The Clinton piece made me a lot of friends in the New York media world. And the magazine offered me a regular interviewing position, along similar lines as the one I had held in Paris. I was happy to take it for until then I was feeling at something of a loss in Denver as Hitomi concentrated on her career and this gave me a chance to work towards my own ambitions again.
After much discussion, we agreed that we would continue to live in Denver until the end of the academic year, before moving back to New York so that I could pursue this opportunity. Hitomi wrote to the university which had employed her on our last trip there and although there were no positions currently available, they promised to keep her in mind should something come up. In the meantime, she wrote to several others and appeared confident that a job would come her way at some point once we got there.
Shane was born in early spring, the first Cody in four generations to be born in America. Hitomi was not in labour for long – only a couple of hours – and seemed surprised, even a little disappointed, that childbirth on this occasion had not been as painful as she had been led to believe it would be. Our son was perfectly healthy and his face, a mixture of our east–west genes, captivated me with its smooth skin and tiny arched eyebrows, reminiscent of the Naoyuki line, and the piercing blue eyes and snub nose of the Codys. They were released from hospital after a couple of days and we settled down to our initial couple of weeks of nervous parenting in our Denver apartment.
I phoned Isaac from home on the evening that Shane was born and told him the news.
‘Where are you calling from?’ he asked me.
‘I’m back home.’
‘Well what are you doing there if your wife’s just had a baby?’
‘She needed to sleep,’ I replied defensively. ‘As do I. We’ve been there all day.’
He grunted, as if this was a weak excuse but carried on anyway. ‘So I’m a grandfather at last,’ he said. ‘Makes me feel old.’
‘Isaac, you are old. You’re almost eighty.’
‘Yes, but I never felt it before. Have you got a name for him yet?’
‘Yes,’ I replied quickly. ‘We had names ready for a boy and a girl in advance. We wanted to know what his name was from the moment he was born and not just call him “baby” or something. So we’re calling him Shane.’
‘Shane?’ asked Isaac, and I could tell from the tone of his voice that he was disappointed. ‘Why do you want to call him that? What sort of a name is Shane?’
‘His name, that’s what sort. It’s a name we both like.’
‘I thought you’d call him Sam. Tradition, you know.’
I shook my head and stayed silent for a moment. It was true that Isaac had been named after his great-grandfather, and that he in turn had named me for mine. I had considered this and even discussed it with Hitomi; following the tradition would have meant calling the child Sam but, although we both quite liked the name, we believed that by calling him that we would be deliberately allying him to the western side of his personality. He was going to be born an American, of mixed-race parents, and it was unlikely that he would ever live in Japan – at least while he was a child. That being the case, we wanted to choose a name which had no definitive family history on either side. Hence Shane.
‘We’re going with Shane,’ I repeated, hoping he would let the matter drop and he did then, even though I could tell that he was annoyed with me.
‘Well I suppose you’ll be bringing him over on a visit,’ he said. ‘Let him see where his father grew up.’
‘Soon,’ I said. ‘We better wait a few months at least before bringing him on a plane. Why don’t you come here in the meantime?’ I suggested, knowing that he would greet this idea without any seriousness.
‘No thanks,’ he said, proving me right. ‘I’m too old to go travelling around the world. Do you want to kill me or what?’ I gave a small laugh, which seemed required, but was disturbed by his voice as he spoke. It seemed weaker and more subdued than I remembered it. Whenever I thought of visiting now, I felt slightly nervous that I would find my father a shadow of his former self. My guilt at leaving him alone in London continued although I did nothing to salve it. I was aware that he had few years left in him but had put the thought out of my mind for the most part.
‘Have you been to see your great-grandfather recently?’ he asked me after a pause and I shook my head, despite the fact that he couldn’t actually see me.
‘Not recently,’ I said. He was of course referring to Lookout Mountain, where Buffalo Bill was buried and where I had been only once in my time in Denver. ‘Maybe soon.’
‘You should go and tell him the news,’ he said and I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not.
‘You realise he’s dead of course,’ I said, attempting to be humorous but, as ever, he took me up the wrong way.
‘Don’t get smart with me, boy. Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean you can’t treat him with a little respect, all right? You go to his grave and tell him about his great-great-grandson. That’s the least you can do. It’s important to keep the link between the generations.’
I was tired and didn’t want to argue so agreed to do so. ‘All right, Isaac,’ I agreed, even though I knew the chances of me returning to Lookout Mountain at any point in the near future were slim. ‘I’ll go there soon. You want me to send you some photos?’
‘No,’ he said bluntly. ‘You don’t take photos of graves. That’s disrespectful too.’
‘I meant of Shane,’ I said irritably. ‘Do you want me to send you some photos of your grandson?’
‘Oh,’ he replied, a little chastened. ‘Yes, that would be good. Do that. And tell Hitomi I said hello.’ I nodded. Typical Isaac; don’t send your love, just send a greeting.
‘I’ll speak to you soon,’ I said. ‘Take care of yourself.’
He laughed, as if the idea was outrageous, and without another word hung up the phone.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, here’s the crux of it: it is the business of storytelling which always lay at the heart of my relationship with my father. He was always less concerned with building a bond between us than he was with finding a common ground whereby our dialogue might continue. His subject matter was his grandfather and that has been my subject too as I have recounted our relationship and my own story. I spent a large portion of my adult life so far away from my home because I felt there was nothing left for me there; I discovered a new home in Hitomi and, subsequently, in my son. However, just as Bill wrote stories and plays about himself and created his own self-perpetuating myth, and just as Isaac carried those stories down and urged me to write about them, so the lines between what happened and what we wanted to happen blur and even I don’t know where the truth ends and the fictions begin. But all stories must have a climax; in Isaac’s stories of Buffalo Bill, that came with the sexual encounter between my great-grandfather and great-grandmother, Ellen Rose. In Isaac’s own story, it’s probably the moment of my birth and his abandonment by my mother, when he took over my teaching and training and moulded me in a certain image. And for me, it came in 1999, when, at the age of twenty-nine, my first life ended and I was forced to begin a new one.
It was a warm Saturday evening and Shane, who was then five months old, was unsettled. He was teething and his temper was getting the better of him. I’d been out for most of the afternoon, editing an article at the newspaper office, and when I got back home, Hitomi was looking a little stressed from her day. ‘He hasn’t stopped crying,’ she said, dragging the back of her hand against her forehead, which was perspiring slightly. ‘He went to sleep for a couple of hours in the afternoon but other than that, he’s just been at it all day.’
I picked up the baby and held him aloft, peering into his bright blue eyes for a moment and stuck my tongue out at him. Pleased to see me back again and surprised by my sudden gesture, he stopped crying and stared at me as if I was mad. I bared my teeth at him now and growled and he cried again but when I held him close to my chest, so that he could feel my heart beating against his cheek, he quietened down and sucked on his thumb happily. I grinned at Hitomi but instantly saw that she was not in the mood for parental one-upmanship. ‘It’s just his teeth,’ I said. ‘He’s bound to be like this.’
‘We’re out of the gel,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I finished it earlier. I better go out and get him some more.’ The gel she was referring to was the foul-smelling mucus which we rubbed on his gums to alleviate some of the pain of teething. It was ice cold and usually did the trick but he seemed to be going through tubes of it at a ridiculous rate. I was beginning to worry that he was addicted to the stuff.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll get it. You stay in and relax.’
‘No, William, I need a break,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I need some peace.’
‘Why don’t I go for the gel and take him for a walk with me,’ I suggested. ‘It’s pretty cool out so he’ll be fine. The air might even send him off to sleep in the meantime. I’ll put him in his pram, walk to the drugstore, and take the long way back. It’ll take us about an hour. You can have a nap or a bath or whatever.’
Hitomi sighed and pressed her hand back against her shoulder. ‘Would you?’ she asked plaintively, and she was almost crying with happiness at the prospect of an hour’s peace and quiet which she could devote entirely to herself.
‘Of course,’ I said, laughing. ‘Look at him anyway. He’s happy right now. I’m clearly his favourite parent, by far. You run a bath. I’ll stay out for as long as possible.’
‘Stay out all night,’ she said with a smile. ‘Don’t come back till the morning if you don’t want to. Maybe the pair of you could hit a strip club or something. Favourite parent indeed!’
‘He doesn’t like them,’ I replied, gathering up my keys. ‘Thinks they’re exploitative.’ Shane’s pram was sitting in the corner of the living room and I placed him inside it gingerly and put his dummy back in his mouth. The prospect of movement was keeping him quiet for now and he put up no objections when I strapped him in carefully. Walking up behind my wife, I placed my hands on her shoulders and kneaded them between my fingers, achieving just the level of pressure which I knew relaxed her and which might deliver her from the knots which lay beneath. ‘You want anything while I’m out?’ I asked her quietly, raising her hair at the back and kissing her gently.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, turning around and hugging me. ‘I might want something when you come back though.’
I smiled. ‘Take a bath then,’ I said. ‘You stink.’
‘Charming.’
‘I love you, you know that?’ The words were out of my mouth before I knew why; I did love her, of course, I just had no idea why I chose to tell her at that moment. She looked a little surprised but pleased by my spontaneity.
‘What’s not to love?’ she said, her final words to me, and I gave her a wink and wheeled Shane out of the apartment.
The wild west show stayed in London after Queen Victoria’s jubilee celebration for another six weeks and then travelled around Britain playing in Manchester, Liverpool, Cardiff and Edinburgh. Crowds gathered along Princes Street when Buffalo Bill arrived and paraded through the city with Annie Oakley and the other members of his troupe. A reception was held for him afterwards in Edinburgh Castle where he was toasted by the Prince of Wales once again. As they travelled the country, the format began to change. Buffalo Bill’s previous trips around the world had convinced him that there was more to his entertainments than simply the western aspect, although that continued to dominate the show. Now, however, he introduced performers from Russia and Mexico, Europe and the Far East, each dressed in their native costumes, each demonstrating to the audience their own particular skills and fighting abilities. Many of these talents were invented by Bill himself and not all of the foreign performers were actually of the nationality they pretended to be. To demonstrate the new multinational aspect of the show, it was re-christened ‘The Congress of Rough Riders of the World’ and played to packed audiences. Bill himself was planning on one more week in London before returning to the States and set off for there alone after the festivities in Edinburgh had ended.
Ellen Rose had not seen much of my great-grandfather since their one-night liaison after the jubilee show. She had woken the next morning with a great feeling of joy, for she had fallen in love the night before and believed that that love was reciprocated; she was wrong. Unfortunately for her, ever since Bill’s separation from his wife Louisa, and probably for quite some time before that, he was accustomed to having relationships with the girls who followed his every move and had fallen in love with the myth he had created for himself along the way. He had worked hard to turn William Cody into Buffalo Bill and enjoyed the entertainments his self-created fantasy offered him. As he passed through London again, she made another attempt to see him, sending him a letter at his hotel and he arranged to meet her in the bar of the hotel later that evening.
‘Miss Rose,’ he said when he arrived, thirty minutes late. His eyes flickered over her in recognition; he was sure he could remember who Ellen Rose was but was unconvinced whether he might be mixing her up with a young girl he had met in Manchester a month or so previously. ‘I’m sorry I’m late. Had a bit of business to tie up with a friend of mine.’ The business he spoke of involved Marguerite Devlin, the wife of a local businessman who had made herself available to my great-grandfather after watching him performing at a benefit programme the night before.
‘I was late myself, Bill,’ said my great-grandmother, lying deliberately for she did not want it to seem as if she was too needy. In a curious reversal of roles, she stood up and waited for him to sit down, which he did, and she smiled nervously then as she took her seat again, holding her purse between her hands as security. In truth she had arrived a full twenty minutes before their scheduled meeting time, meaning that she had been sitting there alone for almost an hour. The eyes of some of the waiters had glanced over her several times, as they wondered what a young woman was doing sitting alone in a hotel bar in the early evening. The manager had been about to approach her when Bill arrived, thus saving her an embarrassing interview.
‘I’m glad you wrote to me,’ said Bill casually. ‘Still with the circus then, are you?’
‘Yes,’ she said, looking at the ground in misery. Bill was scanning the menu, considering tea and a sandwich, barely glancing at his companion. Several people strolled past and stared at him, for his face had become familiar in recent times through the newspapers. Ellen had prepared a lot of what she wanted to say but found herself unable to find the words now. After a few moments silence he looked across at her irritably.
‘Well,’ he said, struggling himself. ‘I’ll be glad to get home to America. I can tell you that. I think this present tour has exhausted me more than any other. And I’m not the young man I used to be.’ This was true; by now, Bill was over forty years of age and although still in good condition he could feel the desire inside to begin to slow down a little. His health was beginning to deteriorate and he had already begun to suffer from heart problems. He found that, despite his still frequent amorous adventures, he needed an hour’s rest during the afternoon and rarely sat through an entire performance of the show, preferring to appear only when he was specifically needed. By contrast, Ellen Rose was in her mid-twenties.
‘You’re going home?’ she asked, surprised, her heart sinking at the news.
‘I am indeed.’
‘Soon?’ Her voice shuddered slightly as she said the single word, stuttering the ‘s’ in her anxiety.
‘Two days from now. Our boat sails to New York City, which I’m not looking forward to, I admit. I am a great adventurer, my dear, but truth be told I’m no sailor. The trip over was bad enough. But now that I know how treacherous a transatlantic crossing can be I’m looking forward to it even less. Let’s have some tea. What do you say?’ Ellen Rose nodded her head and as the waiter approached, Bill ordered the beverages and a sandwich for himself, inviting his companion to join him but she declined. ‘If you don’t mind me saying so,’ he said, after the waiter had departed, ‘you’re looking a little peaky yourself. Sure you haven’t been on a boat lately?’
Ellen smiled. ‘Not recently,’ she said. ‘Although I quite like them. I’d love to go to America someday.’
‘It’s a great country,’ replied Bill, not even noticing her gentle hint. ‘If you ever do, you’ve got to go down south towards Kansas and Missouri. That’s where I grew up, you know. Didn’t stay there long though. Before I hit my teens I was out looking for trouble. Found plenty of it too. Killed my first Indian when I was only eight.’
‘Oh my,’ exclaimed Ellen in surprise, although she had seen at first hand the level of violent action that Bill’s entourage involved themselves in while they were performing.
‘It wasn’t a safe place back then,’ he said, nodding sagely as their refreshments arrived and he poured the tea. ‘Of course it’s all different now. The wars are over. The land disputes are coming to an end. The old west is dying away, I think. And it’s a shame.’
‘But you’re keeping it alive, aren’t you?’ she asked. ‘With your performances I mean. People won’t forget it as long as you’re doing that.’
‘I’ll die too, one day,’ he replied. ‘Times move on. These shows I do … well they’ll still be popular during my lifetime but when I’m gone and everyone I’ve known – Sitting Bull, Bill Hickok, Annie Oakley – we’ll just be part of history, that’s all. We’re barely keeping it alive as it is.’
There was a silence for a time as Ellen thought about this and Bill indulged himself in a moment of self-pity. Eventually she broke it in a quiet voice. ‘You’ll still be performing in America though, won’t you?’
‘Sure I will.’
‘Take me with you,’ she said quickly, wanting the words to be out before she could think about them and pull them back. Bill seemed almost unaware of what she had said for a moment and only snapped back into the conversation when he began to wonder whether he had heard her correctly or not.
‘What’s that?’ he asked. ‘What did you say?’
‘Take me with you,’ she repeated, opening her hands in a plaintive gesture and sighing, as if her entire future rested on this moment of hope. ‘Take me to America.’
Bill was unsure what to say at first and relied on humour to get him through. ‘What in hell do you want to go to America for?’ he asked, laughing slightly despite a certain tension inside him. ‘The west is no place for a lady.’
‘You just told me I should go there,’ she protested.
‘On a holiday maybe,’ he said. ‘Someday. With your husband. But not on your own.’
‘I don’t have a husband,’ she pointed out.
‘Well damn it girl, you will have one day. And when you do, you’ve got to make him take you there. Look me up when you come and I’ll show you around. You haven’t seen hospitality until you’ve seen the way they treat friends of Buffalo Bill Cody.’
Ellen Rose sighed and looked out the window. She knew that he understood what she had meant but was ignoring it, not wishing to acknowledge her request. Under other circumstances, she would have accepted her rejection and let it go at that but there was more to consider now than just herself and she had little choice but to continue. ‘Bill,’ she said, swallowing hard but looking him in the eye nonetheless. ‘What happened between us a couple of months back—’
‘What happened between us was just what happened between us, nothing more,’ he snapped back quickly, not particularly wishing to pursue this uncomfortable topic. ‘Let’s not make more of it than all it was.’
‘But how can you say that? We … we …’
‘We didn’t do anything that either of us didn’t want to do, that’s all. There’s no point pretending otherwise.’
‘That’s not what I thought,’ she said, biting her lip to prevent tears from coming. Bill leaned forward and took her wrist firmly, enough for her to wince but without actually hurting her.
‘Ellen,’ he said. ‘We’d only met a couple of hours previous. You didn’t think there was a romance going on, now did you?’
‘I thought … You told me—’
‘I didn’t tell you anything so don’t pretend I did,’ he snapped, squinting his eyes at her as she looked like she might suddenly cry. His tone softened. He wished to be away from this conversation as soon as possible and in order for that to happen, he had to set himself free of her immediately. However, he didn’t particularly want to hurt her at the same time. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if you thought more of you and me than it was, but we both had a good time, let’s just leave it at that.’
‘If you take me to America, I’ll make you happy,’ she said, blushing as she heard the words emerge. She hated him for putting her through this but he had given her no choice.
‘I’m not taking you anywhere,’ he replied in a firm voice. ‘If you think you’re coming back to America with me, you’re crazy.’
‘I’m pregnant,’ she said and now he drew his breath in surprise. He stared at her as if she really was insane, pressing himself further back in his chair as if she had some sort of communicable disease. Stroking his beard, he shook his head in sorrow.
‘And you want me to believe that I’m the father.’
‘You’re the only man I’ve ever been with,’ she said.
‘A likely story.’
‘And a true one. I swear it, Bill. You’re the father of this baby. What would you have me do?’
He blinked and looked away. She looked very young sitting there before him. She was, indeed, almost twenty years his junior. He was not a hard-hearted man, my great-grandfather, but he had no room at the same time for unnecessary attachments. He had avoided them this long and was not about to get saddled with a woman and child at this stage of his life.
‘I’m already married,’ he said finally.
‘You could divorce her,’ said Ellen. ‘You never see her anyway, the papers say so. She lives in a different state to you.’
‘I can’t divorce her,’ he said, meaning it too. ‘I won’t do that.’
‘I can’t be here on my own. With this baby. How will we survive?’
Bill laughed. ‘You’ve survived this long,’ he said. ‘You’ve got family, don’t you? They’ll look after you.’
Ellen shook her head and brushed the tears away as they rushed down her cheeks. ‘You’d do that?’ she asked. ‘You’d just leave me.’
‘You’re sure it’s my child?’ he asked half-heartedly, even though he had entirely believed her when she had said as much. She didn’t even need to respond. ‘I’ll settle some money on you,’ he said. ‘You and your baby can live here. Spend it wisely and you won’t want for anything. Maybe I’ll send you a little something from time to time. That’s all I can do. I’m sorry.’
Ellen Rose nodded and picked up her purse. There was something in his tone that made her aware that he was not likely to change his mind. She stood up with dignity and smoothed her skirts, her hand brushing against her stomach and resting there for a moment; Bill watched her hand as she hesitated, somehow shielding the baby’s unborn eyes from its father and then, without another word to her lover, she slipped out of the hotel bar and made her way home.
Night time. The streets surrounding our ground-floor apartment in Denver are quiet. We live outside the centre of town. It’s a relatively peaceful suburban area. We’ve rented it for a reasonable price and intend to stay here until we leave Colorado. There’s a second bedroom which we’ll use for Shane should we still be here after a year or so. Before that if Hitomi lets me. (I think he should be in his own room sooner rather than later.) I often take him for a walk late at night if he’s restless; even if he isn’t it’s a custom I enjoy. I get a certain proud thrill from walking along with my son in his pram. I like it when strangers pass by and glance from him to me in a quick moment, checking for resemblances, looking at the face of the man who has fathered the boy. My usual route takes me across Delarue Street towards Kemley Park which is always quiet save for the dog-walkers and we can safely amble through it at any time before dark. Tonight, like most nights, I stop at a park bench under a light and, as Shane snores in his pram in front of me, pull my book out from my inside pocket and take half an hour’s peaceful reading time. It’s by Philip Roth. It’s a good book. Ten o’clock. Later than I realise. Two joggers run past, two young men. Strong, fit. Handsome. Together, I think. How’s Justin these days, I wonder? Haven’t heard from him in a while. And Adam. He’s getting married soon. Like to be back home for the wedding. That’d be good. Old friends. There’s a song, my mind scrambles to remember the lyric. Good for Isaac to see his grandson too. And vice versa. He’s getting old. I want to call him. I want to see him. Why can’t I make the time? Now a dog-walker. A young woman. Pretty. I glance at her legs. Taut calves. She spots me looking and frowns. Sees Shane. Relents. Smiles a little. I shrug, embarrassed. She gives a little laugh and walks on. Won’t speak to me. She’s friendly but not stupid. Ratty-looking terrier with her. I snarl at it. It yaps back. Shane blinks back to consciousness and stares at me, confused. What are we doing here? he wants to know. I shrug again but he doesn’t understand that. I show him the cover of the book. I put it back in my pocket. Stand up. The three of us – Shane, Philip Roth and I – start for home. I think of Hitomi, lying in her bath. Bubbles surrounding her. She’ll have her hair pinned up with a snappy comb, I think. I’ll sneak in, try and let her hair down and she’ll scream at me. Whenever we shower together, she keeps her hair clear from the spray. No matter what’s happening she’s always alert enough to make sure it doesn’t get wet. I smile. Foibles. I love her. I cheated on her once, I think. Maybe I’ll tell her one day. What’s the point? I didn’t cheat on her. All I did was sleep with someone else. Not even that. I fucked some other woman, that was all. It doesn’t matter. Enough. Check the time. Ten-fifteen. She’ll be watching out for us. I’ve stayed out too late. I’m tired. Work in the morning. Sometimes I want to stop strangers in the street and say Guess what? I’ve interviewed Bill Clinton. I’ve had two books published. My great-grandfather is Buffalo Bill Cody. They’d call the cops. Shane gives a muffled shout, then returns to sleep. Shane’s great. I feel a rush of love for him. I think I may cry for a moment. I love Shane; I want more words to express that but I can’t find them. They’re a mystery to me, those words. Get a grip. Why should I get a grip? Nothing wrong with loving your son. I’ll communicate with him, I think. We’ll talk about other things than family history. We’ll talk about football games, and books, and films. When he’s old enough to be embarrassed by me I’ll dance the funky chicken in front of all his friends and he’ll slap his hands over his eyes and shout Dad get out of here you old fool and I’ll grumble that I never spoke to my father like that even though I did and worse. And he’ll have some troubles maybe, especially if we live in London, because he’s half and half. America’s a good place for him maybe. Or Japan. Or Paris. I don’t know. I can’t make these kinds of decisions, that’s Hitomi’s job, although I know one thing – I’m tired of moving around. I want a little peace and quiet. Want a home. No more of this nomadic lifestyle. I’m a family man now. Speaking of which. Home. Light on in the bathroom. I can see that from here. Still in the bath maybe. More likely out and has just left it on. She’s got some stupid idea that leaving it on clears the mirrors quicker when they’re all steamed up. I don’t know. I’d like to have those heat pads behind mirrors that stop them steaming up at all. Maybe when I’m rich and famous. Car coming. We wait at the side of the road. It’s coming too slow and Shane’s fidgety. We could have made it if we’d gone originally but it’s too late now. Come on, for God’s sake, I’m getting cold. I want to get inside. I want a beer. I want to cuddle up next to Hitomi on the couch because she’ll smell like peaches from those bath salts she uses. She’ll be wearing her thick white woollen dressing gown and her legs and feet will be bare beneath it. She’ll have let her hair down. Call me crazy but it’s a look that always does something to me. I’ll sing quietly to her in her ear if we’re nuzzling up together and Shane is asleep in his cot. Fiddling with my key on the outside lock. When I find it I see that the outside door is already open. Surprising. Once you go through it closes automatically and locks. I walk in and it closes behind me. Doesn’t lock. I peer at it. The lock’s broken. Wasn’t like that when I went out, I think. Maybe it was. Didn’t notice. Must remember to leave a note for the caretaker. Although she’ll probably notice herself anyway. Keys back in pocket. Why did I do that? Need them for my own door. I walk through the next set and down the corridor. The lights come on around me one at a time. Shane is still asleep. And then what’s this? Not my door? Is my door. Open. Lock’s broken. Jimmied open. I swallow. I don’t understand. My mind’s a beat behind me. Why would Hitomi have the door like this? Heart sinks. Shane’s in the hall. I stumble inside. Legs giving way because I’m fucking terrified of what’s on the inside. Bare legs, bare feet, just like I imagined. White woollen robe. Smell of peaches. But she’s lying on the floor. First thing I think is why is all the furniture pushed around? All I can see of her is her feet. What’s she doing? Who’s pushing past me? Leather jacket. Strong smell. Bad smell. What was that? Who was he? I’m lost. It’s not my apartment at all, is it? I see her now. She’s lying flat. Her hair’s down all right. Half her head is dark black and scarlet. She’s been hurt. Hitomi, I cry. I fall on my knees. I fall on my fucking knees beside her and I can’t touch her because I’m afraid with all this blood. Her eyes blink. Blink again. Her mouth opens. Teeth bloody too. She says my name. I shake my head. What’s happened here, I ask her? What have you done? Hitomi, I shout. Get up. Get up, for God’s sake. You’re fine. There’s nothing wrong with you. Get up. William … William … My hands reach down now to help her. The blood is warm and I gag. I don’t know what to do. I’m crying suddenly. And a man’s standing beside me, shouting loudly. I know him. He’s my neighbour. He’s a nice guy. I borrowed some masking tape off him the other day and it’s sitting on my bureau. I can give it back to him now, I think. He’s shouting something and I’m saying she’s fine she’s fine she’s fine there’s nothing wrong here she’ll be fine and more people are running in. Hitomi, I cry. I can hear Shane outside. Can’t hear anyone else now, somehow. Just him. Just me. Her eyes move again in terror and settle on mine. They lock in. I can feel them locking in as now is the time for her to say goodbye. She’s looking at me. She’s scared. I remember kissing her. I can taste her kiss now. The pupils still stare at me but she’s gone. I know she’s gone.
Later, London was dark and cold and the streets were lit by Christmas trees and festive lights. I’d made a mistake coming to Oxford Street on a Thursday evening in mid-December. Shane was wrapped up warm and had fallen asleep in his buggy but I was finding it difficult to negotiate my way through the shoppers. Middle-aged women in heavy coats and matching scarves and gloves looked at me irritably as I made my way along, from time to time banging against their Selfridges shopping bags; frustrated men stared around in despair at the doors of the department stores, too exhausted to step inside, too unimaginative to find presents for their wives. Everywhere was noise; the taxi cabs blew their horns incessantly while the traffic barely moved. A construction crew had chosen this time of the year to begin work on a stretch of pavement on one side of the street. A crowd of people stood at their hoardings, trying to step on to the road and to the other end of the pavement, but what seemed to be an enormous lake of rainwater stood in their way. I stopped momentarily, pulling myself up and gripping the handles of the buggy tightly; I could feel a burning perspiration work its way along my forehead as I clenched my teeth. A teenage boy crashed into me as I stood there. He turned to stare at me in annoyance as he passed; his head had been focused directly on the ground below. He had earphones connected to his pockets and as he looked at me through his dark, hooded eyes, he wore a look of bored contempt. I growled and bared my teeth at him like a woken dog, daring him to challenge me. Little fucker, I mouthed and he squinted, considering the comment, before continuing on his way with a shrug.
More than anything else I wanted a drink. I wanted to find a pub somewhere, sit in a dark corner, order upwards of eighteen pints, and drink them all. I wanted to be carried out of the place sometime towards midnight shouting nonsense. I wanted to throw up in a gutter over Vauxhall Bridge and bury myself in towards the railings, closing my eyes, begging for sleep to come. I wanted to be drunk, that was all. But I couldn’t do any of those things because I had Shane with me and he’d wake up soon and want feeding. I had to finish my shopping and get home.
I’d left Denver a few weeks after Hitomi’s death. The man who had killed her – a thirty-two-year-old unemployed man named Denis Fitzgerald – had been arrested by police the following day after his fingerprints were found all over our apartment. He had a criminal past and a file on record. He was too stupid to wear gloves. He’d never killed anyone before although he had a history of burglary and theft and, although I never came face to face with him, I was told that he did not appear to be unduly fazed by what he had done. He had seen me leave the apartment that night with Shane and, believing the place to be empty, had broken in without much difficulty. By that time, Hitomi was in the bedroom undressing; she heard nothing as she already had the taps on the bath running. When she stepped out of the room, they surprised each other. She had turned and run towards the door and, probably without thinking, he had made a grab for her, pulled her to the ground and, in order to stop her screaming, had lifted the phone from the side table and crashed it down above her right ear, smashing into her temple, silencing her, leaving just a thin gasp of air exhaling from her mouth for the next half hour until I arrived home and held her while that too became lost to her.
I had made friends there, of course, but they were no use to me. I buried myself in Shane in order to give myself something to do; I had little choice on that matter. And then I decided to leave America and return home to London, believing that my old house, Isaac’s house, was the right place for me to be. Naturally he welcomed me home with open arms. Although he had barely known my wife, he was genuinely upset by her death. Indeed the passion of his sorrow angered me for some reason, for I wanted to be the only one going through that pain. I couldn’t accept that someone else would want it too.
Although the Denver police had offered to contact the Naoyuki family and tell them of the tragedy, I felt that was something I should do myself. It was the hardest phone call I ever had to make and can remember little of it. I phoned Tak, my brother-in-law, and told him what had happened. He wept bitterly on the phone while I remained composed. He didn’t blame me – yet – and said that he would tell his parents. When the phone rang the following morning in the hotel room I had taken with Shane I assumed it was the police and picked it up, making only a grunting sound to indicate that I was listening.
‘Is that William Cody?’ said an unfamiliar voice at the other end, but by the inflections I recognised the Japanese accent. In an instant I knew that deep male voice could only be Hitomi’s father.
‘Mr Naoyuki,’ I said, a stab of pain hitting my chest, a feeling of guilt, as if all of this was my fault. I wondered how he had got my number. A flash photo of the first and only evening I had ever spent in their home came into my mind; I was just a kid then, I thought to myself. I didn’t know what to say to him now and there was a long pause as he waited for me to answer his question. ‘Yes,’ I replied finally. ‘This is William Cody.’
‘Mr Cody, you have of course begun to make the necessary arrangements,’ he said in an emotionless and formal voice.
‘Arrangements …’ I muttered. ‘I don’t … I mean what do you mean exactly?’
‘Tajima has informed us what has happened,’ he said with a sigh. ‘There are arrangements to be made.’
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘We would like Hitomi’s ashes to be sent to her family here. In Kyoto.’
Again, a rush of pain ran through me. Her ashes. It was beyond final. Of course I knew that she wanted to be cremated but the thought of actually going through with it seemed barbaric to me. And yet underneath I could see no reason why not to accede to his wishes. Already I knew that I had no desire to keep them with me. If I had thought of it at all, I probably would have wanted to scatter them somewhere peaceful. And although I was upset and angry and felt like lashing out at someone – and Mr Naoyuki being the one I was talking to, he seemed a perfect candidate – I knew instantly that the peaceful place I was looking for was her own home. Japan. Although he could not see me, I nodded slowly and closed my eyes.
‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll speak to the hospital. I’ll arrange for that to happen.’
‘You should never have taken her to America,’ he said and I could detect in his voice a feeling that he did not want to engage in conversation with me but could not stop himself. ‘You know how she felt about America. She knew she would die there.’
I shook my head. ‘That’s not true,’ I said quickly. ‘That was England. She said she’d—’ I couldn’t say the word. ‘It was England she said that about. Not America. And anyway, that was just—’
‘I don’t wish to speak to you about that,’ he interrupted, a crack coming into his voice, a sudden flicker of emotion. ‘My grandson, however. You will need to make arrangements for him too.’
‘Your grandson is my son,’ I said quickly through gritted teeth, anger forcing my hands into fists. ‘Do you hear me? Shane will be with me always. Do you understand me?’
A long pause ensued. I wondered whether he had just been hoping against hope that I would for some reason capitulate and hand my son over to relative strangers, and less than perfect ones at that. I already knew that if I had one thing to live for, it was him. I knew what was important to me. ‘Please ask the hospital authorities to contact me directly after your arrangements are made,’ he said finally. ‘We won’t speak again, Mr Cody.’
‘Fine with me, buddy,’ – (a word I never use, so why?) – I said bitterly, hanging up the phone.
In June 1888, Ellen Rose gave birth to a boy, who she named Sam. She never saw my great-grandfather again after their meeting in the hotel when she had told him that she was pregnant; however they communicated sporadically for, despite his faults, he was true to his obligations and would send her money from time to time, although he never asked for news of the boy or made any suggestion that he would like to meet him.
Despite her parents’ protestations, Ellen left the Regis-Roc Circus when Sam was just over a year old and moved to London where she found work in the box office of a theatre. She was fortunate enough to find a kind employer who had no objection to her bringing Sam with her to work in the evenings and he spent his infant years crawling around the ticket stall, and divided his childhood between the classroom and the theatre itself where he became a regular fixture and unpaid hand.
Isaac never told me many stories of Ellen Rose from the time she had separated herself from my great-grandfather; curiously his interest seemed particular to Bill Cody and not to those with whom he came in contact, even if they were part of his own lineage. Ellen was Isaac’s own grandmother but he did not remember her for she died quite young, when he himself was only a child. Sam, my grandfather, became a soldier and survived the trenches of northern France, returning to England where he was killed in a motor accident shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. As for the tales of my grandfather, there are few for once again Isaac was reticent on the subject. These are the points where his stories end, for his characters begin to die. These were the ones he did not like to talk about. He was at home riding across the prairies of his imagination, or travelling the world with his Congress of Rough Riders, but as his heroes and ancestors grew old and proved they were mortal after all, his enthusiasm would wane. Always, however, he finished with the last stories of Buffalo Bill. Naturally, Isaac’s historical world could only ever end one way – with a death.
As my thirtieth birthday approached, I found myself sunk into despair. Shane and I were living with Isaac, who was dying even before my eyes. His sight had faded a lot and he had difficulty hearing the television if it wasn’t pitched up to its highest possible level. He seemed to be losing his alertness as well; I caught him looking at me sometimes with a strange look in his eyes, as if he was not entirely sure who I was. Shane seemed to scare him somewhat, although the child always wanted to sit with him. I was grieving, deeply grieving, and yet found myself cooking and cleaning and keeping house for my father, for if I did not do it, who would? Sometimes, I wanted to talk to him about Hitomi, about how much I missed her, about how senseless her death had been and how angry and lost it made me, but such conversations would have been pointless. I knew that he had already forgotten her and could never have conceived of the tornado blowing inside my mind. I felt absolutely alone and despaired for my own future.
And then, in the deepest moment of my unhappiness, a simple offer proved a lifeline. While I had been in Denver, Adam and Kate had married, and they had made a point of inviting me to their house, which was not far away, ever since my return to London. I had gone for dinner once but found their happiness – not to mention their obvious attempts not to appear too happy lest it would upset me – too much for me and had collapsed at their dinner table, weeping hysterically, furiously grabbing at the corners of their table for support, and yet unable to allow them to comfort me. At home that night I had wanted only to join Hitomi and found myself standing by the mirror in my bedroom, a kitchen knife in my hands, staring deeply into my own eyes to see my own pain, holding the knife to different parts of my body, willing my hands to force it in, knowing all the time that I had not the guts to do such a thing, and instead dragged its blade across my face, sighing with happy pain as I cut myself, not deeply enough for any true damage, but surface scars nevertheless. I scratched it down time and again until my cheeks were a bloody roadmap of sadness, pure lost despair, before sitting on my bed in sorrow, wondering how and when this terrible feeling would pass me by. That night was a difficult night and I prayed for some release.
The release came in the form of my friends. Kate offered to take Shane two evenings a week if I would agree to go out with Adam and Justin and get – in her words – rat-arsed. Her offer made me laugh when she made it but I accepted, not really thinking that it would help but glad to get out of the house for a night and away from the responsibility of looking after my son. If I didn’t have to keep worrying about him, I thought, I could at least concentrate on making myself even more miserable.
At first, I could tell that Adam and Justin felt uncomfortable with me. They wanted to help me, to comfort me, but did not know how to do it. We had known each other all our lives and were now grown men of thirty years old, with experience and maturity behind us and suddenly we were reverting to our youths once again and spending a lot of time together getting drunk. And somehow over the course of several months they managed to bring me back to some form of consciousness. Although I often lashed out at them, saying dreadful things, insulting them openly, they sat there and allowed me to abuse them until I had no choice but to believe they were truly my friends, truly cared for me and would not allow me to disappear. And when I accepted that, I knew that I was not alone after all. What they showed me was not that I had them in my life, but that I had Shane. And even Isaac. And I was loved.
‘You don’t have to do this any more, you know,’ I told them eventually one evening as we sat in a local pub. ‘You don’t have to keep spending so much time with me. You have lives, you know.’
‘We’re not going through this again,’ said Justin immediately, sensing that I was trying to get rid of them. I shook my head and patted him on the shoulder.
‘That’s not what I mean,’ I said. ‘You need to get back to your lives. We should make it one regular evening a week, not two.’ They both looked at me, unsure how to respond, waiting for me to say more. I could tell that they wanted that too, that as much as they had nursed me back to health, the rest of our lives could not continue like this. ‘I mean it,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to pretend things are perfect. Of course they’re not. I’m not going to say that I don’t think of Hitomi every hour of the day, because I do, but the awful darkness is slipping away.’
‘You do seem more … together,’ said Adam cautiously.
‘Because I am,’ I said, desperate to reassure them. ‘You’ve both helped me so much. And so have Kate and Mark allowing you both off the leashes so often to be with me. It does mean a lot to me you know. I don’t know what the right words are to express it.’ I sighed and breathed heavily, staring at my beer mat for a moment, twirling it between my fingers. ‘You’re my friends,’ I said finally, a simple statement perhaps but I meant it. ‘But you’re not my son and he’s the one I should be with, you know? He doesn’t understand any of this but he’s going to one day. I mean he’s talking now a little and I need to be with him more than I am. For God’s sake, he thinks Kate is his mother and she’s not, his mother’s dead and I need him to realise that. I mean it’s not that I’m not grateful to her—’
‘It’s okay, I understand what you mean,’ said Adam quickly, biting his lip and I could see his eyes were a little glazed because the lines that were coming out of my mouth were indeed the old me, or at least a slightly battered version of the same.
‘Isaac’s dying,’ I said with a shrug. ‘You both know that. He doesn’t have much time left and I should spend more time with him now too. I want to just feel like I understand him before he goes. I don’t want to feel that I never said things to him that I should have. You see that’s how I feel about Hitomi. There’s things that—’ My voice cracked and I caught myself in time, stopping the sentence, knowing that I had promised myself that I would not allow every conversation to lead inexorably towards her. I breathed and pulled myself together before looking up at my two friends gratefully. ‘One night a week from now on, all right?’ I said. ‘We’ll get drunk, catch up, go home and wake up with hangovers. How does that sound?’
They smiled. I wanted to hug them but the table was in my way. Maybe I didn’t need to. Sometimes people know how important they are to you and you don’t have to keep showing it to them like that. I went home that night and felt as unhappy and miserable as before, but there was a difference now; I knew my life had meaning and worth and there were people in it who added to it. And they didn’t want to lose me either. And that mattered. It matters now.
As for Buffalo Bill Cody, the twentieth century was not kind to him, except after he had died. He returned to America and continued to tour with the Congress of Rough Riders until he was invited by the government to be part of the plans to settle Wyoming. This brought him back to the events of his youth and he took a great pride in helping design the towns and cities which would make up the basis of the state; one of the towns, Cody, was ultimately named for him. When Nate Salsbury, his long-time partner in the wild west shows, died, he took the opportunity to invest a greater portion of their earnings in a mining company in Arizona, which soon went disastrously wrong. Within a couple of years, he had lost every penny he had ever earned, the shows had gone bust and he returned to Denver, Colorado as he reached his seventieth birthday, refusing to be broken by his bad luck. The wild west shows ended when interest in the west floundered among the American people. It would be many years later before that interest would be rekindled in nostalgia and movie reels, but there could be no denying that he was as responsible as anyone for the myths which developed over the ensuing hundred years. Myths which somehow developed into history lessons, creating an ideology and a story which was more fiction than anything else. Throughout his life he had earned and lost fortunes, the fact that his old age found him penniless was neither a surprise nor a concern to him.
As the shows began their inevitable decline, my great-grandfather poured more and more of his savings into them. Finally, he was a bankrupt and lived off nothing but his reputation. Divorced now from Louisa, he tried to become involved in the fledgling movie industry but without success. The early pioneers of short films in California were all young men attempting a new form of entertainment and had little interest in an ageing mythologiser whose time had been and gone. What little resources he had left he poured into trying to set up his own new movie company but he received no financial backing and had little choice but to retire to Denver, where he died in 1917, alone and penniless. He never did see his son, the child he had fathered with Ellen Rose, nor did he live one extra year to discover that he was a grandfather through that same child. The newspapers show that he was widely mourned upon his death but few of the articles knew how to differentiate between the life he had led and the one he had portrayed for himself on stage and in books, for the lines between the two intersected too often.
My great-grandfather was a self-invented figure. He swept from adventure to adventure, unable to ever settle down to a normal stable life, creating the character of Buffalo Bill Cody at an early age and constantly reinventing it in order to appeal to a changing nation. He was an entertainer and a showman to the last. In life he had expressed a desire to be buried on Cedar Mountain in Wyoming, but in death Louisa and his surviving children saw to it that his final resting place was Lookout Mountain in Colorado, a more peaceful setting.
Isaac died at home, in the autumn, just over a year after Hitomi. Although his last few months had found him slipping between full consciousness and near senility, the last week of his life passed by relatively peacefully. He woke one morning and had extreme difficulty breathing; a trip to the hospital saw him placed on a ventilator for a time but his doctor confirmed to me that he had only a few days left at most. He could stay in the hospital, hooked up to machines, or he could return home with a single ventilator which would keep him comfortable until the end came naturally; the choice was mine; I was told. I shook my head and gave the options to my father.
‘Home,’ he said, with a solid wink.
Adam and Kate offered to take care of Shane for a few days so that I could look after Isaac and I gave him to them gratefully. I was almost thirty-one years old now and I couldn’t remember when I had last felt so much like a child as I did while nursing him through his final hours. In the end there was only a day and a half between his leaving the hospital and his death, but I tried to make the most of those hours, knowing that I was being given a chance here that I never had with Hitomi. He lay in bed on his last night talking to me, and I sat there in the lamplight, watching the machine clicking away, noticing how his eyelids would droop from time to time as he lurched towards sleep, even though he wanted to talk to me yet.
‘You know what I want?’ he said around eleven o’clock that night. I was tired myself and hoped that he would not ask for something outlandish. Something which could potentially kill him there and then.
‘What’s that?’ I asked cautiously.
‘I want a glass of whisky,’ he said firmly. ‘Straight up. No ice, no water. A good glass of Scotch. How about it? Will you join me?’ The effort of saying six full sentences exhausted him for a moment and that last offer came out more as a wheeze than anything else, but I understood him nonetheless and nodded with a smile.
‘Sure, I’ll join you,’ I said. ‘I suppose you expect me to go down and get it for you too, do you?’
‘Well if you wouldn’t mind,’ he said, a slight smile flickering across his lips. I fetched the bottle and two glasses and helped prop him up a little in the bed by fixing a couple of extra pillows behind his back.
‘Here,’ I said, offering him his glass. ‘Just take it easy, all right? Don’t rush it.’
He ignored my advice and took a good gulp of Scotch before turning slowly to look at me and winking. ‘So what do you think of me now?’ he asked then, somewhat unexpectedly. ‘I don’t suppose you ever thought you’d see me reduced to this.’
I didn’t know how to respond to what he had said and so just smiled in a fairly non-committal fashion. ‘You’re fine,’ I said lamely.
‘I’m dying, William,’ he said. ‘You know it. I know it. Doesn’t matter.’
I could feel a sting behind my eyes and looked away from him. I remembered when I was a child and he had seemed so big, so much more enormous than me or any of my friends, and I wondered how he had been reduced to the shell he was now.
‘Tell me something,’ I said after a lengthy pause. ‘The wild west show. If I had agreed to sign the papers, would you have really done it?’
He sighed dramatically, a long exhalation of long-suppressed irritation with me, and his voice became clear now. ‘Of course I would have,’ he said. ‘It was my dream. My only dream.’
‘Yes, but would you have actually seen it through? Made it profitable?’
He laughed. ‘Probably wouldn’t have made any money if that’s what you mean,’ he said. ‘Not the point though. I would have done it. What else have I done with my life?’
‘Lots,’ I said, even though I knew that I would have been hard pressed to say what.
‘Nothing,’ he confirmed. ‘Maybe it just skipped a few generations. My grandfather had it, my father and I didn’t do much with our lives. It’s up to you, isn’t it. You’re making something of yours.’
‘I don’t see what,’ I grunted.
‘You know what, I’m dying, William. This isn’t about you right now.’ There was a reprimand. And of course he was right. ‘The thing about you,’ he continued after a moment, ‘is that you’ve always blamed me for not being close to you.’
‘I haven’t,’ I began, not wishing to get into a fight now but he silenced me with a wave of his hands.
‘Just hear me out,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got much breath so don’t let me waste it. You think I haven’t been close to you, that all I’ve done is tell you stories all your life. Well maybe that’s so, but that’s where I saw our connection should be. Did you ever wonder why I told you stories about Buffalo Bill?’
‘Because you’re obsessed with him,’ I said. Because you wish you were him, I thought.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I told you them because they’re family stories. They didn’t all tell you about who your great-grandfather was. If you’d listened to them a little closer you would have seen that some of them told you who I was, some of them told you who you could be. It wasn’t all about the history and it wasn’t about showing off. I was trying to get close to you the only way I knew how.’
‘It’s fine,’ I said, shaking my head. I could feel myself gearing up to challenge him on what he had said but knew inside that there could never really be a less appropriate time for me to do so.
‘It’s not fine,’ he barked, sitting forward suddenly and pointing a bony finger at me. ‘You’re a father yourself now. You shouldn’t sit in judgement of me so much. You don’t know, that’s all.’
‘I don’t judge you, Isaac,’ I said quickly. ‘Honestly, I—’
‘You do, you do, Jesus but you do,’ he said with a sigh. ‘It doesn’t matter though. I’m past caring. I know what I tried to do. Maybe I succeeded, maybe I failed. Who knows. Maybe someday, though, you’ll find yourself telling those stories to someone else, to Shane maybe, and maybe then you’ll see that my life wasn’t totally in vain. That there was a reason for some of it.’ A silence descended for a few minutes and finally I reached across and took the empty glass from his hands. He seemed to have fallen asleep but as my hands touched his, he woke quickly and gripping on to my wrist tightly he pulled me close and stared at me directly in the eyes. ‘And one last thing,’ he snarled. ‘Stop calling me Isaac, all right? I’m your father. Show a little fucking respect.’
I stared back at him, part of me terrified, another part of me wanting to hug him, but he relaxed me by lying back into the pillows, releasing my hand and patting it gently. ‘You’re not a bad son, Bill,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should have started calling you that a long time ago. Maybe you’ve earned it after all.’
I stood up and walked to the door, watching him for a few minutes to make sure that he really was asleep before closing the door quietly and walking downstairs. I switched on the lamp in the living room and, placing the whisky bottle and glasses on the table, I filled mine again and put it on the table. Before sitting down, I walked across to the wall and took my great-grandfather’s Smith & Wesson handgun down and brought it back to the armchair where I sat down, examining it carefully. It was the most polished thing in the house, my father’s prize possession. I wanted to reach across for my glass but found that I couldn’t. Instead I held on to the gun with both hands, tighter and tighter, my knuckles turning white as I gripped it, refusing to let it go, wanting it to be with me for just a few minutes longer.
My father had left strict instructions in his will that he was to be cremated and for the second time in a couple of years I attended such a funeral. Unlike the first time, however, I did not feel as devastated at Isaac’s passing as I had at Hitomi’s. He had lived well into his eighties and had not been denied the chances that she had. His time had come; she had been robbed. And although he knew that he did not want to be buried, he had not said what I should do with the ashes. And unlike the occasion with Hitomi, I knew exactly what I needed to do.
It was late in the year and the sun was not shining as Shane and I walked hand in hand along the dusty trail. It wasn’t cold but there was chill enough in the air that we kept up a healthy pace. Shane’s vocabulary had expanded considerably and he locked his hand into mine as we walked along, his tiny voice chattering away without any self-consciousness while I watched the path ahead, knowing where my destination lay, my mind lost in thoughts even as I tried to answer the questions he asked me.
He was too young to understand death, of course, and so I didn’t bother to explain it to him. Someday, years from now, I thought I would. He wouldn’t remember Isaac, of course, but there were things I could tell him about his grandfather that would keep him alive. Stories that might make him wish that he had lived just a few years longer so that they might have got to know each other a little.
‘Here we are,’ I said finally, just at the point where I thought he was getting ready to start complaining about the length of the walk. ‘This is where we need to be.’ There was no one else around but Shane pointed in the distance and I stared as a deer appeared from the woods and turned its graceful neck towards us, staring at us indifferently before padding cautiously on its way and out of sight. I looked down at my son who was staring up at me with breathless delight, his face lit up with such wonder and happiness that I felt an urge to pick him up and crush him to me. And so I did.
I opened my haversack and walked to the side of the mountain, taking the lid off the urn. ‘What’s that?’ asked Shane from behind me and I turned to see him pointing towards the headstone marking the grave of his great-great-grandfather, Buffalo Bill Cody.
‘That’s where my great-grandfather is buried,’ I explained to him. ‘I thought Isaac would like to be here too.’ Then I scattered his ashes over Lookout Mountain and, without waiting around any longer, took a firm hold of my son’s hand and turned to leave. We were only there a few moments; there was no need for more.