Feast for Thieves (29 page)

Gummer Lopez swung by the pine stand one Monday morning when I was out cutting firewood and asked to talk. His need for counsel proved far more pleasant than most. He’d been courting Emma Hackathorn for a few months now and boldly wondered aloud if a fella such as him would ever stand a chance asking Emma to marry him.

“You love her with all your heart?” I asked, setting down my axe.

He nodded.

“She love you the same way?” I asked.

He nodded again.

“What’s the problem?”

Oh, there were a heap of problems, Gummer said. She had the children, for one. And they liked him just fine, and he cared for them a great deal, but he wasn’t sure if he’d be any good as a stepfather to them. Then there was limited time between Emma’s husband passing and now. Gummer wasn’t sure if long enough had passed and worried what folks around town might say. Then there was the whole notion of marriage, Gummer admitted. He couldn’t rightly sort it through in his mind—being attached to one person for the rest of his life. He loved Emma, but he wasn’t sure if he was man enough to go the distance.

“Gummer,” I said, looking at my axe blade, “I don’t know a hill of beans about marriage counseling, but the way I see it, marriage is kinda like baseball. Last month when Boston beat St. Louis in the World Series, every man in town’s got his ear glued to the radio—right?”

He nodded.

“I reckon the problem is you’re closing your eyes whenever you see the ball fly toward you—that’s what. But when it comes to playing in the series, Providence ordains it. Your body demands it. You yourself want to play ball. So step to the plate, man, put your fears to bat, and swing for the fences.”

Gummer left with a smile. I didn’t ask him further what he intended to do, but I reckon he’d tell me when he figured it out for himself.

Another bright spot was that Christmas 1946 came and went with no small amount of joyful fuss. Sunny and I spent every breakfast together now over at the café. She was talking up a storm and even reading a few words, and she drew and colored pictures for me every evening and brought them to me each morning at the café. She loved living with the Hackathorn children, and Emma was enjoying having another little girl around, she told me. Emma and Gummer were spending every wakeful hour together ever since the talk I had with Gummer, and I secretly hoped that if they’d get married one day, and if I ended up in the slammer for a long spell, that Gummer would end up raising my daughter for me. There were far worse plans for my daughter’s future, I reckoned. Far worse indeed. But those were all in our rearview mirror now.

For Christmas I built Sunny a dollhouse and painted it up pink and yellow and leafy green. Bobbie made for her enormous families of rag dolls and stuffed animals—oh, it seemed like every week a new present went to the child. I borrowed a scroll saw and built Sunny a menagerie of birds to play with too. All the birds of
Texas—bobwhite quail and Inca doves and band-tailed pigeons and eagles and Cooper’s hawks, roadrunners and mockingbirds and even a great blue heron.

Sunny’s dollhouse was clean and bright, and Bobbie helped me cut out scraps of flowered wallpaper from some she had left over. Together we built Sunny a home she could delight in. We did.

The first week of January 1947, Bobbie drove over to the parsonage early one morning and asked me to drive up to Rancho Springs with her to visit Cisco at the mental hospital. I was a mite worried about this, seeing as how Cisco had shot at me last time we met. But Bobbie stayed in constant contact with Augusta, and Augusta said Cisco was making real progress and wanted to see folks, even me. This time there’d be no guns.

Bobbie didn’t want to use her jeep for the four-hour drive. The highway was too windy in a jeep, she insisted, even with the soft top put up. There was too much flapping and fussing, and it was hard to carry on talk. I checked the oil in Clay Cahoon’s old Chevy truck, filled up at Gummer’s filling station, and Bobbie and I headed out of town and up the highway. All was quiet for some time on the road. I kept glancing over at the girl, but she kept silent and looked out the window at the passing terrain. Finally about mile sixty she turned to me and asked a question.

“You know anything about Creole?”

“The language?” I checked the speedometer. The pickup rattled along at a cool 45.

“I need to learn it before I can become a missionary in Haiti. Daddy and me talked it over, and the original plan was for me to head over to Dallas this spring to get situated before the language program begins at the university early in the summer. I need to take a full year of language study before heading to Haiti for the
rest of my life. They call it a ‘compressed’ program due to its starting early. But there’s a big question in the mix now—everybody waiting until your trial is over to see what’s what. If you go to jail for any length of time, then the church will need to call a new minister, and that can take up to a year. Sometimes two. So I’ll fill in wherever needed until the new fella arrives. That may delay my studies some.”

I needed to say something, so I offered, “It makes sense for the sake of the town,” and checked the rearview mirror. “But I didn’t know your daddy had thought this through already.”

“My daddy didn’t. I did. I know the money’s here now for me to go right now, but I volunteered to stay on in Cut Eye as long as I’m needed. What I’m saying is I’m not going to Dallas just yet.”

“Well, I guess they could call any ole fella over from the seminary for a spell. If I’m put in jail, then he could work as an interim if you still wanted to go right away.” I downshifted as a semitrailer passed us, and the wind from the truck’s wash shook our Chevy.

“I guess they could.”

“So why you want to stay here?”

“Oh . .” Bobbie fiddled with the door handle. “There’s someone I want to get to know better before I leave Cut Eye for good. Just out of curiosity. Just in case.” The girl tossed her hair and looked out the window again.

“Who’s that—Sunny? I appreciate all those toys you’ve made for her. I truly do.”

The girl didn’t answer right away. She looked back out the window for a while in quietness. Then she said, “You’re fairly stupid, aren’t you.”

A snort came out of my nose. “I don’t think so. And, no, I don’t appreciate you implying that I am. Not everybody can go to university like you.”

“This has nothing to do with university, Rowdy.”

“What then?”

Bobbie started fiddling with her door handle again. “I got a call from my fiancé last week. He stayed with his folks in Houston over break, so we didn’t see each other at Christmastime. He’ll be finished with seminary at the end of May and said that would be a good time for us to hold the wedding.”

“Oh. So you’re asking about the service, then. I’d do it, sure, but I’ll probably be in jail by then—remember.”

“No, it’s not about that,” Bobbie said. “It’s about me asking my fiancé about what we would do after we got married. He said we’d go to China, of course, same as he has always been planning our futures. He didn’t ask my opinion of the matter, so do you know what I said to that?” She was looking at me now. Glancing at my hand on the gearshift.

I shook my head.

“I told him no.”

“No?”

“God’s calling me to Haiti, not China. I don’t want to go to China, and I’m not going to go, even if my fiancé does.”

“So you’re prolonging the wedding plans then—is that what you mean by no?” I glanced over Bobbie’s direction. Her face was set like flint.

“No. That’s not all. It means I don’t appreciate any man making plans for my life. Any man except God, that is.”

The faintest twitch of a smile appeared on my lip. “So what’s this have to do with you calling me stupid?”

“It means—” Bobbie grinned and glanced up from my hand to my face and back down. “I broke off the engagement.”

The tile in the entryway of the hospital was colored green and beige, and I found myself staring at my feet while Bobbie talked to the receptionist. A buzz sounded from behind the glass partition, and a locked door opened to our left as if on command.
Bobbie and I walked through the door and down the long hallway, heading for the room that the receptionist said was Cisco’s.

For a state mental ward everything looked sane to me—no bars on the windows or nothing. It just looked like the inside of a hospital building with rooms and nurses. Off to our right lay a commons area with a sign that read, “Activity Room.” As we walked by I glanced through the windows. Most folks were in their bathrobes. A few were muttering to themselves and a few others were pacing up and down. Two fellas in the corner played ping-pong. Everybody had real messy hair.

We kept walking. Cisco’s room lay at the end of the hallway on the right. Bobbie knocked on the door and Augusta opened it for us. She gave us both long hugs and thanked us for coming. Cisco was doing real well, she said, and invited us into the room.

It looked like a regular hospital room, similar to where I’d stayed when I’d been shot in Holland. There was a bed and some machines with red lights, and on the wall was a painting of a sailing ship.

Cisco was dressed in everyday clothes and sat in a chair by the window. The big man was reading and he looked up when we approached.

“Hey y’all,” he said.

“Hey yourself,” we said. Bobbie gave him a hug, and I shook his hand.

Augusta pulled over a chair and offered it to one of us, but it was clear by the knitted afghan on it that it was her chair and she’d spent a lot of time in it these past months while caring for her husband, so we declined and both sat on the edge of the bed.

“I’ll get right to it,” Cisco said. “They’re letting me out next week. I’m coming home to Cut Eye and the café. But before I come home I wanted to apologize for taking a shot at you, Rowdy.”

“Don’t give it another thought,” I said. “You were hurting in a powerful way.”

“I was out of my mind, that’s what,” Cisco said. “I’ve got some pills now, and the folks here have been awful good about talking to me about things. Helping me to see things in new ways, I mean.”

Augusta beamed. “He’s doing real well, real well indeed.” She looked at me. “How’s the food at the café been while I been gone?”

“Nothing’s the same.” I rubbed my belly. “We can’t wait ’til you both get back.”

They both smiled. We was all being polite, we was.

“Mr. Wayman?” Bobbie said. “I wonder if I could ask you a question?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Looks like you’ve been doing a lot of reading since you’ve been here. Did you come to any answers?”

“Answers?”

“About God being responsible for Danny’s death.”

I glanced at Cisco but his face showed no expression. Boy, that Bobbie could sure drive straight to the heart of the matter when she wanted. There was a long pause. Augusta squirmed in her chair.

“No,” Cisco said.

“Nothing at all?” Bobbie asked.

“I’ve been doing a heap of reading, that’s for sure,” Cisco said. “And I can give you a lot of answers that come out of books, that’s probably right. God’s not the author of sin; he didn’t dream it up, I know that. He allows things to happen for reasons we don’t understand, I get that. We need to have faith—of that I’m sure. But the answer is still no.”

“I think that’s an okay answer to arrive at,” Bobbie said.

Cisco sighed. “You know, me asking the question I asked of Rowdy just before I shot at him—the inquiry into why didn’t God do something to stop my son dying—there was nothing crazy about me asking that question. The only crazy thing was me shooting at Rowdy after I asked it.”

We all chuckled at that, but Cisco stopped chuckling quickly, so we all stopped too.

“I spent a lot of time reading the book of Job,” Cisco said. “There’s a fella who starts with everything and ends with nothing, and in the end God doesn’t give him an answer why it happened. So that’s the only sensible answer I came up with. I don’t know why God allowed my son to die, and I may never know the answer, and I’m not okay with that. I’m truly not. When I think of Danny, my gut aches deep within me, and I believe it always will. But God is God and I’m not God, and that’s the only answer a man is given.”