Tumbleweeds (33 page)

“I’m doing my best to keep my head down and my faith up,” John’s letter had stated. “It’s not an easy balance, and I have my anxieties,
believe me. It’s sort of like the feeling I used to get when I was reaching for a first-down ball and knew a two-hundred-pound linebacker was a grunt away.”

Trey had yearned to write him back and tell him to get his damn butt out of there, but of course he didn’t. He wrote a check instead and sent it anonymously to the Catholic Relief Fund for Guatemala. After that he searched every mail delivery for a letter from John and when none arrived, crazy with worry—surely Aunt Mabel would have told him if something had happened to John?—Trey had telephoned her for news. John had managed to get out of Guatemala with his hide, she’d told him, and next summer he was to be sent to India, where he hoped to meet Mother Teresa. Meanwhile, he was teaching at a Catholic high school in New Orleans and coaching football.

Trey had felt a deep loss when John stopped writing and could guess at a number of reasons why he had. One, John had given up trying to lure him back into the fold, presumably to Cathy’s side. She was still unmarried, and her baby was almost four years old. Maybe John had come to realize that the friend he’d sacrificed so much of his soul for wasn’t worth his effort and time. That thought made Trey’s nerve ends stand on end. If that was the cause of John pulling out on him, what was to keep him from going to the authorities—and the Harbisons—with the truth of that November afternoon? Or maybe John had simply grown tired of receiving no response from him, or he’d gotten too busy to write, or he thought he didn’t care to hear from him. None of his speculations quite fit the friend Trey remembered. Once in John’s heart, always in John’s heart. He was tenacious when it came to holding on to people he loved.

At the time, Trey had just signed with the San Diego Chargers and was looking forward to living the lifestyle of the rich and famous or, rather, the grossly overpaid and notorious. He’d lost all contact with home except for the tidbits Aunt Mabel fed him of local happenings and people, including Cathy’s childhood friend from California,
Laura Rhinelander. She had entered medical school. He could imagine how the information had affected Cathy. He’d felt for her feelings, and the blues had trailed him around all day like a bad dream he couldn’t shrug off.

Rufus died that year. The news opened the floodgates. It was like a lever had been pulled, and all the sadness Trey had kept dammed up poured out in his grief for the dog. He’d always thought of Rufus as belonging to him, and Aunt Mabel had told him that the dog never failed to perk his ears and run from room to room looking for him when he heard his voice on television. What bothered Trey the most was not being with Rufus to say good-bye. As the years passed, Laura Rhinelander graduated from medical school, Cissie Jane married and divorced, Bebe Baldwin stayed on at Bennie’s but was promoted to manager. Gil Baker came home to help his father run the family’s feedlot, Ron Turner, who’d not had a championship season since 1985, retired under duress, and Miss Whitby, thirty-seven, unmarried, and still a scatterbrain, was killed in a car accident.

A vortex of memories had spun through Trey’s brain at the report of her death. “Hall, what the hell is the matter with you today?” his quarterbacks coach had yelled at practice the day he learned. “What’s eating you, son?”

His coach had caught him emotionally and mentally in the back row of Miss Whitby’s homeroom the January day in 1979 when Cathy walked into the room. “There’s been a death in the family,” he’d said.

It was 1995, and he was twenty-seven. No female connection had worked since Cathy. He’d been married briefly to a model who grew tired of the walls she’d failed to scale and in and out of relationships with women he dumped as soon as he grew weary of them, a frequent occurrence. He had established a reputation as one of those high-profile bachelor athletes to steer clear of if a girl didn’t wish to be chewed up like a delicious plum and tossed away like a pit. Those who traded in gossip of famous sports figures never bothered to examine
the possible cause of his fickleness that other superstars who attracted girls because of their fame and money understood. Only Cathy had loved him for himself alone.

Aunt Mabel had not mentioned her or her son’s name to him since Trey’s freshman year in college. When she’d visit him in California, the Bensons were never brought up, but in regaling him of the latest goings-on in Kersey their exclusion was as conspicuous as the missing page of a book. He forgot the faces and bodies and names of the girls who flitted in and out of his life, but Cathy’s remained inerasable, as persistently stuck in memory as the lines of a poem he’d memorized in grade school.

Cathy’s son would be twelve by now. He and Cathy were sure to attend the ordination service.

“Mind if I come in?”

Trey batted the moisture from his eyes. Yes, he did mind, but she was nicer than the usual girls and she’d been thoughtful to make coffee. “Reading your mail?” she asked, setting a cup before him. She wore a loose robe over a teddy, and he hoped she didn’t invite herself to sit on his lap and play with his hair.

“Uh-huh. I didn’t get to it last night.”

She grinned at him. “You did have other things on your mind.”

He did not rise to the insinuation, and to his annoyance she picked up the invitation. “What an impressive cover. What do the initials
A.M.D.G.
and the dissecting cross mean?”

“They’re Latin for
Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam
, which means ‘For the greater glory of God.’ It’s the motto of the Jesuits.”

She cocked a surprised brow. “You know about stuff like that?”

Her meaning was clear. His hedonistic image did not jibe with someone who would have knowledge of religious matters. When the Internet first became available for home use, Trey had researched the Order of the Society of Jesus and read countless testimonies from ordinands explaining what had drawn them toward the priesthood.
It was the celibacy issue Trey couldn’t understand. It wasn’t normal for a man to deny himself his God-given urges. John had as strong a libido as he, if more restrained. Bebe must have thought John had lost his mind when he told her he wanted to become a priest. Or maybe… after Cathy no other woman would do.

A search through the Internet yielded an answer. Catholic priests were called to be “espoused” to God and the Church, Trey read, “because it frees the individual to concentrate solely on the concerns and needs of the larger family of God without the distractions associated with marriage. This spiritual concept is the reason why family words—father, brother, sister—are used to refer to those in a religious vocation.” One priest wrote: “People don’t choose celibacy because they don’t want to get married. Quite the contrary. They choose to live the celibate life in order to give an undivided heart entirely to God and man.” Trey remembered Aunt Mabel writing emotionally that when John took his first vows he’d said he was aware of the sacrifice of a wife and children of his own for a much larger family in the Church.

But if John had known the truth, would he have made the sacrifice of his son and the girl he loved to set out on his journey for atonement?

The years-old question usually kicked in late at night when Trey couldn’t sleep, and there were times he’d be at his computer in the study reading of the order of John’s calling when the sun rose through the window behind him and lit the screen.

She opened the invitation. “My goodness,” she said in admiration when she’d read it. “Who is John Robert Caldwell?”

He retrieved the card. “An old friend.”

“You’ve never mentioned him to me.”

“I suppose not.”

“There’s no
suppose
to it, Trey. You never have.”

He swiveled his chair away from her and got up. This was the point where his girlfriends accused him of shutting them out. He would lay money on what she would say next.

“Trey, why don’t you ever share anything about your past with me?”

He’d have won his bet.

“Look, Tangi, why don’t you get dressed? There’s no point in hanging around here. I’m going for a run, and the rest of the day I’ve got things to do. I don’t know about tonight, either. I’ll have to give you a call.”

The look came on her face he’d left on many a girl’s when she knew it was over. “Was it something I said?” she asked, her voice small and hurt, like a child’s.

“No,” he said gently, drawing her into his arms. He pressed a kiss to her forehead. He’d liked her and they’d had a good time. “Nothing you said or did or didn’t do. It’s… just the way I am… who I am.”

“A very hollow man,” she said, pulling away, closing her robe. “I’m sorry for you, Trey.”

“Me, too,” he said.

T
urning her neck with difficulty, Cathy glanced across the aisle to give Will a smile. The aircraft’s wheels had popped down in preparation for landing at the New Orleans International Airport. It was his first plane ride, and he was one year older than she’d been in 1979 when, at eleven, she’d taken her last trip by air. Her son returned her smile and leaned toward her. Nearly six feet in height, he blocked Mabel’s view behind him.

“How’s the neck?”

Cathy kneaded the area of her left carotid. She’d awakened with a painful crick in her neck. “Sore, darn it. Let’s hope it unkinks by the time of the ceremony.”

She did not want to miss a single detail of the ordination service. John would be entering from the rear of the church and she hoped to follow his every step in the procession. She and Will were to be seated in the first row, and to see everything would take quite a bit of neck craning.

Beside her, Emma said, “John is going to be surprised at how much his godson has grown since the last time he saw him.”

It had been a year, and in those months time had begun to refine Will’s facial features and physical build. Cathy saw Trey’s
chromosomes at work in her son’s dark hair, deep brown eyes, and athletic grace, but missing were the chameleon temperament and cocksure manner that had set his father apart at that age. Though he was already catching the eyes of the girls, was an exceptional student, class leader, and baseball stand-out, there wasn’t anything remotely swaggering about Will. He possessed what his father never had—a rare combination of humility and confidence.

The June before, John had come home for a couple of weeks between completion of a Masters of Theology degree and a summer assignment to gain pastoral experience at a parish in Chicago. Will had not been able to get enough of his company. Out of school for the summer, he and John had hung out in the school gymnasium shooting hoops and on the baseball diamond, where Will practiced hitting John’s fastballs. John had bunked at Father Richard’s, but he’d spent his days with Will while Cathy ran Bennie’s, the two of them stopping by the café for a hamburger at noon, then taking off again on some outdoor expedition—horseback riding and hiking in Palo Duro Canyon, fishing and sailing on Lake Meridian, the type of pursuits John and Trey had enjoyed at Will’s age.

The two had turned brown as saddle leather and were thoroughly played out by mealtimes when they sat as a family around Emma’s table, then watched television together until it was time for John to leave for Father Richard’s.

Will had pined when John had gone, and Cathy had recognized in him the kind of loneliness that only an abandoned and orphaned child can know—the sundown blues, she and John and Trey had called it, because they felt their forsakenness the deepest at dusk. It was another one of those times when she would have gladly wrung Trey’s neck. His name had not been brought up among them for some time, not even by Mabel, and Cathy wondered if Will ever thought of him or fantasized what it would be like to grow up as the wanted son of TD Hall.

“Will knows that you and Trey grew up together,” she said to John. “Does he ever ask you about his father?”

“Never. Not once.”

“Do you ever speak of him?”

“No.”

Others remarked to Will on his father successfully leading the San Diego Chargers to the NFL play-offs season after season—some to get a reaction—but Will stolidly added no comment of his own, and after he turned nine Cathy never heard him speak Trey’s name again.

“He’s come to a realization and accepted it,” Emma had observed.

“I wish I knew what was going on in his head. He feels deeply and says little. I don’t want him to hate his father or become embittered by him, but what can I say to defend Trey’s denial of him?”

“All you can do is what you’re doing—adding no fuel to the fire and making him understand that in the long run a person becomes who and what he is because of himself, not his parentage.”

“I hope it’s working.”

“It is.”

There were times Cathy was not so sure. When Will was ten, she’d found a
Sports Illustrated
magazine hidden under his mattress. The cover featured Trey Don Hall in a classic quarterback pose, arm back to pass, the other outstretched, his uniform showing the ravages of a hard-fought game. One-third of the four-page article was devoted to his phenomenal staying power and luck in having survived seven years in the NFL without injury. Chronicled were his verbal run-ins with the news media as well as examples of his satirical exchanges with female TV reporters who stuck a microphone into his face at halftime and after a game. It was Trey’s opinion that “women have no business on a football field unless they’re shaking ass and pom-poms.”