Tumbleweeds (22 page)

“I’m afraid I have some bad news, Trey.”

Trey lowered himself into the proffered chair apprehensively. “It’s not my aunt, is it?”

“No, not your aunt. It’s John Caldwell. He’s not coming to Miami.”

Frank had deliberately dropped the news without preliminaries. How Trey reacted to it would reveal if he’d known of John’s decision and maybe gotten used to the idea of suiting up solo.

But clearly Frank had thrown a grenade into the kid’s lap. Trey’s face washed of color. “What?” he said. “What do you mean he’s not coming to Miami?”

“I mean he’s changed his mind about joining our ranks this fall. He’s declined his scholarship.”

“But he can’t do that, can he? Legally, I mean.”

“He can if he doesn’t play football for another college or university for a year.”

“Not play football…”

Clearly another shock. “You know any reason why he’d pull out on us?”

“No… I… thought he’d probably get married, live off campus, but never give up coming to Miami, playing football. The girl he’s… marrying has a scholarship here, too.”

“Well, he certainly isn’t getting married,” Frank said, “at least not to a woman. He’s going to Loyola University in New Orleans to become a priest.”

Trey gazed at Frank like someone who’d taken a bullet to the chest, shot by a friend. It was several seconds before Trey reacted to its impact. He pushed back his chair and stumbled to his feet. “No, he wouldn’t—he couldn’t!
God, John—!
” He swung away from Frank’s desk and covered his face with his hands, hunching forward as if taking blows. He held the position a few minutes before he turned back, wiping angrily at his tears.

“I’ll be honest with you,” Frank said. “I feel like crying myself. John Caldwell could have been the best wide receiver in college football. Did you have any inkling he’d do this?” He took a box of Kleenex from a drawer he kept on hand for his sneezing fits during allergy season and offered it across the desk. Trey snapped a tissue from the box and swiped his eyes.

“No… not now. Like I said, I… guessed he’d be getting married.”

Ah
, Frank thought,
so that probably explained it. John Caldwell and his girl had had a blowup. But, my God, at eighteen to renounce everything going for him because of a girl to enter the priesthood and become a celibate?
“Well, look,” he said, leaning forward. “It’s not too late to get him back here. We’ll track him down and you can have a talk with him, convince him to get his butt back here—”

“No.”

Taken aback at the immediate response, Frank said, “Why not?”

“Because I wouldn’t be able to change his mind.”

Frank knew boys. Trey was keeping the lid on something he had no intention of sharing with him, a painful secret he thought too private to discuss. But there was nothing too personal Frank
hadn’t heard. He adopted his fatherly pose. “TD, what happened when you returned home? I know something did because you turned around and came back to us a different person and now John’s taken off to join the priesthood. I appreciate that it’s hard to talk about, but whatever it is, I might be able to help. You told us that you two have had a dream to come to Miami since junior high. When you were recruited, you never even considered another school. So what happened to change all that? If it’s only a girl that’s involved, then, by all that’s holy, we’ve got to talk to John. He’s too young to make this kind of decision right now. He can take his vows later. Lots of priests do.”

The boy’s eyes were now dry, though grief lurked in their darkness. He pushed himself out of his chair. “I’ve got to go,” he said.

Startled—it was for Frank to decide when a recruit left his office—he said, “Very well, but all may not be lost. John might come back to us next year when he gets a taste of what his vows will entail. I once thought of becoming a priest until I spent a little time in what’s called the discernment period. I didn’t last. Poverty, chastity, obedience—those are the vows. I can see John dealing with two out of three, but chastity—?”

A twitch of the boy’s facial muscle indicated Frank had hit a nerve. “Discernment period?”

“The preliminary time a candidate for a religious order is required to go through to determine if he’s cut out for the priestly life.”

“He’s cut out for it,” Trey said, and turned toward the door.

“Before you go, Hall, be honest with me.” Annoyed at the feeling the kid had gotten the upper hand, Frank’s tone was insistent. “Is John’s defection going to affect what we brought you here to do?”

Trey wadded the tissue and lobbed it into the trash can by Frank’s desk. Minutes ago, he’d looked like any vulnerable eighteen-year-old boy. Now he’d taken on the stature of a full-fledged, bitter man. “No, Coach. Football’s all I’ve got left.”

B
ACK IN HIS ROOM
, Trey dropped down hard on his bed and pushed his fingers through his hair.
John, going into the priesthood? Good God!
He should have seen something like this coming. Ever since last November he’d watched John gravitate toward his Catholic leanings, but he could never have dreamed that John would go to these lengths to redeem himself—certainly not
now
. Where would that leave Cathy? He was supposed to have married her with nobody the wiser about her pregnancy. How could John go off and leave Cathy in her condition unless… unless…

Trey stood and wrenched open the bureau drawer containing Cathy’s letters, five of them, unopened, and one received from John a week ago, also unread. He tore it open, and the neatly written, one-page letter confirmed his suspicion.

Trey balled the letter in his fist, tears streaming.
He doesn’t know… hasn’t even guessed… Cathy, either. If she had, she’d marry John, not wait for me.

He sat down again and clasped his head, reliving, as he’d done many times, the moment of Cathy’s announcement, feeling again the swamp of shock and anger and disbelief and… abandonment. It had taken only seconds for the certainty to hit his heart—like lightning striking a power source—that he’d never,
could
never, feel the same for her again. She’d destroyed the one essential element that had bound him to her.

He still remembered the feel of her tanned skin when he took her arm and shoved her out onto the porch and out of his life. He’d braced himself against the locked door, his lungs on fire, and heard her small fists pummel the wood and his name cried over and over.
“Trey… Trey…!”
she’d cried, his fallen little angel, storming heaven’s gates to open to her once again, but he was deaf to all but the voice of Dr. Thomas delivering his verdict in his office in May.

“What are you trying to say, Doc?”

“Your semen analysis shows that your sperm cells are abnormally shaped and cannot swim.”

“And that means?”

“It means that you are presently sterile….”

Each blow on the door had driven a spike through his heart, but she was guilty of the one sin he could never get past. She had betrayed him with his best friend. He would rather have died than to think of Cathy in John’s arms—the two of them copulating—and in only a week of their split. Fairly or unfairly, he’d trusted her to remain faithful to him even in the storm. She should have known it would blow over. She knew him better than he knew himself. She should have perceived that something had gone horribly wrong with him to break up with her. She should have trusted his love enough to consider his actions might have something to do with her welfare.

Her pleas had finally stopped. He’d heard her move away from the door and off the porch, her footsteps hesitant and slow, sounding like fallen leaves brushing stone, rifled by the wind. Tears had scalded his eyes. John would marry her, he’d thought, seeing the irony in the whole miserable mess. He had loved her since the sixth grade, same as Trey. He’d kidded himself in believing John thought of her as a sister. He’d marry her and raise the kid who at the moment she thought was Trey Don Hall’s.

He had planned to tell her and John the truth about his… condition when they arrived on campus—the truth he would have spilled to Cathy just before she dropped her bombshell if she hadn’t pressed her fingers to his lips.
Too late for confessions
, she’d said, and he’d thought she was speaking of his escapades at Miami, which of course she had suspected. Later in the confusion that had raged like hornets in his brain, he’d wondered if his capers were the reason she’d cheated on him, like most girls would have out of vengeance, but that didn’t sound like Cathy, so he’d had to believe she’d simply gone to John for comfort and one thing had led to another and they’d ended up in bed together.

Too sad, too bad.
She should have kept her panties on. She should have waited.

He couldn’t have confessed his secret before he left Kersey. His pain was too great. Cathy and John had orphaned him again. They’d destroyed the family they’d built, and they deserved to feel the abandonment and loss they’d inflicted upon him. He’d expected them already to be married by the time they reported to campus—or would shortly after they heard his news.
Guess what, guys? I’m not the father of your baby, Cathy. You are, John. So you all have a good life—without me.

And now John had gone off to study for the one vocation that would make his and Cathy’s marriage impossible.
Christ!
How could everything have skittered so far off course? How could all their
dreams and hopes and plans have changed as quickly as a fumble on the goal line and blown the winning score?

The drawer containing Cathy’s letters was still open, begging to be read, her handwriting conjuring up her trim, small figure, but her memory brought only the bitter resurgence of his feeling of betrayal. How stupid he’d been to believe she was different from any other girl in the world.
Women!
You couldn’t trust a one. Even John’s mother had strayed, and look at all the damage her adultery had caused.

He would never read Cathy’s letters. He would not be tempted by sympathy or guilt—or remorse for his own part in the breakup—to take her back, because now there was no way he and Cathy would ever work. But what should he do? Should he tell her and John the humiliating truth about himself before it was too late or… wait? What good would the truth do anyway? As much as John’s loss to the game was nothing short of a tragedy, he had made up his mind to enter the priesthood. What right did Trey Don Hall have to interfere with John’s plans to atone for that day in November? And as for Cathy… she was only eighteen. She would get over him. She was beautiful and smart and determined. Despite the baby, she had a promising future ahead of her. And… as much as she cared for John, she did not love him. Wouldn’t it be wrong to condemn her to marry him for the sake of the baby when later, down the line, she might fall in love with someone she really did love and want to marry?

He was aware of what his silence would cost—temporarily. Aunt Mabel and Miss Emma would feel some disgrace. They were of the generation where nice girls didn’t get pregnant out of wedlock, but the younger people would shrug. So what? It happened all the time—just not to smart girls like Cathy. He felt a special kick of guilt when he thought of the stigma to the baby. His aunt’s friends would never forget it was born a bastard, and her nephew would be considered one, too, for deserting Cathy, but in time the town would forgive him. It always did its star football players. John probably never would. The
priest might forgive him for leaving Cathy to face her situation alone but—though he had no room to point—not the boy who loved her. John should have known his best friend would wake up and reconcile with Cathy, but how could he not have answered the call of his gonads when she was available and willing?

Trey got up from the bed and closed the drawer. He’d give it a year. If John found he couldn’t stick it out at Loyola and if Cathy was still carrying the torch for him, he’d tell them the truth. The rest would be up to them. If neither was the case, he’d keep his secret and let be what would be.

He felt better instantly. His tears had dried. The void in him was still there, a painful emptiness that brought back feelings of his days at Aunt Mabel’s parlor windows, but other friends and other girls would come along to fill the space. It would just take time, and he had plenty of that.

Meanwhile—he picked up a football from his bureau, the feel of the pigskin comforting and familiar in his hands—he had the game.