the side, privately—talk to him, the two of us. It’s his duty to confess to the family. And to Matthew. That’s it. That’s the way to do it if we can. Matthew doesn’t have to know you’ve kept his real father a secret from him.”

“His real father,” Roan repeated quietly. He looked defeated.

I put my arms around him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“He probably won’t go to Dunderry anyway. He was disappointed and apathetic after he looked at those pictures.”