Chapter 9: Anger

“That day has never left me.  It’s something I’ll never escape.” He looked back down at the uneven wood floor.  He rose out of his chair and slowly walked to the hearth.  His fingers ran down along the edges of the black plastic rimmed spectacles next to candle.  He picked them up and held them towards the ceiling and them brought them back down and wiped the smudges from the lens.  “Every damn day I think about it.”

            It was a moist summer evening and the crickets were chirping their ritual, uneven song.  The light breeze through the open adjacent window carried in the sweet smell of curing tobacco.  The old man in front of Todd was standing there silently, his hand over his mouth.

            “Todd, I just don’t know what to tell you.  We all knew that John was sick.”  He shook his head slowly.  “His tendencies, you know, the way he used to do things, just didn’t seem right.”

            “Like what?”

            The old man moved his hand from his mouth to his temples, rubbing them slowly.  “The way he talked.”  He thought silently to himself for a few seconds.  “He never really had a whole lot to say, you know.  But just before the accident, it was almost as if he was forgetting things that we had just talked about a day or two before.  I mean, we’d talk about the irrigation pipes on Tuesday and then on Thursday he’d have forgotten what we were talking about doing.  Almost like he had something else on his mind.”

            “Humph.”

            “What?”

            “Someone told me that he didn’t get the farm truck inspected on time.  That’s something that he never ever forgot to do.” Todd looked out the window.  The bug zapper hanging from the neighbor’s post in the back yard was glowing blue.  “I’d imagine, by that time, he’d made up his mind.”

            The old man sat back down in his velvet covered chair.  He still massaged his temples slowly.  “It’s such an awful question to ponder Todd.”  He put his hand back down on the arm of the chair and stared intently at Todd.

            Still staring out the window, Todd could feel the old man’s eyes looking at him.

            “What torments you so, son?  Why is it so important to you that you figure this whole thing out?”

            “Because if I don’t understand why he did it, then I won’t understand the rest of him.”

            “The rest of him?”

            “Yes sir, the rest.”

            “What’s that supposed to mean?”

            Todd looked over at  Mr. Clemmet and met his stare directly.  “It means that I can’t understand why he would do it, when he had everything so wonderful around him?”

            “Wonderful?  What the hell are you talking about, son?”

            “He had MaMa and Gina and Dorothy around all the time.  They comforted him when he was sick.  How could he just leave them?”

            “Son, they couldn’t save him.”  He leaned forward towards Todd, and laid his glasses on the table between them.  “What?  Did you expect him to tell them what was going on in his head?  He was too hard-headed for that.”

            “But why did he do it when he did it?”

            “Does it matter?”

            “Yes!” He sprung from his chair.  “Why did he do it with MaMa and Gina right there in the yard?  What the hell was he thinking?  They were the ones who took care of him!  How could he do it right in front of them?”

            Clemmet reached for Todd’s arm.  “They never saw him do it.”  He grabbed him by the wrist. “They heard the gunsh...”

            “Gunshot?  No kidding?  Did he think of what they would have to deal with after he blew his damn brain out?” Todd erupted.  “What did he think was going to happen after that?  That some freakin’ angel was going to swoop down and carry his bloody body away?  Can you imagine...” his voice started to crack, “can you imagine having to see Maggie like that Mr. Clemmet?”

            The old man stared coldly at Todd.  “I can’t imagine a lot of things son, but I will be damned if you’ll ever...”

            “You don’t understand Mr. Clemmet.  You don’t understand.  I wanted so desperately to be just like him.  I didn’t want to be no farmer, but I wanted to work like him, to look like him, to smell like him.  Everything.”  He reached for the old man’s hand with his other arm and put his hand on top of one grabbing his right forearm. “He was everything that I wanted to be.”

            Clemmet leaned in towards Todd.  “How he ended his life, is not how he lived his life.”

            “But it’s the one thing that I remember most vividly,” Todd said, tears now forming in his eyes. 

            “You were too young to remember much else.”   He thought to himself.  “Let’s walk outside.”  The two of them walked out of the little den of the house and out onto the front porch.  Mr. Clemmet turned off the light and the two of them leaned against the railing that stretched along the front of the house.  They stood there silently for a few minutes.

            Their skin, moist from the humid air, almost stood on end when the breeze slowly passed over it.  Todd looked out from the porch and over the field across the road.  Three, no, four deer slowly moved seemingly side to side, searching for husks of corn among the young green stalks just barely four feet tall. 

            “I remember the summer before,” said Todd. 

            “What do you remember?”

            “That I wanted to work with him.”  He exhaled a small laugh. 

            “Did you?”

            “Part of the time.  Mostly at the beginning of the summer.”

            “What were you doing with him?” 

            “The racks.” 

            “The racks?”

            “Yeah,” said Todd, “you know, the racks that go in the curing barns.  We would take them from the trailer on the harvester and bring them back to the barn.  As we would put racks in the barn, the guys on the harvester would fill up another trailer.   I think we had to do seven and a half trailers a day.”  He thought for a second.  “I think.”

            “How did you like it?”

            “Well, it sure as hell beat having to work on the harvester.”  He wiped the remnants of the tears from his cheek.  “They used to make me work on the top of the harvester taking tobacco out of the tray, just so I wouldn’t mess anything else up.  I was too young to do anything else.”

            The deer in the field slowly started to fade from their line of sight. 

            “I thought John used to drive the harvester.”

            “The years that I worked there before that, he did.  But for some reason, he didn’t that summer.”  He looked down to the railing that they were leaning on and rubbed his right hand smoothly along its surface.  “There was something different about him that summer.  There was something about those three months that I spent working with him everyday that I don’t know how to explain.”

            “Some things don’t have explanations.”                                

            Todd looked back out across the field.  His eyes darted quickly from side to side desperately searching for the deer that had just slipped away.  “I don’t know Mr. Clemmet.”

            The old man turned and looked silently out into the cornfield.  After a few minutes, he turned around and reached for their iced teas.  He handed Todd his drink and sipped softly at his own.  He looked at Todd’s profile and could see John’s rugged jaw and subtle cheekbones.  Todd could pass as his son.  “Perhaps, Todd, he just wanted to spend time with his grandson.”

            Todd spotted a single doe peek its head out of the corn.  He watched her as she bent down slowly to nibble at a fallen husk.  Todd looked over at Mr. Clemmet and mustered a small smile.  “Perhaps he just wanted to be with me.”