Bodark Creek - 48. Chapter 48

As hard as it was when Eddie died riding his motorcycle, it was harder when it happened all over again to Rodney. Pat called first. She’d been working at the hospital, and someone phoned her even before they called Joann. “I had to tell her,” Pat said. “I had to tell my own sister that she no longer had a husband.”

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “It’s horrible.”

“He went very fast,” Pat went on. “It wasn’t like Eddie at all. With Eddie, there was always a chance he’d be saved. Rod didn’t make it to the ambulance.”

It was a rainy day. Rodney had been going around a curve outside of town, and someone in the other direction turned just a little wide. Rodney was hit almost head on, and he went over the car and broke his neck.

“It was quick. You gotta say that much,” Neal admitted. “I’m sure he knew what was happening. And I’m sure he hoped like hell it wouldn’t.”

“Still,” Del added, “he might have liked going this way. Flying through the air.”

It’s true. Rodney might have thought it was funny. He laughed at some very strange things and was still more of cowboy than anyone would have chosen. But that changed some in the nine years he was married to Joann.

“I’ve got to be more of a father than I sometimes want to be,” he’d admitted. “I can show Paul and Lilah it’s okay to be different. But not so different you don’t have any friends.”

Each year, his hair got cut a little shorter and his beard was just a little better trimmed. “I don’t want to be mistaken for something I’m not,” he joked. Though sometimes, he waxed the tips of his mustache to show off. Mostly, he did that so the kids could make fun of him, because he didn’t seem to mind being laughed at. He seemed that sure of himself. But some of it was silly pride. And he might have given up his motorcycle in time. He said he’d been riding it less and less.

“Since we got the farm,” he’d told me. “The pick-up’s really more useful.”

He and Joann had bought a small farm right at the town line. “It’s more like a garden,” Joann said, laughing. “Hardly ten acres. But the older Paul and Lilah get, the less I like them growing up without responsibilities.”

I knew what she meant. Even with all the advantages my children had over the way I was raised, they had so much more to do. Though after Rodney’s funeral, Paul and Lilah had almost too much to take care of. Paul was fourteen and Lilah was eleven, but they were doing nearly everything for Joann. She was in terrible shape.

“Do the three of you want to stay with me for a while?” I asked her. “You know there’s room.”

“It wouldn’t be fair, Mama.”

I didn’t understand that, but I had to say, “Well, it’s not really fair what you’re doing to the children, either.”

She thought about that for a couple of days and finally answered, “I know. But I can’t disrupt their lives even more. I can’t make them move.”

“Then let me stay with you for a month. Or more. I don’t mind. I can sleep on the couch in the living room.”

She thought about that, too, and must have asked the children. Because after another few days, she phoned to say, “All right. Lilah said she’d sleep in my bed with me, so you can have her room. But it’s only for a couple of weeks. I should be fine after that.”

Except she wasn’t. She started going to work again and could keep herself together as long as she was there and in front of the children. But at night, after they were off doing their homework or had gone to sleep, Joann would sit in the living room and barely talk. She’d have the television on, and I’d sometimes sit watching it with her or read with the sound going on in the background. But I could always tell she wasn’t listening. She’d be thinking about Rodney. Or about the children. Or about their lives.

“At least, I don’t have to worry about money,” she’d suddenly say, as if we’d been having a conversation all along. “I have a good job, and even if something terrible happened to me, the kids could go live with Bobby. They wouldn’t lose everything.”

“Nothing terrible’s going to happen to you,” I told her.

“Nothing was gonna happened to Rod, either,” she pointed out. “But look what did.”

I didn’t want to say, “Well, Jesus has his ways,” because I’d never been one to try and figure them out. But it did seem we had to trust a little more than usual that year.

“Paul will be old enough to take care of himself in a few years,” Joann would go on. “And he’s growing up pretty good-looking, like Bobby. And Bobby and I were married right after high school, so that could happen to Paul. And Lilah loves her daddy, and even though he already has two more kids, I’m sure she’d fit right in.”

I could have said, “Lilah can live with me,” but I didn’t. Because I didn’t want Joann to go on talking about death.

Though I tried to think what it would have been like if Martin had died when I was her age. That would have been near the start of the second world war, and I would have been thirty-four with four children and the farm. Still, my brothers would have helped. And their wives. And Rosalind and Dock. And I knew that, in the same way, Joann had Pat and Del and Neal and their wives and me.

I told her that, though she said she already knew. But she also said it was going to be a long time before she even started getting over Rodney.

“We were so close,” she insisted. “Much closer than...”

She didn’t finish, maybe because she didn’t want to hurt my feelings. Or maybe because she thought that just because I didn’t touch Martin every time I had a chance, or kiss him, that the two of us meant less to each other. And maybe it would have been nice for Martin to look at me the way I watched Rodney looking at Joann. But that didn’t happen in every marriage.

“I can’t explain what an amazing man he was, Mama,” Joann told me late one night. It was almost two months after Rodney’s accident, and I’d been thinking it was time to move home again. Joann seemed to have most of her sad moods under control.

“Did I ever tell you how I met Rod?” she went on.

“No,” I said. “But I’m not sure you wanted us to know you were seeing him at the beginning.”

She smiled at that, then went on smiling about something I probably couldn’t imagine.

“I met him at a party,” she admitted. “It was right after he’d come to town. And who knows why they hired him at the VA, looking the way he did. But he’d been in the army, and I guess they felt some obligation. He said he came here because he didn’t think he could live in a city anymore.”

“He grew up in Austin, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, all his family’s from around there. They work at the university or for the state.”

“I hear it’s very pretty.”

She nodded. “But it was too much for him. He finished two years of college before joining the army. But he wasn’t interested in the rest.”

“I don’t remember him talking about the army.”

“He wouldn’t have. He said he went in at the last good time. That if he’d been even two years later, he would have been killed in Viet Nam.”

“That would have been awful.”

“And you know how he felt about the war. That’s why he didn’t talk about the army.”

The war in South Viet Nam had hardly touched us. It wasn’t like the big wars or even Korea. And if I didn’t understand Korea, I never understood Viet Nam.

“Rod figured he could hide in a small farm town like this for a couple of years and see if he liked it. Then, if he was ready, he’d go back to Austin and become the man he was supposed to be.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“It was something else he wouldn’t tell anyone.” She smiled again. “Except he said that the first time he saw me, he knew he’d never go back to Austin. He said he knew I couldn’t be happy there, and that he’d never be happy living without me.”

And then her eyes were full, and tears were running down her cheeks.

“If I could just tell you what it was like being with him, Mama. If I had the words and wouldn’t be embarrassed...”

“It’s all right, honey,” I said. “I know a little bit about love.”

“It’s not just love I’m talking about. It’s about what you want. And need. And all you can do if you only let yourself.”

And then she was crying too hard to talk. And all I could do was wait.

“I’m not sure I’ll ever get married again,” she finally went on. “Bobby set me up me for Rod, and Rod was just...”

Again, she didn’t finish.

“Everyone thinks that,” I told her, after a time. “Especially at the start. But my daddy had two wives, and Dougie had two. And in a few years, after Paul’s out of school and Lilah’s more grown...”

“I can’t imagine,” she said.

Yet Pat was starting to date again. And when Valerie left Neal, he promised he’d never put himself through that again. But the promise didn’t last, and with his new family, he was as happy as he almost always had been. And maybe Joann knew that. Maybe that’s why she was fighting so hard not to let go of Rodney.

“I should have had another baby,” she said. “One of Rod’s. I wouldn’t have loved it any more or less than Lilah and Paul, but there would have been something of left of Rod.”

“Did you ever talk about having more children?”

“We joked. He said he wasn’t tall enough yet.”

I laughed at that. Rodney was plenty tall. Though it might have been just as well that Joann didn’t have one of his children. After he died, she might have favored it too much, even if she tried not to. I know Daddy claimed he never loved any of his children more than the others, no matter which marriage they came from. But there were times I loved Walter just a little more than my other brothers and favored Del just a bit because he was with me during those lonely first years on the farm.

And I wasn’t sure I missed Martin any less than Joann missed Rodney. Martin and I were together longer, and our life together came to a natural end, and it would have been hard if it had broken off so close to the beginning. But that life was still over. And I thought about him every day.