didn't turn from him at all, although she avoided his gaze — propping herself up with pillows instead, taking an aromatherapy bottle from the bedside table, a vexed expression crossing her face while she inhaled the cherry oil which conjured the cough drops her father had sucked like candy: “How strange. Daddy keeps popping into my head these days, and I'm not sure why. I guess I keep thinking he never had anything like this, you know. Just that same old house, pretty much those same rooms from start to finish. I wish him and Mother had settled somewhere else. It might've been a lot better for them, if they'd had something like this to look forward to. I think Daddy would've appreciated the desert, don't you think?”
“Probably,” Hollis said, the cherry-oil scent filling the space between them, his deceased father-in-law then appearing in a haze of cigarette smoke (Marlboro fuming at the man's chapped lips, crossword puzzle book folded across the lap of faded jeans). “Can't see why ol’ T.J. wouldn't.”
And Hollis knew that Debra, too, was remembering the man exactly as he was envisioning him — alone in the living room of a West Texas farmhouse, sitting upright on the right end of the couch, empty Lone Star cans by his slipper-covered feet, a cluttered TV tray before him, the Magnavox flickering several feet away with the volume set low. The No. 2 pencil held by his liver-spotted hand slowly deciphered the puzzle — jotting an answer, or erasing a wrongly chosen word — but presently the pencil stopped moving and the man's head slumped forward, eyes shutting while a cigarette continued to be savored, his thoughts propelling him elsewhere for a little while; then her father shuddered once and coughed, startling himself. Raising his head and eyelids, exhaling more grayish vapor, he returned from whatever daydreams were just experienced to the stagnant room where his body resided, the pencil soon resuming its methodical work.
12
At the outset of their first proper meeting, Hollis had readily perceived his future father-in-law as a recondite, intractable soul. Just prior to being introduced in the large backyard of Debra's family farm — an isolated homestead named What Rocks, buffered by thirty acres of land, surrounded by cotton fields and, beyond, the limitless sweep of West Texas plains — he watched the man loitering among brittle, yellow grass. Not wearing any pants but clad with a plaid bathrobe which didn't fully conceal a white undershirt, black dress socks, and red slippers, Debra's father watered a lone mesquite from a green hose which snaked through the grass to where he was standing and had been lifted up between his pale, hairless legs, hoisting the rear hem of the bathrobe; the tree in front of him was gray and looked barren save for a number of empty Dr Pepper bottles someone had slipped over branch ends (the durable bottles often set in motion by the fast winds coming off the plains, clanking hard against one another at times like a primitive wind chime — yet never shattering).
“Nobody around here calls me
“Pleased to know you, T.J. — ”
“Said you're Hollis then?”
“Yes, Hollis — Hollis Adams.”
Nodding slightly, and with a degree of wryness, T.J. said, “Well, that's fine — nice making your acquaintance, Hollis — Hollis Adams,” resuming his watering, showing no concern that his bathrobe had now completely unfastened.
In truth, not everyone had called him T.J.; to his two daughters he would forever be Daddy, to his wife, Ida, he was Father (she was Mother to him), while others knew him redundantly as Junior Jr.: the enterprising son and heir apparent of Junior, a rancher who had inherited his own father's thriving cattle ranch — more than eight hundred head of cattle by 1926, about twelve hundred head by 1929 — until the black blizzards of the dust bowl years rained long-term ecological and social devastation on the Panhandle, that protracted drought abetting the near-simultaneous collapse of the American economy. When, finally, there was no more feed for the starving cattle, no more grazing found on the dirt-swallowed prairie, Junior reluctantly sold his entire herd to the government slaughter program, taking $15 per head for young cows, $10 per head for old cows. Thereafter, he paid all his ranch hands and employees a decent parting wage, temporarily closing shop — he assured them — in full expectation of better days on the horizon. Still, the dusters continued rolling across the plains, along with countless bankruptcies and foreclosures; fearing he could lose everything, Junior divided the ranch into nine parcels, selling most of his property at a loss while keeping thirty acres and the stately Victorian family home T.J.'s grandfather had had built. But that sacrifice didn't prevent him from cursing such bad fortune, from assailing the sandstorm consuming his diminished land — bounding outside as his wife and son sat mystified at the dinner table, shouting obscenities in the midst of the blinding abrasive swirl — and, overcome by hopelessness, dropping on his knees while pressing the barrel of a Colt revolver against his jawbone; the resounding crack-shot then echoed back from where he had come, surpassing the wind's low hum, signaling his departure to the grit-tainted rooms and hallways of a lonesome, darkened house which hadn't been graced with sunlight or sky for nearly a week.
But in its heyday, the huge, neglected three-story house — erected on a grassy hill overlooking the plains, a crumbling monument to the decorous age of cattle barons — and its run-down bunkhouses had provided shelter for more than thirty people, although by the time Hollis arrived there in early 1951, the sole occupants of What Rocks were T.J. and his family (the individualistic foursome having plenty of space in which to carve out their own territory, navigating around one another with a curious mixture of intimacy and disregard). Adopting Queen Anne styling — the exterior consisting of brick, sandstone, and marble, the interior fashioned with mahogany and oak mantels, coffered ceilings, cornices, and parquet floors — the house was already a grand anachronism when compared to the newer, efficiently sized homes springing up in nearby towns and distant cities. As such, at least half of the interior wasn't utilized — the doors of some rooms kept shut year-round, several passageways dulled by unbroken, thickening dust layers. Behind a given entrance could be a gloomy, musty, vacant bedroom which needed mousetraps and a fresh coat of paint, and yet the adjacent living quarters might be bright, clean, furnished, with the wood floors shining.
Eventually, as both daughters married and moved away, less than a third of the What Rocks house became used (most of the ground floor, a bathroom on the second floor). While Ida maintained a regular workweek at the county courthouse, T.J. found it harder and harder to venture past the gates of the property, shunning the weekly domino games he had once enjoyed in town, arranging front-door delivery for his beer, gin, cigarettes, cough drops, crossword puzzle books. Subsequently, he was no longer encountered anywhere, not appearing at Ida's side when she repeatedly won elections as county treasurer, or attending the funeral services for departed friends. Some of those who had known him throughout the years began discussing T.J. discreetly, exaggerating him in a manner which made children wary of the imposing residence outside of town, the eerie hilltop house where the human spook named Junior Jr. crept at night. He would, in fact, creep out the remainder of his life inside the vacuous home, growing old faster, it seemed, than his peers, sometimes mumbling continually but addressing no one — often crossing from one room into the next with eyelids half open, as if he were trapped within a dream he couldn't escape.
Yet decades before T.J. died, Hollis had recognized something of himself in his reclusive father-in-law, had, in his own way, experienced similar lapses which likely summoned a disparate mix of mental imagery: the vast cotton fields T.J. had helped farm since the dusters subsided and the maze of two-lane backroads running for hundreds of miles through endless, un-ambivalent prairie — interwoven with lush, dense tropical islands abruptly seared black and left smoldering by the contrivances of warfare; the inability to reconcile such polarized worlds had irrevocably shaped him, Hollis was positive. But only after T.J.'s passing did Debra, too, begin to contemplate that lurking disparity, suspecting then that his visions must have gradually consumed him like an incurable malady while, at the same time, he had quietly resisted them without much success. So, in hindsight, she concluded he had started drinking to moor himself to the present — among the clutter of the living room, on the couch, with the TV rarely turned off — doing so to lose consciousness of the widespread battles which had urged him from his small
