Father and Son (12 page)

He turned up County Lake Road. He got up pretty close to the house and started seeing vehicles pulled over next to the ditches.

“Boy boy,” he muttered, guiding the cruiser carefully between the cars. They'd damn near blocked the road. He never knew what to say at these things. Stuff like this where nobody was really to blame for it. Nobody to punish for it. Nobody really guilty of anything except maybe carelessness, or just being young.

He eased past the house to see a throng of people in the yard. There was an empty space at the end of the driveway as if they'd left it just for him and he swung in and parked. He shut the car off and got out and put his hat on. Folks nodded and spoke as he walked up.

“Hey Bobby.”

“How you doing, Sheriff?”

He shook a few hands, being quiet and respectful, lifting a hand to wave at faces here and there. They parted for him and he went up the wide brick steps past the potted flowers onto the porch. It was crowded, people gathered still in their church clothes and kids not playing but sitting mutely on the porch boards with their feet hanging above the flower beds, behaving like they'd been told to. He took his hat off and pulled open the screen door and stepped inside the living room. People in chairs eating, a low murmur of conversation. He could see the women gathered in the kitchen and he
headed back there quietly, speaking soft hellos as faces turned toward him. He was caught by the arm at the opened French doors and arrested by the seamed face of Miss Lula, who was already old when she taught him in the eighth grade.

“Why don't you set down and let me fix you a plate, Bobby?” She had already begun steering him toward a chair but he just stood still and bent over to her.

“I've already eaten, thanks. I wanted to speak to Dorris and Sue just a minute. Are they here?”

Miss Lula was a small thing in a black lace dress. Her hair was a pale blue with little whorls of coiled webs sprayed and tightly packed.

“Sue's laying down in the bedroom but Dorris is down at the barn. You want me to get her up?”

He glanced at the people watching him. There was food on every available surface in the kitchen, table and countertop laden with fried chicken and deviled eggs, sliced hams and casseroles, pies, cakes, dishes of vegetables and sweet potatoes.

“No ma'am,” he said. “Don't get her up. I'll go out and see Dorris. Do you know if they need anything?”

She gazed around and shook her head as if she were lost in all this and then looked up at him. “Do you know I've taught just about everbody in this house?”

“I don't doubt that, Miss Lula.” He smiled down at her. She still had her hand on his arm.

“When you gonna find you a nice girl and get married? You can't live with your mama your whole life.”

“I'm workin on it,” he said, already turning his attention away from her. “I'm gonna ease on out here. I'll see you, Miss Lula.”

“He's took it hard, Bobby.”

“I know he has.”

He moved away from her and began to try and make his way through the kitchen to the back door, people jostling a little and shifting to allow his passage and all of them eating, forks moving toward mouths and fingers holding rolls and pickles. He knew this was just the preliminary. The actual funeral would be much worse.

“Hello, Bobby.”

“Hey. Scuse me, ma'am.”

They'd all have to watch and listen to the screaming and the wailing and the gnashing of teeth. Then they'd all come over here and eat again and trickle out one by one leaving the clean dishes stacked on the tables with their names written on tape beneath them and the leftover food crammed into the refrigerator. The dogs would eat good for a few days. All these people would bind together for a number of hours or days in the way that only great tragedy wrought. And then their lives would have to go on and the loss would diminish for all those except the ones who lived in this house. They would wake to it every day, sleep by it every night. It would infiltrate their meals and their lovemaking and their trips to take out the garbage. The slightest thing would remind them of it. It might grow gradually dimmer with a great passage of time but it would never fully leave or be closed out like the shutting of a door. That's what he hated about it. He didn't blame them for eating, but he wouldn't have even if Jewel hadn't fed him.

He breathed an open sigh when he stepped out on the back porch. He nodded to some wide-eyed boys who viewed him with mute admiration, their mouths slack with awe.

“How you boys?”

Dorris had his tractors and his combine and his two cotton-pickers parked under the big shed he'd built three years ago and Bobby could see the fields of cotton stretching away behind the house, a vast acreage of green that lay shimmering in the heat. A group of men were sitting in
some lawn chairs in the shade beside a cotton trailer. He walked across the yard toward them and a man standing a little apart from the group came out from under the shed to meet him. He could see that Dorris was shaking his head and crying before he got to him and he felt like crying himself because it was so unfair. He reached his hand out.

“God, Bobby,” Dorris said.

They didn't hug but they shook hands hard. Dorris had been in the boat when Bobby hooked the boy's leg with the gambrel. Standing in that muddy water and feeling that cold slick limb come into his hand. Having to raise his face and look at Dorris in the boat.

They dropped their hands and watched each other. Bobby asked him how he was doing.

“Not worth a shit. I thought I could take it better than this but I can't. Come on out here and get you a chair.”

Birds were moving in the branches of the trees. From inside the house came the steady babble of voices. They walked side by side to the end of the yard and across a patch of gravel that was stained with oil or grease and sunlit. Broken gaskets and flattened cans.

“I had to get out of the house for a while,” Dorris said. “All them people. You know. I mean they mean well. They've brought a ton of food.”

“I saw it. Have you made arrangements yet?”

“We picked out the casket this mornin. He's out at the funeral home tonight and the funeral's at two tomorrow.”

Bobby nodded but he couldn't think of much to say. He knew all the people sitting out there: Sammy Brewer, Carlton Thomas, Lewis Foster, and there looking up at him with something like personal insult on his face was Ed Hall. It made sense that he would be here since he had something in common with Dorris now. Bobby spoke to them all and they all said hello or nodded except Ed. They were sitting at the edge of the shade among drums of oil and sacks of seed and fertilizer, weather-browned
men who with their hats off showed a white line of demarcation above their foreheads where the sun never touched them. Farmers, carpenters who never took their shirts off if they were outside.

“We was just talking,” Dorris said. “About that old pond. I never had fished in it but Lewis said he had.”

Lewis leaned forward enthusiastically to tell his fish story in a high and rapid voice.

“I caught a bass out there one day weighed eight pounds,” he said. “Caught him on a weedless worm and the son of a bitch fought like a motherfucker. Caught him over there on the back side right next to an old log that was in there.”

“I didn't know they was goin,” Dorris said. “I wished I'd knowed they was goin.”

Bobby looked at the toes of his boots and said to himself, But you wouldn't have done anything different, Dorris, you would have stayed on your tractor or worked on a fence or whatever you were doing. They were just going fishing.

“Course I don't blame myself for it,” he went on. “He'd told me he could swim a little. Said he was gettin pretty good. I was gonna take off one Saturday and me and him go. Course I always stay so busy. I'm always so busy,” he said.

Yeah, and hindsight, and what if? You could do that forever and drive yourself crazy with it when the simple truth was that they had been fishing, and his boy had suddenly stood up on the transom of the boat and told the other two to watch him cut a back flip. He had gone into the water and he never had come up. Bobby thought he might have hit a log down there. It was full of logs, always had been, and in truth there had been a swelling low on the base of the skull. It was his right as the sheriff to order an autopsy, but with the body lying under a tarpaulin on the bank with a small crowd of the grieving already gathered, Dorris had led
him a few steps away and whispered fiercely into his ear that he couldn't stand to think about them cutting him apart, that he was dead and nothing was going to change that, and please don't let them do that to his baby, Bobby, not the one who fed the bottle calf Omar Junior and whose rabbits housed in hutches he could almost reach out and touch from where he was standing now in the shade of the shed.

They stood or sat in silence for a moment. Dorris leaned up against his cotton-picker. He was massaging his left hand with his right. Bobby could feel Ed watching him and he knew why.

“How you doing, Ed?”

Ed wasn't doing okay. He was braced in his chair and a tumble of words was trying to come out of him but he was nearly strangling on his rage.

“He's out.”

“What?”

Bobby knew then he'd made a mistake by not taking a good look at Ed when he'd first walked up, because now he could see the tears shining in his eyes and how his body was shaking and then he was coming out of the chair and standing and openly crying and trying to form words.

“They don't get no older,” he finally said, and he took little half-shuffling steps forward. Bobby looked at the faces watching them and he put one hand out to try and stop this from happening.

“Hold it, Ed. Dorris don't …”

“Dorris knows what I'm talking about.”

Bobby glanced at Dorris. He was slowly folding up, his face breaking into lines and caving in on itself. The other men just sat there.

“Ed. Don't do this to Dorris.”

“Why not? He's gonna have to learn it like I had to learn it. My boy would be nine today if that drunk son of a bitch hadn't run over him. And he is
out
?”

He was heaving by then and he had crouched lightly as if he were going to jump him and Bobby didn't know that he wouldn't. And what would he do if he did? Whole house full of folks looking out the windows? Their elected official. A grieving constituent. Rolling over the ground duking it out at this somber gathering. Uncool.

“You get ahold of yourself, Ed. You walk on out here with me and I'll listen to whatever you got on your mind.”

“You know what I got on my mind, I want to know how come you let that sorry bastard out.”

Sometimes in his job he didn't know what to do and this was suddenly one of those times. He hated to coldcock him right here with his slapstick.

“Let's go get in my car, Ed.”

“I don't have to go get in no car. I ain't done nothing wrong.”

“You're upsetting Dorris.”

“Dorris was already upset.”

“Yeah, well, you're not helping things any. You either shut up or you come on with me.”

He could see him thinking everything over, could see his eyes slowly shifting sideways to where Dorris stood.

“Come on, Ed. For God's sake think about this family.”

Bobby walked closer and took him by the elbow the way somebody might take an aged relative or feeble shut-in. He spoke over his shoulder as he walked him away. “I'll be back, Dorris.”

He started to add that he was sorry but he was already sorry and it was probably too late for that. Ed shook off his hand and they walked around the side of the house, past the cars in the yard. He opened the passenger door of the cruiser for Ed and walked around. He got in on his side and took his hat off, laid it on the seat between them. The revolver was still under the seat where he'd put it when he left Grinder's Switch.

He pushed the door out to the second notch in the hinge and propped one boot between the windshield and the top of the door. He pulled out one of his smokes. Ed had already lit one of his and was puffing hard.

“Fellow needs to be careful what he says at a time like this,” Bobby said. “Things stick in people's minds.”

“You talking about me?”

“I'm talking about Dorris. He's got a lot of hard times ahead of him. That little scene back there didn't help him none.”

A few cars had already left. He hoped he didn't have anybody blocked in who would need to get out anytime soon. But all of a sudden he didn't want to stay much longer himself if he could help it.

“How'd you know he was out, Ed?”

“Uncle Albert saw him in town yesterday. But the judge had done called me and told me he was coming home. What the hell happened? I thought they gave him eight years.”

Bobby bent his head and lit his smoke. He snapped the lighter shut and dropped it in his shirt pocket. There was a long sigh in him and he went ahead and let it out. The workings of the law and probation and parole and he didn't even want to start talking about it.

“First let me say this. I'm sorry for what happened. I was sorry before and I still am.”

“Yeah, and maybe if you'd been out patrolling more you could have picked him up before he had a chance to kill my boy.”

He had it now. Ed was going to do his best to piss him off. So why didn't he just shut up since there wasn't any sense in talking to him?

“Let me ask you this, Ed. If they'd took Glen Davis and put him in the gas chamber, would you be happy?”

He could almost see the wheels in his head turning. Ed was drawing thoughtfully on his cigarette, one knee crossed comfortably over the
other and one hand supporting his elbow while he smoked in a gesture that was almost feminine. Finally he shook his head.

“Naw. I don't guess so. I'd feel a little better maybe. Knowing the son of a bitch was dead.”