Hearts Left Behind (21 page)

“You lied to me, Alvin.”

“Lied about what, Tuck?” he said in a way that told me
he’d been expecting the question that was coming.

“It wasn’t Andrew Dales, was it, Alvin?”

A sad look fell over the Old Man’s face like the final
curtain.  Even through the screen on his front door, I could see there was
no more fight in him.  He was tired. 
Tired from a
life spent on
top of a Cub Cadet and
under the unforgiving sun.
 
Tired from years.
 
Tired from lies.
 

The Old Man didn’t invite me inside his house. 
Instead, he stepp
ed outside on his front
porch, the coils on the screen door squealing a
  long
,
witchy cackle as it closed behind him.  We settled into the two rocking
chairs on the Keller’s front porch.  “Alvin” was painted in red across the
top of his seatback and “Myrna” across the back of mine.  I’d almost
forgotten there was an Old Woman Keller.  We creaked in our chairs. 
The sun
sat
high in the sky and its stare made me
hot.  Sweat trickled down the right side of my face and I wiped it dry
against my shoulder.

“Hot,
ain’t
it?” said the
Old Man.  I nodded.

“You know I’ve been riding that same damn mower for
more than thirty years now?  Think I’ll stop running before it does. 
Damn good machine.  Oh sure, I’ve had to make some repairs over the years,
but nothing I couldn’t handle myself.  For the most part, I just take care
of it - change the oil and the plugs, sharpen the blade – you know.”

“Alvin.”

Undeterred, he continued.  “Yes sir, that machine
has done me well over the years. 
Dependable.
 
Predictable.
  Just take care of it, replace the
bad parts when need be.  Yes sir, predictable.”  Taking a deep
breath, he sat back in his chair and looked off somewhere far to the
left.  The horn of a train could be heard in the distance, making its way
toward us.  That’s the thing about a train – only one way to go, really –
straight. 
Straight forward and fast.
  Beads
of sweat dotted my forehead and nose, dripped down the sides of my face. 
The sun was brighter, hotter.

“Alvin, did my Grandpa have something to do with Katie
Cooper’s death?”

Not facing me, he said, “People aren’t machines,
Tuck.  Not as reliable.  And you can’t just replace the bad parts.”

The train’s horn blared louder as it approached.

“Tell me what you know, Alvin,” I said.

And he did.

The day that Katie was killed, Grandpa told Keller
that he had been watching Heather while Grandma was shopping with me and
Gavin.  Grandpa told Keller that he’d been there drinking alone, but ran
out of Scotch and
went to Glidden for
another bottle while Heather was napping.  It was when he got back to town
that he saw Slim Jim and Katie walking toward the tracks together.  That’s
what he told me, at least.

“Your grandfather
said
that he’d be in some serious trouble if your grandma or your mother ever caught
wind he’d left your sister napping alone in the house like that. 
Especially for a bottle of whiskey in the middle of the afternoon.
 
Your sister was what – two, three years-old?  Anyway, when he found out
later that Katie had gone missing, he came to me ‘
cause
he didn’t know what else to do.  That’s when we come up with that
anonymous tipster thing.  I called Sheriff Buck, told ‘
em
what I seen.  He figured out it was me, of course, but promised to keep me
out of it.  You know the rest.”

“Alvin,” I said with one eye on the memory, “I
remember that day.  Heather came with us.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that she went into town with me, Gavin, and
Grandma.”

“No,” he said.  “Are you sure,
Tucker
? 
That was a long time ago, now.  Are you sure?”

“I’m sure, Alvin.”

Grandpa had lied to Keller.  Why would he
lie
unless it was him who had killed Katie? And in my
wonder, the misty certainty rolled in.  “He did it,” I said.

I said it quietly, but Keller jumped as if I had
yelled the words out of me and thrashed him with them.

“Now, you listen to me, Tuck.  Your grandfather,
he’s a good man. 
Known him a long time.
 
A long, long time.”

“Just some
bad
parts, right, Alvin?”

“Yeah.
 
Bad parts, right.  But not that bad, Tuck. 
Not as bad as you’re thinking.  Just, he drinks too much sometimes,
right?  That’s all, right?”

He blinked and winced, one corner of his mouth going
up involuntarily.  He exhaled through his nose and it was a sound of
surrender.

Best buds forever. 

“Alvin?” I asked, staring back out at the vacant
world.  “Was it you who paid for Jim to be buried here?”

He sighed deeply and said, “No, Tucker.  But I
know who did.”

“Who?
You’re not going to tell me it was Grandpa, are you?”

“No, it wasn’t your grandfather.”

“Well then who the hell was it,
Alvin?
  Who else would have paid for Jim Johnson to be buried back
here in the very town where he had killed a girl?”

Sighing again, he said, “It was Howard and Betty
Cooper paid for it.  They heard about Slim Jim’s upbringing, how sick in
the head he was.  They forgave the man and paid for a proper
burial.”  He paused, shook his head slowly.  “
Them
Coopers are fine people, Tucker.”

It was too unbelievable not to believe.  Besides,
the Old Man had run out of reasons to lie.

“Damn fine Christians, those Coopers.  Just some
damn fine Christians.”

Sometimes the things we discover outside ourselves
make us question what is inside ourselves and the realization rumbles through
our core.  I am what only Victoria Mueller and Ronald Gaines could combine
to produce
in a specific moment in
time.  The same is true of the two of them and their parents. 
Biologically, the men whose genes comprise me – my father, my father’s father,
my mother’s father - are alcoholics and adulterers. 
Molesters
and murderers.
  Their blood flows through my veins.  A DNA
comparison would provide scientific evidence of a similar and insidious double
helix.

I did not feel those things inside me and yet
there they were, the little dragon monsters. 
Biologically, the potential was there.  Maybe that wicked genetic recipe
needs to stew in life’s failures and disappointments before being ready to
serve.  Or maybe it’s just a matter of time and opportunity.  Perhaps
with time and opportunity I would become the same.  What more lay ahead
for me?  How much more of me was there to learn of?  And what should
I do with what I had already learned, I did not know.

The Old Man had told me everything he knew. 
Probably everything that there was left to know.
 
Except, that is, for what was in my Grandpa’s head.  That was all there
was left to know.  A hundred miles of thoughts swirled through my head in
the six-block stroll I took through town.  I walked the meanderi
ng sideways walk of a child who is going somewhere he
doesn’t want to go.

If Keller was to be believed, my grandfather – my
blood – was a murderer.  Yet there was no real proof. 
Nothing to do with these questions, these accusations, but throw
them at Grandpa and watch him react.
  How could I confront him and
yet how could I not?  In the end I decided that I couldn’t live my life
with the not-knowing. 
The not-knowing of my grandfather
and of the shared blood that ran through our veins.

I watched my feet move in front me – left, right,
left, and imagined them overlapping the childhood steps that I had surely taken
on this very pavement years before.  Taking the long way home, I moved
down Adams Street past the school and toward the park, hoping to find my
swinging sage.  And find her I did.  As always, she was there. 
I stopped for a moment and from a distance watched the little girl swing back
and forth.  Chained and unchained. 
Safe and
unsafe.
 
The destiny of sky.
 
The fate of ground.
 
Life on a swing.

A deep sadness
came
over me as I walked toward her.  And I felt like I was suddenly leaving in
a world that knows shade, but not sunlight.

“Hi!” she said.

“Hi,” I said, moving toward my bench.

“
Thank you for
helping me the other day.”

“You’re welcome
,
Miss Settles.”

She dragged her feet until the swing stopped, climbed
off and made her way toward me on the bench.  She sat right down next to
me, leaned forward on her knees the same way I was and then spoke.

“My dad told me that you guys grew up here together.”

“Yep, we did.”

“Were you two friends?”

“Me and your dad?”
  I
smiled down at her.  What a special little girl Son Settles had. 
“Yeah, sure,
of course we were
friends. 
Used to play a lot of baseball and basketball
together.”

She nodded, “Yeah, he still likes to play those games.”

“Can I ask you something?  What’s your name?”

“Well, I guess I can tell you since you saved me from
choking and everything.”  She laughed at herself and then looked up at me
with those flowery eyes of hers.  “My name is
Mel, short for Melanie.  Don’t call me
Melanie.  And I already know that your name is Tucker, so you don’t have
to tell me.”

She reached down and picked up a handful of pebbles
and started throwing them at the metal slide across from us.  Each one
making a loud pinging sound as it hit.  My sadness grew into something
bigger and I realized that I had love for this little g
irl.  It was little boy love and I felt so much
of it in that moment that I wanted to cry.  Left over love for Katie
perhaps, I don’t know.  All I knew for sure was that the beauty of youth
had grown even more precious as the world around me grew
more
ugly
.

She
pursed
her lips
determinedly with every throw of a pebble and then tucked
that lovely brown hair back behind her ears.  She
looked up at me and I saw again the handful of freckles that decorated her nose
and cheeks.  Like a porcelain doll whose maker had dotted each one to her
face with the tip of a very fine brush quite delicately and with great
care.

I opened my mouth to speak, stopped,
released
the breath I
hadn’t realized I was holding.  Bending down, I picked up a handful of my
own pebbles to ping the slide with.  We sat there in silence until I had
pinged
my last pebble against the slide and said, “Mel, have
you ever had to do something that you really didn’t want to do?”

“Uh, hello, I’m a kid.  My whole life is about
doing things I don’t want to do.”

“Yeah, I suppose.  So, how do you deal with
it?  I mean, do you ever try getting out of it?”

“Used to.
  Then I
figured out that when
there’s something
that someone is making me do, one way or the other I always end up having to do
it.  Usually it’s best to do it quick.”

“Huh.  You’re a pretty wise little girl,
Mel.  You know that?”

“Yep.”

All the colors.
  I could
see them as I approached the cemetery.  They had not been there
before.  From a distance it almost looked like confetti or maybe
flowers?  But no, they were envelopes. 
Envelopes
of different colors and sizes – dozens of them.

I walked above the dead, weaving a path between the
headstones and taking it all in.  The letters were propped against
headstones and sticking out of flower arrangements.  Some seemed to be
growing right up out of the ground, tiny little paper headstones sprouting up
from the little slots plowed into this sacred soil.

And there were people there, too.  Living people,
I mean.  Not many, but more than I’d ever seen at a cemetery before. 
I saw an older couple walking hand in hand as if strolling through a Japanese
garden.  I saw a former Sunday
School
teacher of
mine with a basketful of letters, sneaking around like the Easter Bunny. 
Placing a yellow envelope here and an orange one there.
 
I saw Lyle Weber leave with a handful of letters and I saw Abigail Simpson
standing and reading just one, a quivering hand covering her mouth as she did
so.  Whoever had written that letter had love for Abigail Simpson. 
And Abigail Simpson had love for whoever that letter was about.

Beatrice Hart was sitting cross-legged in front of
Laura Jane’s headstone with several open and read letters stacked neatly at her
side. 
At least that many more in front of her waiting
to be opened.