Eli the Good (25 page)

“Stanton!” I heard Nell’s scream, which sounded as if it had been ripped up out of the bottom of her ribs. She was running faster, her hands curled up into fists that punched at the air as she ran. Her bell-bottoms sailed like flags around her calves, and her peasant blouse rode up, exposing her white belly. She had plaited her hair, and the braid trailed out behind her like a horse’s tightly woven tail. Her broad, smart forehead was even wider than usual. “Please!”

I walked my bicycle a little closer, still straddling the bar that ran from handlebars to seat. I thought about turning around and riding away. I didn’t want to see my father commit suicide. But it felt wrong to leave, too. I moved onto the edge of the woods and let my bicycle fall to the ground. I squatted down beside it.

I didn’t dare get too close, though. I thought he might see me out of the corner of his eye and be so ashamed that he would go ahead and step off.

I felt what he felt when he stood there. I believed that at the time, anyway. I imagined what was going through his mind.

Rain on big leaves.

Lightning that came down and touched the top of his best friend’s head.

The soldier he killed, the way he crumpled down and his hand stretched out, his fingers uncurling and letting go of the gun, my father standing over him and seeing that he was just a person, imagining that the man had children and a family and a home somewhere at the end of a jungle path.

All the faceless men whose hearts were stopped by bullets fired from his machine gun. He saw all of them when he slept at night and gave each of them faces.

Children lining the road, dressed in long sleeves beneath the broiling sun, their hands out. My father placing halves of Hershey bars there.

Thinking of me and Josie when he looked into their eyes.

Thinking of these children’s dead fathers or mothers he had seen lying near the huts.

Rows of men marching through rice paddies, their rifles drawn.

The hostage they kept in the field, with men at four corners, watching the night.

The way the shrapnel bit into his back like shards of glass.

The gunfire and mortars and all the explosions bursting as if he were floating in the sky among a collection of July fireworks instead of lying on foreign land with his face pressed close to the ground.

A field full of dead men, men he knew.

The whir of helicopter blades.

The explosions, the planes that flew very low and let down a rain of napalm that burned up the trees.

And all the trees, the beautiful trees that would always remember his hand upon their trunks as he passed them on his long walks across a country he did not know.

He saw himself strutting down the streets of Boston, a free man now, a survivor.

And two girls spitting at his feet.

“Baby-killer,” they said. Moving through the world like a dream.

Nell was not one to stand back and watch. She ran right up to the bridge railing and put her hands on his ankles. “Stanton, please, God,” she said. They hadn’t really spoken since that night he destroyed the guitar. She gripped his ankles as if she could keep him from jumping this way.

“Go on, Nell,” he said, words spoken by the living dead.

Again I thought my calling out to him the way I had done that night in their bedroom might solve everything. But I was afraid to speak. I was afraid the breath expelled by my voice would swirl through the air and punch him in the small of the back, causing him to fall.

“It’s all right,” Nell said. She had collected herself now and had let go of his ankles. She wiped at her face with the backs of both hands, then held on to the railing. She felt her way down the railing so that she could come to his side and look up at him. He kept his eyes on the river. “Think of Eli and Josie. And Loretta. And me. Don’t you know how much we all worship you?”

“It don’t matter,” he said, just as he had said to my mother about the flag pants. Nothing mattered, that’s what he was saying. “I’ve lost them. I’ve lost everything.”

“No,” Nell said, speaking quickly, shaking her head. “Look at what all you’ve gained since you came back from there. Your own little house and your children and your wife. The station and all the people who look up to you and respect you.”

“I keep seeing that man’s face,” he said.

“You chose life,” Nell said. “Choose it now, Stanton. Don’t do this to your family. It’s too selfish, and that’s one thing you’ve never, ever been.”

He looked at her, jerking his head around as if she had said something insulting.

“Don’t you know how much I loved you?” she said. Her voice shuddered, like someone who has been crying long and hard. There were no tears in her eyes, but her face and voice were full of grieving. She curled in on herself, trembling. She had to keep her brother from killing himself and she knew it. “Can’t you see that that’s why I was out there protesting? It was all for you.”

I crawled closer on my hands and knees, easing along the side of the road in the higher grass and tiger lilies.

Daddy had kept his eyes on Nell the whole time she spoke, but now he turned back to the river. “I could float down and be lost forever,” he said, like a poem. Like a grown man standing in a classroom, reading a poem aloud for his teacher. “I could.”

“Step down from there to me, Stanton,” Nell said, and put her hand on the back of his calf. I thought about the line from that book she had read me at the beginning of the summer:
Only the rocks live forever.
She spread her whole palm out there. “Remember when you were little and would have growing pains? I’d set for an hour and rub your legs. I’d do anything for you when you’s little. I still would. My little brother. I always —” At this she couldn’t contain her grief anymore, her face convulsed with weeping.

“Go on, Nell,” he said again, not wanting to think about all that, not wanting to let the good creep in.

“I’m the one who’s supposed to be dying,” she said, and laughed like a crazy person through her tears. “I have to go first.”

I stood and clung behind a small beech that stood near the road. If I leaned out just enough, I could see them.

Nell put her hand out to him and stood that way a long time, peering up at him, not letting her eyes leave his face. He ignored her hand but she stood right there without moving. I don’t know how she held her arm up that long.

The gloaming had moved on, slipped back up into the sky, and darkness was taking over the valley now. The moon was a white rind above the horizon. One by one the crickets began to call out. Some kind of insect sounded every few minutes, like a tambourine being shaken.

I thought we might be there forever, three people stuck in time.

And then, all at once, he simply put out his hand and took hers. He stepped off the bridge railing as easily as someone coming off a porch step. They didn’t embrace, but he put his arm around her back as they walked toward the truck. He leaned on her like a man with a broken leg. Neither of them spoke.

But then he saw me. I just stood there, feeling an overwhelming sense of sadness wash over me. I had felt alone all of my life, had felt as if my parents only saw each other as they moved through the world, thought they loved each other so much that there was no room to love me. But now, by the way Daddy looked at me, I knew better.

His face is what convinced me. He was so hurt to see me there, to know I had seen all of this. So I knew, once and for all, that he did care if I existed or not.

Daddy walked toward me with his hands out in front of him, his steps picking up speed until he was in a little sprint. When he reached me, he capped his hand around the back of my head and pulled my face into the oily scent of his work shirt, against his belly.

“Oh, God. I’m sorry, buddy,” he said. “I didn’t know you was there.”

I put my arms around his waist. I drew in the scent of the service station that was held within the fabric of his shirt, gas and grease and the cool contained in the shadows of the cement-block garage.

I felt worn out, the same way I had felt the night of the fireworks when all the excitement of the Fourth mixed with my regret over the argument with Edie had completely exhausted me. I suppose my father sensed this, so he picked me up. He placed me in the crook of his right arm, against his hip, and with his left arm he picked up the bicycle, hooking it over his left arm. I laid my head on his shoulder while Nell stood by the truck, watching us.

We bounced back over the rough road toward home. I sat between them, but closer to my father. Not a one of us spoke. I had never been in his truck before when the radio wasn’t playing, but now it was silent, and I listened to the warm grind of the motor, the way the gearshift clicked in a silver sound every time we went over a bump, the redundant sound of the wind searching through the sheaf of papers my father kept tucked behind the visor hanging over his seat. Daddy kept both hands on the steering wheel, his eyes following the yellow headlights, but his side was open and warm to me, so I cowered there against him.

I
don’t believe my mother ever knew how close my father came to jumping off that bridge. I certainly never told her, and I can’t imagine that Nell or Daddy did, either. Maybe he did; they often had long, serious talks when they lay down at night. But somehow I think he knew better than to give her this awful knowledge. She would have been forever worried, even after he finally sought out help later that year. The only time I ever mentioned it was that very night, when I told Josie.

Late that night, I finished Anne Frank’s diary, and I wanted to go over and peck on Edie’s window and let her know that it was now one of my all-time favorites. She had been anxious for me to be done with the book so we could talk about it. Finding out that Anne had died that way, after all that hope and happiness she carried around throughout the book, was almost too much to bear, and I needed to talk to Edie about it, mostly because I didn’t completely understand the way the book had made me feel. I knew that Anne was dead, yet I felt hopeful. That reaction didn’t make any sense.

It was past midnight, so I was easing out the back door when I noticed Josie sitting on the glider — in Nell’s regular spot — completely still.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she said, a little laugh in her voice.

“Over to Edie’s.”

“This late? Her daddy will shoot you one of these days.” She patted the glider seat beside her. “Come talk to me a minute. You’re always off in the woods or somewhere. You used to always be on my heels.”

I sat down and she stretched her arm across my shoulders. “You’re always with Charles Asher or gone,” I said. “Or mad.”

“Well, the Charles Asher part won’t be a problem anymore. We broke up tonight.”

A wash of regret ran down into my belly. “Why’d you do that? I
knew
you’d do that someday.”

She laughed. “Well, it wasn’t up to me. He broke up with me.”

“No
way,
” I said. This was unbelievable. Everybody knew that he was crazy about her.

“He did,” she said. “But it’s all right; I’ll make it.”

Everybody was always talking to me like I was older, like I was their
confidante
(another word that Edie had looked up in her dictionary and tried to use as much as possible — she had once told me that her confidante was the willow tree).

“You were awful to him all the time,” I said. I hated the thought of Charles Asher not being at the house with us anymore.

“I know,” she said, as if speaking to herself, and looked out at the yard.

“You’ve been mad all the time lately,” I told her, and she didn’t say anything, just kept looking out at the darkness like something was moving about out there, something only she could hear. I looked down at her hand, lying there on her lap. Her fingernails were chewed down, the white polish chipped and worn. This made me real sorry for her, but I was still mad at her, too. She was six years older than me, and I thought she was grown, that she had everything figured out. But somehow I also knew that I understood more than she did.

A brief wind slithered through the porch, a sign of oncoming rain. The wind chimes clicked together in the corner, and the night was so still and black that I could hear the corn rustling out in Mom and Stella’s garden.

“Daddy almost jumped off the bridge tonight,” I announced.

She might as well have said “What?” in a shocked way, because I felt this question in the sudden stiffening of her body beside me. She looked at me, and when I didn’t reply for a time, she squeezed my shoulder with her hand. “What are you talking about?”

And so I told her. She listened without interrupting me, but her face replied in all the right places. When I was finished, she leaned over and kissed me. I wondered if her pink lipstick had left a mark on my forehead.

“It’ll be all right,” she said. “Don’t worry so much, okay? You’re too little to be worrying all the time.”

We sat in silence for a time, not moving or speaking, then I went into the house and lay down on the floor so I could pull the yellow Whitman’s Sampler box out from under my bed. I had not had a chance to return the last batch of letters to Mom’s cedar box, since I had come home to find Mom and Josie in their big fight and hadn’t been able to get into the bedroom. After finding Daddy at the bridge, I hadn’t even thought of them again until Mom was already in bed. Now I was glad that I had not had the chance because it was time that Josie saw how Daddy had always been thinking of her while he was in Vietnam. I sat very close to her while she read the letters, pointing out lines where he mentioned her, remembered her, asked about her. She read the letters without speaking, occasionally letting out a little laugh that sounded like pure joy to me, tensing up and not speaking on the worst parts.