As the months became years (blurringly swift), he became interested in, and then obsessed with, the genealogy of his family and of his wife’s family, and he spent many hours each week writing letters, gathering information that he carefully structured in the tree-shape of matings and progeny. Piece by piece, he put the tree together, going from the thick, name-heavy bottom limbs upward and as he went upward on his paper tree, he went backward in time and place—from Georgia to the Carolinas, from the Carolinas to Virginia, from Virginia to Pennsylvania, from Pennsylvania to England and Ireland. He found among his ancestors (and hers) laborers and politicians, preachers and trappers, carpenters, silversmiths, thieves, farmers, soldiers, journalists, teachers. With each discovery he felt less lonely.
And he began to do one other thing that he had seldom done: he began to talk freely with his children of his own childhood, and they were amazed at the man who was their father.
“Funny, when Mama was alive, Daddy never said much,” Carrie remarked to Kate. “Now he talks all the time. James said he’s always told him stories, but I don’t know that he’s ever said much to the rest of us.”
“I think James is special to him, James being the youngest,” Kate said. “Wonder how much of it’s true? Old people get to the point where they make things up and swear they happened, especially when there’s nobody else around to call their hand on it. I heard somebody talking about that on television. Art Linkletter, maybe.”
“Good Lord, Kate, don’t get started again,” exclaimed Carrie. “Nothing’s wrong with Daddy’s mind. It’s clear as a bell.”
“I don’t know,” Kate said. “Did you ever hear Mama talk about him having a sister who died of the smallpox plague and was buried in a common grave with lots of other people?”
“No, but he said he did,” Carrie argued. “And that’s good enough for me. Just because he never talked about it before, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
“That was our aunt, Carrie,” Kate said pitifully. “We don’t even know where to take flowers.”
His daughters and sons visited often with him, bringing their children and their grandchildren to embrace him. The smaller ones sat on his lap, with warnings of injury to his hip, and he fed them bits of soft peppermint candy that he kept in a sealed jar, pushed to the back of his roll-top desk. He did not know all of his grandchildren or great-grandchildren, but he pretended that he did. He gave them silver dollars for accomplishments and sent them birthday cards that he selected from the card rack in the drugstore (reminded by Kate or Carrie of their names and birthdates). When they left him after their visits, he sat quietly in his chair, hearing their echoes. Their echoes were noisy. Their echoes lasted as long as he wished to hear them.
He visited regularly at her grave—Cora’s grave—and at the grave of his oldest son. It was peaceful in the cemetery.
White Dog was with him. Always with him. At night, White Dog curled at the bottom of his bed. No one else touched White Dog.
He wrote in his journal—brief, daily footnotes of brief, daily occurrences.
—Received the seed catalogue I ordered. I won’t send off for any seed, but I like looking at the pictures of flowers.
—Lois and Tabor came by today to show me their new car. It is a Ford.
—This afternoon I took a nap and dreamed of some gypsies that came by the house forty years ago. Don’t know why I had such a dream.
—Today is Mother’s Day. I put some flowers in the church in Cora’s memory.
—A man from New York stopped by to see if I had some trees for sale. He said his father had bought trees from me. I told him I was retired, but it was not the right time to be putting out trees, being the middle of July and the sap running. When he left I remembered the time James sold a man from New York four stalks of cotton for a dollar apiece, telling the man it was a rare southern plant and not to worry if it wilted a few miles up the road. I had to spank James for that, but I knew I’d never have to worry about him making a living.
—It rained all day and it was cold. I had to turn on the heater for a little while. White Dog and I stayed inside.
—Kate and Carrie have been out today cleaning the house before Alma and Lois show up this weekend to clean it. Said they didn’t want it to be such a mess. I will never understand my daughters.
—One of Neelie’s grandsons came by today to bring me some tenderloin from a hog killing. He is a handsome, light-skinned boy, well-mannered like all of Neelie’s grandchildren. She taught them to be proper and all of them are making a good life. I still miss Neelie. The tenderloin was the best I’ve had in a long time.
—My hip hurt today. Except to feed White Dog and get a bite for myself, I have stayed in my chair.
—Listened to a radio preacher shouting his head off about the end of the world and asking for money to keep going until then. He said the world was going to end on March 10, 1979. I think I’ll send him a check and postdate it March 11.
* * *
In late spring of 1980, he was watching television, and the program was about the symptoms of cancer, and he knew instantly that he was dying.
He sat for a long time after the program was over, his eyes closed, and tried to feel the nibbling of the cancer’s voracious feeding inside him. It was there, its wide, acid mouth devouring the succulent, tender-sweet flesh of his body. He knew it was there—the mutant cannibal; he could feel it moving in him.
I will not die quickly, he thought. Not like Cora. There will not be a time bomb erupting in my heart like an unexpected suicide. No, I will not die quickly.
He called for White Dog, and the dog trotted to his chair and nuzzled her face into his hand.
“I’m going to hurt, girl,” he said quietly to his dog.
His journal entry that night was:
I realized tonight that I have cancer and am dying from it. I do not know how long it will take for the cancer to kill me, but I know it will be painful. I hope the Almighty will give me the strength to stand up to the pain and not make me much of a burden on my children. I would like to die fast, like Cora died, but I do not believe that will happen. I will die like Hattie Lewis died, wasting away until there is nothing else to do but die. I know I am right about this, but tomorrow I will make an appointment with the doctor. If I am lucky, I will be with Cora and Thomas before too much longer.
Three days later a doctor in Athens confirmed what he already knew.
“How long do you think I have?” he asked matter-of-factly.
“Hard to say, Mr. Peek,” the doctor said in a tired, sad voice. “A few months. Maybe a year.”
“I appreciate you telling me straight-out,” he said to the doctor.
The doctor nodded. The doctor had seen many people die, had too many times been the messenger, the announcer, of gloom, and the task always left him with a sour taste in his mouth, as though the words were bitter fruit.
“A lot of what happens will be up to you,” the doctor said. “I don’t know why—I don’t think anybody does—but the way a person thinks and acts has a lot to do with their health. I’ve known people with milder cases of cancer than you’ve got, Mr. Peek, and they’ve walked out of here and were buried in less than a month. Not because the cancer killed them, no matter what we put on the death certificate. What killed them was their own determination. They wanted to die, and they did. They didn’t have to, not that fast. I hope you do the opposite, Mr. Peek. I hope you fight it with everything you’ve got in you.”
“I used to think I’d live to be a hundred,” he said absently. The doctor stood at his desk. He picked up the charts before him and glanced at them. He said, “You know, if it wasn’t for the cancer, you would. You’re the healthiest man I’ve ever examined at your age. You’ve got the heart of a thirty-year-old man. Yes, I think you would have made it.”
“I just hope I don’t get to be a burden,” he said.
“You’re lucky,” the doctor told him. “You’ve got a good family. They’ll share what n
eeds to be done. Don’t think about being a burden. I promise you, they’ll want to take care of you.” The doctor paused, then said, “Do you want me to tell your daughters, the ones that came with you?”
He thought of Kate and Carrie waiting anxiously outside the doctor’s office. They would become hysterical. Best not to let them know. Not now. He would tell James and let James keep the secret until it had to be known. Once he had kept such a secret for James—when James went to southeast Asia before the Vietnam war, when everyone thought he was in Hawaii, in a soft, sunlit Army paradise (all his letters were postmarked Hawaii), but he was not; he was in Thailand, where war simmered like a volatile temper. James would know the value of keeping a secret.
“No,” he said to the doctor. “Don’t tell them. Not yet. I’d rather do it in my own way.”
“Whatever you wish, Mr. Peek. You understand they’ll have to know before long.”
“I understand,” he said.
That night he called James and said to him, “Son, I need you.”
“All right, Daddy,” James replied. “I’ll be there in three hours.”
25
James would keep his father’s secret for two months and then he would beg to be released from his commitment.
“I know how I’d feel if I was one of the others, Daddy,” he said to his father. “I’d want to know. I’d want to have some time to take it all in.”
“All right, son,” he agreed. “I guess it’s time. I can’t keep putting it off.”
“Do you want me to tell them?” James asked.
“It’s all right with me.”
His family responded as he knew they would. His daughters swirled around him, with large, frightened eyes, busying themselves in his house, trying to talk cheerfully, but failing. His sons were quiet, serious. Sometimes his sons would ask if he needed anything taken care of that might be unpleasant, some preparation for his dying like wills or final wishes. He insisted that his children not begin their hovering until it was necessary.
“I’m not helpless,” he said to them. “Maybe I’ll get that way, but I’m not now. Having people coming in every few minutes makes me tired. Can’t do what I want to do, when I want to do it.”
“We just don’t want you to be alone, Daddy,” his children said.
“I’m not alone,” he argued. “I’ve got my dog.”
And he knew what his children were saying among themselves.
“His dog. Seems like that’s all he cares about. Maybe Neelie was right about that dog. Maybe she’s got a spell on him. Never saw him that crazy about any animal before.”
“It’s just a dog.”
“That’s all it is. Nothing but a dog.”
“You wouldn’t say that if you lived around here,” Kate vowed. “Would they, Carrie?”
“Sometimes it’s scary,” Carrie reported in a hushed voice. “You’d think we could at least touch her after all these years, but we can’t. Nobody can. And you don’t ever see any other dogs around her. Never. Don’t ever hear them bark, or anything.”
“Never,” emphasized Kate.
They were saying among themselves that only White Dog seemed to matter. He knew what they were saying, but they did not understand.
The cancer moved through him, feasting.
In the summer, in the heat of the summer, he became weak and did not often leave his house and the whirling blades of the fan aimed at his armchair. He ate sparingly, not caring for the food, even when it was food that he had enjoyed. “No need for so much food,” he said to his children. “Not doing anything. No need to eat much unless I’m working.”
He could not work. He did not go into his plot of pecan trees to pull away the grass and the grass matted the ground. He could see it from the kitchen window. That’s done with, he thought. I won’t work the trees again. He took the last order book that he had used and looked up the name of the person who purchased the last tree he would ever sell, and then he recorded that man’s name in his journal.
Dorsey Pilgreen from Anderson, South Carolina, bought two pecan trees from me on April 11. They are the last trees I sold, out of thousands over the years.
The cancer feasted.
On a Sunday in the autumn he went with Lois and Tabor for a drive into the north Georgia mountains to see the leaves of the hardwoods. The leaves were brilliantly colored—reds and golds dripping from limbs like hot lava spills—and he asked Tabor to stop at a pulloff near a path leading into the woods.
“Need to stretch a minute,” he said as excuse.
“I do, too,” Tabor said as accommodation.
“Daddy, be careful,” warned Lois. “There’s some gravel out here.”
He hobbled on his walker down the path, to a hanging tree limb of a tall pignut hickory. He reached up and touched a bright yellow leaf, took it between his fingers and caressed it. Then he pulled it from the tree and put it into his mouth and bit into it. The taste of the leaf—still pith-tender—was the taste of wood.
“All right,” he said to Lois, “I’m ready to go home now.”
That night, he told Kate, “I think it’s time somebody started staying with me.”
“All right, Daddy,” Kate said softly. “We’ll take care of it.”
On Monday afternoon, Alma moved into the house with her suitcase, beginning the long-agreed schedule of care that would last until his death—a week-by-week alternating of his four daughters and, occasionally, his sons and daughters-in-law.
White Dog was in the room with him when Alma arrived. White Dog sat in a corner of the room, watching.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever been this close to your dog, Daddy,” Alma said. “You think she’ll let me touch her?”
He shook his head. “Don’t think so.”
“She always runs away when we come in,” Alma said. “Wonder why she didn’t today?”
“Maybe she’s tired, like I am,” he answered.
“Well, you rest, Daddy. Whatever you need, I’m here.” Alma left the room to put away the contents of her suitcase and White Dog crossed to him and placed her face in his lap.
“Not just the two of us any more,” he said quietly to the dog. “Now we got to put up with people being around all the time.”
The dog whined, rose up to the top brace of the walker beside his chair.
“You want out?” he said. “All right.”
He pulled himself up on the walker and went to the kitchen door and opened it. The dog rose up again on the top brace and pushed her face into his hand, then dropped from the walker and trotted from the house.
He never again saw White Dog.
Each day he put out food, but the food was never eaten. He sat on the side porch and watched the road and the fields, but he did not see the dog. He watched for circling buzzards, but there were none. He sent out his sons and his sons-in-law and his grandchildren to search for White Dog, but they returned to tell him they could not find her.
He wrote in his journal:
My dog of many years has disappeared. It happened on the day that my children moved back in to care for me. White Dog was a good companion, the best animal I ever had. I miss her but I do not think I will ever see her again. Maybe she got tired of me being sick. I, also, am tired of me being sick. The pain gets worse every day. I do not think it will be long now.
Before he died, his body sipping from morphine to deaden the sharp-teeth gnawing of the mutant cannibal, he began to hallucinate. He saw Neelie at the bedroom window, and he laughed aloud and said to Alma and Lois, who were visiting at his bedside, “There’s Neelie. Right there at the window. She’s laughing, just laughing out loud. Got some more colored with her. But they’re good people. They like me. They’re good people.” He talked with the memory of Marshall Harris, looking at Paul, believing Paul was Marshall. He believed Alma was his wife, Cora. He mumbled incoherently about Hattie Lewis and Martha Dunaway Kerr.
His body withered.
He cried out for the barrel of a hy
podermic needle, loaded with killing drops of instant mercy. “Why won’t they let me die? I couldn’t let my animals suffer like this. Why don’t they take a gun and put me at ease?”
The cancer was ending its feast.
On the day before his death, he lay in his bed, his eyes clear, and he listened as James spoke calmly to him about trivial matters of family. James had taken pictures of the children and grandchildren.
“Thought you’d like to have them on the bedstand, Daddy,” James said to him. “Soon as the prints come back, I’ll have them framed.”
He turned his eyes to James and he said, hoarsely, “You got a picture of my dog?”
“No, Daddy. I wish I did. I tried to take a picture one time, but I couldn’t find her.”
“She’s gone,” he said, his voice becoming firm.
“Yes sir. We keep looking for her, but we can’t find her.”
“She left.”
“Yes sir.”
“That was your mama, son.”
James swallowed hard. “Who, Daddy?”
“White Dog. It was your mama come back to watch over me.”
James did not reply. He took a damp bath cloth and wiped it across his father’s forehead. He saw tears shining in his father’s eyes.
“Your mama knew it was all right to go when you children came back,” he said and he smiled. “I’m going to see her soon. I’ll see my dog, too.”
“Yes sir.”
“Every night, White Dog was your mama.”
“Mama?”
He nodded. He reached for his son’s hand and held it. James could feel the skeleton of his father’s fingers.
“It was your mama. Every night, she’d rest on the bed beside me. She looked like she did when she was a girl. She was pretty, son. She was a pretty girl.”
James could barely speak. “You need to get some rest, Daddy.”
“I’m all right, son. I feel good. I don’t hurt.”
“Do you want anything?”