63
For fifteen minutes I followed the beat of my heart on its route to my feet. I imagined I was also moving the pieces of Philip Wolsey’s extra-strength aspirin around. Doing for myself. Helping myself. I opened my eyes, and the burning had stopped, at least slowed down, and I didn’t feel exhausted. I had progressed to tired.
The stars fell back, but the darkness had a clarity, and things around the highway seemed in shade rather than night. Philip sensed I was not sleeping.
“Sleep. Good for you.”
“I’m fine. I feel a lot better. I do this thing with the beat of my heart. I move it. I mean, if I concentrate on it, I can move the beat around my body. When I get to my feet, I can send the beat right out the bottom.”
“So you meditate, then.”
“I guess I do.”
“I ponder things,” Philip said. “I ponder things and hope to one day understand.”
I thought about this for a moment. “Understand what?”
“I’m not clear on the specifics, but I want to gain an understanding of the why. The why. I would like to go backward to the beginning. That’s why I ponder.”
We rode heavy and smooth. My bike wedged against dog food behind me. Philip Wolsey made sense to me.
“I would like to go backward, too,” I said. “I think maybe that’s part of the quest thing.”
“Possibly.” He nodded thoughtfully. “There’s more, though.”
“I guess,” I said.
We climbed a small hill. I couldn’t see morning, but I could feel it. Philip lit a cigarette. His cap furrowed down close to his eyes. He said, “What do you hope to accomplish at Bethany’s rest home?”
For a second or two I had forgotten I’d told him some of Bethany at the diner. I simply shrugged.
We rode quietly. Philip took only a couple puffs of the smoke. Pondering.
“I am sixty years old,” he said, his eyes tight on the highway.
“I’m forty-three,” I said. “I used to weigh two hundred and seventy-nine pounds. I don’t know, Philip. I just don’t know.”
Now there was the beginning of orange sun at the end of the desert, at the tip of the plateaus.
“Father was an Episcopal minister.”
“I’m Episcopal. Kind of. I mean, I don’t go or anything anymore. And . . . and, of course, I don’t . . . believe.”
“You don’t believe?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Why?”
“It’s like I said. I just don’t know.”
Philip nodded and cracked the window of the cab. Sage and pine smells. I thought that the desert smells an awful lot like Aunt Paula’s turkey stuffing. “I was named for Sir Philip Sidney, the English adventurer and poet. My brother was named for Sir Walter Raleigh for similar reasons.”
“I was named for the guy who turned the first official double play.”
Philip smiled and pretended to catch a baseball. “Yes. We played baseball. All sports, really, that we could access in Ames. Our little Iowa town. The Wolsey boys. Walter was my senior by five years and some months. We attended St. Thomas Priory adjacent to Father’s parish. A very liberal, a very leveling education. Classics and sciences. And most excellent people, too. Teachers, classmates. Walter and Philip Wolsey were the only colored children—the only children of African descent—yet we found a commonality with the others that served us powerfully for years.
“In 1943 Walter joined the army, of course. Turned eighteen and popped into the service like a weasel pops out of a box. We were all frightened, but Father explained about duty and honor and, in short, a kind of special American obligation to serve, to offer yourself to the common good. Want some coffee?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I offered myself, too. Drafted.”
“As fate and luck had it, the war ended before he left the States, and before we knew it, he was out of the service and off to the University of Chicago. Father’s alma mater. Legacy. Walter had distinguished himself in so very many areas of academia, he could have attended any school that accepted colored—African students.”
“He was smart, huh?”
“Gifted. Intellectually superior, and I’m not a man who throws superlatives around. Gifted.”
“That’s great.”
“Who’s Who on Campus, 1946, 1947, 1948. Graduated in three years. I shall never forget . . .”
He lit another smoke against the wheel.
“I shall never forget driving up with Father for the graduation. Tall, flatheaded. Truly the features of an aristocracy that no longer has a place in our universe. That’s my theory.”
Philip took one puff and punched the cigarette out in the ashtray. We rode again in a shared quiet, and the sun came on, and the long, dry earth spread out.
“That’s my theory,” he said again, almost to himself.
“His degree was English literature with a special concentration on Thomas Hardy. Father assumed that Walter would teach, but our Walter surprised us all by applying for, and getting, a position on the Chicago Times-Herald.”
“That’s great,” I said.
“Journalism. We might have known. And there were books to be written. Wonderful novels somewhere. We knew that. We had always known that, really. In the meanwhile yours truly, Philip Wolsey, while not as brilliant a student, still, as now, I read voraciously and graduated from St. Thomas Priory in 1949.”
“You speak great,” I said, in a short and stupid and true compliment. Philip smiled.
“Sometimes, when one drives a truck, one speaks as a trucker. Sometimes one speaks as oneself.”
“That’s true,” I said, but Philip had lost me on that one.
“I was to attend Chicago also. I would have loved to have read the law like Father’s brother, Andrew, in Des Moines—who defended Bob Staghardt, the Tornado Rapist, and defended him successfully, too—but the Korean conflict began, and after another reminder of national obligation, I, too, went to war. Only mine happened.”
This I understood completely.
“I went to war, too. Mine happened all over the place.”
“The night before Father put me on the Des Moines train to Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Walter came home, and we had a wonderful dinner of steak and corn. Fresh sliced tomatoes. Melon. Mrs. Gautier was our cook and housekeeper. Mother, of course, had died of tuberculosis when I was just a baby. But Mrs. Gautier was a splendid and inventive cook. Catholic, though, but knew she was appreciated.”
“That’s sad about your mom.”
“Well, yes, but I never knew her. It’s in the knowing, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“After dinner Walter regaled us with his electric accounts of working for the ‘great paper,’ as he called it. He was an assistant copy editor of the metropolitan room and occasionally covered sports and police.”
“Cubbies?”
“Saw DiMaggio play the White Sox.”
“Williams?”
“Saw him.”
“Wow.” My pop loved DiMaggio. You couldn’t say a sour word about Joe DiMaggio, but he loved Teddy Williams more. I didn’t know why I thought it just then, but I will always be surprised my pop never walked over to our Norma’s house and picked her up and brought her to listen on the porch. Teddy Ballgame.
“And so I went to Korea and the hot gates and took the common duty,” Philip said, another cigarette firing.
“That’s the Mojave,” he said, gesturing to the left of us. “Back in there. That’s the Mother of Deserts.”
“You wouldn’t think so many things would grow on the desert,” I said. “Flowers and things.”
“Rain, rain’s the ticket. October is a rainy time.”
“I left Rhode Island August twenty-ninth.”
Philip thought about this and then said, “Well, it’s October sixteenth, so that would make this your forty-ninth day out.”
I nodded and looked out at the Mojave. In October it just wasn’t the desert I imagined it wa
s. Flowers.
“October of 1951 I was returned stateside and reassigned to Petersburg, Virginia. Fort Lee. Quartermaster School, but really a place where those who had already fought waited for separation from the military. It was in Virginia that I first received word of the Chicago event.”
Philip lit another cigarette. He took his two small puffs, held the smoke, then stubbed it out.
“What was the Chicago event?” I asked.
“Coming into Kingman, Arizona,” he said, pointing straight ahead. “Now we’ll roll, still on 40, down through a goodly slice of our Mojave to Yucca, and in no time at all we’ll cross the Colorado into California.”
“California, here I come,” I said, and we both chuckled a comfortable chuckle, like two people who have known each other a long time. I felt that.
“Walter was not a copy editor for long. His compact prose made quite an impression on his employers at the Times-Herald, and of course one could not easily overlook this young colored man’s access to sections of town and community not readily available to the paper’s rank and file. In short order my brother secured his own beat and, within a year, a byline. Father had sent several of his articles to me in Korea. Walter had a sense of person and place in relationship to the times he was writing in that was so utterly unique you felt you were virtually being taken into another’s confidence and that the words were for only your ears.
“And such varied subjects. I remember one, listen: ‘The Blues Are Looking Rosy.’ That was the title of a piece on Ra Tanner, who played the twelve-string guitar and wrote songs only about a girl named Rose. There was ‘Collards and Coloreds,’ which got an inside look at the kitchen of Marie Bliss, who had the most successful Negro restaurant of all time. Later Mrs. Bliss used the title of Walter’s article for her own cookbook.”
A big smile played over Philip’s face. But after a moment or two, his face flattened and his eyes seemed heavier.
“You okay, Philip?”
“I’m fine, young man. Thank you very much. He also began a series of stories about heroin and the jazz community, if ‘community’ is the word. Horn blowers. Brush drummers.”
“My pop thought Errol Garner was a genius.”
“Errol Garner had a vibrancy,” he said, almost begrudgingly. Philip seemed angry, and his eyes narrowed onto the road.
“Personally, the deliberate distortion of pitch and timbre of sound into some polyphonic improvisation has left me cold, but I will admit to a certain coldness to many things I do not understand. And so my father sent on three articles in Walter’s jazz-heroin series. Then the letters stopped. Abruptly. That was in Petersburg, 1951.”
After a moment I said stupidly and forty years after the fact, “I hope nothing was wrong.”
We drove on in silence. I saw a tall cactus and, behind it, peeking out, was my beautiful sister. I almost felt like waving to her, that’s how real she seemed.
“Walter had been too . . . protected. In many ways Father’s world was a difficult one to carry on into a cosmopolitan reality. Not, mind you, that Father was wrong in his insistence on duty and honor and belief. It’s that for most people those things are much too difficult to incorporate into everyday life. And Walter could not. He fell hard, first into the propulsive, syncopated rhythms of jazz and then into its narcotic.”
Heroin, I thought. Walter.
“I learned this later, and I think I have pieced the sequence of events correctly. But who knows? By the time I was informed of our predicament and returned home, it was finished.”
Finished, I thought. Oh, God.
“I returned to Ames, and in the midst of my chaos, I determined this: Walter, as I said, fell hard. It doesn’t take long with the horse. It offers euphoria but gives a horror. A horror. A few months and the wonderful byline gone. The job itself gone. Friends having to turn away. I tell you, they had no choice but to turn away from Walter, who in the snap of a finger became alone. He ran home. He left home. The days went on like years for Father. His superior boy, gifted boy, ruptured in the spirit. When Walter came home, he stole from Father. He became something adrift. Mrs. Gautier told me later that once he actually threatened her with violence if she would not give him money. Threatened our dear Mrs. Gautier while Father, overwhelmed, prayed in his study.
“One evening—Mrs. Gautier had by now left Father’s employ because of fear of Walter—he fled Chicago again. He came home in that same hope of leaving his addiction in the city and being healed. But, of course, by the time he arrived home, he was nothing more than the beast who rummages for cash. This time Father had no illusion. Prayer had fortified him. It would require an almost superhuman strength of purpose, an absolute resolve, to save my brother from himself.”
Philip smiled bitterly, a smile that goes inside and is really a crease across your face. He shook his head and seemed older than sixty. I had seen the downturn of his mouth on my father’s face. I didn’t want him to talk anymore. I thought I saw a woman, as thin as wire, old, in rags. I thought I saw her behind a small canyon we rolled through. I closed my eyes tight.
“Finally it’s all a guess. A compilation of events. A personal belief, really, of events. Yet it was necessary, as I said, for myself, as a man and a son and a brother, to be clear. As clear as I possibly could be. As close to the actual truth as I could be. And so I re-created the evening as I feel it was, so that I might understand.”
I opened my eyes, and the hag was not there, and we rolled out of the canyon back onto a desert flat. Philip’s face was blank. Lightning flashed in the west, and five or six seconds later, thunder cracked over us.
“I can’t be sure, of course,” Philip said softly. “Maybe that’s my cross to bear, but I will say that I’m personally satisfied with the conclusion I’ve drawn. Father confronted Walter in the rectory. It’s my belief Walter was going to try to sell the communion vessels, which were quite authentic and had some value as antique and silver. Walter was no longer our Walter, and I’m certain Father understood this. Somehow, in the struggle for the vessels, Walter struck Father. Not a terrible blow. I’m absolutely certain it was not a blow designed to injure, to kill, a man as robust as Father. So no matter what the police findings, a more reasonable explanation was that the blow to Father simply loosed a preexisting condition—a clot, a weakness of the tissue around the cranium, something, as I said, preexisting.”
“Walter killed . . .” The words just came, and I couldn’t swallow them back.
“No, no, the essence . . . the essence is that Walter was only a catalyst. Walter loosed the malady. It was the malady itself, whatever it may have been, that took Father home. Now Walter, alone in the rectory, the room in shambles, the vessels strewn all over, realizes what has happened. Father lying there as if in a nightmare. As if Walter had awakened to an even worse horror. Father. Dear God.”
Philip gripped the wheel and shook slightly. He reached for his cigarettes but could not get one out of the package. I took the pack, drew a smoke, and lit it. The first smoke I’d tasted since the wake. It tasted bad. I handed it to him. He took his small puff and held it against the wheel.
“Walter ran into the church, as I’ve re-created it, grabbed a cushion from one of the pews, and rushed back up the stairs to the rectory. The cushion was found lovingly under Father’s head. That is an incontrovertible fact.”
He puffed again with purpose.
“Cushion,” he said with smoke.
Rain had begun to fall on us. A steady light rain. More thunder cracked above us, but I missed the sparks of lightning.
“Walter fled the church, ran across the open Iowa field, to our home. He ran to Father’s study, tore the lock from the gun cabinet where the Wolsey men all kept their shotguns. Grouse and partridge. Pheasant, too. He frantically loaded his own, pressed both barrels against his eyes, and flew this world with Father.”
Lightning flashed. This time I saw it. Philip stubbed out the smoke. He seemed embarrassed.
“I ponder, you s
ee.”
“That’s so hard.”
“Hard is this desert. Hard is this head here,” he said, tapping the side of his head. “This old black head.”
We rode on. We rode out of the rain and left the snap of thunder behind us. Ten miles later I said, “Bethany killed Uncle Count’s dog, Wiggy. She grabbed that sweet thing and put him into a freezer.”
Philip glanced over to me. “That’s hard,” he said.
“I never told anybody about that.”
“Thank you,” he said, “for telling me.”
64
I couldn’t sleep. I put on my clothes and went downstairs. I went through the small rooms and into our kitchen. Mom had left the oven light on. I got a beer from the refrigerator and drank it standing by the open fridge. Then I got out two more beers and sat at the kitchen table. Because this was the night before Bethany’s marriage to Jeff Greene, Mom had wanted me to sleep in my old room.
“I don’t know, Mom,” I said. “I’ve got my own apartment and everything.”
“Well, it would be just for tonight.”
“I could come over first thing in the morning.” Mom really wanted me to stay the night, though, and I admit I wanted that, too. It was going to be our last actual night as just the four of us. Also, I hated my apartment.
I drank the two beers quickly, then put the three cans into the trash. It was 3:40 in the morning. I made myself a screwdriver and stood in the low light by the sink window, sipping it. Bethany’s wedding day was going to dawn wet and cold. I looked across to Norma Mulvey’s window. There was a light coming out from behind the venetian blind, but no movement or shadows that I could see. I lit a cigarette and smoked it between sips of the screwdriver. I heard steps on our stairwell, so I emptied the screwdriver into the sink, swirled the glass, and filled it with water. Bethany entered the kitchen yawning. She went to the refrigerator and rummaged for food.
“You’re up early,” she said.
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“I figured.”