Dogwood (13 page)

The only time I ever saw my father at odds with Jasper was when the people of the church complained about Jasper’s dog. He was a short-haired mongrel that loped through the cemetery like it was his own, with the proclivity to lift his leg on some of the most well-to-do members planted in the ground.

My father was elected to tell Jasper the bad news that his dog—unnamed by Jasper but Carson and I called it “Urine”—would have to go. I was with him, skirting the edges of their lopsided conversation. “We just can’t have a dog peein’ and poopin’ on the graves, Jasper. It’s nothing personal.”

Jasper mumbled louder than I had ever heard him. His sentences were filled with
n
and
h
sounds, punctuated with the dribble and spit of the tobacco juice. He pointed past the church toward the road. “Nat daw obaan mmhn behh ahhn moh kihh huh cuh aroh heeh,” he yelled.

Afterward, with my father’s help, I had pieced together his argument and that one sentence: “That dog obeys me better than
most kids who come around here.” Jasper was right. The dog did obey, but when Jasper wasn’t around or was tending the back plots, the animal had a mind and direction of its own.

Jasper seemed perplexed that anyone could feel his dog wasn’t hospitable. In fact, he was known to nuzzle the preacher’s hand when he read, “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust . . .” The mongrel seemed to have an uncanny ability to pick out the most bereaved in the crowd and sit at their feet.

“I’m sorry,” my father said. “I really am. The people are serious about this. They say if the dog doesn’t go, you’ll have to leave.”

“Wheh I goh tah hmn?”

“I’ve got some friends on a farm over in Hamlin. I can ask them if they need a good dog. Maybe they’ll take him.”

The next day I rode in the middle of the truck, my father to my left and Jasper to my right. The dog sat between Jasper’s legs, sniffing at the wind blasting through the cab of our truck, watching the trees go by, licking and sniffing. They say a dog’s sense of smell is a lot more sensitive than a human’s, and I figured that was why the dog liked Jasper. The man was a veritable olfactory smorgasbord. His clothes hadn’t seen the inside of a washing machine except for the few times he allowed my mother to do a load for him. His boots were caked with the mud of the dead, his armpits smelled cadaverous, and I could only imagine the inside of his home, his bed, his kitchen. I couldn’t even think about his toilet.

Two weeks after Jasper dropped the dog at the farm and waved good-bye to him in that field, Urine returned to the cemetery. I suppose Jasper’s scent was just too strong. Jasper tried to hide him at first, but soon someone from the church called my father, and I accompanied him on one of our longest rides together.

“Why can’t Jasper tie him up?” I said, stating the obvious.

“I’ve told him the same thing, but Jasper says tying up a dog is a sin. I guess he tried it, and it nearly broke his heart to see it run back and forth, wearing a path out beside the trailer.”

“It’s better than losing him, isn’t it?”

“Will, it’s hard to understand some people. Why they do what they do. With Jasper, it’s easy. Because of what he went through as a child, he can’t bear to see an animal caged.”

“What happened to him?”

My father clenched his teeth and thought for a long time. “Let’s just say his parents weren’t the most well-adjusted people on the planet. His mama loved him, but she had other kids to care for, and when she died, his daddy kept him locked up so he wouldn’t go roaming at night.”

“Locked in his room?” I said.

“Something like that.” He shivered and shook his head. “I’ll take you back to their place someday. Maybe. But don’t be too quick to judge Jasper about his dog. Have you seen the way animals sidle up to him?”

“I figured it was because Jasper smells more like a dog than a human.”

Another father would have shamed or scolded, but my dad smiled, his eyes crinkling. “You may be right. But I think it might have more to do with his gentle spirit. Jasper has every right to be angry at the world, but somehow he turned that meanness into goodness. There’s not a soul on earth as close to God as that old boy.”

“I’ve never seen him in church,” I said.

Daddy nodded. “I don’t think he’d be welcome. People would be more concerned about the way he smelled than the state of his soul. But I’ve seen him in the summer standing outside an open window, staring off into the sunset. Seems to me he’s praying. Some people are given a great gift of not caring what others think or about anything but being faithful to what they’re called by God to do. I think Jasper is one of those people.”

We pulled into the church parking lot, and as soon as we closed the doors, Jasper was outside his trailer looking at us. He lived about a hundred yards from the church, and as we came
through the main gate of the cemetery, he darted inside and emerged with something black in his hand. The dog jumped up on him and followed.

“Oh no,” my dad said. “Jasper!”

A shot rang out. It was the only time I ever saw my father step on a grave. He bolted for Jasper’s trailer, and I caught a glimpse of the young man he once was, fast and lean. The wind whipped his hat from his head, and it landed on a fresh grave. I grabbed it, and when I caught up to him, he and Jasper were standing over the dog’s lifeless body. Blood splattered Jasper’s coveralls, and he said something through an expressionless face as he turned over the first shovel of dirt. My father put a hand on the man’s shoulder.

“Mind if I have a minute alone?” I said to my brother.

He checked his watch again. “Yeah. I’ll head back to the car. We should be getting home soon. Jenna—”

“I’ll only be a minute,” I interrupted.

I knelt and studied my father’s stone. It was gray, the kind Daddy said he liked as he roamed the grounds. Not too big. He always had a problem with people or families who thought they were important enough to take two parking spaces. It was the same in death.

“Well, I made it, just like you said,” I whispered. “I came back. I’ll take care of Mama now, for whatever time she has left. I wish I could have been here for you. I wanted to at least say good-bye.”

His face swept through my mind like a flash flood. Pictures of him younger, a sepia tone to his skin. Him asleep on the couch, me watching a game. Him and his father standing by an awning, near an old Chevy, squinting into the sun, a foot apart, hands clasped in front of them, not touching. A grainy video played in my mind, with yellow streaks running through it, the kind you see of those famous stars when a find is made in their basement. Only these movies would never be seen by anyone but our family. My father riding
the tractor. My mother in the kitchen. Carson and I called her “Our Lady of Perpetual Baking Soda.” Shep, our white and brown collie, panting in the summer dust and my father sitting beside him on the porch, a blue sky framed in the background. Those were the images I carried of my father and a thousand more.

A car door slammed, and Carson started the engine.

I patted my father’s headstone in the same way he had patted my head so many times when I was younger. I found a path and walked it, looking from side to side at the graves. Most were early 1900s here, but I was surprised to see one newer stone. At the bottom, under the names and near the ground line, were the words,
“Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.’”

I stood transfixed. Children’s lives taken at such an early age. Lives forever entwined with my story.

Carson honked and I joined him, knowing I was about to enter my hometown, free-falling into a life I had left so many years ago. Fear—metallic and strong, tasting like blood—bubbled up from somewhere under the earth. I had navigated the years away, avoiding taunts and threats and indescribable evil, but this new voyage, coming home, somehow scared me more. I felt out of control, tossed on unending, unforgiving waves. Life has a way of doing that. At one moment you’re moving in a direction that seems sensible, even exciting, and the next you’re hurtling, breaking from orbit, wondering what forces caused gravity to loosen its hold.

What would I say to people who asked what I was going to do with my life?

Carson cut through the belly of Hurricane and under the railroad until he found Virginia Avenue, a familiar stretch of back road that had strangely narrowed in my memory. The homes seemed closer to the road, and I could almost read the fine print in the satellite dishes that dotted the double-wide trailers and small homes. As
kids we would travel this road in search of an open tennis court. There always seemed to be someone on a front porch, kids swinging in a tire suspended from a walnut tree branch, but now the porches were barren and the front windows flickered the light of big-screen televisions.

I remembered when this road was unpaved and the ruts from the trucks taking the back route were so deep that we had to ride the side of the hill, the car pitched precariously at a seventy-five-degree angle. Those were the days before mandatory seat belts and air bags.

We drove in silence, the chirp of crickets and a soft humidity settling over the fields and meandering streams. I had heard the same at Clarkston, a faint, muted melody that somehow seemed too far away to grasp, but here I felt I could reach out and touch it. Grab it with a fist and hold on tightly.

Fireflies—we called them lightning bugs when we were young—drifted up, their rears flashing yellow, as if something was approaching, some unstoppable train that was bearing down on them, and there was nothing they or any of the rest of us could do about it.

Railroad tracks ran to our left, an old freight line that chugged through every evening about this time. Later in the night it would pass the other way, coming and going, a cycle of the hills.

“Think I might find an old Ball jar in the basement tonight and fill it full of those lightning bugs,” I said, breaking our silence.

Carson glanced at me like I was roadkill, a mess of blood and guts by the curb of some five-star restaurant. “Why would you do a fool thing like that?”

I closed my eyes. “Just to see what it feels like. To be a kid again. To get excited about something innocent and pure.”

“Go ahead and bring a big jar of bugs into the house and see what Mama does,” Carson said. Then he thought a moment. “On second thought, after what you’ve been through, it would prob
ably be better to do that the first night and get it over with. She ought to know you’re crazy from the get-go rather than getting her hopes up.”

We crossed under the I-64 bridge, and I read the same spray-painted message I had seen every day on the way home from school twenty years ago: “Dogwood Sucks.” A newer message was written on the other side, where my family could see it every time they drove past: “Fry Will Hatfield.”

Carson frowned. “I asked them to come wash it off or paint over it, but it didn’t do any good.”

“It’s okay. Good to know what I’m up against.”

“Listen, that’s not the half of it. There are some things you’re going to have to get used to. One is that the people around here have good memories. A bunch of them are still fighting Vietnam. Some are still fighting the Civil War, for crying out loud.”

“I know this will be an uphill battle,” I said.

“Yeah, but you don’t know how uphill. That sucker is tall and these people hold a grudge as well as anybody on earth. I don’t know that two lifetimes in jail would satisfy them.”

Telephone poles carried the outside world into the hollow, and electrical wires looked like lifelines. I expected everything to look smaller as we rounded the final turn and saw the house. Instead, the rosebushes and shrubs seemed to have taken over. Trees grew over the road, dangling limbs and branches reaching out to intercept us.

I glanced at my watch and calculated the time it had taken to get from Clarkston, and I figured it was twice as long as if I had driven myself. It was just one more thing I hadn’t done since I’d been arrested—cared about time.

Jenna was at the door as we stepped from the car and made our way to the concrete path. The huge windows of the great room, an extension Carson had designed and helped build, reflected the
golden glow of the evening and the lightning bugs ascending into the mist.

“Hello there, stranger,” Jenna said as she opened the creaky screen door. She gave me a weary smile as my mother appeared, older than I’d expected—grayer, more thinning hair, her face puffy, her hands frail. She took a high step, lifting her leg twice as high as she needed to clear it, then grabbed Jenna’s arm. Jenna gave Carson a look.

“Aw, honey,” my mother said, her eyes filling with tears. She held my face in her hands and shook her head. “I never thought I’d ever see you again.”

“I know, Mama.”

I held her a long time. Finally she pulled away, grabbed her glasses, and wiped her eyes with a paper towel. “Your father would have loved to see this day.”

“I wish he were here.”

“I didn’t sleep at all last night. Was up the whole night praying. Just hoping everything would go okay.” She looked at Carson. “Did you find him all right?”

“Yeah, Mama, he was right where I thought he’d be.”

As Carson helped her inside, Jenna turned and draped an arm over my shoulder. She wore a low-cut blouse and perfume that wafted like a cloud of nuclear waste. She licked her lips, leaned forward, and whispered into my ear, “I’ll bet it’s been a long time since you’ve been this close to a woman.”

I leaned back and tried to smile. “They don’t have many dances up there, if that’s what you mean.”

I took her arm from around me, but instead of moving away, she reached behind me, put both hands in my back pockets, and pulled me close. “Your mama’s a lucky woman to have a man like you around again.”

“Yeah,” I said, stepping back. “I’m not sure she should be all that excited. You know as well as anyone what people will say.”

Jenna crossed her arms. “Nothing they haven’t said for a long time. When my customers find out my last name is Hatfield and who my husband is related to, they get sick and have to cancel their appointments. Most never come back.”