Shame

Contents

Cover

On the Tractor

Birthdays

Philanthropy

Bass Fishing

Morning Time

Communal Raccoon Suicide

Dreams and Murmurs

Fools

Crutches

Wild Turkey

Shame

Domino Buddies

The Harold Angels

What Could Have Been

What Is, orBack on the Tractor

Acknowledgments

AfterWords

Discussion Questions for Shame

A Conversation with Greg Garrett

Extras

For Martha,
Who loves

 

“The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath taken away;
Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Job 1:21

“What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Love of the Last Tycoon

On the Tractor

My name is John Tilden, and this is a story about my life.

My parents always thought I'd grow up to be a doctor. I don't know how they settled on this—not through personal knowledge of one, since I don't recall any doctor ever staying in our small west Oklahoma town long enough for anyone to get to know him. Maybe it was
General Hospital
, which my mother watched furtively when she knew my father was in the fields; maybe it was simply the default dream uneducated country people have for their sons. In any case, all the time I was in high school they had this image of me ministering to the sick and, maybe, pulling down a six-figure income to provide for their old age.

My high school sweetheart, Samantha Mathis, thought I should be an architect or an engineer. I don't know why she settled on these occupations for me, since I displayed almost no aptitude in those directions, but when she sat on my lap and kissed me and sketched out our future, I was more than happy to entertain the notion, and made sure all the colleges I applied to had engineering schools, just in case she might be right about me.

I had the idea that I'd become a lawyer or a writer. I've always been good with words, on paper at least, so unlike those other notions, those options seemed reasonable.

None of these dreams came true. What I ultimately became was a farmer, like my father and his father before him, and I plow the sandy red soil of the farm where I've lived the better part of forty years. It is not, I think, what anyone expected, but life, as they say, has a way of changing your plans.

People have always told me I was a thinker, but I believe they meant different things at different stages of my life. When I was growing up, they meant that I was destined for a future far beyond the dusty confines of Watonga, Oklahoma. What they meant once I passed the age of thirty was that I thought too much for my own good.

Trouble is, going off on a mental tangent is one of those things you can't avoid if you're a farmer and you've got half a mind. Driving a tractor just doesn't require that much concentration: You chug around in an enclosed space that grows ever smaller, turning left whenever you run out of row. That's it. A ten-year-old could do it, and this isn't just folksy exaggeration. I've been driving a tractor in these same fields since I was ten years old. Hard to believe so much time has passed and only the tractor has changed: The spindly red Ford is now a monstrous red International Harvester, and here am I, still seated behind the wheel.

The hours stretch as I manhandle the tractor into a turn, shift gears, lower and raise attachments, listen to the dull roar of the engine outside the glass-windowed cab. There isn't much to do out here besides think, which is what I was doing on that afternoon last fall where I want to begin this story.

I thought about my farm: the price of wheat, currently three dollars a bushel, although it would drop back to $2.50 when the glut of harvest began in June; the calves I planned to buy and fatten over the winter on the very wheat pasture I was planting at that moment; the repairs I'd need to do on the combine before the next harvest, something perhaps to occupy me on a winter morning or two after the calves were fed.

I thought about my family: my wife, Michelle, much-loved beatnik senior English teacher at our alma mater, Watonga High; our oldest child, Michael, a moody college dropout (just temporary, he claimed); our obedient son B. W. (named Brian Wilson Tilden by my wife after her favorite rock star poet); our youngest, Lauren, twelve years old and changing so quickly in body and mind that I could scarcely keep track of her from week to week or even day to day.

I thought about the basketball team I coached, the Watonga High School students who, as soon as football ended, would take to the court under my part-time tutelage for the third straight winter: B. W., my point guard, throwing passes with the beauty and precision of geometric diagrams; Larry Burke, whom I called “Bird” because of his wispy mustache and his fadeaway jump shot; Martel and Tyrel Sparks, fast and agile forwards with a lot more talent than discipline; stolid, solid Jimmy Bad Heart Bull, long dark hair in a ponytail, grabbing another of those rebounds that seemed to appear in his hands as though willed there by the Great Spirit. A team, unfortunately, with mostly unrealized promise.

And I thought about myself, the life I inhabited, moving at five miles per hour in a field of dwindling squares enclosed inside each other like Russian nesting dolls, and the contrast with all the lives imagined for me in years long past. Those lives, the ones from which I expected to choose, vanished for reasons you will hear, and yet in some ways they were still there, always present. Maybe a phantom life is like the phantom limb of an amputee: The future I lost still felt tangible—possible, even—but whenever I reached out for it, my hand passed through empty air.

To understand that feeling completely, it's necessary to go back much further than last fall—to go all the way back, in fact, to the winter of 1974. It was the beginning of basketball season at Watonga High, the moment before my life changed for good, and—as they too often used to—that's where my thoughts drifted that afternoon last fall while the tractor toiled. The future was revealed only slowly, of course, peeling off event by event like layers of an onion, but in the winter of 1974, I still believed that great things lay ahead, that nothing bad would ever happen to me.

For those four short months from December to March, as the world outside changed from ice and snow to wildflowers and redbud blossoms, life was golden: I was in love, colleges were writing acceptance letters, and our team was playing basketball like no one in town had ever seen before.

Bobby Ray Daugherty set a single-game district scoring record that season that still stands, forty-seven points against our archrival, Thomas High School; Big Bill Cobb earned All State honors at center and went on to play college ball for Southern Methodist in Dallas after becoming one of the leading scorers in Oklahoma high school basketball history; Phillip One Horse returned from a five-game suspension for repeated and flagrant infractions of Coach Parker's team rules and pulled down seventeen rebounds against Comanche to help us advance to the state finals; Jim “Oz” Osborne threw up a thirty-five-foot set shot at the buzzer of the Comanche game to seal our victory; and I was a point guard with so many targets that I led the conference in assists for two years running, the kind of player who could always make other players look better.

Together, the five of us did what no Watonga High School sports team had done before or since: We won a state championship. For years after, whenever people from Watonga wanted to conjure us up out of the past, they simply mentioned the year we won it all—1975—and sighed, or without further clarification, referred to “The Team,” and there was never any doubt on Main Street who they were talking about.

We were a team, true enough. The five of us had played together for what seemed like our whole lives. On the court, we completed each other, covered for each other's weaknesses in a way that was marvelous to behold. It's too bad that we couldn't do that for each other off the court and in the life that followed.

Because, you see, it is no easy thing for a young man to conquer the world—remember how Alexander the Great is said to have wept when he realized there were no more worlds to conquer?—and that is what a state championship means in a country town held together mostly by its school and sports. Between the five of us, I think we represented every possible reaction to early greatness: As of last fall, Bobby Ray had gone through two wives, had three corporations file for Chapter Eleven, and lost more money than I will ever be able to earn; Bill had played college ball, earned his degree in business administration, and stayed on in Dallas where he parlayed his smile, handshake, and jovial laugh into his current life as a bigwig in commercial real estate and the Texas Republican Party; Phillip robbed a Watonga liquor store with a couple of other malcontents in 1979, did ten years hard time in McAlester State Penitentiary, and after his release, hid out on forty acres north of town; Oz went to pharmacy school at Southwestern State courtesy of his pharmacist father-in-law and grew stoop-shouldered from fifteen years of hanging over the counter of that pharmacy down on Main Street, helping the elderly and indigent who are just about all who remain in a town like ours.

And me? Well, in February of 1975, when Samantha Mathis broke up with me for the first and only time, I was paralyzed with grief. Phillip One Horse was even at that early date a reliable guide to the world of alcoholic excess, so when my life's fateful moment presented itself to me early one Saturday morning in the person of cute and lanky Michelle Hooks, I was too drunk to recognize it as a fateful choice until it was too late and the rest of my life was determined.

When Samantha drove out to the farm thirteen days later and tearfully apologized for our fight, we got back together, and I thought it would be best if I didn't tell Sam about Michelle. Besides, our moment together had really become nothing more than a pleasantly foggy memory.

Sam and I got back to making plans about our future life together, talking about marriage—when it might come, what it might look like. She wanted five bridesmaids, which in those days was an awful lot, although I've seen more since.

The last time Samantha and I ever talked about marriage was later that spring when I pulled my truck over to the side of a country road in the middle of a thunderstorm and told her that I was going to have to marry someone else.

Michelle Hooks was pregnant, and I was the father.

I will never forget the silence that stood between us, an invisible wall in the tiny enclosed space of my pickup cab surrounded by the noise of falling water. First she had cried, which was bad, but then she was silent, and that was worse. She wouldn't look at me. We sat, the engine revving, “Fire and Rain” crackling in from distant WKY-AM in Oklahoma City, sheets of water pelting the roof and hood. I thought maybe it was starting to hail. A fierce ache rose up from my stomach and took root beneath my rib cage, and I had no real hope or belief that it would ever leave.

“Are you sure it's yours?” she finally asked. She was still looking out the fogged-up window toward the fields green with winter wheat.

“Yes,” I said. I was sure.

“Are you sure you know what you're doing?”

I bit my lip, let out a pained sigh, shook my head. I was not sure what I was doing, supposed I would never be sure again. “But I have to,” I finally said, and raised my hands, palms up, in front of me, a gesture I've performed since I was a kid, a gesture that can mean variously “I'm sorry” or “What can I say?” or both, which is what it meant then.

And that was that. My life in the wider world with Samantha, my career as doctor or architect or engineer or lawyer, someone that people might have treated with respect—all of that was gone. I never really had another choice. Maybe in some places this type of taboo would not require ritual expiation, but in Watonga, Oklahoma, in 1975, the dictates of my conscience and the mores of my community were in perfect accord; there was only one thing I could do and still call myself a decent human being.

People have always insisted that I am a good man, and to a certain extent I believe them. I have tried never to do anything in the dark that I wasn't willing to make good in the light, and my faith tradition teaches that we are called to do what is right, not what is easy.

I got Michelle Hooks pregnant, so I married her.

And that is how my life changed forever.

Michael came along as anticipated; after Michael, we had two children who were more or less planned. I took over my parents' farm out west of town near the Canadian River, and in 1991, a few years before the story I am to relate, I agreed to help out my impoverished alma mater by volunteering my time as basketball coach, an arrangement mostly satisfactory for all concerned.

When I was on the tractor and imagining my life as satisfying—for truly, much of it was—I liked to think of it in terms of the land, my family, the gorgeous
rip
of a basketball finding nothing but net, and Michelle. Basketball season, after all, was my favorite time of the year, and for more reasons than just the sport. There were, for example, those chilly winter evenings that time of year, sitting with Michelle in the fire-lit living room at the far end of our house. The kids floated in and out, depending on their homework and which of the broadcast channels was coming in visibly on our TV. Michelle graded papers, did lesson plans, or curled up with a book. I did my share of reading, and when there was room at the desk, I did my share of writing: letters to my parents in Arizona and to my little sister, to former players lonesome for mail away at college, to Bill Cobb and Samantha—for the girl I loved in high school did not stray outside our team to find a husband—in Rockwall, a suburb of Dallas, where they rubbed elbows with interesting neighbors like Marina Oswald, widow of Lee Harvey, and Olympic track star Michael Johnson, the kind of people I would never meet unless they got as lost as Robinson Crusoe.

On those winter nights, with the fire glistening in the glass of the fireplace insert, the wind whistling across the north field and into the thick stand of cedars my father and I planted along the north side of the house, some Eagles or James Taylor playing low on the antiquated turntable in the bookcase, we sat, Michelle and I, and occasionally we would look over at each other, our eyes would meet, our mouths would curve slightly upward into smiles, and I'd remind myself that things sometimes turn out for the best. Michelle and I had not always loved each other—or rather, I had not always loved her—but I did at last learn to, and wasn't it better to be unsure at first and in love twenty years down the road than the other way around?

Still, there was that night the family and I were watching an episode of
Unsolved Mysteries
about a husband and father of five kids in Galena, Kansas, who got on the tractor one morning and left it sitting empty at the crossroads of a state highway five miles away, engine still running.