Ask Him Why (14 page)

A voice startled me so much I swear I almost went over. Or it felt that way, anyway—one of those false feelings, because really I could have fallen onto my face and still been on solid ground.

“Mind if I ask when you last ate, young lady?”

I spun around to see him. Finally, to see him.

He was walking in my direction from the house, bent over a cane. I’d had no idea he would be so old—maybe in his eighties, from the look of him. I expected somebody that looked like a father to Joseph, but this guy looked like he could be Joseph’s great-grandfather. He had only a ring of disheveled hair left over his ears, and it wasn’t a color much different from his skin, which was a weathered gray. All in all, he didn’t look like a perfect specimen of health, to put it mildly, but he was walking.

“I wasn’t going to jump,” I said. “Honest.”

He stopped and straightened up as best he could. He had a curvature to his spine. He could lift himself up if he needed to, I guess, but it looked like a lot of work, and I imagined he wouldn’t want to do it all day long. He looked right into my face and cocked his head, and in his eyes I saw a twinkle of humor.

I wondered where he was able to find humor in the subject of people throwing themselves off cliffs. I figured if you could find it there, it was available to you everywhere, and I wanted to beg him to teach me how to do that. But I was frozen, of course, and didn’t speak.

“You’d be surprised how many people tell me that,” he said.

I knew it was him, because he had that rolling, nearly magical accent that could only be Scottish. Not so thick that I couldn’t understand him, but every word was wrapped in that lyrical blanket. It was unlike talking to anybody else I had met.

“Really, though. I’m telling the truth. I didn’t come here to jump. I came here to see you.”

He cocked his head again, like a curious dog.

“Do I know you?”

“No, sir. You don’t. But you know my brother.”

Much to my alarm, he took several steps closer. With a toothy smile blooming on his face, he reached a hand out and touched my cheek. I was more than wary, but I didn’t move a muscle.

“So you must be Ruthie, then,” he said.

My mouth dropped open. I could feel it, and he could, too, in addition to seeing it with his own eyes, because he still had one warm, ancient palm on my face.

“How did you know that?”

“First off, Joe’s told me so much about you and Aubrey, I feel like I know you both for my own self.” He dropped the hand, as if his old arm could no longer hold it up. “But that’s not really the whole story, if I’m being honest. Truth is, lots more people have been by here in the last couple o’ months, and they all come here to talk about Joe.”

“Joe?” I asked, as if we were talking about two different people. I started to feel like he couldn’t know Joseph the way everyone said he did, or he would have known that nobody, and I mean
nobody
, called him Joe.

“Joe Stellkellner. That
is
the brother in question, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then back to the original question. When did you last eat?”

“Oh. Let me think. I had cereal for breakfast. But it was a long drive. And it’s pretty much lunchtime by now, I’m thinking.”

“So come inside and I’ll make you my signature breakfast. You’ll have breakfast for lunch. It’s really the only thing I know how to make worth a darn, anyway. But it’s quite famous, because it’s saved more than a few lives. Whatever time o’ day it is, I always make ’em breakfast. And it never seems to fail to help people.”

He turned back toward the house and began to make his way along a gravel path to the patio door, hunched over his cane.

I followed.

I was thinking about a breakfast that saves people’s lives, and even though I had never been about to jump off a cliff, I felt as though I needed rescuing, and I desperately wished for him to be proven right—that the breakfast would be magic, and that it would have the power to save me.

There wasn’t much separating Hamish MacCallum’s kitchen from his living room—really just a partition on one side—so I looked around the place without feeling like I was being rude and leaving him alone to cook for me.

“I hope you’re not going to all this trouble just for me,” I said. “Did you have your lunch yet?”

“No, I haven’t, Ruthie, so it’s for both of us. And I have to say, I’m a bit glad you dropped by . . . well, for a number of reasons, but on the small end because all I was going to fix for myself was a frozen dinner. I’m happy for the excuse to make a nice big breakfast instead.”

Halfway through the word “breakfast,” I saw the photos. He had a huge stone mantelpiece—flat shale-type stones all cobbled together around a wood fireplace—and on it were seven framed photos. They sat up on their own, obviously the kind with easels on the back of the photo frame to hold the thing in place, and the people all looked like they could be no possible relation to each other. None of them looked like Hamish, and nobody looked like anybody else.

One of them was my brother Joseph.

“Who are all these people on the mantel?” I asked. “I mean, if you don’t mind my asking.”

“Well, you know who one o’ them is,” he said, punctuated by the sound of two cast-iron skillets hitting the stove burners, one after the other. “The rest are some other friends o’ mine who I got to know over a breakfast like the one I’m about to make for us right now.”

I walked back toward him and leaned my shoulder on the partition.

“So those are all the people you saved from jumping?”

“No, not all of them. Just the ones kept in touch. There’ve been five more than that over the years, but I never heard anything from them afterwards. Maybe they went through with it somewhere else, or some other way, but I like to think not. I think some just don’t keep in touch because they feel embarrassed. Ashamed, even. You see, the magic of their coming here’s more than just the breakfast, though that’s not insignificant, let me tell you. People don’t eat when they’re upset, and they let their blood sugar get quite low, and their brain has nothing to power on, and then everything looks so dark. And they’re always so astonished at how they feel after filling up on bacon and eggs and home-fried potatoes. They need some protein, and they need to feel solid again. And then after they eat, they always tell me nothing has changed, but
everything
has changed. The whole world is the same, and they can still see it clearly, but now, all of a sudden, it doesn’t feel like more than they can bear anymore. But the breakfast is only part of it, and you’re a smart girl, so I’m sure you know that. It’s the fact that I made it for them. It means they’ve been seen. And it’s a funny thing, this being seen. Everybody’s looking for it, and nobody would go through that fence if they hadn’t given up on finding it. But once they get it . . . well, it seems to go one o’ two ways. They either grab onto it like a life preserver and never want to let it go . . . and that’s those in the photos, the ones that went on to be a part of our lives. Well, my life, now. They were part o’ my wife’s life, too, but she passed on year before last.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“That makes two of us, Ruthie. That makes two.” He laid strips of bacon in the bigger cast-iron skillet, four for each of us. The pan must have been preheated, because each strip set up sizzling the moment it touched. “But then there’s the other kind. They’re not used to being seen. They want it but they don’t want it. It’s like bright sunlight. You live in the dark all your life, you want nothing more than to step out into that warm sun. But then it hurts your eyes because it’s too bright. It burns you. So the others, when they know they’ve been seen, they go away from the seer from that point on. Whether that means they were helped or not, I really can’t say. But I never thought I could save the whole world. I can save what I can save and that’s that.”

“I’m sure some must have gotten by you in the night,” I said, but I don’t know why I said it.

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” he said. “There’s a motion sensor.”

I watched him in silence for a moment as he cut onions and briefly microwaved potatoes before it hit me that my one big question had already been answered.

“So Joseph did come here to jump off a cliff.”

Hamish MacCallum’s hands stopped moving, but his eyes began to move instead, and they drifted far away.

“I never really was sure what to think about Joe. He showed up not too long after the first article about me got printed in the paper. The San Francisco paper, I think it was, but then it hit the Associated Press and I was everywhere. And then there’s this boy in my yard. This child. That shook me up a bit. Twelve years old, he was. I couldn’t figure how he’d even got anywhere on his own. They’d always been full-grown adults showing up here, both before and since. And he came at dawn. Nobody comes at dawn. Everybody comes in the night if they mean business. When they think nobody’ll see. But he came in the light, and just around time for breakfast. So to this day, I’m not sure he came because he heard it was a good place to jump off a cliff. I think maybe he came because he heard it was a good place to get saved from it.”

“That sounds right,” I said. “Well, maybe I shouldn’t say that. I don’t know what’s right, because I wasn’t there, but it sounds good. It sounds like what I want it to be, and I believe it.”

“Well, your folks were of another mind. In fact, they pretty well lost their minds when they heard. Hustled him off to a mental hospital, and to this very day I think it did him more harm than good.”

“Did you tell them?”

“No, I told Joe to go home and come clean with ’em. Your parents are the heart o’ the problem, you know, and how could he solve the problem if he couldn’t even talk to them? Except in another way they’re not the problem, at least not the start of it and not on purpose, because they likely grew up the same. They didn’t get what they needed from their folks, so now they can’t give you kids what they don’t have. They’re the victims and the perpetrators, both, and the cycle just keeps going around and around. And I don’t know what to do to stop it any more than anybody else does, except I just know bacon and eggs and potatoes. It doesn’t fix everything, but it makes a dent, and anyway, like I said before, I can only do what I can do and no more.”

I wandered over to the kitchen table and sat, because I felt heavy and needed to get off my feet. I played with the salt and pepper shakers that were made of porcelain in the shape of Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus. Here it was, June, and he still had the Christmas salt and pepper shakers out.

“So if I have kids,” I said, “I’ll mess them up the same way?”

“You’re not required to, and I don’t recommend it. It’s not mandatory. You can heal your own self first, but most people never do. Maybe because you have to start by admitting you’re broken.”

“I could do that.”

“I’m not surprised,” he said. “So could Joe.”

I felt my head shake when I hadn’t meant to shake it. “I don’t get something. Nobody calls my brother Joseph ‘Joe.’”

“Wrong,” he said, not missing a beat. “One person does, and that’s me.” He indicated his chest with one withered thumb.

“Didn’t he mind?”

“Did and still does. But it never mattered. I had a reason for it, and I told him the reason, and I told him to just try and stop me. And that was the end of that.”

By this time, both the bacon and the potatoes sizzled in the pan, and we had to raise our voices to be heard over their enthusiasm. The smell was making me hungry. Desperately hungry. I could feel what he’d been trying to tell me—how life starts to feel unmanageable and we don’t realize that at least part of it is just a simple message that we need food.

“What’s the reason?”

“Because you can’t go through life treating everybody like a stranger. ‘Joseph’ is what you call somebody you don’t know. It’s their whole, full name. It’s formal. Nicknames are about more than just making a name shorter, you know. Think about me calling you Ruthie. It
adds
a syllable. It’s not about the syllables. It’s about the familiarity. It makes a name more familiar, and that makes the
person
more familiar. It’s something you grow into as a way to show you know somebody. It’s how you open the door and let him in. Going by ‘Joseph’ your whole life is just a way of showing the world that nobody gets in. It’s like those hospitals and repair shops that have the doors that say ‘authorized personnel only.’ Well, somebody has to be authorized personnel, don’t they? Or what’s the point of the room behind the door?”

“What do people call you?”

“Ham. Or Hammy. My wife called me Hammy. And it’s a bit of a laugh, you know? Because what could suit me better?”

He turned his face away from the stove and to me, and it was there in his eyes again, that flash of humor—only this time it wasn’t hard to imagine where he found humor in the moment in front of us.