MONDAY, OCTOBER 8, 1984
I drove through the night, fueled by gas station coffee and cold Mountain Dew, the elixir of my childhood. I reached Dogwood Monday morning in time to see truckers and plant workers meeting by the interstate to share rides. There was now one stoplight in town, a sign of progress. I went past our high school and the church of my youth, a thousand questions about Jesse swirling. Could I save her from her grave mistake? Could I turn her heart a different direction before the wedding? It suddenly felt cliché, and a little desperate, me coming back.
I sat in my car, a six-year-old blue Toyota Corolla liftback, and stared at the plane outside the school, a WWII memorial featuring a real F-86 Sabre. It was under the left wing of that plane that I had asked Jesse to the prom. She had refused, saying, “I ain’t prom material, Matt, and you know it.”
“I don’t know it, Jesse. You’re the prettiest girl in school. You deserve to be queen.”
“Can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” she said.
“If it’s because you don’t have money for a dress, I can help.”
No matter how much I pleaded, the answer was no. And the sight of the plane brought back the old ache.
I passed the ghost of Blake’s General Store, just a shell now. A half mile later I came to the Dogwood Food and Drug where Jesse worked. I knew this, as well as everyone who had died within a fifty-mile radius, from my mother. She clipped obituaries like coupons and sent them, but the names were just as hazy on the page as they were in my mind.
At my grandmother’s house, which my parents had made their own after her death, I pulled halfway up the drive and sat overlooking the creek, water trickling underneath the bridge. The stately walnut trees were still there but the large hickory was a stump. Lightning had done its cruel work two summers before—my mother had sent a snapshot. The pine trees my father and I had planted as a project to replenish the deforested earth were huge. They had been about as big as my hand when we planted them and now they soared above me. Funny how much growth can happen in twelve years.
I was startled by a banging on the window and recognized Jasper Meadows, who lived across the road. He carried a shotgun and had a chaw of tobacco the size of a fist in his mouth. He was as weathered as his coveralls and as faded as the Cincinnati Reds hat that sat crooked on his head. I rolled down my window.
“What are you doing sittin’ there?” he said around the chaw, an edge to his voice.
“Mr. Meadows? I didn’t want to wake my parents.”
He gave a crusty laugh. “You’re Calvin’s boy? The little one?”
“Matt.”
He grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “Well, I’ll be. Matt Plumley. How’s everything up in Chicago?” He said the name of the city with an “er” at the end.
“It was still there when I left,” I said.
His eyes were milky in the middle and he cocked his head and pawed at the gravel. “Shame about them Cubs. I thought this might be their year.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“All right. Won’t bother you. Just keeping an eye out on the groundhog that keeps getting in my muskmelons and I saw you sitting here and thought maybe you was up to no good.”
“Not this morning,” I said with a smile. “Are there a lot of people up to no good these days?”
“You’d be surprised. Don’t know what the world is coming to.” He took off his hat and scratched the side of his head with the bill. “Have you seen your mama lately?”
“No, sir. But I’ve talked with her.”
“Well, she’ll be happy to see you, I’m sure. All your family is good people. You ought to come around more often.” He said it to me, but I could tell he meant it for his own children, who had flown and hadn’t returned. “People are way too busy these days, if you ask me.”
I wanted to ask him not to let anyone know I was home, but I figured Jasper would keep the news between him and the groundhog.
He waved a hand without turning around and kept walking.
I pulled up the driveway a few minutes later and parked over the septic tank. There was a garden above the house in full bloom, near the barn. My father’s tools and mower were now in a shed below the house, but not much had changed since my childhood. I took a walk in the yard, the dew wet on the grass and clover.
The back clothesline was empty and the chinaberry tree by the walk had two lawn chairs near it. I pictured my parents here, talking, sharing news of the town and the church. I wondered how many times the conversation had turned to me at this spot.
The back door opened with a squeak and my mother appeared, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “Matt, is that you?”
I smiled and hugged her and she laughed and cried at the same time, clinging to my neck like a wisteria vine. “When did you get here?”
“A little bit ago.”
“And why are you . . . ?” She pulled back and I could tell she had figured it out. My mother had an inner sense of everything from politics to which eligible single man belonged with which eligible single woman. She could overhear a conversation and precisely diagnose the relational problem. Call it horse sense or a sixth sense, she was always able to put two and two together.
“Matt, you’re not going to mess things up, are you?”
I had prepared for that question, but I didn’t know it would come so quickly. I used a tactic of my own to avoid it.
“Mom, I’m starving. You don’t have anything for breakfast, do you?”
She knew I was playing her, but she joyfully led the way into the house and fried eggs and hash browns and bacon. She cut two English muffins and put them in the toaster.
“Where’s Dad?” I said.
“You know what he does on Mondays. A man needs to get away from the world’s troubles, Matthew. Every day has enough of its own.”
She said my name as if using it would make me understand the deeper meaning, the Scriptural reference clear as the pain on her face.
In conversations with my mother, through college and beyond, she rarely asked about my classes or work. Most of our conversations centered on the town, the people, her physical problems, and whatever social or political crisis was going on in the world. It seemed easier to talk about these things.
She filled my plate and put it down, still steaming, as if handing me a serving of my childhood. The smell of cooked meat and eggs mingled with the memories and I took a deep breath. There was enough food on the plate to feed a small village, but this was my mother’s way. A child of the Depression, she knew what it was like to be hungry and have next to nothing and still be better-off than most. She took any chance for abundance.
“Have you heard from Ben lately?” I said.
She nodded. “He called last week.”
“Cindy and the kids?”
“They’re fine. I always wanted to give my children wings so they could fly as far as possible but then fly back. And you’ve flown back to us, haven’t you?” She patted my hand as I took a napkin from the stack in the center of the table.
“Let me bless the food,” she said, bowing her head. She was losing hair around her crown.
I closed my eyes and bowed my head. In the house of my youth, prayer was not just for praise and petition, but also for teaching those in hearing distance.
“Lord, we thank you for a new day, a new week. Thank you for your blessings. We don’t take them for granted. And thank you for bringing Matt. Bless him, Lord. Show him your love. Your grace. Give him wisdom about whatever he’s trying to do here. Now bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies. In Jesus’ name, amen.”
“Amen,” I said, spreading the napkin on a leg.
She spoke of the health of people at church and worked her way around the neighborhood, hitting the highs and lows. When I asked about the Blackwood family, she got quiet, so I changed the subject.
“Did you see what happened to the Cubs?”
“Wasn’t that something?” she said. “We didn’t see the game because of the evening service, but your father was heartbroken for the team and the city.”
“I used to think if I prayed hard enough and begged God enough, he’d help the Pirates win.”
She smiled and shook her head. “You ate and drank to that team. And when they lost, it almost killed you.” When I didn’t speak, she added, “The Cubs will bounce back. You wait and see. Adversity is just an invitation to get better.”
The words settled between us and I tried to think of something else to talk about, something to bring up that might keep her from prying. I didn’t come up with anything before she said, “Matt, honey.” Her voice lowered and turned sweet. “Sometimes I think the Lord wants us to move on and let go of what’s behind. So that we can press on.”
“Are you talking about the Cubs or me?”
She tipped her head back and laughed, but it felt obligatory. I had used humor in my youth to rescue my mother from her inner thoughts and demons. Music and food played the same role. Now I felt like I could push a little further. “Mom, you and Dad were called here. I always knew you felt that way. But I was thinking on the drive, what if it was God’s will that I met Jesse? What if we were meant for each other?”
She winced as if she’d licked a cast-iron skillet. “Those are old wounds. You have to move past them. And from what you’ve said about the work you’re doing in Chicago with those kids, it sounds like you have.”
I put my fork down after eating a few ounces of the two pounds in front of me. She picked up the plate and took it to the metal coffee can she kept outside the back door to feed the varmints, as she called them. My loss of appetite was a conscientious objection to our previous war with food.
I took the phone book from a shelf by the table and found Jesse’s name. I jotted the number down on a scrap of paper and put it in my wallet as my mother returned from outside.
“You might get a call,” I said. “I left your number in case anybody needs to get in touch.”
“Shouldn’t you go back? You don’t want to jeopardize your job.” The question hung as she turned resolutely toward the sink. My father had bought a dishwasher for her years earlier but I think she believed the Palmolive commercials with Madge, who said, “Relax, it’s Palmolive.”
As she scrubbed and cleaned, I looked around the house, not to escape domestic duties, but to create space. Sometimes you needed to walk into a different room for five minutes. I wandered to the piano and studied the hymnal, open to “Rescue the Perishing.” I picked out the melody and read the words. The third verse caught my eye:
Down in the human heart, crushed by the tempter,
Feelings lie buried that grace can restore;
Touched by a loving heart, wakened by kindness,
Chords that were broken will vibrate once more.
I looked in the mirror and saw my mother’s shadow near the hall. I stood and moved to the fireplace mantel, a shrine to Ben and me. In the pictures, I had a buzz cut that accentuated my ears and made me look like I could fly with a stiff breeze. Ben’s hair was also painfully short. This was how they wanted to remember us, I assumed.
Departed loved ones were on an end table nearby. There was a photo of my grandfather and his wedding party, men dressed in turn-of-the-century wool. He was a hardworking man from the “old country” who hadn’t known a word of English when he reached Ellis Island. He had become a coal miner, deep in the southern coalfields, but had moved his family to Dogwood when he discovered how hard life could be. Dogwood proved to be just as cruel but in different ways.
The front door opened and my father walked in smiling. He wore a long-sleeved shirt and dress pants, his wing-tip shoes and signature wool fedora. In the crook of his arm was a worn, black Bible. So much for taking the day off, I thought.
“Matt? When did you get in?”
“Early this morning,” I said, looking at my grandfather’s picture and noticing the striking resemblance.
He took off his hat and looked at his watch. “Well, it’s too hot to be Christmas. And it’s not Mother’s Day. What’s the occasion?” He shook my hand.
I could write a book about my father’s hands. They were rough and calloused from working on the farm as a boy. He gained more layers of callouses at the glass factory in Dogwood, and when he moved to Pittsburgh and got a job in the steel industry, he led with his hands. At some point the call from God pushed him from manual labor toward seminary, and he eventually returned to pastor the church he’d attended as a child.
“I think you know why I came back,” I said.
“I’m not sure I do.”
“When were you going to tell me? Were you going to let Mom send a clipping from the Herald-Dispatch?”
He shoved his hands into his pockets and looked at the thin, yellowish-brown carpet. How many people had traipsed through the living room and kitchen after a Sunday service? How many couples in crisis had sat on the old couch? As many struggles as my father had addressed here, he had spent little time with ours, or so it seemed to me.
“Well, the truth is, this came up quickly. Jesse and Earl asked if I would marry them, and I told them I wouldn’t unless I could counsel them. To make sure theirs would be a Christian marriage.”
“A Christian marriage? Dad, you know how Earl will treat her. And you’ve always known how I felt.”
My mother walked in, wiping her hands on a drying towel like Lady Macbeth. She had a knack of interrupting significant conversations between my father and me. I could be close to some hidden revelation, about to uncover a nugget of truth, and she would appear, guiding us away from each other and back to our respective corners.
“I don’t want you two to fight.”
“We’re not,” I said, keeping my eyes on my father. “When were you going to tell me?”
“I really didn’t think it was your business. What Jesse does with her life is her decision.”
“You should see them together, Matt,” my mother said. “If you could see how he cares and dotes on her . . .” She took a few steps closer, tears welling, and a hangdog look. “She’s made a real nice girl. She works hard in the meat department at the Food and Drug. You know she didn’t have a chance in the world. But she’s become a fine Christian girl.”
But she wasn’t good enough for me or our family. That was what I wanted to say, but the look on my mother’s face stopped me. I wondered what my parents would have said about Kristin and her decision that I wasn’t the right guy for her because of the lack of depth to my faith.
Before I could respond, my mother held the towel to her face and gave the low moan of pain I remembered from my childhood. Back then it usually related to Ben. When my father preached about hell, it was always the weeping and gnashing of teeth that got me. That prospect for eternity made me want to run toward God. Abandon all hope, ye who enter my mother’s grief.
She collected herself and looked up, a trace of a smile on her face. “Do you remember Gwen? Such a lovely girl. I saw her the other day at Eula’s salon and she asked about you.”
I held up a hand and turned to my father. When I was young, they’d played good cop/bad cop, mercy and justice. One was rugged, the other soft. One advanced, the other retreated. At times they switched roles, but mostly my mother was firm and my father soft. I rarely saw them march together in my teenage years. Instead it was a push-pull, teeter-totter parenting method that left me disoriented, wondering which to trust and who was really on my side. There was no debate, however, that my mother was commander in chief.
“Matt,” my father said with a gentleness that surprised me, “you have a good heart. And I know you want to help. But you can’t force someone to accept your love.”
“Who said anything about love? I think she’s making a mistake. I can’t understand why you don’t see that.”
“She’s not your responsibility, Matthew,” my mother said.
“People make choices with their lives,” my father added. “Some are good. Some aren’t. And we all live with the fallout.”
My mother waited to the count of ten. “Nothing good can come from this. Move on. Put the past behind. Press on toward the prize of the high calling—”
“What is it about the past that scares you?” I said, looking from his eyes to hers and back again. “I’ve spent a dozen years leaving the past, and here it is bubbling to the surface.”
“Let’s not go through this all again,” my mother said, shaking her head.
Ticking like a time bomb in the corner of the room was the grandfather clock my mother had received one Christmas. She’d always dreamed of owning one. It was a status symbol that countered her poverty-stricken childhood. The three of us were frozen and it felt like that first day when we’d arrived in Dogwood, the first dinner at my grandmother’s house when I’d said I had made two friends. The air had gone out of the room when I said their names.
My grandmother had narrowed her gaze. “Don’t hang around with that trash,” she said.
My mother and father had stayed silent as we ate. I wanted to tell them about the dead horse and Old Man Blackwood, but the truth seemed better hidden.
Now my mother spoke over the clock’s ticking and the memories that shouted. “Why don’t you put your things in your bedroom? You’ve driven all night. You have to be tired.” She looked at me and tried to smile. “That’s what this is about. You’re tired and you need rest.”
“Take a shower and get some sleep,” my father said. “We can talk more later.”
I knew a shower couldn’t wash the questions away, but I sighed and said, “It’s been a long night.”
“I’ll get you a set of towels,” my mother said, heading for the laundry room.
I opened the front door as the sun peeked over the edge of the hill and burned the dew. The air was fresh and crisp like October was supposed to be. I saw my gym bag in the passenger seat and went to retrieve it. As I opened the door, something inside told me not to sleep. I climbed behind the wheel and drove away, my father staring from the front window.