He thought he saw her flinch just the tiniest bit, as if blocking a blow.
She nodded, accepting his flat and somewhat final assessment.
“Let’s go,” he said suddenly, his voice hardening.
Bell started to turn the car on, forgetting the engine was already running. It let out a cry of distress, the starter squealing in protest. She told him to roll up his window and put on his seat belt. He bristled over her giving him any commands. Just because she was right about the frat party didn’t mean she was in charge here. He felt a foundational need to let her know he was in control now. Darren told her that the plans had shifted. They would go to Thornhill. They needed to get to Rey. And Darren needed Bell’s help getting him inside a town that had, with great force, already removed him from their municipality. Fine, she said, but she wanted it done quick. Having revealed so fragile a part of herself, she was now petulant, at the edge of anger. With pursed lips, she reminded him she needed to get on the job hunt soon. There was a clear accusation in her tone, a suggestion that it was Darren’s fault that she was now out of work. As if she’d forgotten the whole reason Darren Mathews was even in Nacogdoches was because she’d come to him about a young woman in trouble. Or maybe she hadn’t forgotten, and therein lay her true grievance with him: that her son had come only because someone else needed him. He hadn’t come for her. These past three years, like the whole of his life, he’d just made clear, he had been better off without her. They had circled back to the original wound, his birth and her feelings about it, the pain his life stoked in her. “I told you I couldn’t handle it, what all I’d lost.”
“What you lost, right.”
Bell finally wrenched her body around in the driver’s seat and looked at her son.
“You don’t understand. I blamed myself for it. If he hadn’t been in Nacogdoches trying to see after me, maybe Duke would have lived, might still be alive right now.”
He felt the mechanics of her manipulation, the play for self-pity.
It enraged him.
“What does Duke in Nacogdoches have to do with it? He died in Vietnam.”
“Darren,” Bell said, as slow and gentle as any parent might be with a difficult truth, with words that might shock their child. “Your father was never in Vietnam.”
18.
SHE TOLD her version of it in a straight line for the first time, certainly the first time she’d ever told any of it for Darren’s benefit, a son who hadn’t asked the questions she’d been dying to answer since she met him when he was eight years old. Met him for the second time, that is. She’d had a good twenty hours with him after he was born, wrapped in her arms after Gracie, a midwife out to Camilla, had delivered him in her parents’ front room. The room was close and damp, the air bitter with the musk of blood and shit and piss and other fluids she didn’t realize, despite half a semester in college, could come out of a body in one sitting. She’d held her boy in her arms, seated near the front window, letting a beam of sun warm his little face, skin as brown and smooth as cocoa pudding. She wanted to nibble every inch of him. Her mother hollered to get the baby out of the sun, ’fore you blind the boy good. “But you hadn’t even opened your little eyes yet, hadn’t even seen your mama. We just held each other close, you in my arms, your hand wrapped around my pinkie finger. We stayed like that for almost a whole day before your uncles got word of the birth, that their baby brother had a son. And then here they come, pointing out what I already knew. That I didn’t have no money, no help with the baby. Pete was on shift work at the plant back in Nacogdoches and rarely home. My other brothers was in and out of jail, and my own mama, your gran, was in and out of touch with the real world. She liked a drink too. And the Mathews men, your uncles, come around and said Duke would have wanted better for the boy, and honestly, looking around my parents’ little shack, knowing how far I was from how I thought this was all gon’ go, I couldn’t argue with either one of them.”
“The war, Mama,” Darren said, pressing her back to the topic.
“He had a deferral.”
“Because he was a student at Prairie View, that’s what Clayton said.”
Bell nodded. She followed it with a sigh that seemed to steam-press all the air out of her lungs, deflating her completely. “But then I got pregnant. The two of us had been finding ways to see each other his freshman year at PV and my senior year at Nacogdoches High School,” she said. “He had a little Mercury Comet he used to drive up from Waller County on weekends. And, sure enough, I come up with a baby in me right after my high-school graduation, even though I was planning on going to college that fall.”
“Were you scared to tell him?”
Bell gave him a rueful smile because of all he didn’t know about his daddy.
“No,” she said. “He drove up when I did, and we sat on that porch at Petey’s house, and he said, ‘Well, lil’ Bell, what are we going to do, then? We can marry here in Nacogdoches, where we got at least one of your people. Or we can go back home and get married in San Jacinto County with all our families. Either way, looks like we ’bout to make ourselves a home somewhere. May not be nice as we want it right off the bat, but I promise you, girl, we get through this rough part, we finish school and all that, and we gon’ make a life together. Me, you, and that little one in there,’ he said.”
Duke was rubbing her feet, even though she wasn’t even hardly showing then, didn’t know yet the kind of aches that would take up residence in all corners of her body. “But he was gentle like that, your daddy,” she said. He’d leaned down and kissed her toes, and by the following morning, he had enrolled in Stephen F. Austin to start his sophomore year in the English department that fall. “He moved into Pete’s with us.”
“English?” Darren had never heard this before. It was, frankly, unbelievable to him. The whole story had the gauzy feel of a fairy tale, scenes washed over in pastels rather than the sharp edges of real life. Darren once more wondered what decades of hard drinking had done to his mother’s mind. Could he honestly trust a single thing that was coming out of her mouth? “He was studying English?”
“Wanted to be a professor, he said. Boy loved, loved to read.”
Not history or law or sociology or political science, the academic paths that had been chosen by the other Mathews men, studies that led to careers in law and law enforcement. His father, Duke, had supposedly charted a course that led to a study of art, that built a life around the pleasure in it, of a good story. Books and a quiet life of the mind. How then had Duke fared in the grand debates in the Mathews home between William’s faith in American laws’ capacity to bend toward justice and Clayton’s certainty that nobody had time to wait for that sickle to curve in just the right way not to cut your head off? Was Duke’s answer a passage from James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street? With books, had his father escaped Darren’s fate of growing up feeling forever trapped between his uncles’ two different versions of being black in America? One built on our native optimism, a natural tendency to see and believe in our ability to make beauty out of almost anything, and the other built on base pragmatism, on recognizing the limits of our grace in the face of folks who double down on their cruelty at every turn. Because to let up on the whip, this many centuries in, even if only for a minute, was to leave time enough to consider how the whip came to be in your hand, to ponder your continued grip on it, how it still benefited you.
“But if he enrolled in SFA,” Darren said, still trying to get to how Duke coming to Nacogdoches had anything to do with whether he had served in Vietnam, which is what his uncles had told Darren any time he asked — admittedly fewer and fewer times as he got older. It was easier in some ways for his father to stay shrouded in history. “He would have still been eligible for deferment. Is that what you’re saying? That because Duke had a student deferment, when he got called up to go, he had an out?”
“He had an out,” Bell said. “But something went wrong when he transferred from Prairie View to go to school out here. You have to remember, shit was just done county by county back then, wasn’t no computer or nothing to make a system out of it, to make it fair. When his number come up, a letter showed up at the farmhouse in Camilla…” At the mention of the home in which he had been raised, Darren felt his skin flush, felt something turning over inside him. He got an image of his uncles finding the letter from the United States government telling their baby brother to report to service. Did they still have the letter? In a hatbox somewhere? In the leather trunk where his grandmother had kept her quilting supplies and family photo albums and two tattered Bibles, one from her side of the family and one from his grandfather’s ancestors? There were marriage licenses in there, maybe even the original deed to the property. Why had his uncles not sat him down and gone through every inch of the thing, why hadn’t they told him more about his father? Why hadn’t he asked?
“I will go to my grave believing the draft board in Nacogdoches County was up to some funny business, somebody claiming they couldn’t find the right paperwork saying he’d properly transferred to a new school. I remember he spent a few days running between here and his home county and even down to Waller where Prairie View is, anything to fix what was clearly just some kind of clerical error. But in the end, they told him they had no record of a deferment, and he would have to report for duty. And that way somebody else’s boy didn’t have to go. Draft board playing slick.”
“So he did serve in Vietnam,” Darren said. They were back where they’d started.
“No,” Bell said. And here a bittersweet smile came through, lifting her eyes as if they were on a string. The smile was quivery and unsure of itself. “He wouldn’t go. Said it wasn’t his war, and he wouldn’t follow any law that would make him leave his child. They could come get him if they wanted to try. But he’d made up his mind.”
She looked at Darren, proud of this next bit. “He told them he was a conscientious objector, wasn’t gon’ fool with the violence they were asking of him.”
This is where she lost him.
Because there was just no way.
In all the political discussions he and his uncles had had around the kitchen table, a Lucky Strike burning in an ashtray and Solomon Burke on the hi-fi, there was no way Clayton would ever have shut up about his baby brother refusing to put his life on the line for a war that benefited not a single soul on the shores of the United States of America, a nation that could just barely be bothered with fortifying its own democracy. He would have been too proud. It would have been his forever trump card to play with his twin, William, who had volunteered to serve in a very different “Vietnam conflict” when he turned eighteen, who believed in the power of service. It took a certain courage to love your way into this country’s goings-on, to find a passion to mend what was broken. No, it was impossible, Darren thought, that he wouldn’t have heard that not only did his father not die in Vietnam, but he had also blatantly broken the law on principle. William would have been heartbroken, Clayton elated.
“No,” Darren said, rolling up his window now, signaling an end to this. “I don’t believe you.” He didn’t know what she was trying to pull, what she thought this story might gain her, or if there was simple pleasure in holding up a narrative contrary to what his uncles had told him. It felt spiteful. And petty. She’d brought up the church. Deciding his fate on a wooden bench in the back.
There was a ruthlessness to telling all this to him now. He just didn’t know yet what her play was, why, this late in the game, she would introduce a new story about his father. And he didn’t want to know. He felt the bricks being laid inside, walling off this whole line of inquiry, stopping himself from asking the questions that lingered, the pieces in this he still didn’t understand. If his father hadn’t gone to Vietnam, if he chose to believe any of what his mother was saying, then how did Duke Mathews die? And if she was telling the truth, did that mean his uncles, the men who had raised him, had deceived him his whole life? There was just no way. “I don’t believe any of this,” he said, shaking his head against all that this would mean if this tale was true. Opening that door would only lead to him drinking himself into a stupor this very night. He didn’t have time for this. Sera Fuller didn’t have time.
19.
IT WAS Darren’s idea to make it seem like Bell was entering Thornhill alone. He’d already been escorted out of the town, and he worried his face might raise a red flag to security. Bell, on the other hand, was on record as a prospective resident. And precisely because she still had an open application to live and work at Thornhill, she wasn’t a fan of this whole idea. She didn’t want him ruining this for her, her one big chance, didn’t want this to go left in a way that reflected poorly on her. Darren, who’d laid himself out flat in the back seat, or as flat as his six-foot-one frame would go in the back of the Nissan, and was presently hiding and sweating under a mound of her and Pete’s dirty laundry, assured her he had no desire to drag this on any longer than necessary, gently chastising her for her inability to put her own needs aside for the sake of finding Sera Fuller. “Ain’t about me,” she said. “This about taking care of Petey.” This time, he heard no recrimination in her voice, neither a plea for Darren’s pity nor a demand for his love. In the silence, there was just the fact of where her life had deposited her at sixty-two. It would change their lives to get a job and a place to stay out there, she said. Get Petey’s medical bills covered. Thornhill was a dream, her whole plan for taking care of Pete, as the two of them aged. “You ain’t got no kids, ain’t never known what it is to be responsible for another person, but me and Pete, we struggling, son. A job at this place would mean free housing, maybe free medical care for the both of us. It’s a wait list there a mile long. I’m sixty-three this year, Darren. My mama gone. Daddy too. One of my brothers died locked up in Huntsville, another’s body give out before fifty-five. It’s luck that Petey made it this long before a stroke got him. Neither one of us getting any younger, and we only got each other. And when he goes… I’ll be alone. I need this, Darren.” She didn’t want him messing this up for her.
If they got pulled over or in any kind of trouble, she assured him that she wouldn’t claim him as her son or even a man she’d ever seen before. She was prepared to holler and carry on and say that Darren had forced himself into her car to get into Thornhill. “I’m serious too,” she said, speaking loudly so he could hear her beneath the mounds of musty fabric as they approached the gates. Inside his hot and dark cocoon, he couldn’t even lift a hand to wipe the sweat from his brow without upsetting the careful con he’d arranged in the back seat, without Bell having to pull over and reposition the dirty laundry and paint-dappled sheets on top of him. So he lay perfectly still with his own worries about his potential future, years ahead spent alone. He thought of Randie and the proposal that never was. He remembered that he’d never returned her call and felt a sharp panic that he might never hold her again.
He heard the click of her turn signal and then Bell’s voice again, softer now.
“I put in a good eight, ten years at Thornhill, if my body can handle it, and I could put some money away, some real savings in our pockets for the first time, a nest egg of some kind. If Petey went first, I’d be all right, maybe. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, my last years. Somebody like me, not a lot of education, not a lot of money —”
