Roses (45 page)

“Well, I guess this is it,” Wyatt said, his glance coming to rest on Percy for a rare time in his life. His eyes, clear as
a spring stream, were empty of accusation, guile, or condemnation. “I think it’s a good idea that you’re not coming to the
station with us, Dad. You and Maw would just get in a fight, and I don’t want to remember you two that way. She’ll go to her
card game afterwards. Those biddies she hangs around with will help her get through this.” He stuck out his hand, and Percy
slowly took it and gripped it hard. To his horror, tears filled his eyes.

“I wish… I wish things had been different between us.”

Wyatt shook his head. “A man doesn’t choose his sons. Things happened the way they did. Matthew was a good boy. I’m glad he’s
out of this business.” They released hands. “Take care of Maw the best way you can—if she’ll let you,” he said, his mouth
quirking in a grin that made his rugged features endearing.

But Percy could not let it go. “When you come home, maybe we can start again.”

The head shake again. “It wouldn’t change things. I’m me, and you’re you. So long, Dad. I’ll write.”

And he did. Percy devoured his letters, following the course of his platoon in the South Pacific from Corregidor, through
Guam, and finally to Iwo Jima. Wyatt distinguished himself as Percy had suspected he would, winning commendation after commendation
for bravery on the battlefield. Percy read the letters and newspaper accounts of the jungle warfare, of heinous traps and
Japanese atrocities, of the rains, mire, and malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and wondered if somehow, some way, Matthew was calling
the plays for his brother from beachhead to beachhead, foxhole to foxhole, keeping him safe, keeping him whole.

And then, at last, it was over and Wyatt was coming home. But not to stay, he had written. He had found his niche. He was
staying in the marines. He’d been commissioned on the battlefield and would retain the rank of first lieutenant. Percy and
Lucy met him at the station. They hardly recognized him when he stepped down from the train, the left side of his uniform
jacket a jaw-dropping testimony of the battles he’d survived. It had been four years since they’d seen him. Percy had passed
his fiftieth birthday, and Lucy, already gray, was forty-five.

“Hello,” he said simply, his voice that of a stranger, the eyes foreign to them. Lucy was slow to embrace this man she’d raised.
He was powerful in build, taller even than Percy, and awesome in presence. Battle-hardened, combat-fit, his visage was that
of a warrior who had found his tribe, his destiny, his peace.

“So, you’re not planning on returning to the business?” Percy asked later.

“No, Dad.”

He nodded. There would be no starting over again after all. He extended his hand and clamped his other hard over Wyatt’s grip.
“Then I wish you safe landings always, son,” he said.

Lucy blamed him for Wyatt’s decision. She knew by now that Wyatt had been aware that Matthew was his brother. “Why
would
he want to come home and work for a father who had preferred his first son?”

“I believe Wyatt has come to terms with that, Lucy,” Percy said.

Her eyes glittered with the old pain. Percy knew that she was hurt to the core that she’d been deprived of her son. She’d
looked forward to having Wyatt home again, marrying, giving her grandchildren. “Well, maybe, but he hasn’t forgiven you for
it, Percy,” she said. “And he never will. The fact that he’s staying in the marines is proof of that.”

One morning five months after Wyatt had returned to his regiment, Percy looked up from reading his newspaper at the breakfast
table to find Lucy standing by his side. She was dressed in a suit and hat. A mink stole hung from her shoulders. “Where are
you off to this early in the morning?” he asked in surprise. His wife rarely opened an eye before ten.

“Atlanta,” Lucy said, pulling on her gloves. “I’m going there to live, Percy. There’s nothing for me here anymore, now that
Wyatt won’t be coming home. I’ve already leased a town house on Peach Tree, and I’ve arranged for Hannah Barweise to pack
and ship my things.” She took a sheet of paper from her handbag and handed it to an astounded Percy. “Here’s the address and
a list of my expenses. I’ll also require a monthly allowance for personal items. The total is there at the bottom. It may
look outrageous, but you can well afford it, and I’m sure you’ll think it’s worth the amount to get me out of your hair.”

“I don’t want you out of my hair, Lucy. I’ve never said that.”

“You wouldn’t. You’re too much of a gentleman, but this is best for both of us. Now, for old times’ sake, would you like to
drive me to the station?”

He did not try to talk her out of it, but at the station, he looked down into her plump, middle-aged face and remembered the
girl he’d come to meet here over twenty-six years ago. “A lot of water, Lucy,” he said, feeling a pull of his heartstrings.

“Yep,” she agreed. “The only trouble was, you and I watched its flow from opposite sides of the bank.”

Her hat was a little askew. He straightened it and asked on a pensive note, “Don’t you want a divorce, while there’s still
time to watch its flow on the same bank with someone else?”

“Not on your life!” She laughed sharply. “You can forget about that. My threat still holds. No divorce until I say so, and
that won’t be while Mary Toliver DuMont is still alive.”

They did not embrace when it came time for her departure. Lucy seemed disinclined to put herself into Percy’s arms and offered
her cheek for a peck instead. She allowed him to take her elbow to help her board, and as she started up the steps, she turned.
“Good-bye, Percy,” she said softly.

“For a little while,” he said, and slid his hand down to her wrist in the old way as the train whistle blew. The gesture took
her by surprise, and he heard a short hiss of breath before she jerked her arm free as though burned. After holding his gaze
a fraction longer than she seemed to wish, she turned her back to him and disappeared.

A
fter Lucy’s departure, Percy did what he’d always done when a hole opened in his life: He added more hours to his workday
and expanded operations. He enlarged the pulp mill and gave the go-ahead to begin construction of an adjoining paper-processing
plant on the acres he’d bought from Mary. In addition, he had land cleared nearby and blueprints drawn for a residential development
that would offer affordable houses to workers and their families willing to live within smelling distance of the odorous emissions
from the pulp mill. The proposed number were snapped up immediately. The sulfurous smell was by no means disagreeable to the
soon-to-be home owners. The odor meant consistent paychecks handed out each Friday, health benefits, pensions, raises, and
paid vacations.

For companionship, he had the constants of Ollie and Mary and a welcome newcomer to their circle of three, a young lawyer
named Amos Hines. Amos had wandered into Howbutker in late 1945 on the heels of William Toliver’s departure and was immediately
asked to join the law firm of his old friend and family attorney, Charles Waithe. Like his father, William had discovered
he was no farmer and had taken off for parts unknown one fall morning, not to be heard from for several years. Once again,
Mary was bereft of an heir to Somerset.

With her wry half smile, she summed up their failures to Percy in a single observation. “We’re a pair, aren’t we?”

“That we are,” he agreed.

“You miss Lucy?”

He pursed his lips and reflected. “I feel her absence, but not her loss.”

He invested in an oil company and was required to sit in on meetings in Houston with several other partners, whose sole endeavors,
passion, and income centered on the petroleum industry. It was during one of these conferences that he met Amelia Bennett,
a year after Lucy took up residence in Atlanta. A recent widow, she had come by her partnership as a result of inheritance,
but unlike Percy, she knew the industry backward and forward. They clashed immediately in a dispute over the financial prudence
of drilling for oil in an area of West Texas known as the Permian Basin. He was for it; she was against it.

“Really, Mr. Warwick,” she said, addressing him with a disdainful look down the polished conference room table, “I can’t imagine
how a
lumberman
would have the faintest idea of where to drill for oil, let alone express an opinion concerning it. Perhaps you should keep
quiet and let those who know decide where to set up the company’s rigs.”

Percy’s brow arched. Ah, a challenge. Not since Mary had he encountered a challenge.

“I shall take your well-meaning rebuke under advisement, Mrs. Bennett, but meanwhile I’m casting my vote to drill in the Dollarhide
Field of West Texas.”

Later, when they found themselves alone in the elevator, she looked his six-foot-three frame up and down and declared, “You
are the most impossibly arrogant man I’ve ever met.”

“So it would seem,” Percy concurred agreeably.

She favored simple pumps and dark, slim skirts that she wore with silk blouses in pastel colors. Her only jewelry was a gold
wedding band and single-pearl earrings to complement the mother-of-pearl buttons of her blouses. After several more meetings,
Percy experienced the exquisite pleasure of slipping those buttons through their holes and parting the silk blouse.

“Make no mistake, you are still the most arrogant man I have ever met,” Amelia said, her eyes glowing with the lambency of
the finest amber.

“I would not dream of disputing it,” Percy said.

Their affair proved eminently satisfying to both. Neither was interested in marriage. A mutual need for intimacy with someone
they liked, trusted, and respected was all either wanted from the other. They dated openly, letting the gossipmongers make
of it what they would. None did. It was the postwar era, and certain social mores were relaxing. Percy and Amelia were consenting
middle-aged adults. They were rich, influential, and powerful, accustomed to doing as they pleased. Who was there to dare
criticize publicly a healthy, nubile widow for sharing a bed with a virile tycoon who’d been deserted by his wife?

Wyatt was now stationed at Camp Pendleton. He seldom wrote, called only on Christmas and Percy’s birthday, and came home never.
Percy corresponded frequently, filling his letters with news of the Sabine plant and housing development, of Mary and Ollie
and his new friend, Amos Hines, of local events and happenings that might keep Wyatt in touch with Howbutker by however slim
a thread. Once, after reading Sara’s final letter to him, he wrote that Miss Thompson had married a high school principal
in Andrews, Texas. After long consideration, he decided to risk confiding that he and Miss Thompson had once been very close
and that her marriage had left him with a bittersweet feeling. To his surprise, Wyatt responded immediately, mentioning Sara
with the simple comment: “She always was my favorite teacher.”

Six months before the decade ended, a letter arrived from Wyatt announcing his marriage to Claudia Howe, a transplanted schoolteacher
from Virginia. They were living in the married officers’ quarters on base. He was now a captain and a company commander. Lucy
had recently paid them a surprise visit when she flew in from Atlanta to meet her new daughter-in-law. Wyatt did not suggest
that Percy do the same.

Percy at once picked up the receiver and placed a call to Camp Pendleton. A woman with a pleasant and well-bred voice answered
on the first ring. “Good morning,” she said. “Captain Warwick’s quarters.”

“Claudia? This is Percy Warwick, Wyatt’s father.”

He thought he detected a silence of pleased surprise, confirmed when she said with a lilt in her voice, “Why, how nice to
hear from you. Wyatt will be so disappointed to have missed your call. He’s on maneuvers.”

Stung with disappointment, Percy said, “I’m sorry, too. Bad timing on my part, regrettably.”

“I hope you’ll try another time.”

“I will indeed.” He searched for something to say to fill the silent line. “I was delighted to hear of his marriage, and I
hope to meet you soon. You must get Wyatt to bring you to Howbutker.”

“I will certainly mention that to Wyatt.”

Percy noted the avoidance of an invitation to visit them and framed several more polite queries regarding their welfare that
Claudia met with gracious but brief answers not conducive to prolonging the conversation. He hung up feeling cheated and depressed.

He sent a large check for a wedding gift that was promptly acknowledged in a note from Claudia with one line added from Wyatt.
Percy suspected the short salutation had been his wife’s idea. A year later, another letter arrived from his daughter-in-law.
She wrote in a fine, distinct hand that he was now a grandfather and that the enclosed photograph was to introduce him to
his grandson, Matthew Jeremy Warwick. They called him Matt.

The next day, he was shocked by bold black headlines screaming from the front page of the Sunday
Gazette:
NORTH KOREAN TROOPS CROSS THE THIRTY-EIGHTH PARALLEL IN A SURPRISE ATTACK AGAINST SOUTH KOREA
.

Over the next few days, with increasing alarm, Percy followed news stories of North Korea’s refusal to comply with the UN
Security Council’s demand that its government immediately cease hostilities and withdraw its forces to the thirty-eighth parallel.
North Korean troops were already on their way to capture Seoul, capital of South Korea, for all intents and purposes to bring
down the recognized democratic government and forcibly unify the country under Communist rule. The UN Security Council responded
by sending troops to support South Korea, dominated by American forces and commanded by General Douglas MacArthur. One of
the general’s first orders: “Send me the marines.”

That’s it! Percy thought, staring at the picture of his grandson over his breakfast plate. I’m catching the first plane to
San Diego. I don’t give a damn if Wyatt doesn’t want to see me. The First Marine Division is always the first in, and I’m
going to see my boy before he leaves.