Roses (42 page)

“We did, Dad,” Matthew said, rolling his mother’s eyes, “but we thought it was thunder sounding on the plain.”

“That’ll be good for a couple of boxed ears,” Ollie said benignly. “How about it, Percy, my boy? We’re stealing Wyatt as it
is.”

Percy wanted to accept. Lucy would be playing bridge with the lowbred cronies with whom she cavorted every Sunday, knowing
that Wyatt would be well fed at the DuMonts’. But Wyatt glanced down and shuffled his feet, and Percy took that as a sign
that his son preferred he decline. So he said, “Thanks anyway, but I had planned to do a little work at the office.” In reality,
he’d be going to Sara’s house later and eating a grilled cheese sandwich, probably scorched. Her talents did not include cooking.
Matthew definitely looked peaked, he decided, and he worried that the DuMont household might not be taking the boy’s condition
as seriously as it should. “Wyatt, don’t overstay your welcome, you hear?” he said. “Let Matthew get some rest this afternoon.
Kick him home, Ollie, when you need to.”

Ollie looked at Wyatt affectionately and clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Will do, but Wyatt never overstays his welcome.”

“Well, then behave yourself,” Percy said, and added as an afterthought for Wyatt’s benefit, “He always does. Why do I feel
I have to say that?”

“Because you’re his father,” Ollie said, a wise twinkle in his eye.

So it was with some surprise, but no shock, that Percy found Wyatt waiting for him when he returned from Sara’s earlier than
planned that afternoon.

H
e’d driven home with a heavy heart. Sara was leaving him. She’d accepted a job far out in West Texas, where school districts
on oil-rich lands could double the salary she was making in Howbutker. There was no future for her here, anyway, she’d said,
her look tender but her meaning clear. Sadly, Percy had concurred.

He entered his drive wishing he had somewhere else to go. He’d rather be anywhere but here. He could have gone to his office,
but he had no mental energy today for paperwork. He was hungry for food and comfort, neither of which his home provided. His
house and grounds had the look and feel of a neglected mausoleum. All the help had gone except for the cleaning women who
occasionally came in when Lucy, occupied with her card parties, thought to arrange for them. Since they no longer entertained—once
their old cook retired—Lucy saw no need to hire a replacement. She did not like to bother with supervising the kitchen or
planning menus or checking accounts, preferring to put together simple meals for her and Wyatt to eat at the kitchen table
hours before Percy came home. Sometimes she left a plate warming for him, sometimes she didn’t.

As he drove past the house to the garages in back, Percy noticed the overgrown flower beds and newly fallen leaves in need
of raking. Nobody lives here anymore, he thought gloomily, spying a crack in one of the mullioned windows of the sunroom.
Inside the house, he had knelt to examine it when he heard a throat cleared from behind him. “Dad?”

He threw a startled glance over his shoulder. “Wyatt? What are you doing here? I thought you’d be at the DuMonts’.”

Wyatt swatted a cobweb hanging from the door and shuffled into the room. Doesn’t he ever pick up his feet? Percy asked himself
with a flash of annoyance, then realized that of course he did. He’d seen him lift those size thirteen D’s often enough on
a football field. It was only around him that he dragged his dogs.

“Something wrong with the window?”

“It’s cracked. Probably hit by a bird or a BB. I’ll have to get it replaced.” He brushed the dust off his hands as he got
up. The windowpanes were dirty, like most of the house. “Things are cracking up around here,” he said with a grin at his pun.
“You look like something’s on your mind. What is it?”

Percy thought he could guess. He’s come to ask if he can work out at the plantation on Saturdays with Matthew through the
harvest, he conjectured. He should have seen it coming. Each boy understood that he was to work at his family’s business on
Saturdays throughout the school year and every day but weekends during summer. Percy often wondered if Matthew had ever had
a choice as to whether he wanted to learn farming or retailing. From the time he could walk, Mary had dragged him out to Somerset.
He didn’t believe the kid had ever so much as stood behind a counter in the DuMont Department Store. Matthew didn’t appear
overenthusiastic about his future as a farmer, but he didn’t balk at it, either, minding his chores with the same cheerfulness
with which he attended everything else.

Percy was as uncertain of Wyatt’s feelings for the vocation for which he was being groomed. The boy labored uncomplainingly
and willingly, but silently. He’d never expressed one sentiment about the business he would someday share with his father—and,
in time, inherit.

“Well?” he prompted.

Wyat’s gaze roved, refusing to meet Percy’s—another affliction he suffered in his presence. “It’s Matthew,” he said with his
usual lack of inflection.

“What about Matthew?”

“I think he’s really sick, Dad, and he won’t let me tell Mister Ollie or Miss Mary or Coach. I didn’t promise nothin’ about
telling you.”

It seemed to Percy that all time stopped. “What makes you think he’s sick, son?” The address slipped out naturally. Neither
indicated he took note of it. “You can tell me. I heard him coughing in church and thought it was a cold. What makes you think
it’s more than that?”

“He’s got a fever. I made him let me take his temperature. It was a hundred and four degrees. He don’t look right, neither.
I’m awful worried about him.”

For once, Percy took no notice of the poor grammar that ordinarily set his teeth on edge. Percy heard only urgency in Wyatt’s
tone and saw it in the blue eyes that were at last riveted to his. “Where is Matthew now?”

“Upstairs in my room. His folks think we’re at the practice field throwing a few balls around. Matthew barely made it through
dinner.”

Appalled, Percy said, “You mean they let him go? They didn’t notice that he was sick?”

“You know Matthew, Dad. The way he can carry on, nobody’d know nothin’ was the matter. He’s afraid if his folks or Coach find
out, they won’t let him play Friday night.”

“Then I was the wrong one to come to, Wyatt. If he’s sick, I’m calling his parents, game or no game Friday night.”

Wyatt nodded. “That’s why I came to you. I knew that’s what you’d do. Matthew is more important than any dumb old football
game.”

Percy took the stairs two at a time to Wyatt’s room, his son on his heels. “Ah, Wyatt, you
told
!” Matthew accused when Percy burst into the room and he saw the look on his godfather’s face.

“I never promised I wouldn’t tell my dad,” Wyatt said. “You’re sick, man. You need to see a doctor.”

Percy placed a hand on the boy’s forehead. It was burning up. His teeth were chattering in spite of the cocoon of blankets
Wyatt had wrapped around him. “He’s right, Matthew,” Percy said. He could taste the metallic bite of fear in his mouth. The
boy’s color was bad. There was a blue tinge about his eyes and under his nails. Percy had seen that cast in 1918 among his
army buddies disembarking for home and carrying with them the deadly virus that would sweep the nation and kill four hundred
thousand people in a flu epidemic. Oh, God, please don’t let it be what I think it is, he prayed, feeling his legs turn to
putty.

It was worse. Staphylococcal pneumonia, Doc Tanner’s new replacement diagnosed. The recently discovered antibiotics were powerless
against it. How, where, and when Matthew had contracted the particular virulent strain—called the Bowery-bum variety—nobody
knew. Those who sat numb with grief by his bedside knew only that it had come with devastating speed and was resisting every
attempt at treatment. One week Matthew had been a healthy, active teenager bent on leading his team to victory Friday night,
and the next he was lying in bed fighting for breath, coughing up spume, death already behind the sunken green eyes peering
out at the faces peering in, desperation meeting desperation.

“Doctor,
do
something!” Mary wailed, clutching the new doctor’s sleeve, her face a bloodless mask.

But he and the specialists consulted sadly agreed that there was nothing more to be done except pray that Matthew could ride
it out. He was young and healthy and strong, and there were reported cases of victims his age who had survived the disease.

A room was prepared in the Toliver house for Percy and Wyatt to share so that they would be near Matthew’s bedside. “It would
mean so much to all of us for you and Wyatt to stay here until the boy’s better, Percy,” Ollie said when it became apparent
that Matthew might not recover. “You’ve been a second father to him. No man could have been more caring, and Wyatt could not
have loved him more if they’d been brothers.”

Percy looked at his friend—the man who knew that it was his son and Wyatt’s brother who lay dying—and could not speak for
the love and anguish choking him. He was grateful, too, for Wyatt’s presence beside him in the sickroom and in the guest quarters,
where they lay sleepless in twin beds, staring at the ceiling, bound together in mutual grief, until finally, toward morning,
Percy was relieved to hear the sound of his son’s youthful snoring.

It was Wyatt whom Matthew asked to see in the last hour of his life. Percy found him in the hall roaming like a blind bull,
thick shoulders hunched, shaggy head drooped, hands shoved into pockets, dumb with grief. “Matthew is asking for you, son,”
he said gently, and without speaking, their eyes never meeting, Wyatt followed his father to the sickroom, where he edged
shyly around the door.

“Hey, Wyatt,” Matthew said.

“Hey, yourself.”

“How’s practice going?”

“Not so good without you.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll get back if I can.”

Suddenly galvanized, as if an electric current had been switched on inside him, Wyatt lunged across the room and hauled a
chair close to his bedside. “No
ifs
about it,” he said, speaking with hard insistence into the pneumonic face. “You have to come back, Matthew. We need you,
man.
I
need you.”

Matthew was silent. Then he whispered with the wheezy substance left of his breath, “I’ll get back, man. You may not see me,
but I’ll be there. You keep on blasting holes in that line.”

“No…,” Wyatt groaned. He reached for his friend’s hand and crushed it in his great grip against his chest, as if he could
keep death from snatching him away. “No, Matthew… you can’t leave me, man.”

Mary turned away, her eyes wide with terror, and Percy and Ollie bowed their heads. It was the first time they knew that Matthew
realized he was dying.

At the end, the ones who loved him best were all with him. Sassie and Toby hovered wet-eyed in the doorway, Abel looked on
bleakly from a corner chair, Wyatt and Mary and Ollie hung over his bedside. Only Percy stood apart, gazing out the window
at the sun rays slanting through the moss-draped cypress trees that Silas William Toliver had transplanted from Caddo Lake
a century before. Toliver history had it that the trees were not expected to survive, but whatever the Tolivers planted on
their land survived, year after year—no matter what disaster. Only the Toliver children died.

“Dad…”

Percy’s shoulders tensed, but he did not turn around. It was Ollie who answered. “I am here, my boy,” he said, and Percy heard
his chair creak as he bent closer to his son. Beyond the window, the September afternoon blurred in a sea of blue and gold.
The cypresses wept.

“It’s okay, Dad,” Matthew said clearly, the breathlessness gone. “I’m not afraid to die. I figure heaven’s like here and God’s
like you.”

Percy turned from the window in time to catch the last flicker in the green eyes fixed upon Ollie before the lids fluttered
closed and the light was gone.

I
t seemed to Percy in the days following that Mary never left her stance before her parlor window overlooking the reclaimed
rose garden. Morning, noon, and night he’d find her standing there, her back to the room, hands clasping her elbows, an aloof
figure, drawn into herself. He was powerless to comfort her. He could not look into the grieving eyes of the mother of his
son without betraying the grief of the father in his.

He and Ollie and Sassie received the callers to the house, accepted the telegrams, the gifts of food and flowers, while Mary
stood her vigil at the window, often acknowledging the condolences murmured to her frozen profile with only a nod of her dark
chignoned head.

“Chérie…,
” Ollie consoled, embracing her stiff shoulders, smoothing the sleek sides of her hair, brushing his lips against the high,
stoic curve of her cheek. “
Ma chérie…”

Finally, Percy could keep himself from her no longer. She was wasting away, turning to stone before the window. “Mary?” he
said softly, laying a hand on her shoulder. To his surprise, as if she’d been waiting for him, she reached up and clutched
it to her collarbone. They were alone in the house. Ollie was at the store and Sassie at the market. He’d come in at Sara’s
behest only to drop off in the hall a basket of condolence letters written by Matthew’s classmates.

“I thought it was overexertion, Percy. You know how hard the boys practice and how drained they get the first weeks of football
practice, playing in those uniforms in humidity and heat. I begged him to get more rest, to eat more, to drink plenty of water….”

His ears thrummed. What was her point?

“And in spite of what you no doubt think, I didn’t haul him out to Somerset to force-feed his heritage to him. I did it because
it was the only way I could have him to myself. I lived for summers and Saturday mornings. I knew the time was coming when
I’d have to give him up to… his own dreams. He talked of becoming a coach.”

Why was she telling him this? But he believed he knew. Yes, she’d perceived correctly that in the first crazed days of his
grief, he’d asked himself if Matthew would have survived if she’d been home to notice his illness. But that had been unjust.
She could have been around twenty-four hours a day and it wouldn’t have mattered. Matthew would have concealed his condition
from her. It had taken him years to see it—to admit it to himself—but Matthew had belonged to Ollie. He’d loved Mary, but
he preferred the man he thought was his father. Ollie had been his confidant, his friend, his pal. Mary had been almost like
an interloper, no matter how hard she tried to create a bond between them. Matthew had shut her out, and—as always when alone—she
had turned to the land. He only now realized how hurt she’d been, how lonely.