In An Arid Land (13 page)

And so now she's gone too, and his time up, the cancer eating him alive, and he wants us to care for him. And Carla, with a tender heart for animals, even the human kind, anything in pain, and Carla taking up for him. He's got a right, sure, it was his place his and Mother's, mind you his land, his house, his trees, his debts too, that we took. But it's ours now, ours, free and clear, no matter where it came from. You work a place eleven years and it ought to be yours and it ought to be up to you who can die on it and who can't. It was his, sure, it was, and maybe he's got a right. . . . Better get there, better get home.

He recalled what Carla had said the night before and how her voice on the line went low and deep so the old man wouldn't hear what she said, not that he could have heard much with one ear smashed and silent and the other so weak that you had to holler at him to get his attention. "But he's your father."

And Warren came back: "I don't care, I don't care if he's my patron saint, I won't have him. Not in our house."

"It's his house too."

"No sir, not anymore."

"And just what is he to do?"

"There's Becky. She's his sister, let her take care of him."

"But Warren, that old lady couldn't care for a kitten, she's so weak and senile, and with a bad hip and that Billy of hers still in the house at the age of fifty."

"Then let him go to the poorhouse."

"Warren!"

"I don't see what's wrong with the Veteran's Hospital down in Houston, that's what it's there for."

"But Warren"

"Don't 'But Warren' me."

"But Warren," she said and he let her do it. "Is that where I should take you when the time comes?"

He thought about this for a moment, thought of the way it was with men like them, how they had both gone to their wars and how they had both spent their time in Army hospitals, twenty-five years apart, and how they both received their disability checks each month, the pittance that at least kept them from starving, and how the only thing for men such as them was to end their days among the lonely and ragged within the high inhuman walls of a government institution. And he said, "Yes."

"No, and you know better too," she said. "He doesn't want to die in a hospital."

How was he to argue with her? After another period of silence she mentioned the long-distance charges they were piling up and said they'd better talk about this when he got home.

"I don't want him there."

She didn't answer.

"I'll throw him out," said Warren. "After I have my say."

"Please be careful," said Carla.

He waited, stewing, then muttered, "You too."

"Love you," she said.

"Yes," he said, though he wished now that he had said more.

He was just outside Lufkin, having made better time than he'd expected, crossing the Angelina River bridge, his thoughts already at the house, his boot firm on the pedal. He felt no surprise or shock, only anger over the delay it would cause, when, reaching pavement again, in a deep and long stretch of shade, the truck veered sharply to the left as if under its own control and then spun around on a patch of ice. The tailgate struck the ditch embankment. The impact jostled him but nothing was hurt.

"Why'd you come back?" he said after a moment of stillness.

Then he opened the door and stepped out, into the mud.

III

It was after noon before Warren found a farmer willing to pull him out with his tractor for twenty dollars. The old guy reminded him of his father, with bandy legs in faded jeans and a waist as small as it was the day he became a man, and a dirty mule skinner jacket with corduroy on the collar, and a straw hat with its brim rolled crudely into a funnel at the front, and tennis shoes on his feet, and a cigarette in his mouth. He was still agile, hooking up the chain, but bent and slow.

"You just stand back there, son," the old guy hollered, smiling at Warren from his noisy tractor, the cigarette hanging off his lip. It was then that Warren noticed the rotten brown teeth and the rotten brown cancer splotches on his cheeks and noticed how he even sounded like his father.

"Now you're set, sure enough," he said when Warren handed him the twenty and thanked him. "Happier'n a dead pig in sunshine, I'd bet." He grinned impudently. "Go easy now," he yelled, waving, and started off slowly down the highway.

Chunks of mud rattled against the wheel wells of the truck. Even at two o'clock the sun was low in the southern sky, glaring at him through the windshield, but the ice was gone from the warming road. The pines along the road swayed like dancers in the wind. Warren was colder in his bones than he'd been in years.

He would be lucky now to make it home by dark. Again he found himself driving faster than he should; he wanted to get there. He had things to do, and to say. He had a lot to say. He wanted to tell him one last time what he thought of him and let him know that he would have to pay for the way he had lived and what he had done. Yes, he had a lot to say. And in the morning Warren would drive him to the hospital in Houston and walk him inside and leave him there, and he would be through with it then.

Too bad, really, the way things turned out. They had been close when he was young, a hard-edged older man and his big boy. He would take Warren to town on his errands and he would heft him onto the counter and the other men would tease the boy and the women would smile. Later, when he was older, they hunted together and played pitch in the yard, and later still, in his youth, there were the Friday night football games at the high school and he remembered even now the sound of his father's voice from the grandstand, yelling the loudest, laughing and smiling afterwards, making a fool of himself in front of the others. And there was the night he took the young man to the Tarry Awhile Tavern for the first time and set him down with his first ever taste of whiskey. Warren remembered how tenderly his father had stood over him later alongside the road home, holding him by the neck as Warren retched into the weeds, saying, "That's it, get it all out." And there was, later still, the firm manly handshake and the wet eyes on the day Warren, dressed in his uniform, left for the war, and then the short misspelled letters of encouragement and gossip that he received once a week for three years. He learned even later that his father wrote those letters, never dated, while his mother was away at church on Sunday mornings.

So what had happened? It was true they had never gotten along his father, the local rascal, and his mother, the stern-faced Baptist who quoted scriptures and prayed for his soul but something had changed by the time Warren was home again. There was hatred between them and they all fought about it. Warren knocked him down once after parrying his weak blows and he refused to be helped up. He took his revenge on Warren's mother and there was another fight, mostly shouts and the slamming of doors, and Warren moved to town, and then everything went to hell.

"It's yours," he said one day, meaning the land and the house. He had come into Huntsville where Warren was working then, just to see him. He was dressed up and his own truck was packed with two suitcases, a few boxes in the back. "Tend it for your mother and it's yours when she's gone, as far as I'm concerned."

"You bastard," said Warren.

"You don't understand this," he said.

"I understand you're a bastard."

His father smiled sadly and nodded his head and it was many years before Warren saw him again.

Finally, Huntsville. The house wasn't far now. It was late afternoon and the clouds were back, low and dark. From what he could tell it was getting even colder. Might even snow, the radio said. He hated to go home without something for Carla but he was in such a hurry . . . . At a service station he stopped to fill up the truck on Mr. Hudson's money and on the counter sat some samplers of chocolate-covered cherries. She loved those things. He bought a box; at least he'd have something.

There were two strange trucks in the yard. Coming in the long rutted drive toward the house he recognized one of them. Dr. Sweeney, here to see about Old Velvet. The other was brand new, a fancy job with chrome wheels, parked next to his father's Dodge. Carla, alone, was waiting for him on the porch.

"Where have you been?" she said, pulling the lapels of her heavy coat tight against her chest. "I've been worried to death."

He mentioned the accident, calling it "very minor," and asked her what in the name of reason she was doing out there in the cold. "Just waiting," she said, clapping her gloved hands, and he limped to the bottom of the steps gazing up at her. She looked like the best thing he had ever seen in his life, the essence of warmth, but he knew the look she was offering was meant to put him on his guard. He handed her the box of chocolates, saying, "For you," and she showed him a quick smile before putting it away in her deep pocket. Carla drew him to her then and they sat down together, hands linked in her lap.

"Warren," she said and he cocked his head.

"Warren." It was a warning to prepare himself. "He died this afternoon, just awhile ago. The doctor's in there with him now."

IV

Sometime in the night Warren got out of bed and went into the room where his father had died. The room was chilly, and even chillier when he switched on the bedside lamp, its glow pale and blue. This had been his room when he was a boy and it still held the furniture his parents had bought second-hand or made for him. The narrow chest of drawers and the boy's desk in the corner with its ladder-back chair and the oval rug on the floorboards and the bed with the bookcase headboard in which rested Carla's childhood collection of rag dolls. At first they had hoped this room would be lived in by their own children, but then, over time, it became known as the guest room, though they seldom had guests.

In the corner sat his father's old-fashioned suitcase. Draped over the chair were the clothes he was wearing when he arrived the day before, "coughing like a consumptive and all but falling out of the truck when he opened the door," as Carla had put it. There were his jeans and a western shirt and a corduroy jacket with a cheap furry collar. On the floor sat his boots, the uppers lying on their sides like the wings of a bird. Carla had put out his "personal items" on a towel atop the bureau. A razor and a soap mug with a faded etching of an old sailing ship on the side and a pocket comb stuck into the bristles of a brush. He had always been meticulous about his hair, even toward the end when there was precious little of it left, thin and pearly. He found a ring, a simple gold band, worn smooth, and he wondered if it had been from his mother or from Shirley, the other one.

He had looked quite handsome in death, his skin clear but for the splotches and his jaw set against his chest and his eyes closed as if in prayer. Warren remembered, standing above the bed, staring down at the Mexican blanket Carla had covered it with after the doctor had signed the death certificate and the undertaker's son had come and gone with the body. Carla had combed his hair for him and there was a look of well, what? Dignity, perhaps? Serenity? The way the dead always look once they've been fussed over and prepared by the living.

"I'm sorry you died," Warren said out loud, his voice a separate presence in the room.

Then Carla was standing in the doorway. Her hair was down and the hem of her robe lay on the floor around her hidden feet.

"He had wanted very badly to see you again," she said.

She took a seat on the bed, patted the place beside her

as an invitation, but he turned away. He parted the curtains and looked out at the snow falling gently, whispering gently, and the eerie gray sheen of the weighty clouds. White patches were already forming on the ground between the trees and on the tops of the fence posts. It had not snowed in that part of Texas in many years and he knew it would be all the talk that day.

"What else did he tell you?" Warren asked and glanced at her. He saw that Jasper, the only one of the dogs she allowed to sleep with them, had roused himself and come in to see. He was resting against her leg as she absently rubbed his white chin.

"He was disappointed that you weren't here when he arrived," she said with a worried look. "He told me to tell you he loved you and missed you and hoped you'd understand him."

He snorted through his nose, a sound of mockery, derision.

"He told me to tell you that your peach trees were going to need more pruning in February and to be sure to transplant the blackberry shoots at the same time."

Again he snorted, scoffing, ridiculing, dismissing.

"He was worried about our little orchard?"

"Yes, he was," she said. "He sat at that window and looked out at it for a long time. How he could see it, I don't know, he was so blind, and he wouldn't bother with his glasses once he got out of the truck. Oh, and he said to be sure and separate Old Velvet and the little one from the other horses for a while."

"I know that," Warren said. "Sweeney and I talked about it, and besides I already knew that."

"He wanted to feel useful, that's all. He knew how much she means to you, and this new one, too, being a purebred. That's all he had to leave you with, he said, advice and this house."

He gave her a severe glance to let her know that he didn't like going into that, that they had settled that piece of old business long ago and he would never see it her way, or his.

"Warren?" she said. He let the curtains go but didn't turn to listen. "Warren," she said. "He wanted me to ask you a favor. It was very important to him. I was going to wait till tomorrow."

She hesitated until he said, "Well?"

"He wanted . . . why, you know what he wanted. He wanted you to bury him here, on the property, next to your mother."

There was a long adamant silence during which only the happy panting of the dog could be heard and the almost-sound of the whispering snow. Warren said, "I figured as much.

"But I won't do it, you know. He gave up all his rights here, to this place and to her both, and I won't do it, I won't."

"That's so spiteful, Warren, not to forgive. It seems wrong."