Twilight Child (21 page)

 The old
sandlot where he had played first base was a Safeway by then, and the so-called
lover's lane a couple of miles from town, near the shore where, before the war,
the kids went in their jalopies to neck, had become rows of fancy waterfront
homes. They had had a good manly laugh about the necking, which was barely
comprehensible to Chuck at that time.

 “We didn't
know much about sex then,” he had told Chuck, blushing to his roots, less from
the explanation than because of the memory. Sexual prowess in those days was
measured by a hand cupped around a breast on the outside of the brassiere. “For
the real thing you went down the road to Maggie's.” Chuck had nodded as if he
had understood. It was in the telling that Charlie had found the real joy, the
recounting that stimulated recall. It gave him the feeling that he was
imparting secret knowledge to his son, his seed, passing coded information from
one generation to the next.

 They had
driven past where Maggie's had been, along a road that was once a narrow
two-laner and had become a four-lane highway. He knew the spot, almost by
instinct. To his surprise, it had become a McDonald's. Father and son got a
kick out of that and had a Big Mac and a giggle to mark the occasion. On that
day, he had also taken Chuck to all the best places where they had fished and
hunted and played; and he had pointed out where his grandfather, who was a crab
fisherman, had first taught him to sail a tiny skiff and where his father and
he went clamming when his father got home from his traveling salesman chores.

 “How come you
left, Dad?” Chuck had asked as they sat in the car, its hood pointed into the
sunset of the bay. He had wondered if he had painted too idyllic a picture, one
that he truly felt in retrospect, but which did not quite jibe with the reality
of the time.

 “No place to
make a decent living,” he told the boy. “A man must have the courage to move
on. It's his duty.”

 His brother
Ned, whom he hadn't seen in years, and with whom he talked usually only on
Christmas Day, had gone all the way to Kansas City to find a new life with his
wife's family, who had put Ned in the hardware business. She was a Catholic,
and he had converted. The result was an army of kids working their way down
into the third generation. Ned's life was elsewhere and had been for a long
time.

 But it was
not only economic conditions that were responsible for Charlie's leaving. The
Depression had been a plague on the young people of Crisfield, but it had been
the war that showed them that there was more to the world than this sleepy bay
town. At least, that was what they thought. Coming back, especially that time
he had come back with Chuck for the obligatory grand tour of his roots, the
place had seemed like a paradise.

 “Great place
to be a boy,” he told Chuck.

 “I wish you'd
never left, Dad.”

 Hearing that
took him by surprise, and he wondered if he had given the boy a brief taste of
the same joy that he had known. Or was it that he was looking through the rosy
prism of time, painting foolish pictures to impress his son?

 And then his
grandson.

 He had taken
Tray down to Crisfield a few months after Chuck had died. Just the two of them.
It was a gorgeous spring day in late May and the blossoms had all sprung into
bloom. To him, middle spring was always the best time for the bay. It had also
seemed to signal the moment to put aside grief, to put Chuck's loss in
perspective, which meant accepting his death irrevocably.

 They had
walked down Main Street to the municipal dock, and Charlie showed him the house
where he had grown up. It had been miraculously reconditioned and painted, and
there was a tricycle in the front yard and a playpen on the porch, with a baby
chewing the railing and gurgling. A young woman came out of the house and
waved, and they walked up the path to the porch to greet her.

 “My grandpa
used to live in this house,” Tray told her.

 “Really? How
lucky.” She turned toward Charlie and smiled. “We love it here. My husband works
for the bank. It's a great place to raise children. We were both brought up in
big cities. This living beats it by a mile.”

 “Can't argue
with that,” Charlie had said. “I'm just showing my grandchild around the old
place.”

 “Would you
like to go in?”

 “That would
be very troublesome to you,” Charlie said, but it was obvious to the woman that
it was what they wanted.

 “Not at all.”

 They followed
her into the house, which had been rehabilitated and remodeled completely.
Charlie could not restrain a quivering lump in his throat and had all he could
do to keep himself from crying.

 “That's where
your old gramp slept with his brother Ned,” he told Tray when they had walked
upstairs. One of the walls had been broken through to make a bigger master
bedroom suite for the new owner and his wife. He gave Tray a running commentary
as they moved from room to room. Coming down, he hesitated on the staircase.

 “Third step
used to creak. You could never sneak upstairs because of it.”

 “Oh, we had a
whole new staircase built in.”

 “You did a
wonderful job. We had a lot of happy times here.”

 They went
into the kitchen, where memories of his mother flooded back. He was not
conscious of squeezing Tray's hand.

 “Ouch,
Grampa.”

 He had taken
the boy's hand and kissed it.

 “Better now,
Tray?”

 The boy
nodded.

 Later, he
showed him Grampa and Granny Harper's house and Grampa and Granny Waters's
house, and the other landmarks of the guided tour. Except, of course, where
Maggie's had been, although he did show him the spooning spot beside the bay.
Then he had rented a day sailer, and they had spun around the inlet. He had let
Tray hold the tiller.

 “Would you
like to live here someday, Tray?”

 “Can we,
Grampa?”

 “I was
thinking about it. Someday when I retire. About eight years from now. Me and
Gramma both. We'll get a place down here and you'll stay with us summers and
we'll go boating and fishing and clamming.”

 “What's
clamming?”

 He explained
it as best he could, enjoying the boy's rapt attention.

 “Would you
like that, Tray?”

 “Oh yes,
Grampa.” He jumped on him and hugged him around the neck, and Charlie hugged
and kissed the boy on both cheeks and held him for a long time.

 “God, I love
you, boy,” he said, holding back his tears.

 “And I love
you, Grampa.”

 In a few
years, he knew, manly reticence would interfere. It was a moment to be savored
and cherished and held onto as long as possible. The day would come when the
boy would be a man and Charlie would be just another old man with a scratchy
beard and sour breath.

 “Are you my
best friend, Grampa?” the boy asked.

 “For ever
always.”

 “And Gramma,
too?”

 “Of course.”

 Charlie had
hesitated for a moment.

 “And Daddy,
too. You musn't ever forget your Daddy. He was your best friend, too.”

 “Even in heaven?”

 “Daddies
never stop loving their little boys.”

 “And
Mommies?”

 “Not Mommies
either. Never, never.”

 Charlie
remembered that day and how he had cursed time for not just stopping for a
millennium or two, letting them be just as they were, a little boy and his
grandfather sitting on the rim of the eternal bay as if it were the remote edge
of the planet, basking in the great biological mystery of blood kinship and
creation.

 In a strange
way, that day had blunted his grief for his lost son, and he believed in his
heart that God had offered him this child to rear and love in place of Chuck.

 Instead of
anger, the memories only added greater weight to his already heavy heart. He
was no longer the heroic figure of his youth and middle age—the adventurer,
soldier, husband-lover, teacher-father, rugged hunter, fisherman, sailor—that
could sustain him in the face of what he now knew was the real truth. Hadn't he
led a rather pedestrian life, an ordinary man in an ordinary job with an
ordinary house and a run of lousy luck? In the end, everything had turned out
to be a disappointment—Chuck,Tray, Frances. Now Crisfield. Maybe even Molly.

 No!

 In his
thoughts, he heard Molly's voice berating him for his self-pity and, worse, his
self-abasement. He was not ordinary. No man is ordinary. Every man is like his
own fingerprint, individual, a miracle, wonderful. It had been a very bad idea
to come back to Crisfield with its rich memories of loving families and
adolescent hopes and dreams. Life was simply chronologically unfair, he assured
himself. An old man who allows himself to view things through the rosy filter
of his lost youth plays a fool's game. There was nothing to be found in the
physical place of Crisfield that wasn't better in the mind's eye, where you
didn't get the intrusion of passing time. He shook himself alert like an old
dog and, as the old cowboys used to say, hightailed it out of town.

 But by the
time he got back to Baltimore, the realization that he had not found in
Crisfield what he truly needed had come rushing back to afflict him, providing
another disappointment to add to the list. With his luck, he thought bitterly,
he might live as long as his father. Except his house didn't have a porch. Nor
did he have a son to visit him, if only to pass the time and validate that he
had done his God-given duty of replicating the race in his own image. Christ,
he thought, what am I going to do with the rest of my life?

 Or even the
rest of the day?

 He had roamed
through the house. In the kitchen he made himself a cup of coffee and lit a
cigarette, then walked into the den. He sat down on the chair and tried to
devise mental strategies to fill up the vast emptiness that stretched out
before him. He felt hollowed out, eaten away, corroded.

 Not like the
shiny hunting rifles proudly exhibited in his gun-case. He had lavished loving
care on those, had killed only as a real man kills. For food. And in war, only
his enemies.

 Feeling for
the key above the cabinet, he found it and unlocked the case, removing the
shotgun he had bought for Chuck when he was seventeen. The boy had been
ecstatic, he remembered, and they had gone up to the beautiful low ranges of
West Virginia to hunt deer.

 They had
rented a cabin tucked away in the midst of a pine stand and slept in sleeping
bags laid over plank bunks. Wood smoke had parched the walls and crept into the
nap of the woolen clothing in which they slept and hunted, and even the sweetly
chilled fall air of predawn morning could not dispel the smell of it. They would
roam the winding trails through the woods, eyes alert for tracks or droppings,
signaling to each other with shrugs or looks or low grunts as they moved like
phantoms to outwit and kill their unsuspecting prey.

 He had told
Chuck, as his father had told him, and as his grandfather had told his father,
that the joy was not in the kill but in the hunter's ingenuity in the pursuit.
The animal was to be respected and killed cleanly, to be mourned as a fellow
creature who shared the earth, and blessed for providing the human species with
food. In these hills Charlie and Chuck shared the common experience of manhood,
a kind of secret soldiering that suggested intimacy and courage and the joyful
freedom of cutting loose from domestication and women, of being free from the
taming constraints of civilization and participating in something primal and
profound.

 That year
they had decided to go for buck only, the biggest they could find, inventing a
horned giant with enough fire in his belly to attack even if provoked by
nothing more than the human presence. Nasty Jake, they had dubbed him, deciding
that they would settle for nothing less. They had come across less—does and
mares, all over the place. But when they had the creatures in their sights they
had moved their barrels out of range, firing to chase and not to kill. They had
even found themselves a buck, but it was not one of sufficient size, and
letting him escape to grow more menacing in the years to come had given them
continuity and a future to believe in.

 Coming back
to the cabin, bone-weary but exhilarated, they lit the wood fire of the
old-fashioned wrought-iron range and threw steaks on a hot fry pan and slivers
of peeled potatoes into boiling oil. They ate the steaks and french fries
smothered in ketchup while the coffee perked happily on the range and the room
was all aglow from the log fire crackling in the stone fireplace. Charlie was
surprised at the remarkable accuracy of his recall, or so it seemed. He could
see the orange flicker of the wood flame on Chuck's smooth, boyish face, the
ridge of black on his nail tips, the roughened chap on his own hands. He could
taste the chewy meatiness of the steaks and the crisp hardness of the potatoes,
the hot pungency of the strong coffee. He could feel the dried texture of the
old table, the porcupine sprout of his own beard.

 The voice
that floated with pristine accuracy in his mind's ear was Chuck's. Somehow in
the magic chronology of memory the table had been cleared, the cracked plates
washed and dried. The fire spit fierce sparks over the rim of the metal grate
on which their boots rested. They had spread their sleeping bags on the floor
in front of the fire and crossed their arms behind their heads, eyes raised to
the exposed, smoke-soaked low rafters of the old cabin.