Roses (37 page)

“Oh, of course. Sassie loves that boy like her own.”

Percy broached Ollie’s request with Lucy. Since the evening of their last parley, they’d been getting along somewhat. He knew
she was frightened by the ordeal of childbirth, and he was frightened for her. Since she did not like to read, he’d withdrawn
books on childbirth from the library and read them aloud to her in the evenings in their sitting room. She’d listen intently
and discuss their contents with him afterward without animosity.

It was a tenuous truce at best, and it was with a feeling of guilt that Percy asked if she minded his leaving her at such
a time. But, as usual, she surprised him.

“I think you should take him, Percy. You know the reason Ollie doesn’t want to go by train, don’t you?”

He confessed that he did not.

“Well, because… How long were you fellows on the train from New Jersey?”

“About six days.”

“Can you imagine how Ollie must have felt, what he must have thought, during those days and nights coming home to Howbutker
without a leg? No wonder he doesn’t like trains. Yes, you should drive him. I’ll be fine. Your mother and father will take
care of me, but we’ll wait for you in any case.” She smiled at him, reminding him of the old Lucy. Much of her behavior lately
reminded him of the girl she was before their marriage. The change was not—as his mother would say—“put on,” but seemed due
to a genuine desire to become his friend.

“Thank you, Lucy,” he said, returning her smile. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Percy drove them in Abel’s roomy new six-cylinder Packard sedan, but the trip was long and hot to the Veterans Administration
Hospital in Dallas. Ollie was flush-faced from heat and exhaustion by the time they reached its entrance. Perspiration stood
on his forehead and dampened his shirt collar, and Percy ached for his discomfort as his friend labored to heave himself out
of the sedan. An orderly appeared with a wheelchair, but Ollie waved it away and settled his crutches under his powerfully
developed arms. “Let’s go get ’em, Percy, my boy,” he said, and swung after the orderly pushing the empty wheelchair.

After an interminable delay in filling out admittance forms, an attendant arrived with Ollie’s medical records under his arm
to escort him to an examining room. It was at the end of a long hall, and Ollie looked visibly dismayed at the distance. “Steady,
old man,” Percy said, following close beside him. “Only a few yards more.”

But short of their destination, Ollie gasped, “Percy, I can feel my leg again, and the pain. I think I will take that wheelchair.”

But it was too late. His one leg buckled, and he toppled forward, his face contorted in pain. Crutches and the steel medical
file clattered to the floor as the attendant and Percy tried to break his fall. The attendant ran for a stretcher while Percy
loosened Ollie’s tie and the top buttons of his shirt, his hands trembling, seeing again the body of his friend lying helpless
and soaked with blood alongside a shell-shattered road. “Now, get that look off your face,” Ollie ordered with a determined
smile. “Sometimes this happens, and I’m all quivering flesh and raw nerve ends, but it passes. Just make sure you have a stiff
Scotch ready for me when I get out of here.”

“If I have to distill it myself,” Percy said.

The stretcher arrived, and the two attendants lifted Ollie onto it. “If you’ll pick up his file, sir, and bring it along,
we’d be grateful,” one of them said as he hoisted the framework of poles. Percy picked up the crutches and medical file, his
hands still shaking. He took a minute to catch his breath and steady his own nerves before following the white-coats down
the hall, but by the time he’d reached the anteroom of the examining area, they’d whisked the stretcher behind the No Admittance
doors.

He decided that while he waited for somebody to return for the file, he’d take a look to learn the extent of Ollie’s condition.
Until today, he had not known that he could still feel pain in his missing leg. He never complained to him, but Percy was
well aware of the reason. Like the wise man he was, the incomparable friend, Ollie knew that nothing drives a thorn deeper
or quicker into the side of friendship than guilt.

The initial army report came first, the entries written in the hurried scrawl of a frontline doctor, the kind he’d read dozens
of times on the clipboards hanging from the cots of men he’d visited in tent hospitals. In medical jargon, it described Ollie’s
injury and amputation, and then, at the conclusion of the report, a line—added like an afterthought—stilled the flow of his
blood. He read it once, batted his eyes to make sure of his vision, then read it again: “As a result of Captain DuMont’s injuries,
the urethra is susceptible to infection resulting from retention of wastes normally excreted in the urine, and the irreparable
damage to the penis renders the organ incapable of functioning for the purpose of intercourse and procreation.”

The metal-covered file fell to the floor with a loud bang. Percy did not hear it. He flung himself out of his chair and staggered
to an open widow, struggling for breath. His stomach heaved, his head reeled. He pressed his forehead to the cool white enamel
of the window frame to stop the spinning of the room.
Oh, my God… oh, my God…

“You all right, sir?”

It was the orderly, come to retrieve the file. From his position at the window, Percy mumbled, “I’m fine. Go tend to Captain
DuMont.”

He fell into a chair next to the open window and pressed his palms to the sides of his head.
Matthew… that sweet little boy… his—his!
The obvious sequence of events unrolled in his bursting brain like the erratic reel of a silent film.
Mary discovered she was pregnant after he ran off to Canada. She waited, but he did not come home. Finally, she went to the
only man who could rescue her and her child. “Ollie was here,” his mother had said. And so Ollie had married her and agreed
to raise her son as his own… shattered Ollie, who could give her no more children… who could not…

He dropped his head into his hands and moaned—deep, bellowing tolls of grief dredged from the bowels of deepest despair. The
orderly returned thirty minutes later to find him sprawled in the chair beneath the open window, staring blank-eyed like a
dead man, his face ashen and glossed with tears. “Uh, pardon me, sir,” he said, fidgeting with obvious embarrassment, “but
I’ve come out to tell you that Captain DuMont will be hospitalized for observation and treatment until he can be fitted with
a prosthetic limb. That’ll take about a week. He’s been given a sedative and is fast asleep. You can see him in Ward B during
visiting hours from six to eight o’clock this evening.”

Percy was spared the awkwardness of the visit when he telephoned home from the hospital and Beatrice asked that he return
immediately. He was now the father of a strapping ten-pound son.

H
OWBUTKER
, 1933

E
xcuse me, Mr. Warwick, but there’s a Miss Thompson here to see you.”

Percy did not glance up from the report he was reading. It was late October, four years after the financial crash on Wall
Street, which had sent the nation spinning into the Great Depression. Every day brought job seekers into his secretary’s office
pleading for work at Warwick Industries, one of the few stable ships in the county still sailing calmly in the worsening economic
waters. “Did you tell her it’s a waste of time to see me, Sally? The payroll is splitting at the seams as it is.”

“Oh, she isn’t here seeking employment, Mr. Warwick. Miss Thompson is a teacher. She’s here about your son.”

Percy turned up a blank stare, his mind working with the phrase
your son
.

“Wyatt, sir,” Sally said.

“Oh, yes, of course. Send her in, Sally.”

He rose to greet her, as was his custom when visitors were shown into his office. It did not matter who they were or the purpose
of their call. Percy Warwick was noted for the dignity he accorded everyone, even those who, as was often the case these days,
came begging, hat in hand, for a job, a loan, more time to pay off debts.

Miss Thompson had not come begging, that was plain to see, but despite her composure, Percy saw that she was clearly nervous
and uncomfortable when she took the seat he offered. What the devil had Wyatt done?

“Is there a problem with Wyatt, Miss Thompson? I was not aware that you were his teacher.” He made the point not to give the
impression that he was one of those fathers who was on top of everyone who affected his son, but out of surprise that he had
never met her. For the last few years, he had served as president of the school board. One of his functions was to greet personally
the teachers new to the Howbutker Independent School District at the annual welcome reception.

“I was engaged to finish out the term for Miss Wallace, who married earlier in the year,” Miss Thompson explained. “She and
her husband moved to Oklahoma City. Miss Wallace, as you may recall, was Wyatt’s original teacher.”

Percy leaned back in his chair, templing his fingers, enjoying her clear, pleasing voice. “I am sure the change has not been
to his detriment,” he said with a gracious inclination of his head.

“I hope you will continue to think so when you hear what I’ve come to say.”

“I’m listening.”

She took a deep breath, lowering her gaze momentarily in an apparent effort to renew her courage. Good Lord, Percy thought.
What kind of grief
had
Wyatt given her? He’d make sure he regretted it, if it was as bad as Miss Thompson seemed to imply. Still, it was easy to
see how an eleven-year-old boy on the verge of puberty might be guilty of inappropriate behavior in order to gain her attention.
She was a very pretty young woman, with clear hazel eyes and neatly bobbed hair evocative of the innocent shade of new wheat.

“Your son,” she began, “is deliberately and systematically inflicting injuries upon Matthew DuMont. I am afraid if somebody
doesn’t stop Wyatt, he’ll do serious harm to that little boy.”

Percy’s chair protested as he snapped forward, his pleasure in her beauty forgotten. “Explain what you mean, Miss Thompson.”

“I mean, Mr. Warwick, that every day during school hours, Wyatt manages to hurt Matthew DuMont in some way. It can be anything
from tripping him in the hall to deliberately throwing a ball in his face. I can’t tell you the number of nosebleeds the child
has endured because Wyatt has hit him. I’ve seen him… I’ve seen him…” Her cheeks reddened, as much from anger, Percy thought,
as embarrassment.

“Go on,” he urged tensely.

“I’ve seen him knee Matthew in the groin many times.”

Percy felt his face grow hot. “Why in God’s name did you wait until now to tell me? Why didn’t you go to the school authorities?”

“I did, Mr. Warwick. I went to the principal, but he refused to listen. I tried to enlist the aid of the other teachers, but
they refused to help me, also. They’re all afraid of you… of your power. They fear for their jobs. The children, too. Their
fathers work for you.”

“Good God,” Percy said.

“Today was the last straw,” Sara Thompson continued, visibly gaining confidence now that she perceived she was making headway.

“What happened today?”

“Wyatt slashed Matthew’s prized baseball glove, then threw it into the cesspool at the rear of the school. When Matthew waded
out to get it, Wyatt threw a rock and hit him on the temple. It knocked the child nearly senseless and left a deep cut that
bled freely. He lost his footing—”

Sara bit her lip, as if the description of the smaller Matthew falling into the muck of the waste pit, blood flowing from
a temple wound, were too much to describe, but Percy clearly perceived the picture. He stood abruptly, fingers working angrily
to button his suit coat. He knew the glove in question. It had been a present from him last Christmas.

“And does Matthew ask for these beatings?”

“Absolutely not!” Sara’s defense was emphatic. “I know Matthew DuMont only as a member of my debate class and from playground
duty, but I have observed him to be the nicest student I know. He tries to defend himself, but, though he’s a class older,
his size is no match for your son’s. The other boys… they want to help, but they’re afraid of Wyatt… of you.”

“I see…. How did you get here, Miss Thompson?”

“Why, I…” Sara grappled with the relevancy of the question. “I walked here from the school.”

“That’s over two miles.”

“The importance of my mission made the distance no consequence.”

“So it would seem.” Percy threw open the door of his office. “Sally, have Booker bring the car around. I want him to drive
Miss Thompson home.”

Sara stood up, looking uncertain now and a trifle flustered. “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Warwick. I can’t thank you enough
for hearing me out.”

“Why didn’t you go to the DuMonts with this?” Percy asked.

“Because of Matthew. From what I know of him, I am certain he would rather die than tattle on Wyatt to his parents or ask
for their interference or help. I could not have appealed to them… before I tried you. It would have been a kind of betrayal.
I would have gone to Mr. and Mrs. DuMont next, however.”

“You admire Matthew, don’t you.”

“He has a great deal of character.”

“And Wyatt?”

Sara hesitated, then met his gaze directly. “He has a mean streak in him, Mr. Warwick, but only toward Matthew, I’ve noticed.
If it weren’t for his… obvious jealousy of the boy, I suspect they’d be buddies. Your son’s lonely, Mr. Warwick. He has few
friends.”

“His fault, I fear.”

His chauffeur appeared in the doorway. He’d been on call today at the office rather than at the Warwick residence. Visitors
from California had arrived to tour the mills. “You’re to drive Miss Thompson to her residence, Booker. Then come back and
pick up our guests. My car is here. I’ll drive myself to the house.” He held out his hand to Sara. “Thank you for coming to
me. Booker will see that you get home.”