Clayton sighed and sipped on his tea. “Well, I like her,” he said. “And kicking the drinking, if that’s to do with her too, then I’m happy for you, son.”
“It was Mama.”
And then, because he wasn’t sure that was entirely true, he said, “It was time.”
Clayton looked at him over the rim of his cup, sensing his nephew working his way up to something. Bell’s time on the witness stand had reordered their universe, had both reinforced and completely undone the story that Clayton had been telling him for years. His mother was a liar, yes. But she had done something to save her only son. And because Darren now felt a tiny pulse of trust in her, after all that had come about during the Sera Fuller case, he said, “My dad… Duke… he didn’t die in Vietnam, did he?”
Clayton sat his cup on the Formica table, the same one he’d eaten off of when he was in high school. He ran his finger around the rim, his brows knitting together.
“She told you.”
“Why didn’t you?”
His uncle’s shoulders hunched, his body rounding in on itself like he’d taken a sock to the gut. His face was low, the color sallow, the expression one of distress. Pain.
“You lied to me my entire life,” Darren said.
He was tender all over.
And his hands were shaking.
“It was William,” Clayton said, invoking the uncle they both knew was Darren’s favorite, the one after whom he’d patterned his entire life. The former Texas Ranger, first black one in the state. The man Darren had long considered his North Star, the phantom voice that had been in his head for the past three years, admonishing him for the liberties he’d taken, the extralegal power he’d wrested from his badge.
This didn’t make sense. “What?”
“Duke was in love, despite it all,” Clayton said. “What me and William thought about the Callis people, the fact that our mama and daddy didn’t like it either. But it was you, son, the fact of you. A baby was coming, and he would not leave his son for a war he didn’t believe in, and he wouldn’t leave Bell. You were his family now, he said.”
His mother had been telling the truth.
Not even her turn at his trial could have prepared him for this. Not just the fact that Bell Callis was capable of the truth when it really mattered, but also that had things gone differently, he might have been raised by Bell and Duke, a small boy cocooned in the threesome of their family. It allowed for the possibility that Darren had love at his core, that love was, in fact, in his blood. That love had made him. He’d so often felt like an orphan who was lucky his uncles William and Clayton had decided to love him. This belief had come out in couples therapy too, how much of Darren’s life he’d spent feeling only marginally wanted. “You were so loved, son,” Clayton said.
He couldn’t hold it, not then. Not yet.
But he was distantly aware that nothing in his life would be the same.
“What about William?” Darren said.
“Duke’s deferment got lost in his transfer from Waller County, where he was in school at Prairie View. He reapplied in Nacogdoches County, but people were taking all kinds of liberties, and I believe the local draft board conveniently lost a lot of paperwork that would have kept young men out of the war. But either way, he was drafted, meant to report for basic training, and he refused. He just never showed up.”
“He was AWOL?”
“Don’t know if you can call it that if you’d never officially become a member of the armed services. But what he was doing was dangerous. He could have been arrested at any moment. And, for William, who’d served early in the war and who had an eye on moving up in law enforcement, who’d been talking about becoming the first black Ranger since he got out of the army, for William, it was also an embarrassment.”
“And a professional liability,” Darren said. His throat closed as soon as he said it. He felt strangled from the inside out. He understood at once that having a brother who deserted his military duties would have been a problem for an ambitious William.
Across Clayton’s face, Darren saw behind the rage over William becoming a Texas Ranger. Rage Darren had always attributed to Clayton’s belief that his brother had died in vain, because Clayton didn’t respect the Rangers, didn’t believe they were worthy of his brother. Darren felt childish for not realizing that the grief wasn’t just for William; it was also for his baby brother, Duke. For all Clayton had lost.
In the other room, he heard Naomi showing Randie old quilts in a chest his grandmother had kept in the front bedroom. Their voices were dulcet and lighthearted.
Darren felt like he was drowning.
“He never got caught, Duke,” Clayton said. “He hid out for a while with Bell and her brother in Nacogdoches, even stopped going to classes at SFA to not draw any attention to himself.” His grief sat on his chest, and he sighed deeply. Hurt and confounded. “When William applied to be a Ranger, years later, I guess he thought it made more sense to just let folks believe Duke had been in the service. All of this was before computers. Why draw attention to —”
“So he lied to the state.” Darren looked around the farmhouse, the rooms he’d followed his uncle through, sometimes riding his back as William played horse to his cowboy, rooms where he’d taught Darren the way to comport himself as a man.
“And to me,” Darren added.
“Yes.”
Clayton pushed aside his teacup and reached for his nephew’s hand.
He held it softly. “I know you’ve heard me say all kinds of things about my brother, things I maybe shouldn’t have said in front of you,” he said. “Grief is a beast of a thing. And I have been angry with him for years. Angry with all of them, my whole family, since I’m the last one left.”
“You got me.”
“I hope so,” Clayton said. “I was worried there for a while.”
Darren laid his other hand on top of Clayton’s, so they were gripping each other.
“But you have to understand, your uncle William believed deeply in that badge, in what a man like him, a black man, could do as a Texas Ranger. The whole of what he felt called to do, to take care of black folks’ lives, to protect and keep them, meant he needed a seat inside the most powerful law enforcement agency in the state. The older I get, I see him so clearly. I see his heart, Darren. Not doing things the way I might have done, but everything he did, he did for love of peace and justice. He dedicated his life to protecting black and brown folks in Texas. And if he had to lie to do it…”
Darren pulled his hand back.
He needed a bit of distance to process all he’d just heard.
His uncle William as a deeply flawed and deeply principled man.
Randie’s throaty laughter floated in on the air from the other room. It was an anchor to hold on to, knowing that her arms awaited him tonight. It gave him the courage to reach for the final piece in this. “How did he die, then?” Darren said. “My father.”
