After Visiting Friends (29 page)

Her hand reaches for the pendant that hangs by a thin chain from her neck, raises
it toward me.

His image is small, the size of a bottle cap.

#

They tell me how, in the span of eighteen months, Tim lost his brother, his sister,
and their son. Tim just stares into the table, says, “ ’Course, then I lost my mom
shortly after all of that, too.”

“We’re hoping things get better,” Teresa says. “But I’m sure you know from your own
loss how difficult life can be. How much time it takes.”

I tell them how all of this—my search for the truth and my decision to take on my
fears—has confirmed for me that all of us have to choose life, that I’m trying to
learn to live each day.

“I tell Tim that,” she says. “But he doesn’t think he has long to live.”

I say, “I used to believe that because my father died young, I would never outlive
him.”

Teresa looks at Tim.

“Tell Michael,” she says.

He says, “I know my time here ain’t up.”

She interrupts. “Tim was in a motorcycle wreck. Six months ago,” she says. “They medevaced
him to the same hospital where they took Zach.”

Tim turns his face to mine and starts to speak. “Deer walks out. Next thing I know,
I’m seeing the light. And I start to go toward it. I hear music. And I see my family.
My mother, my brother, Bobbie. They’re all calling me over. Beckoning. And I start
to cross over. I feel happy. All of a sudden, I hear a voice say that I still have
business to take care of, that I need to go back. It says it isn’t my time. Now I
know—I got work to do here.”

I ask him, “Were you a believer before this?”

“No,” he says.

“Now,” Teresa says, “he goes to church every Sunday.”

“When you talk about a purpose,” he says, “I know what you mean. Nothing can trouble
me now.”

Teresa squeezes my hand. “Maybe you’d like to say hello to Bobbie?”

#  #  #

The body of Bobbie Hess rests in a remote corner of Saint Mary’s Cemetery on the edge
of Tiffin. It’s a small patch of manicured earth, just an acre or two carved years
ago out of the meadows that once surrounded the town. A cornfield borders the north
side. The dead stalks brown and withered now, their season past. In the
October wind, the empty husks scrape against one another, like skeletons trying to
keep warm. The Tiffin Farmer’s Cooperative squats on the west side of Saint Mary’s,
with its pens for crops waiting to go to market. And behind everything, a stretch
of tangled woods.

Bobbie’s plot is in a section of Hesses: Raymond W., her father; Rosemary A., her
mother; Bobbie; and then Richard, her brother. At their feet, in the row below, is
Zachariah T. Hess. Teresa kneels before her son’s grave and brushes grass clippings
from his dark stone to reveal a chameleon etched next to his name. The creature clings
to a branch, its tail curled like a fiddlehead fern, eye big and bulging.

“Zach loved chameleons,” Teresa says, her finger slowly tracing down the tightening
spiral of the tail. “He loved how they could change colors. How they could be there,
and then not there. He knew everything there was to know about them.”

“It’s true,” says Tim. “If you come by the house tomorrow, you can see me get that
same chameleon tattooed right here.”

He points to his left biceps.

Teresa walks us toward a gray granite headstone, flush to the earth.

BOBBIE HESS

9-10-45 † 11-3-03

To the left of her name, the stonecutter has chiseled an open book. The pages, blank.
To the right side of her name, he’s cut what looks to be a large zero. I ask why they
chose those icons.

“Those were the two things she loved most,” Teresa says. “Mysteries and Ohio State.
For a while, instead of doing the Ohio State ‘O,’ we talked about a teddy bear. But
we worried people would think this is the grave of a little girl.”

“Thank you for bringing me here,” I say.

“We should thank you. Your search for answers has brought answers to us. Tim and I
both feel closer now to Bobbie. I think maybe now we understand her sadness a bit
more.”

She shakes my hand.

“We’re going to take a drive. We want to see the leaves before they all fall. There’s
a road we know.”

#

The ground on Bobbie’s plot is unsettled. It’s not like Zach’s grave. His is smooth.
Lush.

I feel the need to stand here. Summoned. In some way, it’s the same sense of duty
I used to feel when I rode my bike to the cemetery and stood before my father’s grave.
The belief that I need to honor this person and, when I do so, some sort of Moment
will give itself to me.

But it doesn’t.

There’s just the wind and the sky—like over a runway. Huge and blue. The sun on my
face is warm. Autumn’s last crickets chirp, hidden in the meadow. Some night soon
the first frost will descend, silence them. Milkweed, goldenrod, thistle, sumac—all
faded now. Their seeds, ransacked. Safecracked by birds unseen. A white butterfly
stumbles past and I follow it with my eye. As it rises toward the tree line, I see,
on the edge of the cemetery, a lone purple-martin birdhouse, stuck high on a pole.
Empty. Behind it, the woods are choked with crab apple, oak, and beech. Eastern hardwoods.
Old growth. And now, from beyond the trees, somewhere at first I cannot see but only
feel coming up through the ground—the steady rumble of a locomotive on iron tracks.
A chain of rusting, groaning cars, coupled together. The Wisconsin & Southern. Boxcars
loaded down with freight. Coal cars filled to spilling with the dark fuel that men
pull from the earth. Car after car, farther than I can see. Borne on tracks to parts
unknown. Borne.

#  #  #

In one of her final reviews for her “Book ’Em, Bobbie!” column in the
San Francisco Examiner,
headlined
ART IMITATES LIFE IN “LAST CITY ROOM,”
Bobbie begins with the novel’s opening scene, in which a twenty-four-year-old reporter
named William Colfax is on a job interview with William Burns, the legendary editor
of the
San Francisco Herald,
when suddenly a commotion from the far side of the City Room catches their attention.
Both men turn to see two medics pushing a gurney with someone on it. Bobbie quotes
from the book: “Colfax could see it was a man on the gurney and instantly knew, by
his gray skin and blue lips, that he was dead. Across the city room, reporters were
standing, more out of respect than curiosity, and the noise that had filled the room
was suddenly muted. Then one of them, a woman with a cigarette in her hand, began
clapping, scattering ashes on the wooden floor and sending up a puff of smoke with
each clap. Soon she was joined by others until the whole room was applauding in a
slow, rhythmic cadence until the doors to the lobby swung shut and the gurney was
out of sight.”

Burns tells Colfax that the staff of a newspaper always claps for a colleague who
dies at their desk and that at the end of their shift, the newspapermen and women
will walk to their bar across the street and drink to the memory of the dead man.
Burns then goes on to say that, thanks to the dead man’s “sudden departure,” there’s
an opening on the city desk.

Bobbie ends her review by writing, “If you have been in the newspaper trade for any
length of time, you have met every character in the book. The final day of the
Herald
will make you feel like you are reading your own obituary.”

#  #  #

Mysteries and a flawed obituary. What Bobbie loved, what my father was.

In the end, my father’s mystery is undone by what he loved most and what he lived
for: good reporting. Who, what, where, when, how, and why. All it takes is one man
asking questions. One man filling in the holes in the story. His story. His obituary.

My father. From the day he died, I wanted to grow up and be just like him. To follow
in his footsteps.

Careful what you wish for, son.

Leaving Tiffin, all I can think about is my mother. How can I tell her what I now
know? I think, too, about how close he came to pulling it off. Not just my uncle but
my father. How it’s all just a matter of minutes. A minute later, he’s left her house.
A minute later, maybe he truly does die on the street. A minute later, maybe he’s
driving Lake Shore Drive, feeling ill, swerving into a light pole. He slumps against
the wheel, chest to horn, a long wail that does not stop until help arrives.

Too late.

Minutes earlier, he’s at the bar with Tom Moffett. Feels a sting in his head. His
eyes go focusless. He squints through the pain. Moffett looks at him: “Bob, you all
right?” He puts his hand to his brow, thumb and index fingers on his temples, like
a man trying to block out a prying sun. He squeezes his temples, angles his head down,
his hand sliding down over his face, just before he crumples off the stool to the
floor of the bar.

Minutes later—he’s home, the kitchen door clicking closed behind him. He exhales.
Made it, he thinks. Pulls a chair, sits down
at the table, bends over, and unties his shoes. Whoa, he thinks, there’s something
wrong here. He lifts his head. But the dizziness won’t stop. His head feels like a
balloon full of lightning. A stinging, a striking. He can’t see.

Just a minute, and no one ever knows. Just a minute, and he gets away with it. Just
a minute, and he gets the tragic death. Just a minute, and the truth shifts.

#

We raise our dead at our own peril. And theirs, too. Consider the tale of Lazarus.
As a boy, I lived for his story.

There’s Jesus, out preaching with his disciples, when he receives word that his good
friend Lazarus is on his deathbed. Jesus, however, chooses not to visit his dying
friend.

Days pass. Finally, Jesus decides to go. But by the time he gets there, Lazarus is
dead. His sisters, Mary and Martha, are distraught, saying that if Jesus had been
there, Lazarus would not have died. They weep. They gnash. They throw themselves at
Jesus’s feet.

Lazarus’s friends whisper, “He opened the eyes of the blind man, could he not have
prevented this man’s death?”

Jesus goes to Lazarus’s tomb. He orders the men to roll away the stone.

They refuse.

Martha tells Jesus that Lazarus has been entombed four days. She says, What is he
now but rotting flesh? Bones.

Again Jesus tells the men: Roll away the stone.

This time, they do.

Here, I turn the story over to John, in his Gospel:

Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, here! Come out!” The dead man came out,
his feet and hands bound with bands of stuff and a cloth round his face. Jesus said
to them, “Unbind him, let him go free.”

That’s the end of Lazarus’s story.

A man returns from the dead and we hear nothing from him.

#

And here’s my question: Who said Lazarus ever wanted to come back to us, to return
from the dead? And maybe just as important: If our dead did come back to us, what
would we do with them?

#  #  #

I receive an e-mail from Kay, my father’s childhood friend back in McCook, inviting
me to a reunion of my father’s high school class.

“Everybody loved Bones,” Kay writes, using my father’s high school nickname. “I’m
sure they would have many stories to share with you. I know everyone would love to
meet you.”

#

I get to town at 5 p.m., just enough time to check in to my room at the Chief Motel.
It’s the same place I stayed when I came here with my brother, nephew, and cousin.
They give me a room overlooking the indoor pool.

My father’s class has planned dinners for tonight and tomorrow. During the day, there
will be, as Kay tells me in her e-mail, “festivities in town,” as McCook is hosting
Heritage Days, the annual celebration of its founding.

I’m fine with everything until I get to the door of Bieroc’s, the café where the dinner
is being held. That’s when it hits me. What am
I doing? Who do I think I am? Knowing a truth, yet not revealing it. Coming here to
gather material from trusting people who have no idea what I know.

“Son of Bones?” Yes, I am. A stinking skeleton walking the streets of McCook. But
right now I feel like a vampire.

I glance into the window: white hairs and bald heads, all of them chatting and happy.
This is what you came for, I say to myself.

I open the door. Faces turn to look at me. I’m too nervous to look at them.

I spot Kay. She is talking to two women. Kay sees me clinging to the door. She comes
to me and hugs me. She smells like lavender and her hands are soft. She asks why I’m
shaking.

“I was fine until I got to the door, and then everything kind of hit me. I don’t think
I thought this through.”

“Don’t be silly,” she says. “A lot of people here want to meet you.”

She holds my hand, guides me from cluster to cluster.

“This is Bones’s son,” she says over and over.

#

People at round tables eat ham sandwiches, potato chips out of small bags, and macaroni
salad. There’s red wine and white wine in boxes with spigots. And that coffee in Thermoses
labeled
REGULAR
and
MIDWESTERN
.

I’m sitting next to Kay, drinking a glass of red wine, when Elinor Nielson gets up
and welcomes everyone to the reunion. She says that there are forty-five classmates
here tonight. “We had one hundred and eight in the class. Thirty-five have passed.
So, we’re doing pretty darn good!” People clap. She says she thinks it’ll be fun if
we go around the room and get updates from everyone, what they’ve been doing since
they last gathered.

Jim Daume tells us he’s been married for fifty-one years and “it’s been a great life.”

Ed Kramer stands. “I’m proud to be from McCook. Some of you
know I lost my second wife in January. I live in Utah now. I’ve had a good life.”

Tom Hassler stands. “You all know my wife of fifty-one years,” he says, “Patty. My
high school sweetheart.”