Father and Son

  FATHER AND SON

  A NOVEL BY

  LARRY BROWN

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23 | Chapter 24 | Chapter 25 | Chapter 26 | Chapter 27 | Chapter 28 | Chapter 29 | Chapter 30 | Chapter 31 | Chapter 32 | Chapter 33 | Chapter 34 | Chapter 35 | Chapter 36 | Chapter 37 | Chapter 38 | Chapter 39 | Chapter 40 | Chapter 41 | Chapter 42 | Chapter 43 | Chapter 44 | Chapter 45 | Chapter 46 | Chapter 47 | Chapter 48 | Chapter 49 | Chapter 50 | Chapter 51 | Chapter 52 | Chapter 53 | Chapter 54 | Chapter 55 | Chapter 56

  Also by Larry Brown

  It was Saturday when they drove the old car into town, returning him, passing by the big houses with their blankets of dark grass beneath the ancient oaks. Midday. A hot wind blew in the car windows and rattled papers on the dash as they went up the wide and shaded avenue toward the square. It was cooler here in the hills than it had been in the Delta that morning, though not by much.

  “It’s been dry,” Puppy said. “Daddy’s well quit on him again. I’m afraid it dried up.”

  Glen scratched at a tick bite behind his ear and crossed his legs in the seat.

  “What’s he do for water?”

  “I hauled him some. His pump may be messed up again, I don’t know. I guess you can see about it when you get out there. You are gonna go out there, ain’t you?”

  “I don’t know if I’ll make it out there today or not,” Glen said. “I don’t see nobody here to meet us.”

  “What’d you expect? A parade? Why don’t you go on out there and see him?”

  “I’ll go see him sometime.”

  “He ain’t in real good shape, you know.”

  “I ain’t in real good shape myself,” Glen said.

  Puppy slowed for the intersection, pulled up almost under the traffic light and stopped. “You hungry?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go over to Winter’s and get a hamburger.”

  Puppy glanced at him and studied the traffic light. “I kind of hoped you wouldn’t want to go over there right off the bat. Lunchtime and all. Crowd in there.”

  Glen looked out over the square and the brick buildings that ringed it, the old whitewashed courthouse in the center where they had sentenced him. The dusty automobiles were parked at an angle against the deep curbing and people were moving on the sidewalks.

  “I ain’t had any breakfast.”

  The light changed and the battered old vehicle rolled forward.

  “You should have told me. We could have stopped somewhere.”

  “I was in a hurry.”

  “Afraid they’d change their minds?”

  “It wouldn’t have surprised me.”

  Puppy nodded and turned the wheel to the right and eased along until he saw an open space. He guided the car in. The bumper scraped against the concrete and he shut the motor off. They got out and Puppy stopped at the parking meter and put a nickel in it and bumped it with his hand until the needle came up. He stepped up on the sidewalk, hitching at his baggy pants, tucking in the sweaty surplus of his shirttail.

  “Well, hell, come on,” he said, and held the door of the cafe open for Glen. The screen door flapped shut behind them and they stood in a room floored with boards worn smooth from years of shoe leather. Slow fans hanging from the peeling wooden ceiling stirred the warm air.

  “You want to set at the counter?” Puppy said. “Or do you want to get a table?”

  “It don’t matter.” Glen was looking around to see who he knew in there.

  “Hey Puppy,” said a man at the back. He was wearing overalls and he had one black lens in his eyeglasses. He nodded gravely to Glen and Glen returned it with a sparse movement of his head, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Hey Woodrow,” Puppy said.

  “Who’s that stranger you got with you?”

  “You know who that is,” Puppy said. “Let’s just set at the counter, Glen.”

  They eased onto a pair of round padded stools. The linoleum of the counter was so worn it had no pattern. They could see hamburger patties sizzling on the grill behind the register. The room smelled of smoke, onions, grease.

  “Where’s Jewel?” said Glen.

  “I don’t know.” Puppy was looking around. “I guess she’s in the back.” He nudged Glen in the ribs and gazed past his shoulder. “How’d you like to have you a little of that?”

  Glen turned his head and saw a young woman reading a magazine and smoking a cigarette at one of the tables. She had on a white dress and she wore some colored plastic bracelets on her wrists. She looked oddly familiar to him, like some child he might once have known or merely spoken to.

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  She rocked slightly in her seat to some tune in her head and mouthed silently the words she was reading.

  “Who is that?”

  “Erline Price.”

  “Naw. That ain’t her, is it?”

  “She’s growed up some, ain’t she?”

  She must have heard them talking about her or sensed it. She looked up and squinted behind her glasses. She touched the frames to see better and nodded. “Hey Randolph. Hey Glen. I didn’t know you were home.”

  “Yeah,” Glen said, smiling. “I just got in.”

  She nodded, grinned, and went back to reading her magazine. After they turned away she looked back up at him again.

  Jewel stopped halfway through the kitchen doors with a carton of hamburger patties in her hands. She set them on the counter and wiped the hair out of her eyes and came down to stand in front of Glen. She looked like she was about to cry.

  “Don’t do that,” he said. She reached out and put her hand on his arm. He let it stay there but he kept watching her face. She looked around at the people studying them.

  “I’ve got to turn these hamburgers,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  She went to the grill and started flipping hamburgers, glancing back at him, edging something out of her eye with the corner of her apron.

  “Right in front of the whole goddamn town,” Puppy said in a low voice, and Glen turned to stare at him.

  “You think I give a shit what these people think?”

  Puppy put his elbows on the counter and laced his fingers together. He shifted on the stool and peered up at a ceiling fan for a moment. “Far as I know you never did care what anybody thought.”

  “What y’all want to eat, Glen?” Jewel said.

  “Just give us a couple of hamburgers apiece. And some Cokes. Make em to go.”

  She came back over to where they sat. “Why don’t you eat in here? I want to talk to you. I got a lot I want to tell you.” She was trying to smile, trying to be cheerful. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands.

  “We got to go out to the cemetery,” Puppy said. “Glen ain’t been out there yet.”

  “Oh,” she said, watching him, glancing back at the grill where the smoke was rising thicker. “Well. I’ll hurry up and fix em then. I got some almost ready.” She turned away and stood at a table and began setting out buns from a cellophane pack. “Have you seen your daddy yet?”

  “We just got in. Just this minute.”

  “It sure don’t seem like three years now. Seems like it went by in a hurry. I sure was sorry to hear about your mama.”

  Glen didn’t say anything. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it, plucked a bit of tobacco off his tongue.

  “Let me get your Cokes,” she said. She opened the drink box and reached in for a pair of short bottles, then pried their caps of
f and set them up on the counter. An old man in a suit walked up and leaned on it.

  “You ain’t got my dinner ready yet?”

  She snapped her face up and her eyes got bright and hard.

  “I’m fixin em fast as I can, mister. You’ll just have to wait your turn like everbody else.”

  The old man blinked and backed up. He looked at Glen and Puppy with a hostile glare and sat down, then leaned back in his chair and muttered to himself.

  Jewel was stuffing a white sack full of hamburgers wrapped in waxed paper. Glen stood up and reached for some money but she said, “Don’t worry about that. I’m sorry I’m so busy right now. I’ll talk to you later. Okay?”

  She watched his face for an answer.

  “Okay?”

  She started to turn away but he reached over and touched her arm. A small cloud of smoke was wafting up from the grill, spreading out along the ceiling, loud sizzling and grease burning. A few people stood up to see better. He took the neck of the sack and folded it down, not looking at her. But finally he did.

  “I’ll see you,” he said.

  “I hope so. You hardly ever wrote.”

  “I got some stuff I got to take care of. You know. I got to see some people.”

  “Let it go. Don’t go lookin for trouble. I can’t take no more of that.”

  “Well,” he said.

  She leaned close and whispered, “Things has changed, Glen. We got to have a talk.”

  “Come on, Glen,” Puppy said. He was standing at the door with his hand on it.

  Glen waved the hamburger sack at her. They went out. She went back to the grill and started scraping off the scorched meat and flinging it viciously into the garbage can. She cried a little but nobody said anything. They just watched her like an audience.

  The gravel road curved away to a green and grassy hill bright and hot beneath the afternoon sun. They pulled up in the shade of the oaks and ate with the car doors open, the radio playing.

  “You gonna start back up with her, I guess.”

  Puppy wasn’t looking at him. He was staring out through the windshield, cupping his hamburger in both hands close to his lap. Glen balled up the waxed paper and started to throw it out the door, but dropped it on the floorboard instead. He turned slightly to watch his brother.

  “What did you figure I’d do?”

  “I don’t know. I thought you might want to go out to the place and stay with Daddy. Maybe try to stay out of trouble.”

  “Bullshit, Randolph.” He watched a little breeze riffle through the leaves and turn their pale undersides up. A bird sang in the distance. “I ain’t gonna stay with Daddy. I got a house of my own. Even if I didn’t have a house of my own I wouldn’t stay with him.”

  “You could try it and see how you like it.”

  “I already know how I’d like it. If you so damn crazy about somebody to stay with him why don’t you go out there and stay with him?”

  Puppy shook his head. “I’m just your brother. I just want to look out for you.”

  “Naw, you just want to run my goddamn business for me.”

  Puppy didn’t say anything. His stubbled jaw moved slowly as he chewed. Out past the dusty hood of the car the gravestones seemed to march away to the trees, the deep shade and cool of the bordering timber.

  “Where’s she at?” said Glen.

  “Over yonder on the right. Next to … well, close to Aunt Eva.”

  They sat looking at the stones until Glen made a little motion with his hands.

  “Is that where Theron is?”

  Puppy studied him.

  “Yeah, he’s over there too,” he said slowly. “I’d about decided you never would ask.”

  Glen got out and stood in the gravel and looked back inside, holding on to the door handle.

  “Well I’m gonna go on. See if I can find her.”

  “I may walk out there after while.”

  Glen let the door fall to and went up the road in front of the car. He walked fifty or sixty yards in the gravel and then stepped over a hog-wire fence, holding the wire down behind his buttocks with one hand and fending off the stands of briars with the other and stomping at them and swinging his legs over one at a time. A lizard rustled over a hot stone and the tall, dry sage grass sang softly in a short breath of wind. He stopped and looked for a moment at the stones. So many of them and where to start. The unbroken peace that place invoked. He went slowly, stepping between the headstones and pausing to read one here and there. He kept looking ahead for new earth. But it wouldn’t be new now. Not after a year. It would probably have grass growing on it by now. Each time he saw fresh dirt he went to it, but it was never hers. He was sweating a little under the sun, in the open glare of it, and he wondered what shape the house would be in after three years. He’d have to clean it all up, fix what was broken, get the electricity turned on. He had to see about his car and try to get it running, then look for a way to make some money. He had to see Jewel.

  He stopped in the middle of the graveyard and looked around. Puppy had said next to Aunt Eva, but he wasn’t even sure where she was, and she’d been dead so long. Eva’s was an old funeral, barely remembered. Kids in ties and crying women, mud on their shoes. He was little then. A Davis or a Clark, she’d be next to them. He started reading the names on the stones and working his way right and suddenly found himself in the middle of them. They were all buried together, had been for the last hundred years. Fathers, mothers, children, the grandfathers and the dead from three wars. He found the grave but he couldn’t believe it. There was no stone, only a small metal shield with a white card clamped to it and the name of the funeral home embossed on it to mark her resting place. He squatted and peered at the card, the typewritten words of ink almost bled away. No flowers, plastic or any other kind. Not even the withered stems. Just a rough patch of ground with blue and red clay. He knew that she had probably been buried in the cheapest casket they could find.

  He got on his knees there next to the little metal marker and tried to read the tiny words and numbers printed there. He looked back to see if his brother was coming. He could see Puppy’s feet sticking out a window of the car. Faint music drifted on the summer air. He felt close to these dead here with their stones and the finality of the earth that bound them together. There was a stone there he’d never visited and he finally turned his head and read it:

  THERON DAVIS

  Gone But Not Forgotten

  He cried then, rocking on his heels, watching the small brown striped bees hovering nearby in the scattered clover. After a while he stopped crying and wiped the wetness away from his face with his fingers and sat there, hardening his face, changing it so that his brother would not know that he had cried. He went out the gate and back down over the gravel to the car.

  Puppy was lying on the seat, his eyes closed, his fingers intertwined peacefully on his chest. Glen slapped his feet down from where they were propped on the door, and when Puppy opened his eyes and started up he told him, “I ought to whip your ass. You and Daddy’s both.”

  “You ain’t changed a damn bit.”

  “What’d you do with her money? Spend it?”

  Puppy held on to the back of the seat with one hand and the steering wheel with the other and struggled to pull himself upright.

  “I ain’t seen the damn money. Daddy took care of all that stuff.”

  “Why ain’t there a stone?”

  Puppy glared at him and then came on out the door.

  “Why don’t you ask him? They ain’t no need in gettin mad at me over it. I didn’t have nothin to do with it.”

  Puppy stepped past him and pulled a cigarette out. Glen kicked at the rocks he stood on and looked again out over the grass. “How much you reckon one costs?”

  Puppy lit his cigarette and sighed a lungful of smoke. He motioned helplessly. “I don’t know. I figure you could get one for a couple hundred if it ain’t too fancy. If you want, we can ride over to Tupelo one day and see.”
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  Glen leaned against the car and put his hands on the hood. “I like to never found her. All her brothers and everybody out here and you can’t even hardly find her place. I want us to ride over there one day before long and price one. You reckon they’d finance it?”

  “I guess they would. They financed the funeral. We ain’t never paid for that yet.”

  Puppy turned to the car and rested his arms on the roof, smoking his cigarette and tapping softly with the tips of his fingers on the faded paint and just waiting for the rest of the questions, a small annoyance showing on his face.

  “So how much was the funeral?”

  “I think it’s about twelve hundred dollars all told. It costs a right smart to get buried these days.”

  “Well? Have you paid any on it?”

  Puppy was evading his eyes. He was clearly troubled, but he began nodding.

  “Sure. I made a few payments on it. When I could. Here and there.”

  “How much?”

  “Well goddamn, Glen, I got three kids to feed and bills to pay just like everbody else. Shit, I ain’t made out of money.”

  “How much have you paid on it?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “How much would you guess?”

  “Aw. I guess about thirty dollars.”

  “Shit,” Glen said. He walked around the hood and got in the car on the other side. “Take me out to the house. I got a lot to do.”

  Puppy got in the car and closed the door. “Well you don’t have to get pissed off about it. I’ve had a lot on me. It ain’t been easy for me neither.” He cranked the car and turned it around under the trees, backing up in the gravel and scraping his tailpipe on the bank.

  “Damn,” he said. “This old car’s about wore out. I wish I had the money to buy me a new one. I went out there and cranked yours once in a while.”

  “How long’s it been since you cranked it?”

  Puppy started to answer and then saw a white car pull in off the highway and block the road. There was a six-pointed gold star emblazoned on the door. He hit the brakes and the right front wheel grabbed in the gravel so that the front slewed a little and they came to a sudden halt, sliding in the rocks. Dust flew up around them and came in through the windows.