Jernigan (22 page)

We got off the interstate at the familiar exit. I hadn’t been back this way since my father’s funeral. It still looked like the country, even though there was a new house here and there, if I was remembering correctly. Five years. The white colonial with the swayback roof was now chocolate brown, with staring modern windows in place of the old six-over-six, a red plastic three-wheeler overturned in the front yard. We took the shortcut, the back road from Westford into East-ford, coming out by the General Lyon Inn, then left on 198 up toward Woodstock Valley. The place across from the post office, I remembered, had been a hippie house. One summer day, years ago, I’d driven past and seen a little wedding party posing for pictures on the lawn. A pretty blond-haired bride, a long-haired groom, a capering mongrel dog. Where were they anymore, and what had happened to them in all this time? Not here, I imagined, and nothing good.

A new house now sat at the corner of my father’s road, in what used to be an overgrown field. They’d left the stone wall up and put a blacktop drive through the barway. Not a house, actually, but a double-wide trailer with a Florida room. A lamppost beside the flagstone walk. They did seem to keep the place up. Crew-cut brown grass, suggesting they hadn’t lost the old vim as fall came on. Me, I’d always skipped what should have been the last couple of mowings, and settled for having my eye affronted all winter by lank dead grass.

“Strike one,” I said to Danny. “Used to be tons of little evergreens in that field.”

“What field?”

I flipped my thumb at the trailer. “Used to be a field,” I said.

“I don’t remember it too much here,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “It’s a shame. Your grandfather didn’t really know
how to deal with kids, I don’t think. After I was grown up he and I finally got to be sort of buddies, but before that …” I took one hand off the wheel and wiggled my fingers to suggest iffiness.

I pulled over to the side of the road. This was where the house had been. Two noble old maples—a tree I did know—one at each side of the cellar hole. Some kind of shitty little saplings now growing up out of it. I turned off the engine: sudden, profound silence.

“Well, let’s check it out,” I said. Too loud, too hearty. “I seem to remember some little pine trees or something up behind the house.”

We got out and Danny stretched, holding fists aloft on stiff arms. “Might as well leave the tools here for the time being,” I said.

“Who owns this place now?” he said. My God it was silent up here.

“Got
me,”
I said. “Bank still, for all I know. Be a nice spot for somebody.”

We walked through tangled dead hay that had been the front lawn, and stood at the lip of the cellar hole. A jumbled heap of bricks down there, once the chimney, and the charred end of a beam sticking out from the carpeting of brown and yellow maple leaves. The tops of the saplings growing up out of the old dirt floor were level with my knees. I led the way to the right, around the right-hand maple tree and into the side yard, where the old lilac stood in a waste of brier and burdock. “That was the studio,” I said, pointing to a rectangle of low brick wall, mostly tumbled down, adjoining the old stone foundation. Here, too, saplings grew out of rubble, and I could make out a half-eaten elbow of rusted stovepipe.

“See, originally the henhouse was over there,” I said, pointing. “Cost him an arm and a leg to have ’em move it and lay that foundation for it. Now the doorway into the kitchen, see, was right there. He’d go down to the kitchen in the morning, get his coffee and go straight in to work. So of course when the studio caught fire, the whole place went up. Hey, only connect, right?”

“I guess so,” Danny said. Doing his best to fake it. As old Dad was doing his best to shut him out by talking over his head. Christ.

“Well, don’t worry, champ,” I said. “Your dad’s not going to get into a big thing here. Let’s see if we can’t sneak up on one of those trees, okay? I think this is the time of day they come out to graze on
the side hill.” Not much of a joke, but at least it didn’t demand any fucking erudition.

We crashed through some brush and brambles behind the house, stepped over the little brook that had been the boundary between backyard and apple orchard, sank into mud for a few steps and then found ourselves on solid ground again. Bloated yellow apples lay rotting into the dead grass. We kept the apple trees on our right and eventually struck a path I remembered, leading behind the orchard and up the hill.

“Sure as shootin’,” I said, and pointed at the steep side hill with its outcroppings of ledge and patches of juniper. “Christmas trees galore.” Here and there stood a man-high pine tree, or whatever they were. “Let’s double back and get our weapons, amigo.”

“You’re sure it’s okay to do this?” he said.

“If they take us,” I said, “we’ll go together.”

Back at the car, I got out the ax, scythe blade and snath. “I’ll let you be the grim reaper once I get this thing back together,” I said, feeling around in my jacket pockets for the damn adjustable wrench. “You ever use one of these?”

“I’ve seen guys using ’em,” he said. He must have meant on television.

“Hell is the
wrench?”
I said. “Christ, I know I brought it.”

Danny patted his own pockets helpfully, though he surely knew there was no chance he had it.

“Scheiss,”
I said. “For want of a wrench the scythe was lost, for want of a scythe—here, would you check in the dash?”

He opened the passenger door and sat down heavily on the seat, as I kept thrusting my hands in and out of my pockets like some baggypants comedian. “How about these?” he said, holding up a pair of pliers.

“Saved the day,” I said. “Cannot
believe
I left the wrench behind. What would Freud say about this?
Ist das nicht ein wrenchenslip? Ja, das ist ein wrenchenslip.”
He watched me put the scythe back together, probably wondering what the fuck I was babbling about now. It was impossible that he could love me. Although he certainly had no one else left to hang on to. His only other living relative was his Uncle
Rick, who’d broken up with his friend Rich shortly after Judith died, and had moved to Eureka, California. I toyed with the idea of asking Danny point-blank did he love me, but why ruin a nice day. If that’s what we were having.

“Okay, bud,” I said, handing him the scythe and picking up the ax. “Over the top.”

The path behind the orchard led into what was left of an old two-rut track that went around the base of the hill, cut through the woods and ended up in what used to be some dairy farmer’s haylot. Shoulder-high brush had now taken over the track, and we kept having to detour around patches of brier.

“Mess,” I said. “Let’s try a little ways up the hill. Looks like better going.”

We climbed up out of the brush into the dry grass of the hillside. “Hey Dad?” Danny called. I turned around. He was pointing to a pine tree just above us. “What about that one?”

“Possibility,” I said. “I don’t know, though. See? The top is kind of forked there. I don’t know what you’d do about that.”

“Yeah, I guess not,” he said.

“Bottom of it’s nice and full,” I said.

“Forget it,” he said.

“It’s a candidate if we don’t run across something better,” I said. It was a lousy tree. Though lousy, I reminded myself, only from our narrow perspective: you couldn’t be too careful what you thought. We trudged diagonally uphill, always making our detours around the junipers on the high side.

“That one?” I said.

Danny looked. “Isn’t that one kind of weird at the top too?” he said. “There’s all that space there where there’s not any branches.”

“So you cut all that top stuff off,” I said. “Cut the top, like a foot of it, right off. And stick your star on there.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Doesn’t pull your trigger, huh?”

“Nah, it’s okay.”

“Hey,” I said. “Let’s find one we can really throw our support behind.” No answer. The political metaphor made me think of a joke. “Presidential timber,” I said. But it might have been too obscure.

We climbed on. Chilly as it was, I was starting to sweat. I could feel my heart going, and I had to make a conscious effort to breathe slowly and through my nose so Danny wouldn’t hear his old man panting. He was just striding along on those long, lean, sixteen-year-old legs.

“Want to take a breather?” I said.

“We’re almost to the
top
, Dad.” Said with maybe just the edge of an edge. Or was he simply offering me encouragement? I looked back. From up here you could see the ruined foundation clearly, and you could tell that the lawn had been a lawn. Ruins that made sense only from above, like Erich von Däniken’s landing strips for spacemen.

I sat down. “Tell you what,” I said. “Since the old man’s out of shape anyhow, let me have one of those things.”

“Have what?” he said.

“Cigarette,” I said. “Bertie Wooster calls them gaspers. Isn’t that a great expression, gaspers?”

“Dad,” he said. “I don’t think you want to do that.”

“Shows how
much you
know,” I said. I was surprised that it came out sounding so brutal. I’d been aiming for witty.

“How long have you been off them this time?”

“Too God damn long,” I said, standing up and holding out my hand.

“Dad, I really don’t think you should,” he said. “You’re going to be real sorry if you get hooked on them again.”

“That’s my lookout,” I said.

“They’re my cigarettes,” he said.

I stared at him. A good-looking boy, holding a scythe awkwardly over his shoulder, blade pointing back at his calf. A little taller than me. Gnawing on his lower lip.

“Oh hell,” I said, and sat down again, using the ax as an old man would use a cane. My ass on the cold earth. Danny didn’t move. I looked down again on the place where my father had died.

“Sorry, amigo,” I said, after a while. “I said I wasn’t going to make a scene, and here I am making a scene.”

“I guess it must be weird for you to be here,” he said.

“I hadn’t thought so,” I said. “I guess I shouldn’t underestimate my capacity for having a normal reaction, right? At any rate, thanks
for the tough love. You bastard.” I’d meant that to be jocular too. Everything was going off-key. “Ho, brother,” I said.

“Think we should get going?” said Danny.

I looked up at him. “I don’t even know why we’re doing this,” I said. “The whole thing is fucked, right? I mean, are we really going to go through a whole Christmas thing with them,
knowing?”

“Dad, how come you’re asking
me?”
he said.

“I’m thinking out loud, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “I’m not
asking
you.” If I didn’t know what to do, at least I could be pissy. “You done any Christmas shopping yet?” I said, staring back down at the cellar hole.

“Some,” he said.

“Stuff for Clarissa?”

“Dad, I don’t get why you’re
asking
me this stuff. You mean if we already bought Christmas presents we shouldn’t let them go to
waste
or something? I can’t see what you’re saying.”

“I’m just trying to think,” I said.

“Look, we might as well just stay, you know? You and Mrs. Peretsky are doing okay again, and I get along with
her
really good and I can handle Clarissa okay. I mean maybe she’ll OD or something.”

That got me to look up.

“I’m
kidding,”
he said. “Dad? It was just a joke. You know. Joke?”

“Well,” I said, “I guess we better get this done.” I got to my feet, leaning again on the ax handle. “Here. What’s the problem with this one right here?”

He looked. “Come
on”

“Seriously,” I said. “Take it down and just use like the top six feet of it. It’s got a nice shape up there.”

“You’re going to cut the whole—look, sure, I don’t care.”

“Good,” I said. “Decided. Now let’s clear away some of the little brush over that side, okay? And then we’ll be in business.”

He started just whanging away with the scythe.

“Hold it,
hold
it,” I said. “Let me show you.” I took the scythe from his hands. “You want to keep the blade level, okay? And …” I demonstrated. “Like so. Short strokes. It shouldn’t take a lot of effort.” I showed him again.

“Okay,
okay,”
he said. “Let me
try.”
He tried. “Right,” he said. “Works better.”

“Thought it might,” I said, with fatherly understatement. So this was the moment I thought we’d never have together. However I might eventually come to remember it, it wasn’t much right now.

When he finished, I went in and hacked away the tree’s bottommost limbs to give a clear shot at the trunk. “What do you say?” I said. “You want to do the dirty deed?”

“Yeah, I guess.” I handed him the ax and he stood up to the tree as if at home plate.

“Okay, now—”

“I know,” he said. “Cut it like you’re cutting a thing out of it, right?”

“And don’t chop off your foot in the process,” I said.

Danny managed to get the tree down, then I took over the rest of it. Cutting off the top six feet was tricky, with the tree on its side and the trunk way up off the ground and springing back every time you hit it. I got it done, finally. The bottom half of the tree looked sickening lying there, like the body of a deer you’d killed to take the head and feet for a coat rack. We dragged the shapely treetop down the hill and left the rest behind. Not wholly without compunction, at least on my part. Just without compunction that did any good.

5

When we got back to Martha’s house, there wasn’t much left of the day but some orange-pink sky off in the direction of Hamilton Avenue. I had a headache from squinting into the sun. We’d stopped at a Lum’s on the way back, and I was able to get a couple of beers (in other words, three), which took the edge off things a little. To avoid talking about the immediate future—not, I swear to God, to nag—I’d brought up college one more time. He said he’d been thinking about Berklee,
as in Berklee College of Music, and of course I thought he was saying Berkeley, as in the University of California
at
. So there was a big go-around about that, where I was saying he didn’t have the grades to get into Berkeley and he was saying what did Berklee care if he’d gotten a C-minus in Ancient and Medieval. Oh, I’d heard of his Berklee, just wasn’t thinking. It sounded like Danny, all right: trade school for musicians. What, I wondered, was the aspiration: to be in the house band on David Letterman? He had my blessing, I told him. (For what that was worth.) As long as he was really being honest with himself about his ability, I told him, and as long as that was what he really wanted to do. So nonjudgmental. Though come to think of it the artist’s life had got my father a lot more than the drudge’s life had got me. I mean, at least you could still find an early Francis Jernigan—they usually chose
Arrangement
3
—poorly reproduced in a few books.
My
best shot at having made a contribution to humanity would be giving Danny a couple of unharassed years in which to play scales. But Christ, did he even remember how to read music? He’d stopped going to his guitar teacher after Judith died, claiming he wasn’t learning what he wanted to learn; since then he’d been spending hours a day in there playing God knows what through the Rockman and back into his own head. Well, fine: that showed dedication. Though that’s probably not all it showed. But wasn’t a place like Berklee going to demand some sort of basic proficiency? And, horrible thought: wouldn’t he need a recommendation from the music teacher at his high school, and wasn’t that Martin Sanders?