Dogwood Read online

  “Did Richard send you?”

  Ruthie snapped her purse shut and stood, gathering her cane in the crook of her arm. “Not a human alive could get me here, save Jesus himself. You want to talk, come to my place. Tomorrow. Four o’clock.” And with that, she hobbled away.

  I rejoined the meeting as Constance Weldon read the number of books our guest speaker had written. “What’s the matter, Karin? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

  I told them Ruthie Bowles had visited me.

  The women looked at each other.

  Finally, Constance ran a hand across the empty writing pad. “Ruthie is one of our well-intentioned dragons.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “She means well, but she’s a few cups away from a full Communion tray.”

  Lucille Collander, the most compassionate one of the bunch, shook her head until wisps of hair floated onto the table. “Well, she’s been through a lot of heartache. I’ll give her the benefit of the—”

  “Let’s stay on task, ladies,” Constance said.

  The meeting ground on, but all I could think about was Ruthie.

  Later that night, while my children were occupied, Richard asked about my day. I told him about Ruthie, and he said he had heard of her. Actually he had heard others talking about her.

  “Did you sleep last night?” he said, changing the subject.

  “Enough.”

  “Is there anything you’d like to talk about?”

  I yawned. “It’s been a long day.”

  That night was the worst. Some can face sleeplessness with resolve, doing something constructive with the time like Creative Memories. I fell into that long stretch of night thinking I was losing my mind. Then a more horrifying thought. What if I was losing my faith? What good is a mind if you don’t have faith?

  When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed. It was the same one I had dreamed for years, over and over, like a coded message. . . .

  I am standing in front of the house where I grew up, with the black Labrador chained at the front. His fur is the color of dirt, and mud hangs from his jaws. He pants and pays no attention, as if I’m invisible.

  I knock on the door and wait, cradling an infant. She is a newborn, pink and tiny, almost weightless. A bird chirps and flits from branch to branch of the three hickory trees in the front. The one in the middle is tall, branches spreading as if it is welcoming something. Someone.

  My father opens the door, and he appears older, chubbier, with hair that retreats from a bald spot like soldiers overwhelmed by a frontal assault. His teeth are yellowed from coffee, and his shirt is sweat stained. His eyes are pools of memory. There is an ocean of wisdom in there, if only I could reach it.

  He sees the infant and smiles, reaching for her, gathering her in with strong hands. I have never seen my father care so much for anything, and I give the baby freely, almost haphazardly. I am glad to be rid of her. Relieved.

  I look for my mother in the kitchen, but she isn’t there. The hallway leading to the back of the house is dark. I need to talk. I lean on her at times like this, and she seems to know what to say and what not to say. My mother is comfort and peace in a calico smock.

  I return to the living room, where my father is on the floor hovering over my still child, making faces, smiling, cooing, attempting to summon some reaction. A human defibrillator.

  I stare at the scene, and a sense of despair, failure, and disgust overwhelms me. I do not care for her. I do not love or hate her. I do not care what she becomes. I have no vision for her future. I have no regret about how she came into the world. She has no meaning to my life, and this horrifies me.

  My father is intensely involved. He can’t take his eyes off her. He is enraptured with the very thought of this little one.

  “I have to go,” I choke.

  His face softens, mixed with sadness and love. It feels as if he’s looking straight into my heart. “I know,” he says. I can’t recall my father being this loving, this compassionate. “I’ll watch her until you get back. Until you’re ready.”

  I turn and, without remorse or pause, abandon them. Past the dog. Through the trees. To the road that stretches farther than I can see.

  Will

  There are dime-size holes in the Plexiglas, and it’s all I can do not to put my fingers through them as I consider the list of possible visitors. There have been only a handful in twelve years. Carson. My mother came after my father’s funeral to show pictures.

  “I suppose you’ve heard about Karin,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Mama . . .”

  “I know you don’t want to hear this, but—”

  “One death in my life is enough right now. Please.”

  She handed the pictures through the small slot at the bottom of the glass, and I felt like a bank teller receiving a deposit.

  At first glance, the pictures seemed ghastly. Now, when I feel particularly alone, I pull them out and try to remember names of people with bad suits and oily hair. Farm people. Good people.

  In one picture, I recognized a Sunday school teacher from the little white church on the corner. Mrs. Gilfillen challenged us to memorize the books of the Bible, and I worked for weeks only to mix up the minor prophets. And leave out Zechariah. To some, those names seemed from another world. I heard them every day. Amos. Micah. Obadiah. Names of men my father talked to at the feed store and barbershop.

  I tried to hold back the tears as Mrs. Gilfillen handed out prizes, but I snorted so loudly that everyone laughed. It was not the last time I’d have that same feeling.

  In several pictures, I was able to see the body of my father. Wrinkled hands folded across his chest. Gone were the eyeglasses that rode down on his nose as he read the morning paper or finished the crossword puzzle. He lay in his only suit, as far as I knew, black with tiny white stripes.

  No matter how closely I held the photo, I couldn’t make out his face. I had to close my eyes to see that. The gap-toothed grin. Missing teeth in the back.

  The man’s miserly ways were legendary—5 percent was a good tip in his world. Once, when he was suffering from an abscessed tooth, he reluctantly let Carson drive him to the dentist’s office. Carson related the story a year later. I knew it was true. It fit my father’s template—the quintessential story of the old man.

  “The doctor will have to decide what to do, but that looks pretty bad,” the hygienist said.

  “How much does he charge to pull a tooth?”

  She told him.

  “He came home, grabbed the grain alcohol from the cabinet, and went downstairs,” Carson told me. “I didn’t think too much about it. I was telling Mama what happened, having a slice of pie, when we heard him yell.

  “I ran downstairs and found him at the workbench. The acetylene torch was still glowing, and there was a glass of alcohol on the saw. He’d heated up the pliers until they were white-hot; then he’d stuck them in a glass of water to cool, then into the alcohol. I guess to make sure everything was sterile. There was blood everywhere, all over his shirt and pants. Even the sawdust was wet with it. He dropped the tooth in the alcohol and smiled. I swear he was a tough buzzard.”

  In the pictures, people talked holding Styrofoam cups of coffee. My father lay at the back of the action, much like in life. He had brought people together, unknowingly, unwittingly, and he lay silent over the din of old friends.

  In fact, he had been instrumental in bringing Karin to live near us. He saw Mr. Ashworth at the feed store one day and started up a conversation.

  “Looking for a new lawn mower?” my dad said.

  “Just dreaming,” Robert Ashworth said. “Wife and I are talking about selling. Moving back here.”

  My father scratched his chin. “There’s a new development going in near the post office. Have you heard about it?”

  “Used to be the old Tunney place, wasn’t it?”

  A chance conversation. Pieces of information thrown back and forth. How different would my lif
e be if that exchange hadn’t happened?

  The warden gave me the news about my father. I was escorted to his office, the statue of Christy Mathewson and Rogers Hornsby looking down on us. The warden was not a hardened, immovable man. He even offered me coffee or a bottle of water after he said, “Your father passed, son.”

  I just stared for the longest time, unable to speak.

  “I got the news this morning. I wish I could let you attend the funeral, but I can’t. Your brother told me they’ll bury him at Mount Pleasant. He said you were familiar with it.”

  I nodded.

  The warden opened a drawer and pulled out a notebook with a Wal-Mart sticker still on the back. $1.97. He ripped out a couple of pages and tossed the notebook across the desk. “We had a counselor here before the state cut funding. When he got these calls, he’d encourage the inmate to write out his feelings. I assume by what your brother told me that you and your dad were close.”

  “Yeah.”

  “If you’d like, I can open the chapel. Give you some time in there to remember. I could even call a chaplain if you want.”

  I gazed at Christy Mathewson’s glove and wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. “I’d like that. But I’d kind of like to be alone, if that’s okay.”

  The warden leaned forward, his elbows on the huge monthly calendar that filled his desk. “I see a lot of men come through here. Most of them deserve what they get. But I’ve watched you the past few years, and I swear I don’t know why you’re here. I read the papers like everybody. I was horrified when it happened.” He glanced at his brown, wrinkled hands. They looked like my dad’s hands—the way I remembered them. “The guards say the same thing. I know terrible stuff happened in here, but somebody’s been watching out for you.”

  The words washed over me like water. I had struck up a few friendships in Clarkston, but mostly I kept to myself.

  The next day, a guard led me to the chapel and closed the door. I stood at the back and studied the crude cross carved into the lectern. It almost felt like I was back at the old white church, hearing echoes of “Standing on the Promises,” “Trust and Obey,” “’Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus.”

  Hosea. Joel. Amos. Obadiah. Jonah. Micah. Nahum. Habakkuk. Zephaniah. Haggai. Zechariah. Malachi.

  I checked my watch. Pretty close to the service time back home. It struck me that it took death to get my mother and father out of the house. Other than doctors’ visits and the grocery store, they remained inside, partly by their own choice, partly because of me.

  Some couples dream of exotic travel in their old age. Europe. China. A cruise. My parents’ dreams were confined to the home they had built together. They hibernated, content to see the world from a couple of La-Z-Boys, underneath a circling ceiling fan, staring at a 25-inch RCA. I had contributed to this choice. My crime was against them. I had created the polluted cloud that hung over their lives.

  I tried to picture the casket. My father’s pallid face. And my voice faltered, only a whisper, as I opened the notebook and read. “‘Talk to me of a father’s love, and I will tell you of baseball. Tell me of a tender touch or a hug that lasts in your memory, and I will kiss you with stories of our game. Walk with me in moonlight, tell me the ways your father expressed deep emotion, his innermost feelings, and I will tell you of pitchouts, squeeze bunts, and called third strikes.’”

  As I read, my voice gained strength, and I settled into the comfortable rhythms of the spoken word, like a leisurely walk in the woods with my father.

  “‘The women of my life—my mother, my girlfriends—have never been able to touch the part of me that yearns for the fresh smell of baseball. The finely mowed infield. Deep brown dirt and snow-white bases. The tough, pungent aroma of hickory and leather.

  “‘In the cool of the evening, when his work was done, my father and I played catch to the voices of Al Michaels and Joe Nuxhall. We groaned together through the 1971 season and rejoiced at the next and all the way to Oakland. I still hate Gene Tenace and Joe Rudi for taking that away from us, but it made the experience sweeter three years later when, in spite of Carlton Fisk, we beat the Red Sox in seven.

  “‘It wasn’t the smell of my father’s pipe lingering in the air or the winning and losing. It was the game itself, spread out before us a hundred times and more each year, the same yet changing. Baseball cast a spell that drew us together. Baseball was the closeness we shared. We were never able to express ourselves and enjoy each other fully, without reservation, except with baseball.

  “‘As a child, I had no idea how my father felt about his work at the chemical plant. I still don’t know. I knew little about his childhood, the anguish of losing a mother and brother to the flu epidemic that spread through the hills, the abuse of a stepmother, why he chose my mother as his wife, and a thousand other questions I should have asked.

  “‘But I do know this: I know baseball. I know how he felt about the designated hitter, steroids, and the supposed asterisk by Roger Maris’s name. Baseball became our connection, and each spring when the sirens called, I felt the link grow even deeper and stronger.

  “‘When I was a child and we partook of the blessed sacrament of spring training results, my father and I would coax the sun a little hotter, a little higher and brighter in our West Virginia sky. We trembled beneath that vast, blue canvas, knowing it was the same sky that looked down on the green diamonds of the major leagues.

  “‘In summer we sweated through each extra inning and blown save. We counted mosquitoes, jarred lightning bugs, and believed in our team. We were separated by years, tastes in music, food, clothes, and politics, but we delighted in baseball. We kept scorecards and statistics ready to recall the previous year’s Cy Young Award winner, batting champ, or MVP.

  “‘Fall came and we praised the God who created pennant races. We cursed the demon of the season-ending groundout or pop fly. Baseball was the glue that bound our lives and kept them coming back to each other. Baseball was each tender word never spoken. It was a pat on the back, a whispered term of endearment.

  “‘The last morning we spent together, just before my sentencing, my father and I spoke the last words that passed between us. We talked about our walks in the woods—memories of walking sticks and an old dog. We talked about our town and the changes we’d seen, and we talked of baseball.’”

  My chin quivered as I recalled his face. “‘I have disappointed my father in so many ways. There are things I will never know and things he will never hear me say.’” A pause as a fleeting image floated through my mind, of father and son on a warm summer evening, throwing a baseball back and forth. “‘You once said a man’s life is a series of choices. Small decisions made every day that don’t seem to matter. That nobody notices but you, if you even notice. Over time, those decisions are like raindrops, falling and filling the stream of a life. You believed the big choices were made in the small ones. If I had chosen differently in a thousand ways, maybe I wouldn’t be here.’”

  The door opened and the guard tipped his hat. “Just checking.”

  “I’m still here.”

  When the door closed again, I bowed my head. “‘I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to carry you. I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk about the play-offs again. I hope one day you’ll understand.’”

  And then I began to cry.

  Karin

  I spotted Ruthie crossing the long parking lot, her legs moving like eggbeaters, a black purse as big as a small bison over her shoulder. We were in the middle of deciding whether to serve a Caesar or a Waldorf salad at the spring luncheon. I was dying inside. I hadn’t slept in several nights, and my mind wandered. My personal Rome was burning while we debated salad dressing.

  I excused myself and met Ruthie at the side door and guided her past the atrium toward my husband’s office. He was at the hospital on a visit.

  “I want you to do me a favor,” she said when I closed the door. “I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I think it wou
ld do us both good. Sit, please.”

  “Anything for you,” I said. A little too quickly as it turned out.

  “It’s time for a trip.”

  “Trip?” As far as I knew, she didn’t drive and hadn’t expressed an interest in going anywhere farther than Wal-Mart since I’d met her.

  “I’d like you to go with me up to Clarkston. It’ll take us only three, maybe four hours. We can pack a lunch and stop at the Golden Corral for dinner. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

  The town’s name had a faint ring to it, like a distant bell calling children home.

  Ruthie squinted, trying to see something in me that obviously wasn’t there.

  “What’s at Clarkston?” I said.

  “I’m sure there are a lot of things, but the point of interest to me is the federal penitentiary.”

  “Penitentiary? Why would we—?”

  “I’ve made the arrangements. We’ll go next Tuesday. I talked with your husband, and he thinks it’s a good idea.”

  “You talked with Richard?”

  Ruthie leaned close, and I could see my reflection in her Coke bottle glasses. “We’ve known each other awhile. I consider you a good friend. Do you trust me?”

  “Of course I do, but—”

  “Then go with me to Clarkston. I’ll drive us. There’s something we need to find out together.”

  “What? Are we going to see someone?”

  “Not someone. Him. This fellow you’ve talked about. Don’t you think it’s time you saw him? talked things over?”

  My mouth filled with cotton. The meeting about the spring luncheon suddenly had greater appeal. “I don’t see . . . I mean, I do trust you, but I don’t see what this has to do . . .”

  “Karin, there’s something missing in your life. Something you’re not seeing. I believe deep down you know that. I’ve known it since I met you.”

  “I’m a married woman. You know as well as I do that feelings—old feelings—get stirred up if you let them. And the last thing I want to do is jeopardize what I have—”