Smith Henderson - Fourth of July Creek

Next to his father’s easy chair was a half-full ashtray and a box of.22 rifle shells, the rifle near the window for shooting gophers. Paperbacks on the floor. Louis L’Amour and James Michener. A Bible and a few religious tracts of Bunnie’s.

His mother’s things were in a basement closet. He sat for a long time on the concrete floor turning through albums. There was a picture of five children arranged like nesting dolls on a dray horse. There was a picture of a young woman sidesaddle on a bicycle, her father or uncle or perhaps her new husband holding it upright by the seat. There was a morbid picture of a child on a bier, his or her hands composed around a black, shiny Bible. So many albums peopled with old Scots and Germans who stiffly stood in their canvas and gingham, in wind-blasted straw hair and dun hats like people hewn from wood. Like lifesized dolls or approximations. Pete could scarcely believe these stern apparitions were his people, that any part of them had been handed down to him, that they had ever existed at all, and yet they had, and many had come to novel ends, death by dynamite by rope by fevers by horse by broken hearts by suicide now by pickup.

THERE ARE PICTURES of the wedding. Of Beth, young. A lean, mean girl who can make your head boil with jealousy when she wants. Girdling pregnancy, smoking, and making a bad impression. You say you love her, but how can your father understand? He won’t even look you in the eye anymore. The old man can scarcely be bothered to interact with her or her mother in the weeks before the wedding.

Right before the ceremony, with all the guests gathered and the reverend waiting, he takes you out to the barn and lights a thin cigar, leaning against the palings of the horse stable and regarding you for what feels like a punitive duration. Just smoking at you.

At least she’s pretty.

You’ve taken a pill for your wedding day nerves, and you’re not sure you can close on him and land a fist.

I’m not marrying her because she’s pretty.

You’re gonna tell me this is the right thing to do, are you now?

I’m not gonna tell you anything.

The old man smokes, picks bits of ash off his suit sleeve.

Look, I am the way I am , you offer. Let be the bygones, you’re saying.

Ah, but how did you become this person? he asks academically, blowing smoke at the rafters. And your brother? Did he follow your example?

I wasn’t even out with him last night.

I see. You’re not his keeper.

I’m getting married today! Why is he my responsibility? Where were you last night?

I fed the both of you. Clothed you. He taps ashes off the cigar, makes sure to stamp them out in the straw. But I cannot listen to your conscience for you, Pete.

My conscience—?! You slip off the stall gate, stumble like a rodeo clown. A half-smile curdles onto the old man’s face. The look he has when he screws you over on a deal, when you owe him money, when he has you by the balls.

I’m not perfect. Not like you. I’m just a regular person.

Well, just don’t be too hard on yourself , he says. He claps his hand on your shoulder going by, and to the people waiting in the yard by the orchard it looks like a gentle gesture, a pater’s pep talk. You’d think he’d just given the newlyweds a car or a starter trailer, and the satisfaction radiates off him like it would a lord.

There was a noise upstairs and he heard Bunnie call his name. He called back that he was downstairs, and it was clear from the way she descended — gripping the railing, sideways, one stair at a time — that she resented his being down here. That she suffered him.

“You’re going through old things,” she said.

She looked around the basement like someone making an inventory. She sighed, set her face.

“We’re going to need to sit down and have a talk,” she said. “Me, you, and your brother.”

“Luke’s gone.”

“When the time is right.”

“You know where he went.”

“I know he’s in good hands.”

“This man from your church.”

“Our church, yes.”

“Luke needs to come back. He needs to go to jail.”

“The Lord will tell him where he needs to be,” she said.

“Is that right.”

Her posture stiffened. It was as if she realized of a sudden that she didn’t need to talk to him, that she no longer needed to pretend to like him or want him in her life. He was just the son of a dead man.

She started back up the stairs. When she was out of sight up on the landing, she said that he was welcome to stay in his old room or the den, that there was plenty to eat in the fridge, and that the funeral was at ten, they should be at the church by eight-thirty. And would he bring a camera.

A couple hundred people from all around the state came to the little clapboard church near the railroad tracks. All his father’s vanquished rivals. A bank of legislators in back pews pumped out handshakes and smiled and carried on inimitably. Squat Judge Dyson from Tenmile eased into the row behind Pete, talking bulls and politics until the preacher took to the pulpit. His brother’s parole officer Wes Reynolds arrived with his own mother and father and throughout the service swiveled around, as though Luke were hidden in his periphery.

The preacher spoke at length about how blessed Charles Snow was in business. How well everyone knew this — how not a soul in the place was untouched by his financial activity. Some for good, some for bad. The preacher was young, and Pete and most of the assembled could only imagine what Charles Snow would make of this fresh reverend talking about the absence of Jesus in much of his life, of Charles’s thirst for the blood of Christ. How he was at last saved in this very church. How happy it would make him if one other person got saved today. If his death could be an occasion for eternal salvation.

He was run over by his own damn truck, Pete kept saying to himself.

The old man’s funeral procession rolled through Choteau and back to Charles Snow’s considerable property. The pasture was full of cars. Everyone trudged out to the bluff where the old man had told his wives to bury him. A wind to take your head off as they commended him to the earth. Under the clear and polished sky the reverend’s voice carried off like scraps of paper.

When Bunnie and a cadre of the congregants began to sing and sway, Pete stood and walked across the pasture and up the hill behind the house. The assembled watched him go.

The judge was a long time coming up, pausing, at times asking, then practically begging Pete to come down to him. When he arrived next to Pete he panted, furiously unbuttoned his coat and vest, loosened his tie.

“You’re a goddamn ass,” he said.

“You’re fat.”

“I can lose weight. What are you gonna do?”

The judge breathed heavily for some time longer and then procured a dip of tobacco.

“Where the hell’s your brother?”

“On the lam.”

“Because of the fight with the parole officer. I heard. But where is he really?”

“I don’t know,” Pete lied, in the vague wish that it were true that he didn’t know, that he didn’t have an address.

“He should be here,” the judge said.

“I said I don’t know where he is,” Pete said. “It’s not my job to know where he goes to ground when he fucks up.”

“I didn’t say it was, Pete.”

“Sorry.”

They could see various people eat from paper plates on the front porch of the house.

“Not a drop of alcohol down there,” the judge said. “Reminds me of the time I was at a fund-raiser with these blue hairs out in Dillon. A little luncheon. I ask is there anything with a little kick to drink. And this old lady says to me, We don’t approve of alcohol. And I says, Well, ma’am, we need to remember Jesus did turn water to wine. And she says, And we’re none too crazy about that stunt, neither .”