The True Detective (60 page)

ERIC D. WELLS

Adored Son

1969   1981

Claire feels chilled and breathless standing there, but then she closes her eyes and exhales and sees it as less than a serious violation. Vandals, she thinks. Teenagers driving through the cemetery at midnight in their ignorant but possibly innocent cruelty. Although she has begun to weep, she decides to forgive them. Eric wouldn’t have minded, she thinks. That’s the funny part. He might have enjoyed the visit.

Still, sitting on the grass, she uses her fingers to brush and clear away the touches of dried mud. At last she uses her hanky, and when a shadow of a blur still remains, she leaves it for a rain storm to finish clearing. She feels peaceful then, sitting there with Eric. “Matt’s working a lot,” she says in the softest of whispers. “But I’m going to have him come with me one of these days.”

She looks around. She has tried often to get Matt to come with her, but she isn’t unhappy, she realizes, to make the trip and to visit here by herself. The last time he came, back in the spring, he was ready to start back when they’d been here just a few minutes and then he walked around to read other markers. “I guess it’s for me to come see you,” she says. “It isn’t that Matt doesn’t love you, too, it’s just that—well, that it’s for me to come see you.” She adds then, “He’s doing fine though.”

Sitting here for several more minutes, she doesn’t speak again to Eric, and she realizes that this, too, is one of the pleasures she
derives in coming to visit him by herself. She may speak to him if she wishes, or she may not. She may simply sit here, so they can be together, and however long she stays or what she has to say, she always leaves at peace once more in her heart, a peacefulness which will subsequently elude her, will, on news perhaps of another child falling victim in some similar way, have her in need of coming back, to know again a moment of peace.

It’s a hammer she’s been hearing whacking in the distance, she realizes, as the sound explodes oddly on the air, and she turns to look in the direction from which it seems to be coming. Gazing beyond the road, using her hand to visor her eyes, she picks out the triangular raw timber framework of a new house, or a barn, reaching into the sky. Eric loved such things, she thinks, and it gives her pleasure to have it nearby. Otherwise, there are no houses in view from here. There are the fields and the line of trees down across the road. It is only a thought of the house Eric always liked to promise he’d buy or build for her that interrupts her scanning the countryside, but only for a moment. “Hear that,” she says. “They’re building something.”

She sits back on the grass, though, and looks away again from the construction over there. What she wants to do is tell Eric of something she saw from the bus window on the way there, but she only calls up the image in her mind, for it wasn’t anything very tellable. It was a man with a truck with a flat tire, pulled onto the side of the road. But the man was a father and he had a little boy with him, a seven- or eight-year-old he had propped on the hood of his truck, to keep him out of harm’s way, while he fixed the tire there under the child’s gaze. The little boy looked so pleased sitting there is what she would tell Eric if she were to try to tell him, which she doesn’t. Nor does she tell him how it made her feel awful and wonderful at the same time. Or that what it was that appeared wonderful was the presence in
the space between the two of all that mattered in life, of all that time on earth might signify.

She sits. The carpentry continues, the hammer and saw sounds traveling on the slight breezes. A warm summer day is childhood itself, she thinks. Eric will lie here, she thinks, when the building across the road is finished, and when it has housed a family, and when the family has grown, and when they are all gone, he will lie here still. Even as this is what she knows, it is coming to her now, too, that she has to let Eric go, that he dislikes being restrained, especially on a summer day, that she has to stop holding him and let him go. That after the moment in the funeral home of redoing his hair and of standing to hold his hand, and after the moments during the service of the children from his school singing of his keeping his head on high and of not being afraid and of Jesus calling him home, softly and tenderly calling him home; that after giving him one last kiss before the closing of the casket, and bringing him here to the countryside of his birth; that after these moments of holding to him and waiting for him to rise out of his sleep, it is because she loves him that she has to let him go; that in letting him go he may live again. So it is that she releases him, in this moment; so it is that she lets him slip away from her like a child at play, into eternity.

Photo by Marsha Robinson, 2012.

T
HEODORE WEESNER was born in Flint, Michigan in 1935. Abandoned by his teenage mother at age two, he lived until age five—with his brother Jack, two years older—in a home managed by a 550-pound immobile woman who took in stray children from broken homes. At ages five and seven, Ted and Jack went to live with their father when he set up housekeeping with a farm woman named Hattie Rex.

Elementary school was normal for the brothers, until Hattie was hired at AC Spark Plug and, like their father at Chevy, began working second shift, leaving the prepubescent boys on their own until the shift change hour each day at midnight.

In junior high, Ted and Jack began having scrapes with authorities until, turning seventeen, Jack left high school to enlist in the Air Force. Ted, following into high school and although an avid basketball player, was charged with car theft and incarcerated at the Genesee County Juvenile Detention Home. Ultimately (and permanently) suspended from high school, Ted enlisted in the army as a GED, also at age seventeen, and began a circuitous, personal journey back that would see him graduating from the Honors College at Michigan State University and publishing fiction nationally as a graduate student at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

Leaving Iowa with an MFA, Theodore Weesner went on to publish fiction in
the New Yorker, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, Best American Short Stories,
and other anthologies such as
Audience
and
Ploughshares.
His first novel,
The Car Thief,
a
Book-of-the-Month Club Featured Alternate, was published to critical acclaim in England, Japan, and Germany. While publishing, to date, five other novels and a collection of short stories, Weesner has received Guggenheim, NEA, and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants. Down through the years he has taught at University of New Hampshire and at Emerson College in Boston.

Also by THEODORE WEESNER

THE CAR THIEF *

WINNING THE CITY REDUX *

WINNING THE CITY

NOVEMBERFEST

HARBOR LIGHTS

A GERMAN AFFAIR

CHILDREN ’S HEARTS

*Published by Astor + Blue Editions