Читать книгу The Late Matthew Brown - Paul Ketzle - Страница 16

seven

From my upstairs study window I saw them coming, The van rolled to a careful stop at the end of the block and parked, and then they embarked, first fanning out, then encroaching slowly, house by house, in teams of two, three. These are the only solicitors still allowed in Magnolia Grove. They are evangelicals who come a-knocking, bringing with them their good books, their denomination-specific suits or robes, their grim certainty and the airs of right and righteousness.

The week before it had been young men in orange skirts and T-shirts, heads shaved close but not quite. Before that, the teenage boys in white shirts and ties who called themselves Elders but really just seemed so desperate to talk with anyone about anything that we barely got to religion. Today, it was a troop of elderly gentlemen in warm brown suits, inching their way up the walks. You could tell from their grim huddle and gaze that they meant business.

I let Hero deal with them when they knocked on our door and instead retreated upstairs. In the hallway outside Hero’s room hung perhaps the earliest known picture of the house. No date, but based upon the clothing and styles, it appeared to have been taken some time around the start of the 20th century. My grandfather had pointed it out to me on several occasions as he gave tours of the house. Truth be told, the building in the photo, or at least the incomplete portion that was visible, bore little resemblance to its current form. There was a porch, for one, which stretched along the face of the building and a row of evenly spaced cookie-cutter windows. The whole frontal façade was different, too. In fact, if my grandfather hadn’t been so certain, I might never have believed that this was the same house. But then, I’d since seen a map of the original footprint of the house. You could easily make out the other neighborhood houses that were at least that old. Everything around us was identifiable. Ours was something else entirely. My grandfather had explained that this was due to “The Fire,” which had taken out most of the upper floors and caused considerable damage throughout the structure. Paused in front, several black people in raggedy dress, most likely former slaves from the plantation or their children, stood cold and sullen, their eyes passing judgment, insisting we not forget.

About the house now, the Reconstruction was continuing, albeit intermittently. I’d recently hired a contractor to begin some of the more elaborate work. But as they’d begun restructuring the gables to match the original façade, they’d made a curious discovery. A kind of passageway had been walled off for decades, most likely also damaged in The Fire, as my grandfather reverently referred to it. His oddly fervent insistence that he had no ideas about the cause of the blaze had always left me with vague suspicions that he knew more than he had ever let on—and the uncovering of this secret enclosure held out promise for more revelations.

But the reality was far less interesting. Within the walled-off space, there were mounds of shingles and wood and nails—the residue of a decades-old re-roofing project. Under the dust and debris lay a trove of historical incoherence—an old washing basin and an electric sewing machine; a horse team harness and a car jack. Turn-of-the-century newspapers stacked atop a package of unopened floppy disks. Two unopened burlap sacks of pinto beans, one of flour. In the corner stood a three-legged desk, a mirror frame atop, though no glass, and an old corroded woven straw basket. Scattered about were fully intact olive jars, tins of cough syrup and soda, some lightly lacquered with the dried residue. In one corner, rolls of poster advertisements for items such as Queeg digestive gum and Legent pomade; an arrowhead, a necklace of shark teeth, a brass door knocker, and a nearly complete set of broken china. The treasures of someone else’s age.

The exterior wall was now torn away, and in its place, a blue plastic tarp was all that separated our upstairs from the elements, secured to the new gable’s wooden frame. I hadn’t seen the workmen in several days, the contractor in over a week. As I sorted through the piles of old shingles and nails that were scattered about the floor, I could vaguely hear the sound of voices downstairs. Hero was talking, the strangers answering. It didn’t end quickly. They were engaged. It sounded as if they had left the front door and entered the living room. Hero was rummaging in the kitchen. They laughed together, chatting away the afternoon.

I stayed hunkered in the debris for nearly an hour, sorting, waiting.

When I finally heard the front door open and shut and peered down to see the two men retreating down the walk, I came out. Hero was carrying drained glasses with half-melted ice back to the kitchen.

“You should have come down,” she said.

“What did they want?”

“Saving the damned. Money for their trouble.”

“Same old, same old.”

“It can’t hurt to be nice,” she pointed out.

“Sure it can.”

“My father, the heathen.”

“It’s just a waste of time. Theirs and ours.”

“Maybe not,” she shrugged, then filled the cups up and left them in the sink.

“I somehow didn’t expect you to find that kind of stuff intriguing.”

“I’m exploring,” she said “I’m at that age. I’ve got questions.”

“Keep in mind that you may not like the answers.”

“This is the Bible belt. I would’ve figured you’d be more enthusiastic. Or at least supportive.”

“I just don’t like people trying to tell me what I should believe.”

“I think you just don’t like anyone to question your faith.”

Growing up, my own family had been devoutly semi-religious. My father said we were “Periodicals,” as we hopped from congregation to congregation in no discernible pattern. Lost sheep in search of a fold. Methodists, Presbyterians. Catholics, Unitarians, Baptists, Lutherans. Either the regimen was too strict or too loose, too intellectual or too vapid, and ultimately we left our confused and wearied spirits to drift leisurely, without mooring. But even when we did find a place to settle, we never went very often. Easter, Christmas, and perhaps six other assorted times throughout the year.

Hero and I stepped out through the sliding door into the backyard. This had become an increasingly hazardous endeavor. Nails and screws and splinters of shaved metal and wood littered the patio slab as the wraparound porch began to rise up at the edges. If I wanted to be perfectly authentic, the cement slab, too, would need to go, but I was waffling. It was something I wanted to discuss with the contractor if he returned tomorrow. I made a mental note to call him again, even if he refused to answer. Just so he’d know I knew he wasn’t there.

Barefoot, Hero defiantly walked straight across the patio and out into the yard. The back line of my property was overgrown, dropping quickly into a steep ravine, an undeveloped and presumably undevelopable swath cutting straight through Magnolia Grove—each year creeping a bit closer. The sky above was threatening with heavy clouds, and the afternoon was turning dark.

Hero flopped down onto the unmolested long grass and gazed back up at me with a gray face.

“I hear you’re going to be killing someone.”

“Is that what this is about?”

“I think that’s kind of a big deal.”

“Janice told you, I suppose.”

“About the killing,” she said. “Yes.”

“I’m not killing anyone,” I said, bending down beside her. “I’m just arranging the execution. It’s entirely different.”

“Not for the guy dying,” she said.

“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t exactly matter to him who does it.”

The thick overgrowth loomed in the twilight, and through the buzz and creak of the insects, we could make out sounds of small, slow movement—a neighborhood cat, most likely, or squirrels, raccoons, armadillo, the only roaming animals left to the city in this century. And us, teetering on the fringe of the wild.

“You’re leaving in a week,” I pointed out.

“I know.”

“We don’t have much time to sort all this out.”

“Sort what out?” Her eyes were closed, her lips drawn into a soft smile that might have been satisfaction.

“Us. As in, how do we proceed from here?”

“Maybe we just wait and see.”

“Wait and see what? What is there to see?”

She opened her eyes and stretched her arms out over her head into the grass with a large sigh. The pose struck me with a sense of my own vulnerability, facing the danger of a looming pounce.

“Does it bother you,” she asked, “what you do?”

“What do I do?” I asked, crouching beside her.

“Your job. Locking people up.”

“Someone has to do it,” I said. “Imagine if we didn’t.”

“I’m still collecting data on you.”

“You make me sound like an experiment.”

To this, she just shrugged, as if to say that this seemed fairly obvious. I eased the rest of the way down onto the grass beside her. A bright flash of lightning and a swift low rumble told us we didn’t have long before the storm.

“Maybe I should have given those missionaries money. God seems displeased.”

“Do you believe in God?” she asked.

“That was a joke.”

“But I’m being serious.”

“Then, yes. Of course, I believe.”

“But which god?”

“Now, that’s the kind of question I’d expect from a teenager.”

“Don’t try to change the subject.”

I sighed. “You’re overwhelming, you know.”

“You’re still changing the subject.”

“I just want to know how we’re going to do this, the father/daughter thing.”

Her eyes darkened. “I thought we were doing it.”

“You know what I mean. Visits. Holidays. That kind of stuff.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

“You’re leaving.”

“And you’re rushing.” Hero sat up and stared out into the thicket, cross-legged, tearing at the grass. She didn’t sound upset, but the playfulness was lost into the silence. “Maybe coming here was a mistake.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, maybe we aren’t ready for this. Me. Maybe I’m not ready.”

I didn’t want to ask if this was about Geoffrey, but I felt fairly certain it had to be. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be rejected by your father, the man who’d believed he was your father for your entire life. Val had insisted that the two of them had been very close and very similar. Two peas.

“We don’t have to do this all at once,” I conceded. “Maybe we’re just trying too hard. We have time.”

“Matthew,” she said suddenly, the use of my name sounding so odd coming out of the blue. I may never have heard the word from her mouth before. It carried a desperate and ominous urgency, a plea to stop before we went too far. “I think we should consider the possibility that this may be all there is. And maybe it’s fine to just leave it at that.”

She laid bare the artifice of our relationship. Two people, bound together by a faith in something we couldn’t begin to understand, who perhaps had no business being together at all. I was trying to be a father to her, but I could never fill that role as I imagined it. Twelve years had passed, and that time belonged to another person. There was no reclaiming it. But I was her father still. Somehow, we had to make this work.

“Maybe,” I said, just as we saw the dark sheet of rain fold across the dense forest. “Don’t give up on me yet, though.”

“I didn’t say I had.”

With the arrival of August, the storms had begun to roll through, swift and overwhelming and threatening. You could set your watch by them; they never varied, punching through the thick afternoon at four, rumbling deep to the core and shading out the sun. The intermittent flashes, the occasional strike of lightning. As the winds kicked up and the horizon began to darken, everyone started taking cover, setting up in their usual seats. We settled by the large front window. The evangelists sprinted about with uncharacteristic and unbecoming panic beneath nature’s wrath. Down the block at the senior center, the elderly wheeled indoors onto glass-enclosed porches and lined up by the sill in rows as always to watch the show.

When the rains began to fall, they came in scattered, heavy dollops, along with clipped gusts that rattled branches. Limbs whined under the stress. By the time it was a full-on downpour, puddles and streams ran inches deep everywhere. A knot of boys raced out in shorts, over their mothers’ yells and the steady rumble of thunder, carrying large squares of cardboard. As the ditches and streets filled, they were surfing across the sheen, running hard and jumping onto their sagging boards, flying headfirst into grass and gravel, young blood mixing with the mud and the water and the cheers.