Sons From Afar Read online

  Sammy couldn’t sit there any longer on that chair. He was up, putting his glass down on the tray, and heading back down to the front door while James was still saying thank you to Mrs. Rottman. Sammy let himself out the front door. He didn’t want to stay inside that iron fence, not for another second, so he waited for James in the street.

  When James finally came out, all he said was, “Your manners are rotten.”

  “So what?” They walked on to the corner, not in step. “She’s pretty stupid,” Sammy pointed out to James, who hadn’t seemed to notice that.

  “Not stupid, just—not objective, everything started with how she felt.”

  “Stupid,” Sammy clarified.

  “But don’t you ever wonder?”

  Sammy didn’t bother answering. James would go ahead and say what he wanted to anyway.

  “I mean, we can only know what we know.”

  That was pretty stupid, even for James.

  “I mean, if somebody is always fair to me, and considerate and all that, but is rotten to other people, can I say he’s rotten? And if they tell me he is, how can I believe them, if all of my experience is that he isn’t? Like Gram, when we first got here and everybody said she was crazy or something, but she wasn’t crazy at us.”

  “People just expected her to be like what they were like. And she isn’t,” Sammy said.

  “But if they thought she was crazy she might as well have been. If you see what I mean.”

  “You have to let people be what they are,” Sammy protested. “She never was, no matter what anyone said.”

  “So how can you know what’s really true?” James wondered.

  Sammy couldn’t see what this conversation was about or where it would get them. He stopped at a street corner and asked James to take out the map. The high school was outside of town, to the south. “Do we have time to walk that far?” James worried.

  “It’s maybe two miles,” Sammy said, studying the map. James stopped. “Too far.”

  “Okay.” Sammy folded up the map and gave it back to James.

  “Do you think it’s too far?”

  Sammy shrugged. This was James’s idea, let him make the decision. It wasn’t too far for Sammy, but this wasn’t his idea.

  James didn’t move. He looked all around, as if there were an answer hiding somewhere behind the corner of one of the houses, or up in a tree. “Unless we walk pretty fast. The average walking pace is about three miles an hour, and average is pretty slow. So it might not be too far.”

  “Okay,” Sammy said.

  “We have a couple of hours, it shouldn’t be too far.”

  As far as Sammy could see, there was only one way to find out.

  “I don’t think it’s too far,” James decided.

  They walked along at a good pace, through the town, out past residential areas and then the outlying houses, farther apart, and then farmlands. “How much farther do you think it is?” James asked.

  “We follow this road until it crosses a main road, and the school’s right there. Want to quit?” Sammy chose that word on purpose.

  “No,” James said.

  Sammy slowed down a little, to match his brother’s flagging pace.

  “I was thinking,” James said, “about what Mrs. Rottman said about him. If he was as smart as she said, and she is probably right about things like that because she’s a teacher, he could have become almost anything. Like she said.”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t,” Sammy pointed out.

  “I wonder why.”

  “Dicey said the police were looking for him, in Provincetown.”

  “She told me, you don’t have to repeat everything Dicey said. I already know it. Sometimes, you’re just like her,” James said.

  “Good,” Sammy answered.

  The land emptied around them, uncultivated fields overgrown with weeds and grass and saplings. Walking fast made the warm day start to feel hot. Sammy rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. It would be a good day to play tennis, windless and clear. He wished Mina hadn’t already gone back to school, because there wasn’t anyone else he could play tennis with.

  “I wonder where the family is now,” James said, beside him.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Maybe not, except—just because they left Cambridge doesn’t mean they left the area. They could have started up business somewhere else around here.”

  “I’ve never heard of any candy business around here.”

  “But we haven’t lived here all that long, and we don’t travel around. For example, if I wanted to start up a confectioner’s business, I’d go to Ocean City, where there’s a big tourist season. Wouldn’t you?”

  Sammy wouldn’t want to start up a candy-making business, so he had no idea what he’d do. A distant plane droned across the sky. Following the little dark shape with his eyes, he missed the first sighting of the high school.

  “There it is,” James said, and his pace increased, as if—now that he could actually see their destination—he had the strength to hurry to it. The school looked fairly new, long and low, surrounded by parking lots. Sammy caught a glimpse of several macadam tennis courts off behind one of the wings that spread out from the main building. Windows were open, but it was quiet outside. They headed for the doors with a flagpole in front of them; that would be the main office.

  In the office, a secretary looked up at them. “We want to see Mr. Ferguson,” James said.

  “Down that hallway, through the glass doors, turn left, and it’s the third door on your right,” she told them, without really looking at them. When they found the door she’d directed them to, it had ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL painted on the glass.

  “He still has the same job he had when he came,” James said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s what Mrs. Rottman said. Don’t you remember?”

  Sammy hadn’t been paying attention. “Are you going in, or what?” he asked.

  James knocked on the glass with his knuckles and a man’s voice told them to come in. They entered a short narrow room with only one window, high up on the back wall. A gray-haired man sat behind a desk under the window, facing the door. He had a pouchy face, pouches of skin under his eyes and his jowls hanging down pouchy. He looked at them without saying anything, his watery blue eyes not curious, as if he already knew what they were going to say and what he was going to say. He had a thermos on his desk and some manila folders, but no phone. He poured himself a cup of coffee out of the thermos, without saying anything, then looked back at James and Sammy, disliking them.

  “Well? Well?” he finally said. “Come on up here. Move it, boys.”

  They went up to the desk. Sammy let James stand a little ahead, because it was James’s business. He watched Mr. Ferguson’s pudgy fingers turn a pencil, over and over. He could feel the man’s boredom with them, and his dislike for them, coming across the desk at him like heat from an open oven door. Well, he didn’t care.

  “Spit it out. Who sent you and what did you do.” Mr. Ferguson put down the pencil and opened a drawer to take out a thick pad of detention slips. “And give me your passes.”

  “We don’t have any passes,” James said.

  “Why not?” the man demanded, his voice growing larger and more threatening.

  James didn’t seem to be able to answer.

  “Because we don’t go to this school,” Sammy said, stepping up beside James. He wasn’t going to let this man think he could bully him. Maybe he could bully away at James, but Sammy was a different story.

  “Why aren’t you at your own school?”

  “We’re not hooking,” Sammy told him. It wasn’t a lie. He’d have said it, and said it exactly the same way if it had been a lie, but it wasn’t. He didn’t say any more than that, because he almost hoped the man would draw the wrong conclusions, and try to get them in trouble, and then they would show him.

  “It’s not what you think,” James said, trying to smooth things over. At
the expression on Mr. Ferguson’s face he changed his way of saying it. “We haven’t explained ourselves.” Sammy wished James wouldn’t interfere; he could handle this Ferguson man.

  “A woman named Mrs. Rottman—”

  “Her,” Mr. Ferguson grumbled.

  “Mrs. Rottman told us you might be able to help us. We’re looking for information about a former student, here at the high school. She said you might remember him—Francis Verricker.”

  “Verricker?” Mr. Ferguson leaned back in his chair and smiled to himself. “Bet your boots I remember Verricker. I was the one who got him thrown out, which may be the best day’s work I ever did.”

  “Yes, sir,” James said, agreeing. “So I guess you knew him.”

  “I knew everything I wanted to know about him. He was a bad one. Always in fights—and he didn’t fight clean, either. Bad with the girls, too.”

  “Is that why he got expelled? Because of the fighting?” James asked.

  Mr. Ferguson folded his fingers together over his stomach. His cheeks pouched back as he smiled again. “Better than that. He got expelled for making book. Verricker was running a gambling operation—it was small-time, but he was a small-time type. He’d take bets on the games—you know? He even gave odds, he’d work them up himself, depending on what school we were playing. It didn’t matter what sport, he’d be there like some weasel back in the corner—football, basketball, baseball—his pockets full of chits and his hands grubbing around the dollar bills. I caught him at it, found a couple of people who’d lost a lot to him and were happy to talk, and we gave him the boot. He was trying to act like some Chicago big-time gangster or something, like this was Chicago or something. That boy had no sense of reality. He didn’t even put up a fight. He just crumbled to little bitty pieces—and went away.”

  “Do you know what happened to him after that?”

  “No. I never asked. I’ve seen a lot of kids like him in my time, all thinking they can break the rules and get away with it, with no feeling for the school. He was one of the worst. None of them fooled me for long.”

  “Ah,” James said. Mr. Ferguson leaned forward again, his pleasant memories concluded. He wanted them to leave.

  “I don’t know if you remember when this was?” James answered.

  “Why should I remember a little creep like Verricker? Just, sometime right at the end of the war, forty-five it must have been. I remember thinking it was too bad he wasn’t in time to get drafted.” He opened up a manila folder, as if he was going to read it. “It would have been good to think of him being killed off.” He picked up his pencil and held it over the top sheet of paper in the folder.

  “Well, thank you for your time,” James said. The man ignored them.

  James didn’t say anything, not all the way back into town. Neither did Sammy. Sammy had nothing to say. When they were finally sitting in the grass, waiting for Rev. Smiths to come out of his meeting, James opened his mouth. Sammy thought he’d want to talk about what kind of man their father had been, and he didn’t feel like talking about that, but instead James said, “Weren’t you even a little afraid of that Mr. Ferguson?”

  “Why should I be? Were you?”

  “You never are, are you,” James said. He was sitting up, pulling shoots of grass and rubbing them between his fingers until his skin was stained green. Sammy watched his nervous fingers, pulling up, rubbing, dropping the squeezed grass back down onto the lawn.

  “Anyway, you got busy asking questions, like always,” Sammy reminded his brother.

  “I guess.”

  “You weren’t expecting good news, were you?”

  “I dunno,” James said. “But I always wondered, and now I can see why Momma didn’t name me after him.”

  “She named me after her brother.”

  “I don’t even know why my name is James,” James said.

  Sammy almost groaned aloud. Now James was going to go haring off to find out why he was named his own name. Well, that trip Sammy wasn’t going to go along on. Besides, there was no way of figuring it out. Besides, what did it matter how you got your name, since it was your name. He got up and started just walking around the building. The stone walls went right down to the flat ground, as if they continued cutting down into the earth. The walls were flat and straight, the corners squared off even, and up above, the steeple tried to push its way right into the sky. Standing at the base of the steeple, close up to the cold stone wall, it looked as if the steeple was about to fall over on him. It wasn’t true, but that was the way it looked, an optical illusion. Sammy liked that.

  He thought James was probably getting het up about names to avoid thinking about what Frank Verricker was like. Sammy didn’t need to avoid thinking about what their father was like: He felt like he already knew the guy, inside and out.

  Rev. Smiths came out of the building among a bunch of other ministers, all wearing the exact same hats and suits. He said he hoped he hadn’t kept them waiting, and James said he hadn’t, and reminded him that he was doing them a favor. They got back into his car, with James in the front seat because Sammy had grabbed the back. Once they were on the highway, heading south, Rev. Smiths asked, “Did you find out what you wanted?”

  “We found out some things,” Sammy said, when James didn’t answer.

  “Seek and ye shall find,” Rev. Smiths said, not asking any more questions.

  “Something was opened up to us,” James said then, without turning his eyes away from the road ahead. “But I guess I don’t know just what it was.”

  “I didn’t know you went to church,” Rev. Smiths remarked.

  “I don’t,” James said. “I’ve read the Bible.”

  “Really? Why?”

  James looked at the driver then. He always enjoyed showing off at people with the things he’d read. Sammy sat back, away from the front seat. James explained: “In fifth grade, my teacher said the Bible was one of the underpinnings of western civilization. I liked that idea so much—the way kids get fixated on things—so I decided to read it. It took years. I didn’t read much of it in fifth grade, although I started.”

  James was all ready for a big talk about the Bible, and things in it, like a reading comprehension quiz, Sammy thought. But Rev. Smiths didn’t ask him questions to find out what he remembered. “Do you know,” Rev. Smiths asked instead, “what Gandhi said when somebody asked him what he thought about western civilization?”

  “No, what?” James asked.

  “He said, he thought it would be a good idea.”

  James laughed out loud, and Rev. Smiths joined in, sort of chuckling. Sammy looked out the window, at the distant line of trees at the edges of fields. He didn’t laugh, but that wasn’t because he didn’t get the joke.

  CHAPTER 6

  One thing about being a dork was that you weren’t constantly interrupted by people when you had things to think about. James had some things to think about. For example, he had his father to think about. That kept him busy as he sat on the bench during the first home baseball game, and when he rode with the team, alone in his seat at the center of the bus, to the first away game. That game was up in Cambridge, of all places.

  They won the home game and lost the Cambridge game, no thanks to James either way. He was busy sorting the information he had gathered into different lists. Or, rather, trying to sort the information. Because whenever he thought about it—even just to the extent of just sorting things out—his whole mind got blown over, by feelings like dark night winds blowing clouds across the whole sky. He couldn’t even think whenever he thought about it. Except to recognize Francis Verricker—he figured he knew that man pretty well.

  But coming home on the bus, coming home from Cambridge again, as twilight darkened into evening, sitting, looking out the dirty window while voices talked around him, James found he could look at those lists without that heavy wind rising up and knocking him over. He had finally figured out that on game days he wouldn’t have to play baseball at all. R
ealizing that, James smiled to himself: he could get enthusiastic about games. The darkening landscape swept by the window, and he could think.

  First off, there were some hard facts, that was the first list. Those facts might be clues, if he put them together the right way. He might find some kind of a lead among them. The second list was soft facts, things filtered through the eyes, or opinions, of the two people he’d talked to, who had actually known his father. The third was guesswork, intuitions, trying to put together what those people had implied and figure out the common ground between them, trying to get a sense of who the boy had been and what his life had been like then, there.

  James set to work on the first list, the facts. He rode silent in the coach’s car from school to his driveway, trotted silent up the driveway between dark fields, pinning down the facts. When he entered the kitchen, he heard piano music from the living room and saw that his grandmother was just sitting at the kitchen table, listening. It was Thursday. Maybeth was having a piano lesson with Mr. Lingerle. An extra place was set at the table, because Mr. Lingerle always stayed for dinner after the lessons. James didn’t stop to listen, and didn’t disturb his grandmother. He went right on up the stairs and into Sammy’s room. Sammy was sitting on his bed, cross-legged, doing nothing.

  James dropped his books by the door, with a noise that made Sammy look up. “He was years older than she was,” James announced. “Our father. Because I’ve been thinking, Mrs. Rottman said he was in third grade in 1938, which means he was about eight, which means he was born around 1930. He could have been nine, you see,” he explained at Sammy’s confused look. “It’s only a rough date, but Momma wasn’t born until 1942, so he was more than ten years older than she was.”

  “So what?”

  “It’s not normal, it’s—she’d have been awfully young for him, if you—”

  “Just because something’s normal doesn’t mean that’s the only way. Or even the best way,” Sammy argued.

  “But—” James tried to think of an example his brother could understand. “It would be like Mr. Lingerle marrying Maybeth.”