town, enticing him overseas with the kind of heroic possibilities which could rouse those who truly longed for peace: your country needs you, the posters on Main Street had importuned; and T.J. answered the call, leaving his young wife and daughters behind, going westward in his Rambler, sporting new blue jeans and shined leather boots, inhaling exhaust and cigarette smoke as the flatlands stretched out ahead and ultimately guided him to the ocean.
As the Second World War approached its atomic conclusion and T.J. returned to What Rocks upon receiving the Purple Heart (a bullet having torn away the top joint of his right thumb, a minor injury in light of the graver wounds sustained by many he had served with), his earlier borderline alcoholism soon became a full-time vocation. Yet he pretty much limited his drinking to the living-room couch, the TV tray functioning like a desk and holding the few items he required. On occasion Hollis had drank beside him there — the two men sucking cough drops, sipping from Lone Star cans — but while both were veterans, the fifteen years between them, as well as T.J.'s uneasiness with small talk, made any casual rapport difficult. Still, Hollis had wanted to somehow engage his father-in-law like a confidant, to ask, “Just how awful was it over there? Was it as terrible for you as it was for me?”
Except they never would speak of their wartime experiences, would never utter more than what was required in the moment — the television usually prompting their unsustained remarks, laughs, nods of agreement, or halfhearted cheers. Nothing stirred up the man's ire. Nothing provoked debate or notable commentary. The closest they ever came to sharing an insightful exchange occurred while watching a network documentary about Martin Luther King Jr., the black-and-white program flickering through a bluish, fuzzy glow. “You know, King was an amazing man,” Hollis had remarked at the start of a commercial break, attempting to gain his father-in-law's perspective.
“Yep,” T.J. replied without hesitation, eyes fixed on the screen. He took a thoughtful drink from his beer can, then added: “There's one nigger who had something going for him.”
All the same, Hollis — like Debra — had viewed him as a tolerant man, not as someone inclined toward hatred; T.J.'s head had often shook at what the nightly news reported — the Tet offensive, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, Soviet tanks invading Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring — resigned sighs escaping like a kettle's first shuddering gasp. Before secluding himself at the big house, he frequently drove down to Nigger Town, playing Chicken Foot well past midnight, nursing gin and orange juice with grizzled black men who were fated to pause in front of his unsealed coffin (put to rest late one March, months after his failing liver had become a pitiful filter, his dribbling urine turning redder than wine). When seeing him inside the casket — rosacea-tainted skin retouched by the embalmer's garish palette, eyes now permanently shut, arms placed at his sides, wearing a brown polyester dress suit — it was impossible to glimpse a handsome sailor upon that emaciated, inanimate form. During the war, however, he was an attractive man in uniform, bearing a superficial resemblance to Tyrone Power — although his luck wasn't as good as his looks: separated from his naval unit while fighting the Japanese on the island of Tinian, forced to take refuge with frontline marines, witnessing innumerable variations of death in the southwest Pacific which, later on, he avoided talking about, hoping instead to dismiss it all from his mind even as he never could. Those final weeks of his life unfolded at the V.A. hospital in Amarillo, where — after seeing a news report about HIV-tainted blood reserves — T.J. refused any transfusions out of fear he might contract AIDS, pleading instead for cigarettes while remaining oblivious to the fact that he was already a dying man.
Shortly following his passing, Hollis and Debra assumed the chores Ida didn't have the will to perform, entering the guest bedroom where T.J. had slept alone (an untidy sanctuary near the living room, down the hallway and, seemingly, a long distance from the much larger bedroom he ‘d previously shared with his wife). On a brisk spring afternoon, they packed his belongings, dusted the furniture, polished the floor, washed and folded the linen. Then they tackled his mothball-steeped closet, sorting through clothing — what to keep or throw away, what to donate — climbing atop a stool in order to retrieve cardboard boxes stored well beyond their reach. One box held homemade fishing tackles, one was stuffed with issues of
And there, finally, there: her father huddled with tougher-looking men — marines — on a beach somewhere, crouching together, posing like a football team above the opposing dead. What breathless shock seized Debra then, as if she'd stumbled into frigid water but was unable to cry out, when contemplating a Japanese soldier's severed head clutched by her own father's hand, a hand which had held her hands and had stroked her hair; the boyish soldier's face was savaged on the left side, a rent eyelid hanging over a hollow Asian socket, the black hair coiled around the same fingers which had gently patted her shoulders. “This didn't happen,” she said, abruptly tearing the picture in half. “We didn't see this.” How could Hollis have told her such human desecration was commonplace for the victors of battle — that he, too, had also stood above the fallen, his rifle aimed toward the lifeless? Instead, he kept quiet as the picture was torn again and again — the bits fluttering, sprinkling about the floor. Better, then, for her to collect the pieces without hesitation, depositing them in the trash — better returning that particular box to the highest closet shelf, shutting the door, and not dwelling anymore on what she couldn't fathom. “We didn't see that,” she repeated, and, as her father had also done, never spoke of it further.
But while Debra refrained from disagreeing with her mother's or younger sister's postmortem resentment concerning T.J.'s alcoholism, in time she concluded that it was her father's right to have anesthetized those assaulting memories; he earned the privilege, and none of them should have expressed reproof for his indolent excursions out of the living room — bare feet shuffling along the floorboards, taking slow, deliberate steps toward the kitchen, going to where another cold Lone Star could be fetched. In hindsight, she wished she had shown deference as he had ambled past her like a purposeful sleepwalker, understanding him as one in need of forgetting so thoroughly he'd rather drink himself to death than remember. Even so, she ‘d always loved him very much — she whispered this to herself at his funeral and knew it was true. She had grown into an adult alongside his calm intemperance, had gone from his little girl to Hollis's wife while he inhabited the sagging couch; she had accepted his vague presence since childhood, had maybe sensed his days melding into the manifold of dreams — where his decades of casual dying, to her now, somehow felt like a cloud's broad shadow winding across an unbearable terrain, dissipating by degrees until at long last it was nothing more.
Debra was next to him, propped up in bed, as Hollis lay there with his hands folded behind his neck. Her eyes were blankly staring forward, the bottle of cherry oil held below her nostrils. He was looking at the yellow ceiling, squinting, while discerning something else altogether: that big hilltop house on the West Texas plains — an ominous, creaking silhouette rising high beneath moonlight, a black hole shaken by itinerant winds, doors and windows boarded, panes shattered — abandoned and, at last, truly haunted since Ida had died, his mother-in-law succumbing to pneumonia some ten years ago.
“Come to think of it,” he said, turning his head to her, “I'm not so sure your dad would've liked Nine Springs. I mean, I suspect he wasn't meant to leave Texas, don't you?”
Debra glanced at him with an expression of such melancholy on her tired face that Hollis thought tears were imminent, but she was only readying herself for a yawn. “Who can really say,” she said, her mouth gaping. “You could be right, I guess.”
“Oh, what do I know anyway. It isn't like I think about him all that often these days.”
Hollis had never imagined he would find himself off in an exclusive desert community recalling the life of his late father-in-law, or remembering the solitary Victorian house which had remained standing after the majority of its former residents were deceased. Yet whenever pondering his own life, however briefly, he had assumed his demise would come well ahead of Debra's end — although he hadn't given much thought to how she would survive without him. There were, of course, stock investments, his life insurance, and their considerable savings. The vague supposition lurking somewhere deep in his mind was that she would be able to take care of herself, just like her widowed mother did following T.J.'s passing. In any case, it seemed, for him, the natural order of things: wives rarely preceded their husbands to the cemetery. His mother, too, had buried two husbands by her seventy-third birthday, spending her final years in a Critchfield retirement home while keeping herself busy with bingo and origami. And where Debra had grown up, the men were always inclined to go before-hand — from drinking, heart failure, mental decline, hard living — and, existing beyond their spouses, the widows banded together, becoming attentive to their friendships and Jesus. Rugged cowboys and stoic farmers aside, West Texas was, in truth, a land
