Roses (44 page)

It was another inexplicable conundrum concerning Wyatt that Percy could not figure out. He’d have thought that after meeting
his father’s fist and being threatened with death in the cabin, the boy would have avoided the place like a den of cottonmouths.
Yet Wyatt had introduced the place to Matthew, and it had become the boys’ private sanctum during the years of their friendship,
as it was now for William Toliver and his friends.

Wyatt had disappeared to the cabin for two days following Matthew’s burial. Tonight was colder than the last time Lucy had
sent Percy looking for their son, but he found him where he’d suspected he’d be—out on the lake, hunched over a rod in the
canoe, much the same way Percy had discovered him then. Like that other time, knowing he was entirely visible in the moonlight,
he placed his hands on his hips and waited for Wyatt to notice him. Like then, he was conscious of the lost years between
them, as impossible to traverse now as it would be to walk out there to Wyatt on the path made by the moon.

Presently, the silhouette moved, the strong shape of the hunched back turned in his direction. “Any luck?” Percy called.

“Nah, too cold,” Wyatt called back, and wound in his line. Percy heard the soft plop of the bait being tossed into the water.
He observed Wyatt methodically stow the rod and reel, take up the paddle, and begin to row to shore.

As he watched, a memory floated to Percy.

Percy?

Here, Lucy.

He was hearing his wife’s voice again, the night she had found him in the library and asked him to go find Wyatt after his
disappearance. Drawn to the corner where he sat in the moonlight, she had knelt quietly in front of him and placed her hands
on his knees.
You’ve been sitting here like this for two days, Percy. It’s night again.

Again? He had pondered the inaccuracy of her statement. The night had been constant since Matthew had died five days ago.
His little boy had been lying in the cold, dark earth for two days and nights.

I feel so truly sorry, Percy. Please believe me.

I believe you, Lucy.

I can’t imagine losing a son. I pray to God I never do.

God, or one of His angels, must have pressed a finger to Percy’s lips, sealing them, thereby preserving the residue of their
marriage. For he was about to say,
I hope you never do, either, Lucy
, and she would have taken him to mean that the loss of his second son would be exclusively her own.

Tonight, as he heard the smooth, unhurried slice of the paddle into the lake, a sadness pierced him to the quick of his soul.
How many times had Lucy sent him out to find their son, yet he never had? He’d driven Wyatt away from him right here on this
spot, and he had never come back, not in all these years. He would soon turn eighteen. In September, the Nazis had invaded
Poland and then France, prompting Great Britain to declare war on Germany. His old friend Jacques Martine, with whom he’d
fought in France, predicted in a letter from Paris that America would be at war in less than two years. Two years… two years
to find his son.

And what would he be able to give Wyatt if he should find him? Love? Did he love Wyatt? No, he did not love Wyatt, not the
way he had loved Matthew, with that heart-stopping, throat-closing rush of feeling that had proclaimed him flesh of his flesh,
blood of his blood. He had no understanding why. Wyatt had courage and integrity, loyalty and perseverance. He was not a braggart
or a snob, though he had cause to be both. He was strapping and handsome, envied and sought after, but he took no more notice
of that than he did of himself as the son of one of the richest men in Texas.

“He wouldn’t,” responded Sara in a letter when he wrote to her of these observations. “He looks upon all that attention as
a result of who you are, not him. Your being rich is a source for
your
pride, not his. I can’t believe he’s the same boy who was so cruel to Matthew.”

It was a thought that had often crossed Percy’s mind.

“Give you a hand?” he offered as Wyatt neared where he stood. Wyatt threw him the line, and his father tugged the boat into
the small slip, holding it tight until he could jump to the bank.

“Party get dull?” Wyatt asked, taking the rope and winding it competently around the spike.

“No, that’s why I came to find you. Your mother and I thought you might enjoy it. You earned it.”

“Well, I’m not too much for parties,” Wyatt said in his slow drawl. “Rather catch croppy instead. Wish you hadn’t disturbed
yourself to come out here to get me. You’re probably missing a good time.”

Percy tried to subdue the throbbing ache within him, a sorrow he hadn’t felt so acutely since Matthew had died. Impulsively,
he clamped a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Son, how about you and me getting drunk together? It’s been a long time since I’ve
gone on a binge, not in years, in fact.” The memories were stirring, would not lie still. He felt on the verge of tears.

“When was that, Dad?”

“Oh, it was a long time ago, before your mother and I married.”

“What caused you to do it?”

Percy hesitated, unwilling to answer but afraid to break the moment between them. He and Wyatt had never talked of his past.
He could not recall a single question his son had ever asked about his youth, the war, life before him. Only Matthew had been
interested in his memories. He decided to answer directly. Wyatt was a man now. “It was because of a woman,” he said.

“What happened to her?”

“I lost her to another man.”

“You must have loved her.”

His son was taller, more stalwart of build, than Matthew would have been. His presence was strong in the moonlight. “Yes,
I did. Very much. Why else does a man get drunk?” He tried to grin.

Wyatt frowned. “So, for what reason would we be getting drunk tonight?”

Percy found it impossible to answer. The ache within him swelled, shutting off his breath. “I… don’t know,” he managed to
get out. “It was a bad idea. Your mother would kill us both. She’ll be looking for us, by the way.”

Wyatt nodded and snapped closed his jacket. “Then we’d better go,” he said.

A
fter Wyatt’s graduation from high school—because of his absolute refusal to go to college—Percy took him off the floor of
the lumber mill and gave him a job as assistant to the production manager whose office was in his headquarters building. Wyatt
accepted the promotion with his usual taciturnity and listened stolidly at company meetings, taking dutiful notes with a slow
hand. For two years, he bore with patience Percy’s attempts to fit him into the company as heir apparent and Lucy’s ceaseless
urging that he comply.

He was rescued in December 1941 when the United States declared war against Japan for the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Within
weeks, without consulting his parents, Wyatt had joined the U.S. Marine Corps.

“You must stop him!” a wild-eyed Lucy begged Percy.

“How do you suggest I do that?” her husband asked, equally as distraught. In his sleep now, he heard again the roar of the
guns, the cries of pain and death, knew again the sticky sweat of fear, the stench of horror and panic, woke again to the
forgotten taste of ashes in his mouth. And in his dreams, in the midst of the swirling smoke, he saw not the combat-fatigued
faces of his fallen comrades, but Wyatt’s, the blue eyes empty and staring in death, the question
Why?
still in them.

“He’s almost twenty, Lucy. A man now. I can’t stop him.”

“Would you, if you could?” she asked, the question fraught with anguish, not accusation. Such periods of pointless blame-laying
were over between them. She knew he’d tried with Wyatt, and for a long time her oblique looks when he spoke of Wyatt told
him that she was aware of his growing change toward their son.

“Yes, by God. I’d rather shoot him myself than let him go where he’s going,” he declared, confounded by his feelings.

“You felt you had to enlist this soon?” he asked Wyatt two weeks later as he packed his duffel bag. It was the beginning of
January 1942. Wyatt had been ordered to present himself in three days’ time for induction into the United States Marines at
Camp Pendleton near San Diego, California, where he would begin the first phase of boot camp. His train was due to leave from
Howbutker within the hour.

“No reason why I shouldn’t,” Wyatt said. “Every able man will be needed as soon as possible to put an end to this mess.”

“Maybe you’re right,” Percy said, remembering his own arguments for signing up. He fell silent as he watched Wyatt stuff tightly
rolled pairs of socks into the canvas bag, each spheroid rammed into its mouth bringing him closer to the time he’d pull the
drawstring and hoist the bag to his shoulder.

There is no hell, Percy thought. Hell is right here on earth. What greater hellfire than watching the son you never knew go
off to war, the uncertainty of his return? There had always been a vacuum in his heart where Wyatt should have been, an empty
space where nothing of him had ever caught and hung—no memory of shared laughter, conversation, male confidences. They had
never talked about
him
, his dreams, ambitions, ideas, philosophies. The shocking thought came to Percy that, beyond a general impression, he had
never paid much attention to the individual details of Wyatt’s face. He remembered Matthew’s still—the way his eyes had caught
variations of light, the position of every cowlick, the small, round reminder above his left eye of his bout with chicken
pox. But Wyatt’s features had remained as indistinct and undefined as a face underwater, sure to be a struggle to recall almost
as soon as he was gone.

“Son…” Percy stepped forward, desperate that the boy should not go to war without something of himself having found a peg
in the void, something he could remember him by.

“Yes, sir?” Wyatt said, continuing his packing.

“Tell me something before you go?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“Why did you suddenly stop hating Matthew DuMont? Why did the two of you become such close friends, almost… like brothers?”

Seconds ticked by. Wyatt appeared unmoved, his thickset profile as expressionless as ever as he cleared the bed one by one
of the necessities and belongings that would go with him to war. Shoving the last item into the bag, he said, “Well, because
he
was
my brother, wasn’t he?”

A roaring silence filled Percy’s ears, as if he’d stood too close to a mortar blast again. His hands balled in his pockets.
“How… long have you known?”

Wyatt shrugged without looking at him. “I figured it out in the cabin that afternoon you knocked the crap out of me. You almost
gave it away yourself, remember?” He threw Percy a wry grin. “You said, ‘If you so much as look cross-eyed at your—’ But you
caught yourself in time. I guessed it then. It was instinct, but I was pretty sure you meant to say ‘your brother.’ I figured
you might knock my teeth out for beating up another man’s kid, but you’d only threaten to kill me if I beat up the son you
loved.”

Percy made a move toward him. “Wyatt—” he began, but a wave of bereavement overpowered his words.

“It’s okay, Dad. I never blamed you for loving Matthew. Hell”—he laughed shortly—“everybody did, even Maw.” He stopped his
packing to level a gaze at his father that brooked no contradiction. “But nobody loved him more than I did. I want you to
know that. I never hated Matthew. I envied him. You were right about that. But I didn’t envy him for being what I wasn’t,
I envied him for having what I wanted… what I thought should have come to me. I punished him for winning your respect and
approval when I couldn’t—a boy not even your son, was my way of thinking. When I realized who he was…” He set the cylindrical
bag upright on the bed. “Well, it explained a lot of things.”

Percy itched to halt Wyatt’s hands, to stop him from drawing the bag’s cord. “And… you never had any doubt at all after that
day?”

“No, sir,” Wyatt said, cinching the mouth of the bag closed. “Not since I heard you admit to Maw later that night that Matthew
was your son. I had come down the hall to apologize and to tell you I’d never hurt him again, when I heard your row.”

Percy groped for the bedpost. “You… heard everything?”

“Uh-huh. Everything. That explained a lot of things, too.”

Percy swallowed in an ineffectual effort to clear his ears of the deafening absence of sound. “And that’s why… why you and
I never… made it.”

“Oh, we made it, Dad—in the only way we could. And I don’t want to leave you thinking it was Matthew that had anything to
do with the way things were between us. If he had never been born, it wouldn’t have changed the way you feel or don’t feel
about me. Matthew just made things worse by comparison, that’s all. The way I saw it, by learning the truth that day, I picked
up a brother.”

And lost a father, Percy cried to himself, paralyzed by a yearning to reach out and grab him for one minute before he could
leave, hold him like the little boy he’d never held, never found, until now.
I love you… I love you
, he longed to cry. The feeling was miraculously there, released like a bird from lifelong captivity, but Wyatt would never
believe the words came from his heart rather than the emotion of the moment.
Forgive me…
, he wanted to beg, but he feared Wyatt’s answer. He could not be left with that memento to hang in the void.

“One other thing,” Percy said. He had to know. “Did… did you ever tell Matthew?”

“Nah, and he never guessed. Matthew was never good at figuring out things like that. He took things as they were.” Wyatt gestured
toward the bureau. “In that bottom drawer are Matthew’s jersey and the book he gave me for my birthday. I’d take them for
luck, but I don’t want anything to happen to them. If I don’t come home, they’re yours.”

Incapable of speech, Percy nodded and watched as Wyatt, with one swift motion, swung the heavy bag over his shoulder. Knowing
that any attempt at reconciliation would not only be futile, but appear as currying, he stood in helpless resignation as his
son took a last long look around his room. Wyatt had always respected him. He would at least let him go with that.