Hometown Favorite: A Novel (43 page)

The honors only a small town can bestow began to flow in
during the following weeks. The high school sent Jake home
with a letter, informing Dewayne that the team voted to name
the football locker room after him and gave him a framed picture of his retired jersey for his wall. The break room at Webb
Furniture would also bear the Jobe name. The head librarian
and Winston Garfield of the Springdale Leader had loaded Jake
down with a mountain of newspaper and magazine articles
written about Dewayne's amazing football career that had been
assiduously compiled, dating all the way back to his middle
school years. The mayor of Springdale sent Jake home with a
plastic model of the new road signs reminding residents and
informing strangers this city was proud of the Jobe Highway
that cut through the heart of town. Even though the number of
voices raised to venerate Dewayne was many and their praise
began to restore his shattered faith, it was not enough to probe
and console the shadowed land of his empty heart.

He stirred when he felt the coolness on his bare skin from
the absence of the teddy bear he had tucked into the crook of
his arm at the start of the Stars' first preseason game. Jake had
gotten him set up in the easy chair in front of the television so
they could watch the game. But it was the quiet weeping that
had pulled him from the slumber he had fallen into before the
first quarter was over. He opened his eyes and saw a woman
sitting near him on the floor with her back to him, holding
the teddy bear and rocking back and forth. She did not notice
Dewayne had awakened. Neither of them noticed that Jake
had slipped out the front door without a sound.

Dewayne did not know if what he saw at his feet was vision
or reality, but he raised his trembling hand off the tattered
arm of the chair and moved it toward the dark, sinuous hair.
When his fingertips touched the top folds of the hair, he felt
a static spark igniting a heat within his blood that dispensed
a warm strength into his hand and arm. The current moved
past his shoulders into his chest and settled into his heart. He
knew he was awake. He knew the sensation flowing through
his fingers and into his heart was real. He felt connection to a
familiar touch; the hair and the head and the body he knew,
had fully known, had given him life, and now it was giving it
to him once more. But the body was slumped in shame. The
body would not turn toward him.

The body seemed to grow weaker, as if passing its life into
him. The body quivered and continued to shed disquieted tears.
The body waited. The body waited to hear its name called, to
hear words of comfort, to hear forgiveness spoken. The body
could not move until summoned.

"Rosella;" Dewayne whispered, and her face moved into his
fingers as she turned her head around. It was now skin-to-skin,
fingertips to delicate cheek and nose and eyes and forehead. His fingers smoothed out each wrinkle, each pinched line of
foreboding, like the sculptor smoothing out rough clay. "Rosella."

"I did not know how I would come back," she said. "I just
knew I had to try."

Dewayne nodded like an old soul, wise in the ways of human
action. The lowered head beneath his caressing hand remained
submissive, her hand resting upon his, not wanting release.
But was he able to trust this touch, this reconnection? Could
he ever fully trust Rosella again? The heart is deceitful above
all else. Could he even trust his own heart in the short time
he had left?

"Do you feel like taking a ride?" she asked.

He knew this would be a test. He knew this ride would try
the mettle of his soul and could prove to be the beginning of
healing, a healing more of the spirit than of the body, but what
would the medicine be?

Rosella drove them back to his high school football field
in her rental car. She wanted to return to the spot where she
had accepted his offer to be his lifetime partner, hoping the
memory of her willingness to marry him might curry favor.
She had flown into Memphis that day and was prepared to fly
back immediately if the situation warranted. She did not know
how to interpret the silent ride to the stadium. Was Dewayne
indulging her? Was he mystified or coherent? Was he processing venom or forgiveness?

Dewayne was a willing child led through the fresh-cut grass
of his youth. He still struggled with the reality of the moment.
He knew pulsating life had begun in his veins with the first
stroke of her hair back at the house and continued to surge
through his system. He believed the outcry from within his soul was for life, and as long as he stayed connected, as long as
he maintained this touch, as long as he followed this source,
restoration to life was possible. Murderous floods had fallen
from the sky on both of them, but that darkened torrent had
washed neither of them away. Standing; seeing; touching;
expelling air; feeling multiple levels of pain; moving in any
direction at any speed; hearing your voice in silence; hearing
the breaking of silence by the muscles in your throat praising
or cursing or weeping or comforting-all of these and more
were signs universally recognized as circulating life. In this
moment of twilight, the choice was upon them.

"We're here;" Rosella said, stopping their forward progress
with an easy tug of the hand on the point of the fifty-yard line
where she had stood to receive his proposal of marriage. The
memory was fresh, but the time between then and now had
slipped into eternity. She opened the palm of her hand, and
Dewayne saw his mother's ring, Rosella's wedding band. "I am
not worthy ... I do not deserve these. .

"How did you ... ?"

She put a finger to his lips. "I am not worthy. I do not deserve
them. I do not deserve you. When I tore them from my finger,
I threw away the only thing that had any meaning to me. A
security guard at the prison returned them, a stranger who
could have kept them. I swear to you, when they came back to
me, before any of us knew you were innocent, it was the first
touch of hope I felt. I have raged against everything, beginning
with God and ending with myself. I wasn't ready for what happened to us. How can you be ready for something like that? I
will always question why our son and Sabrina and Bruce were
taken from us. If I could have fought to protect them, I would
have. If I could have died to spare their lives, I would have, but
I did not get that choice. I have been given other choices"

She opened Dewayne's hand and let the rings slip into his
palm, then closed his fingers around them. But she did not
let go, clasping her hands around his fist. The tears she shed
lubricated his fingers, and with each kiss upon the skin of his
clenched hand, Dewayne felt the pulse of life, an exposure to
hope, a sign of the dreadful logic of joy.

Rosella laid her head upon their intertwined fingers, a respite
for her soul's raw disclosure. "I'm so ashamed, but I had to come
to you and beg your forgiveness."

Dewayne's faith taught him to believe what he bound on earth
was bound in heaven; what he loosed on earth was loosed in
heaven. Could there be that much power to forgive given to a
person? Yet the sparks of life that moments ago had splashed
off the flint of his soul would not ignite. His breath quickened.
His face pounded as if from shock. He nearly choked. There
was nothing to draw on, nothing within him, that could fan
this attempt to inflame hope.

He began to uncurl his fingers, relieving the pressure from
around the rings in his hand. He allowed Rosella's hands to nest
beneath his open hand as he stared at the precious tokens, the
wedding band and the engagement ring of his beloved mother.
He gently rattled the mementos in his palm, then stirred them
with his finger like a preparatory ritual for a mystic reading that
would provide him an answer. But there was nothing mysterious about the discord in his heart, nothing enigmatic about
the quest to forgive. Was he capable of forgiving? That was the
question.

"When does the heart stop bleeding?" he asked, and he surprised Rosella by removing his hand from hers and stepping
back. "Nothing to this point has been able to stop the constant
stream. The hole you made in my heart is too big. You plunged
your knife into it that day in the hospital when I woke up not sure of what had happened. What had I done? What had I
done? I had no contact with the outside world. I never saw the
news. I never witnessed the public's rage. They told me what
I had done and kept me in isolation. My only connection to
the horror was through you, and when I see you now, I only
see the memories of your hatred, you throwing these rings at
me, you insisting I sign divorce papers, and worst of all, the
comfort you took with Sly right in front of my face. I don't have
a memory of the deaths of the children. I slept through all of
that, and I will go to my grave bearing the guilt of being unable
to save them. My memories are of you, of your disloyalty, of
your condemnation, of your loathing"

The strength to support her weight vanished from her legs,
and Rosella collapsed to her knees. The judgment she had measured out was returning to her.

"I don't want to be alone when I die, but I've lost my innocence. I thought for a moment it could be as it was, our love
could be restored, but I don't know. I'm dying and I want to
forgive, but I have no strength, no capacity. Too much blood
has flowed out of me, and I'm very sorry."

He slipped the rings into his pocket and hobbled off the field
with Rosella's excruciating cries rending the heavens.

"Chemo and radiation have shrunk the tumor, but didn't kill
it. I propose we would insert the needle here;' Dr. Macy said,
pointing to the picture of the tumor on the image from the
CAT scan with his pen. "We heat the needle with radio waves
and kill all the tissue in the immediate area"

Jake stood behind Dewayne, who sat in a chair in Dr. Macy's
office. Both studied the small diameter of tissue at the tip of
Dr. Macy's pen. How could a man Dewayne's age and in such
excellent physical shape grow so lethal a combination of pulp?
The University Hospital in Memphis told them up front the
operation posed risks; it was only an experiment. The doctors
could give no guarantee of a positive result, but the procedure
had been successful with liver, lung, and kidney cancers. Dr.
Macy and his team would try to "cook" this tumor if Dewayne
was willing.

"The first procedure will target the core of the tumor;" Dr.
Macy said. "We will follow up in a few weeks with a second
stage to wipe out any cancerous cells that may have survived
around the edges. If necessary, we can go to stage three where
we insert tiny capsules of chemotherapy drugs at the margins
of the burn zone. By isolating the capsules, it should spare you
the toxic side effects of normal chemo"

In the last few months he had not been spared from the worst
of evils-the deaths of his mother, son, nephew and niece, fortunes vanished, career over, reputation vilified-so what could
the toxic side effects of one more round of chemotherapy do
that hadn't already been done to destroy him? When Dr. Macy
had tracked Dewayne down and invited him to Memphis for
a consultation, he had decided he had nothing to lose. After
listening to Dr. Macy's presentation, he was still of the same
mind. Dewayne reached his hand toward Dr. Macy, and the
doctor shook it.