Tumbleweeds (26 page)

“No, of course not. I… was surprised, that’s all. I’d had my expectations set on having a girl and now I have to change gears. All I want is for my baby to be born healthy,” she said,
and not to be in any way like his father
.

She wrote immediately to John to tell him the news, and he answered by return mail. “A boy!” his letter began, the exclamation mark punctuating his pleasure. “Have you thought of a name? Could I be called Uncle John, because I plan to love him as if he’s related to me… as I still love and feel related to his father, and in your heart, Cathy, I’m sure you do, too. We must forgive Trey. He’s his own worst enemy. He’ll never know anything is missing in his life until he has it all, and by then, it will probably be too late.”

Cathy folded the letter and slipped it into the family Bible as she had all the others from John.
Forgive Trey?
She did not know if that was possible. It was enough that she did not hate him, but how could she hate him as long as love for him still burned in her heart—as long as memories of the two of them before that last afternoon in Aunt Mabel’s parlor were like flames she could not snuff out? “Time heals everything,” people said, but Cathy imagined time no more able to diminish her pain than the daily swipe of an eagle’s wing could reduce the size of a mountain.

That day, the local paper had featured a picture of Trey—a rookie—released by the
Miami Herald
, firing a pass to a wide receiver during the fourth quarter of a game already in the bag for the Hurricanes. L
OCAL
S
TAR
S
HINES IN
M
IAMI’S
G
ALAXY
read the headline above a shot of Trey in his flawless passing pose, his features familiar behind his face guard. Cathy had caught sight of the photo as she turned the pages looking for grocery coupons and stared at it, dazed
to the point of dizziness, stunned by the rush of warmth between her thighs.

Bennie frowned when she told him the results of the sonogram, his unspoken concern the same as hers. A thoughtless remark had already been thrown out at Bennie’s by a male member of the Bobcat Booster Club speculating that maybe Kersey had another quarterback in the making. “Sure hope so,” his coffee-drinking buddy had agreed. “The boy will have an uphill climb if he doesn’t have that going for him.”

Bennie said with a lilt of hope in his voice, “Maybe the boy will have the fine blond hair and blue eyes of his pretty mother.”

“Maybe,” she said, but her son’s likeness to Trey wouldn’t matter. Trey wouldn’t matter, for when John came home for the Thanksgiving holidays she would ask him to marry her and be the father of her child.

O
ther than an occasional letter from his aunt and sundry throwaway junk mail, Trey’s mailbox remained empty. There were days when he did not even bother to check it. Gil Baker at Texas Tech and Cissie Jane Fielding at the University of Texas would have loved to start a correspondence with him (Bebe Baldwin, Cissie’s roommate—never!), but they’d only make hay out of Cathy and he wasn’t interested in Gil’s braggadocio or Cissie’s meaningless prattle. Trey would bet John received lots of mail—from Cathy, Bebe, Gil, Miss Emma, Aunt Mabel, Father Richard, some of their teammates, and girls from their class. They’d all been crazy about John more than him because John was a gentle tease whereas his kidding could have a sharp edge. Everybody had felt safe with John. Apparently no one from his hometown had asked for his address. Trey felt a warm sense of injustice at the snub.
If only they knew!
He was lonely to hear from someone from Kersey in whose estimation he had not foundered—at least as a football player—and he decided to write to Coach Turner.

Miami had opened its 1986 season as the third-ranked team in the country and had climbed to number two after winning its first three games. Trey relished relating to his former high school coach how the starting quarterback was teaching him things that only a great player
of the game could know and share. “I’m learning what he said he learned by sitting on the bench watching guys like Jim Kelly, Mark Richt, and Bernie Kosar,” Trey wrote.

Trey reread the letter and, satisfied with its contents, posted it. He waited four days for the letter to arrive, imagining Coach Turner’s pleasure when he slit open the envelope with the return address of his All-State quarterback. He gave it another four days before he started haunting his mailbox for a reply. None came. Frustrated, puzzled, he wrote again out of fear that his first letter had gone astray. Again, no response. Worried that something had happened to Coach Turner, he telephoned his aunt to express his concern.

“Oh, Trey, I’m sorry I didn’t let you know,” Mabel said. “How thoughtless of me.”

“Know what?”

“Tara died about a month ago.”

“What?”

“Of a burst appendix. Of course, it was quite sudden. The Turners are bereft. That’s why you haven’t heard from Ron.”

“I’ll… I’ll send him a condolence card, and when you see him, tell him I’m… thinking about him.”

“I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear that, Trey, and I know he’d appreciate the card.”

The card and another letter went unanswered. Trey tried to mitigate the feeling he’d been dropped from his coach’s A-list. A daughter’s death took a long time to get over, but considering how close he and Coach had been, Tara’s loss didn’t explain why he couldn’t at least drop him a line like he’d asked him to. Trey finally had to accept that Coach had not replied to his letters because of his bad treatment of Cathy. Coach had really liked her. She’d been his top student in history class, and it had been easy to see he wished his daughter were more like her. His father’s sympathy had overridden his affection for his All-State quarterback, and he no longer thought of him as a son.

If only the man knew the truth.

At the first of November, Trey was astounded to draw an envelope from his box with the return address of Loyola University, only the second one he’d received from John. Apprehensive, he ripped it open with no intent to reply, but he read the enclosed letter hungry to hear John’s voice talking to him from the page, because he wrote like he spoke. In his dry style Trey expected John to admonish and further plead with him to rescue Cathy from her demeaning existence, but he did not. Instead, the letter provoked another kind of dread.

Fear balled like a cold fist inside Trey. The letter reminded him of how much he missed his old buddy. The longing for John’s company and comradeship followed him around like a shadow he couldn’t shake. But this new peace John craved… Would living “the life of Saint Ignatius” someday move him to make a clean breast of what had happened “that day in November” to Sheriff Tyson and put the hearts of the Harbisons finally to rest?

Would he, TD Hall, have to go through college, the NFL, waiting for the other shoe to fall?

J
ohn put a shoulder to the front door of his house and pushed. His key worked, but the door had stuck from disuse. Apparently his father had not had occasion to open it in a long time. The wood creaked, and the immediate smell of a house long closed up assaulted him as he stepped inside. He left the door open to allow in a draft of cold November air and called, “Pop?”

No answer. John set down his duffel and walked through the living room past a small dining room that had not been used since his mother’s demise and into the kitchen. He was surprised to find it relatively orderly. Dishes had been left to dry in the rack, the table was clear of newspapers and carry-out sacks, and the stove top looked wiped clean. A dish towel hung from its proper peg. The wastebasket contained no trash or liquor bottles.

Something about the absent air of the house different from other long spells his father had been away steered him into Bert’s bedroom, a place John hadn’t stepped foot in since the morning he’d found a strange woman on his mother’s side of the bed. He opened the closet and was strangely unsurprised to find it empty of all but a few bent clothes hangers remaining on the rods. Bureau drawers were empty.
The bed was made, but a lift of the spread revealed no sheets. He looked for a note but found none.

In his room, he discovered an envelope on his pillow on which had been scrawled:

Bert Caldwell. Not
Pop
or
Dad
. Now he knew.

Outside, he removed several bricks from the foundation of a gazebo, his mother’s reading haven, the only attraction in the brown, weed-infested backyard, and found a small strongbox in her hiding place. Inside was an envelope containing ten one-hundred-dollar bills and the deed to the house, which his father had taken the trouble to have transferred to John’s name.

John felt nothing for a moment standing there under the Panhandle sky, the wind tugging at his hair on this sharp but sunny Thanksgiving Day. The man who’d called himself his father was gone, perhaps forever, from his life. He held in his hand all of value Bert Caldwell had possessed. An odd sadness crept into his heart. The man had loved his mother once. John had fuzzy memories of his oil field–toughened father’s tender embraces of her, his gruff affection for him. Their family had been happy enough. But all that changed after John turned four, and now he realized that his mother’s confession of her infidelity had robbed Bert Caldwell of the husband and father he might have been.

How different life would have played out for all of them if she’d confessed only to her priest.

Peace go with you, Pop.

John reset the bricks and carried the packet of bills and deed into
the house. He’d use the money for expenses and take the document to Loyola for safekeeping until time came to part with the sum of his worldly goods. He’d have to spend part of his holiday boarding up the house and arranging for the utilities to be turned off when he left—this time for good, he realized with another jerk of his heart.