Nowadays it is an old postman who limps up the long road to Great Oaks at the close of each day, bringing learned journals of history and literature, along with the local paper and an occasional package from New York. The townspeople think him fuzzy because in his recitation of town events, he often confuses one person with another, assigns unclear identities, fails to grasp a telling detail. "Mr. Drummond's home visiting his son," he told me on one occasion. But Harry Drummond had only one son, and that son is dead, so it was only a grave he visited.
My father once wrote a "character sketch" of Harry Drummond, a description that for all its literary mannerisms, remains unexpectedly evocative of the man it portrays:
Sheriff Drummond was never still. Not his eyes. Not his hands. No part of him knew rest, nor even brief repose. His bones clawed at his skin like cats within a sack. He never sat back without simultaneously inching forward. A drawn breath incrementally expanded his tightened frame, as if by one stretched cell at a time, slowly, painfully, like a drum being hammered from inside. The fingers of his right hand incessantly rolled an invisible coin. His head dodged invisible blows. Asleep he rocked in angry waves or hung from rocky crags till dawn. He never strolled, he lurched. His eyes jabbed and his tongue whipped and even when he was absolutely silent, one detected a manic inner buzz, like a wasp inside a jar.
And yet not one word of this description was physically accurate. It was all interior, what my father saw, Drummond's futile strivings.
I saw him last a full fourteen years before he died. I'd heard that he'd retired and gone farther south, perhaps to Florida, which turned out to be true. But through the years he'd periodically returned to Lakeland, and it was here, while strolling in our town burial ground, that I suddenly came upon him sitting alone on a concrete bench, a wooden cane slanting from his left hand, trembling slightly with his great age. For a moment, we seemed mutually confined within the prison of an old dead world.
"Drummond," was the only greeting I could summon from the great smoldering mound of what I still felt for our shared history.
He seemed unsure that the voice he'd heard was real. He turned with the arthritic slowness of one who lived with great pain.
"Mr. Branch," he said.
Countless times I'd imagined him on his deathbed, lying on his back, hands folded together, ready for the coffin, a great agitation calmed at last.
But here he was, Harry Drummond, beneath the bare limbs of a wintry pecan tree, wrapped in a wool overcoat, a tie knotted at his throat, shoes polished, wearing a snap-brim hat, everything present that had been of old, save the white meerschaum pipe.
He closed his eyes and for a moment I couldn't tell whether he'd begun to doze or was lost in thought. But as I eased down on the bench beside him, his eyes opened in a spasm, then instantly narrowed.
"Somebody said you finally left town," he said.
I could not imagine who this "somebody" might have been since, for most of the people of Lakeland, I was known only as the old man who lived in the decrepit mansion outside town, rarely left its declining splendor, spoke only to the postman who brought the daily mail.
"I took a brief vacation," I told him.
Only eight days, as a matter of fact, during which I'd driven somewhat aimlessly about the Delta before turning eastward into the bloodier regions of our old Lost Cause. I'd visited the battlefields of Fredericksburg, Petersburg, Antietam, stood in the evening shade and contemplated the quiet fields over which the long-silent cannon seemed still to hold sway. But every time, in the final moment, as I'd turned from the scene and headed back to my car, my mind had brought me back here to the Delta, where tragedies were less numerous but no less terribly enduring.
Drummond looked up at the line of somber gray clouds that was steadily advancing from the far horizon. "Storm coming in," he said.
Of all the subjects I'd ever expected to discuss with Harry Drummond, weather had surely been the least likely.
He peered toward the horizon, where clouds massed darkly like some fierce, invading army whose victory, despite its cause, was heavenly ordained. "Too bad you left it," he said.
I knew he meant teaching.
"I wasn't fit for it," I told him.
His withered eyes moved down from the clouds. "What was that word you used in court?"
I instantly recalled both the word and the moment I'd said it, Mr. Titus staring at me from the defense table, the odd grin on his lips, knowing how easily he could use my "fancy" word to discredit whatever else I'd said, show the jury I was just a "fancy-pants young man," as he'd later put it, "from a fancy-pants family."
"Vocation," I answered softly, and with that word I felt the leaden foot of unforgiving time, how the lake of consequence shimmers deep and still.
Drummond lifted his cane and thumped the ground softly, his gaze now directed toward the nearby stone upon which his son's name had been chiseled. "You sure liked it," he said. "Teaching."
"It was my heart's desire," I said.
I instantly recalled the spare provisions of my old classroom, a map of the world, four rows of desks, the wooden lectern behind which I'd held forth, confident, self-assured, speaking of doomed ships, the Medusa and the Minsk.
Drummond drew in a slow breath. "Seems like forever, that business with Eddie."
I shook my head. "It was yesterday."
His body listed to the left like a storm-ravaged ship struggling into harbor, fatally damaged, barely afloat. But he righted himself quickly, as if in preparation for a final, fruitless go at wind and weather. "Probably never would have happened if you hadn't gone to dinner with your father that night."
His mention of my father suddenly returned me to April 16, a Friday evening, and so, like all Friday nights, one I'd scheduled for dinner with my father.
"You wouldn't have been riding around like you were," Drummond said. "Wouldn't have seen anything. Or talked to anybody."
I remembered the twin beams of oncoming lights, the quick glimpse of a dark-haired girl. "That much is true, but still..."
"Wouldn't have felt obligated to help him," Drummond added. "Which you did, I guess, Mr. Branch. Felt obligated, I mean."
He meant to Eddie Miller.
"And after that," he added.
I felt like a book already read and closed.
"After that...," he repeated, letting the words trail off into the wintry air.
"After that..." I looked over our field of stones. "The rest."
The night "the rest" began I'd made tuna sandwiches and coleslaw and deviled eggs sprinkled with paprika, the sandwiches neatly wrapped in aluminum foil, the slaw and eggs packed in individual Tupperware containers. Since getting a place of my own, I'd scheduled Friday evening dinners with my father as a way of keeping watch on his mood, always concerned the "incident" might be repeated. I'd come up with the idea of various dinner themes. This was the third Friday of the month, thus "picnic night," when I brought the simple fare the two of us had once enjoyed in his back garden, always sandwiches and fixings that were easily made and even more easily transported.
My father never locked his door, or at least I'd never found it locked. As usual, I glanced up at the family motto, inscribed on a modest plaque beside the door. It read VENERATIO SILEO VERA, which translated as "Honor rests in truth." After this quick act of deference, I gave my customary two gentle raps of the old lion's head brass knocker, then opened the door just enough for my voice to echo through the foyer.
"Father?" I called.
"In the library, Jack."
His students had thought him fussy and joked about his careful dress, the three-piece suits always buttoned, the burgundy bow tie, along with the fact that he was a stickler for grammar, forever insisting that "unique" could not take an adjective, or that "fun" should not be used as one. He was not yet a truly elderly man, but he seemed older than his years because during the time since the "incident" he'd descended into a kind of hermit life, never going out or inviting anyone to Great Oaks despite its splendid rooms and glorious history, walls decked with portraits of august men and dazzling women. Even so, the house remained his great pride, and he took care to maintain its splendor. "Great Oaks is a monument," he once declared. As it still is, I suppose, though now to fallen things.
On that particular night I found him seated in a large brocade chair that like everything else in the house seemed larger than human life could adequately sustain. It had a high back and rounded arms, and he'd placed faded doilies on the arms, yellowed by time and badly frayed, but priceless to him because they'd been crocheted by his long-dead mother. There was a matching sofa and a lovely old mahogany desk with brass-handled drawers, both of which rested on an expanse of carpet that would have been perfectly at home in the drawing rooms of Versailles.
"You know, Jack," he said, "this old library is still my favorite room."
Which was not an easy thing, given what he'd done inside it.
"Of course," he added, "it's changed a little."
A little, yes.
For example, he'd replaced the old original artworks that had once hung around the room with prints of famous paintings he admired, Monet's Water Lilies, which he called "visible poetry," and Houses of Parliament, which, though painted in 1900, as he was careful to point out, he'd found useful in conveying the "shrouded density of Dickensian London." These two hung on opposite ends of the room, while van Gogh's self-portrait retained its place in the rear corner, the stains he'd never quite succeeded in cleaning from its surface still disturbingly visible, a faint pattern of ghastly rust-red dots sprayed across van Gogh's tormented face.
"But the room still has a meditative air, don't you think, Jack?" he asked.
"Very," I said.
Which was true, for the room's real extravagance resided in the books, classics all, most in English, but many in Latin and even more in French. They were bound in leather, with titles etched in gold, and like all things beautiful and rare, they seemed destined to render lonely anyone who loved them.
"Tuna and coleslaw," I said. I lifted the plastic bag that contained our dinners. "Deviled eggs."
My father smiled, but since the "incident," there had been little twinkle in his eyes. "Let's dine here, rather than in the garden," he said. "There's a chill in the air."
There was no such thing, of course. In fact, it was unseasonably warm for April, but if he preferred the library to our customary picnic in the garden, that was fine with me.
"Life is a tragedy of unpreparedness, Jack," he added with a slight flourish, so that I knew that this was the topic he'd chosen for the evening.
I retrieved a silver tray from a nearby breakfront and placed it on his lap.
"E. M. Forster makes a different point, of course," he continued thoughtfully.
I peeled the foil from his sandwich. "Which point is that?" I asked.
"The tragedy of being well prepared," he answered, "but for a call that never comes." He glanced down at his hands. "Did you know, Jack, that in the Song of Roland, the Knights of the Round Table sometimes died of lost honor?" Even slightly in his cups, he seemed himself a product of that lost age of courtiers, knights devoted heart and hand to a single passion. "They had it right, Jack," he added. "A man should die when his honor dies."
"That would certainly thin the population," I said lightly.
Polite as always, he waited until I'd unwrapped my sandwich and opened the two Tupperware containers. When all was prepared I gave him my best smile and lifted a fork in salute.
"Bon appétit," he said.
We ate almost in silence, and when we'd finished I returned the foil and the containers to the plastic bag and placed it on the table that rested between us. "Okay, another fine dinner put to rest," I said.
My father leaned back in his chair and suddenly seemed mysteriously burdened. "It's only food," he said softly. "Only sustenance. We should live on pine straw, like the sparrows."
His stricken body appeared knit together at the end of time, fraying slightly with each breath. It was as if he'd offended his own life in trying to take it, and that life had retaliated by making itself more labored in the physical living of it, but not a whit more precious to him or in the least bit pleasurable.
After a moment, he released a long breath. "Books," he said. "Let's talk about books. What are you reading, Jack?"
"True tales of horror for my specialty class," I answered. "The one on evil. At the moment, I'm reading about Tiberius. He was a terrible man, especially when it came to children."
"Yes, I know," my father said. "But as to the class, how is it going?"
"The students seem engaged."
I related the day's lecture, though not all the details.
"So dark," he said. His gaze drifted over to the old wooden lectern that stood in the rear corner of the room, and above which hung van Gogh's self-portrait in its spattered ruin. "Such dark things."
I decided to draw him back to a more congenial topic.
"How goes the biography?" I asked.
He had been writing a biography of Lincoln in the long years since the "incident," his progress agonizingly slow, but "ever onward," as he'd once said, "into the poetry of our most tragic life."
"I received a copy of his autopsy only yesterday," he told me. "From the Library of Congress. It seems that when they weighed Lincoln's brain, they found it of ordinary weight."
"But did they weigh his heart?" I asked.
My father smiled. "Very good, Jack. A beautiful response."
"Will you put it in The Book of Days?" I asked, now referring to a second work my father had long been writing, and which, by the chronological arrangement of the volumes, I took to be some kind of journal, though he remained entirely secretive as to its contents, an attitude that further suggested the intimacies of a personal diary.
"Many things find their way into The Book of Days," he said by way of answering my question. "Not one of which will ever be revealed to your prying eyes, Jack."
"Racy stuff?" I asked lightly.
He offered an oddly disheartened shrug. "A poor thing," he said, paraphrasing Shakespeare, "but mine own."
We talked on awhile, but shortly he grew yet more tired, though I sensed that he was weary less of the subject than of human company, mine or anyone else's.
I left him at eight thirty, still early, so I decided to drop by Jake's, a little diner on the outskirts of town.
The usual assortment of local people sat at small tables and booths, some of whom I recognized, but none of whom felt sufficiently at ease to do anything but nod to me. I was, after all, a Branch, and therefore one who summoned other people but who was never summoned by them.
When the waitress came over I ordered a coffee and drank it slowly, continuing with Billy Budd, noting certain phrases from the book, the "mysteries of iniquity," Melville's telling description of the villainous Claggart as having "rabies of the heart," the gentle terms of endearment used by Billy's mates, the way they called him "Beauty" and "Baby Lad," how odd the appreciation of his innocence seemed in men whose own lives had been so relentlessly hard. It was something I might mention in a later lecture for my specialty class, I decided, a needed anecdote to my many tales of inhumanity, a little taste of honey to soothe life's bitter draught.
Nearly half an hour had passed before my cup was empty. I could have had a refill, of course, but the caffeine would have kept me up all night. I glanced at my watch. It was still relatively early, but I didn't want to linger, so I paid the check and headed for my car.
Dirk Littlefield was parked two spaces from my car. He was sitting behind the wheel of a battered old pickup, Wendell Casey in the passenger seat. They were talking in a very animated way until Dirk caught sight of me, nodded abruptly to Wendell, who wheeled around and stared at me with his usual comic grin, part clever clown, part half-wit.
"Hi, Mr. Branch," Wendell said.
"Hi." I was now at my car, reaching for the door handle.
"I've never seen you at Jake's."
The fact that Wendell saw me at Jake's now clearly struck him as a curiosity, though by no means an unpleasant one.
Dirk's manner, however, was abrupt. "How long you been here?" he asked sharply.
His disrespectful tone put me off, so I answered crisply. "Half an hour."
"Didn't see Sheila, did you?"
Before I could answer, he got out of the truck and came around to the back of it, the collar of his jacket turned up, as if against a cold wind. There was something hard-edged and metallic in his every move, as if bolts and pistons were continually shifting beneath his skin.
"I've been waiting for her," he added. He slumped against the back of the truck, his body now in profile, the sharpness of his features made more so by the diner's lighted window. In that misty light, his skin seemed to shine dully, like smudged chrome.
Wendell got out of the car. "I think Sheila stood old Dirk up," he said as he sauntered toward Dirk. "What do you think, Mr. Branch?"
I couldn't tell whether this was a serious question, or meant as one of Wendell's amiable barbs.
"Perhaps," I answered, with a slight smile.
Wendell now stood next to Dirk, slouched in typical sidekick mode, less a force to be reckoned with than a presence to be noted, the foam lightly boiling from the beaker's mouth rather than the poison at its bottom.
"Dirk don't like it when Sheila's late," he said with a comic wink. "He gets a notion she's cheating on him."
"I'm sure she'll turn up," I said.
"How would you know?" Dirk said grimly.
This was not a question and certainly not an attitude I wished to address. I opened my car door. "See you Monday," I said curtly.
Wendell nodded, but Dirk remained motionless, his hands sunk in the pockets of his jeans, both of them clearly balled into tight fists.
I got into my car, turned the ignition, and backed out of Jake's. By then Dirk and Wendell were making their way toward the restaurant, Dirk tall, with broad shoulders, Wendell small and wiry, a Mutt 'n' Jeff team yoked together by a harness no one had ever understood.
On the way home, I noticed the dimly lighted entrance to Glenford State Park, and for a reason I could never explain, I turned off Route 4 and headed out to Breaker Landing. It was little more than a square of rough pavement that fronted Glen-ford Lake, but it was the place I'd occasionally gone when I had a problem, intellectual or otherwise, I wanted to think through. I parked there for a time and stared out at the water, so lost in some nameless wave of thought that I didn't notice whether the moon was full or half full or in a crescent, the surface of the lake calm or agitated, and thus was unable to answer even the most routine questions that were later posed to me about my whereabouts that night.
But there was something else I did remember, a pair of headlights coming toward me as I pulled out of the park a few minutes later. Route 4 was more or less deserted by then, so it was never a question of seeing several cars, perhaps none of them clearly. There was only one car, an old brown van, and as it swept by, I saw a young woman in the passenger seat. She had long dark hair, and I immediately had the impression that it was Sheila Longstreet though the van had rushed past much too quickly for me to be sure. The strange thing was that as I continued toward home, I kept thinking about the girl I'd so briefly glimpsed as I'd pulled onto Route 4. There was something in her posture that disturbed me, the way her right shoulder seemed folded in, along with the fact that her head was clearly bowed, her long dark hair falling forward, covering her face. I'd gotten only a glimpse of her, and yet the image that lingered in my mind produced a tangible disturbance, so that suddenly—and very oddly—I imagined the naked, shivering women of the Minsk, herded together and awaiting their awful turn at the streetcar, bereft of all their female power, heads lowered in desolate submission, staring down at their tied hands.