I spent the morning on a cleaning campaign, determined to be helpful. I changed the sheets on Mother’s bed, did the laundry, and scrubbed things that hadn’t been touched in years: the bathroom grout, the venetian blinds, the coils on the back of the refrigerator. I went into the pantry and threw away everything that had expired—two huge bags of stuff. I dragged her rusting golf cart out of the garage and cranked it up to see if it worked, and, eyeing the grimy bathtub grotto, I hooked up the garden hose and gave it a good spray-cleaning.
Through all of this, I thought about Mother’s refusal to talk about my father’s death, her strange mention of Father Dominic.
I thought on and off about Brother Thomas, too. I didn’t mean to—he simply wormed his way in. At one point I’d found myself poised under the exposed lightbulb in the pantry, holding a twenty-eight-ounce can of tomatoes, and realized I’d been replaying some moment with him from the night before.
The day was warm, the sun bearing down with a throbbing winter brightness. Mother and I ate lunch on the front porch, balancing trays on our laps, eating the gumbo neither of us could face the night before. I tried to draw her out again about Dominic, but she sat there shuttered tightly.
Looking for some way, any way, to reach her, I asked if she’d like to call Dee at college, and she shook her head.
I gave up then. I listened to her spoon scratch the bottom of her bowl and knew I would have to find out about Dominic some other way. I doubted she would ever talk to me about anything, that we’d get to the “root of things,” as Hugh had called it. I hated that he was probably right. It made me determined.
After lunch she lay down on her bed and took a nap. It was as if she were making up now for all the lost sleep. While she dozed, I slipped into her room to get the name of her doctor from the prescription bottle, telling myself I should call him. But I never even copied it down.
I stood gazing at her dresser, the ceramic Mary with the plump Jesus planted on her hip. The drawer was right there. I pulled it out. The wood scraped, and I looked back at the bed. She didn’t move.
The inside of the drawer brimmed with holy cards, rosaries, a prayer book, old photographs of Dee. I groped through all her cherished clutter as quietly as I could. Exactly the way I’d done when I was a child. Was the clipping still here? My heart was beating very fast.
Near the back my fingers bumped against something slender and hard. I knew what it was before I pulled it out. I froze for a second or two, the air bristling around me, bracing myself before I pulled it up.
It was the pipe I’d given my father.
I glanced again at Mother, then held it up to the light slanting through the window, and nothing made sense to me. My knees felt like sponges, wet and squishy—it was impossible to keep standing. I sat down on the chair.
How could the pipe be in the drawer? When had she put it here? It should have been at the bottom of the ocean along with the Jes-Sea, along with my father. I’d played it out in my mind so many times—the way it must have happened.
Joseph Dubois, standing on his boat in the last stain of darkness, looking east to where the sun has just lifted its shiny forehead over the water. He often took his boat out then to “greet the dawn”—that was his phrase for it. Mike and I would come to breakfast, and Dad would not be there, and we would say, “Is Dad still greeting the dawn?” We thought it was a common thing people did, like getting their hair cut. He would go alone on these excursions, smoke his pipe unperturbed, and watch the sea become a membrane of rolling light.
I’d pictured him on the last morning of his life tapping his pipe on the rail. Have you ever seen how sparks fly from the bowl of a pipe, how far they travel? He taps his pipe, and, unknown to him, the fuel line is leaking. One ember, a hundred times smaller than a moth, flies onto a drop of gas in the well near the engine. There is a pop, a puff of flame. The fire leaps from puddle to puddle like a stone skipping water. It lunges and crackles, and I always imagine that this is the moment he turns, just as the flames slam into the gas tank, the moment when everything blazes and bursts apart.
I’d envisioned it this way so often that I couldn’t fathom it happening any other way. And everyone had said as much—the police, the newspaper, the entire island.
I closed my eyes. I felt that the centerpiece of my history had been dug up and exposed as a complete and utter fiction. It left a gaping place I couldn’t quite step over.
I was gripping the pipe almost painfully. I relaxed my hand. Bending over, I smelled the bowl of it, and it was like smelling him.
Everything began to rearrange itself then. It wasn’t the pipe that had caused the fire. I sat at the dresser for several minutes while Mother slept across the room, and I let the knowledge pour over me: I was not to blame.