So whom does a man tell when he falls in love with a woman save the person to whom, before her, he was most devoted.
"I think I'm in love," I told my father.
I'd waited as long as I could, though I'd felt I might surely burst before the clock struck nine and I was reasonably certain he'd awakened.
"With that girl from the Bridges?" my father asked.
"Yes."
"Nora," my father said in a tone near reverential, so that I knew he fully understood how momentous I found this particular moment in my life. "I'm very happy for you, Jack."
I expected him to add something to this, some words of joyful celebration, but instead there was a pause. When he spoke again, his manner was matter-of-fact. "I'd like to see the orchard."
I was still floating on a wave of happiness, and so such a strange announcement pulled me up short. For the orchard had never been more than a hardscrabble piece of land at the farthermost reaches of our property. To my knowledge, it had no value, either real or sentimental. In fact, it could hardly be called an orchard at all, since the pecan and crab apple trees planted on its limited acreage had scarcely ever borne fruit.
"But there's nothing there, Dad."
"For me there is."
"All right," I said. "I'll be right over."
I picked him up at the house a few minutes later. He was leaning against one of its high, white columns, his hand grasping the brass-handled cane his grandfather had once used, according to Great Oaks legend, to thrash a carpetbagger. Despite the spring warmth, he wore what he called his "parade-ground jacket," though its faded fabric and frayed collar seemed less fitting to a soldier on parade than the war-weary veteran of a failed campaign.
"I haven't been out in the light in quite some time," he said as he got into my car.
This was true. Since the "incident," he'd not only stopped going out in public but had also adopted a vampirish affection for dimly lighted rooms. He never threw open the curtains of the library or the study, and I had only rarely found him in the garden or strolling the grounds.
"So, you're in love," he said. "Good." His hand gripped the cane more tightly. "And better it should be a girl from the Bridges than some creature of the cotillion ball."
"But wasn't my mother a girl of the cotillion?"
My father smiled. "We danced the quadrille in many a grand room," he said. "But I should not have forced a grand tour upon her."
He'd rarely spoken of their marriage, save the final episode of it, how he'd fallen to the "bottoms," and sought relief in a year's tour of Europe, he and my mother journeying first to New York then across the waves to England, and from there making their way to Paris. It was there she'd discovered herself pregnant, so they'd remained in the City of Light until, somewhat prematurely, I'd been born, a birth much anticipated at Great Oaks, as my father always emphasized, and which would have ended their Parisian idyll quite happily had not my mother later perished in a fever on the crossing, an event that, each time he thought of it, threatened to return him once again, as he said, "to the depths."
"There was never another like her, Jack," he added now. "Such beauty and intelligence. Such flashing eyes."
For a moment, I had an image of them in their youth, my father in evening clothes, my mother in her gown, dancing in one of the great ballrooms of the Delta.
Briefly my father seemed lost in that same romance. Then, like one slapped back to reality, he suddenly glanced out over the grounds, his expression entirely changed. "Youth, as they say, is another country."
"Was yours wild?" I asked lightly.
He shrugged. "No more than most," he answered.
"No visits to Wanda Ruth's?"
He smiled. "Where did you hear of that particular establishment?"
"From Nora," I answered. "She was raised just across the street."
"In that case she must have seen quite a few plantation boys."
"They were the only boys Wanda Ruth catered to, evidently."
My father made no effort to deny this, nor add to it. "Youth is meant to be misspent, I suppose."
"And its doings covered up if necessary, as well," I added. "Nora told me that Wanda Ruth's body was still warm when the cops arrived to clean things up."
My father rolled down the window. "Where does that fit on your scale of evil, Jack?" he asked. "Doing what must be done to save a family name?"
"As I recall, hypocrites were put on the eighth circle in the Inferno," I told him.
He loosed the scarf from around his neck. "Which is most likely no hotter than a Delta summer."
He didn't speak again until I stopped the car beside the old barbed-wire fence that enclosed the orchard. It was sagging and rusty and in that way seemed at one with the ragged trees and weedy grounds.
I started to get out of the car.
"No need to walk around," my father said. "Being here is enough." He looked out to where twenty or so scraggly trees grew in a desolate field. "It reminds me of Lincoln's face in the last photograph that was taken of him."
I realized then why he'd asked to come here. He was near the end of his biography, and thus seeking a metaphor, perhaps some physical image that would give him a sense of Lincoln's last days, the full weight of his burden.
"Like this orchard," he added. "Ravaged."
He leaned forward slightly, as if trying to see some phantom figure among the trees, a tall, lanky man, ghostly in his stovepipe hat.
"Are you sure you don't want to get out?" I asked.
He shook his head. "He was so tired, Jack," he said softly. "His last days."
His eyes were glistening, and I felt the urge to draw him into my arms, but I knew that he'd recoil from that. And so I pretended not to notice this sudden seizure of emotion and quickly changed the subject. "I saw Hugh Crombie at Broom's when Nora and I were there last night. He was talking with Sheriff Drummond."
It was an image of vague collusion that, in turn, gave rise to the yet stranger notion that I might do well to prepare for some future deviousness on his part.
"He gives me a strange feeling," I said. "Drummond."
My father faced me, his head lifted, eyes dry, the crack in his composure now thoroughly resealed. "What sort of feeling?"
I didn't actually know what the feeling was, and so merely grasped for a word. "Unwholesome."
My father shrugged. "There are a great many unwholesome people in the world, Jack." He was staring out into the orchard again, focused now on a peculiarly decrepit line of trees, crooked branches, bare of leaves. They seemed gathered like starving old men. "And we all become so in the end." With that, he sat back slightly, as if stricken by a disturbing vision. "They're building an old-age home in Jackson. They call it a facility. I think I should take a look at it."
"Why?" I asked. "You're not old. And besides, no Branch has ever been put in a home, and certainly you won't be."
He looked at me with a strange, sad indulgence, as if I'd made a hasty pledge. "I think I should take a look at it, Jack."
But more than thirty years would pass before I actually took him there, and even then only at his aged, addled insistence, never with a view actually to moving him to such a place. By then he was very frail and so a wheelchair had been provided in which I propelled him through the "facility's" various rooms, almost all of which were painted in pastel yellow or light blue. Some of these rooms were equipped with televisions that seemed never to be turned off nor to experience a change of channels, while others had been given over to card tables and shelves stuffed with board games. There were a few potted plants, not quite plastic, not quite rubber. The air had smelled of medicines and the walls were dotted with decidedly sunny landscapes in whose relentless cheerfulness I sensed only the beleaguered optimism of those who know better but will not face it.
"Lincoln's face, yes," my father said softly, his attention once again fixed on the battered field before him. "It was like this, near the end, a ruined orchard."
He fell silent for a time, and during that interval I saw a strange exhaustion settle over him, so that he sat slumped, shoulders bowed, a ragged quality in his eyes. "He lost his son, you know."
"Yes," I said. "Little Edward."
"I don't mean Lincoln," my father said. "I mean Drummond. He lost his son in the war. His name is on that plaque in front of the sheriff's office." He drew in a long breath. "'The last full measure of devotion,'" he quoted. "What a poet Lincoln was." He looked at me. "He actually wrote poetry, did you know that?"
"No, I didn't."
He turned away, surveyed the orchard, moving from tree to tree until his attention finally settled upon the twisted branches of a single crab apple tree. "Lincoln took cocaine for his melancholy," he added. "You could buy it from a druggist in those days. The druggist's bill is in the archive. Of course, he may have bought it for his wife instead. So the mystery continues."
"How might you solve it?"
"Why should it matter?" my father asked.
"For the record," I said.
He waved his hand. "A man doesn't need to know everything. Especially about a revered figure. Like that boy you're helping. He should be careful, the questions he asks about his father."
"Why?"
He looked at me intently, from what seemed behind the veil of a grave experience. Then slowly and prophetically, he said the scariest thing I'd ever heard: "Because the answer to a heartfelt question, Jack, will always break your heart."