47
Grant had reached the bottom step of the porch when the screen door pushed open and Emmet came backing out, an aluminum travel mug in his gloved hand. He saw Grant and stopped.
“You’re up early,” he said.
“So are you.”
“This ain’t early.” He gripped the railing and came carefully down the steps. He wore his good dark overcoat, dark slacks, black shoes, and the bright red cap pulled down over his ears. Gaining solid ground he looked up and met Grant’s eyes. “How’s that boy?”
“Sleeping it off.”
“How bad?”
“Not as bad as it looks. Two good shiners and a somewhat enlarged nose.”
“Broke?”
“What?”
“The nose.”
“No. Just the wrist. They put a cast on that.”
“I want you to give me that hospital bill, Grant.”
Grant waved this away. “It was just a scrap, Em.”
Emmet cocked an ear at him. “How’s that?”
“It was just a scrap.”
“If my dog gets loosed and kills a man’s chickens, is that man gonna come to me and say, don’t you bother, Emmet, it was just a scrap?”
“Not the most flattering analogy, Em.”
The old man cocked an ear at him again and Grant shook his head. He looked to the corner of the house where the tail end of the El Camino jutted. Emmet sniffed and looked at the sky.
“Why don’t you let me drive you, Em?”
“They ain’t took my license from me yet.”
“I know it. I feel like a drive myself.”
“What about the boy?”
“He’s fine,” Grant said. “He’s sleeping.”
WITHIN THE BORDER OF ponderosa pines were a few decorative birch trees, bare and white amid the stones. Grant got out to walk but there was no place in the cemetery from which he could not see the old man clearly, and he watched him trek through the snow until he reached a rose-colored stone of modest size and began to clear the snow from its crown, whisking left and then right, the way she must have once brushed snow or dander from his shoulders. When the stone was clean he pulled the cap from his head and rested upon the stone, his back to the graveyard, his fine white hair bristling.
Grant swept the snow from a bench and sat on the cold slats. The bench was aligned for a view to the north where on a clear day the mountains must be visible, rising above the hills, but this morning there was only the low thick clouds like a gray canopy over the world. In the corner of his eye he saw the old man at the stone. The white head nodding, cocking as if to listen, nodding again. Sipping his coffee. After a while the old man stood and turned and touched the stone once more and began walking toward Grant. Grant brushed more snow from the bench, and Emmet sat down beside him.
“Her folks are buried over in that corner there, where that birch is. She wanted to be closer, but them plots was bought up long ago.”
“It’s a nice spot she’s got,” Grant said.
“I bought the two plots for us and two more for the boys if they want them. If they don’t, they can sell them at a good profit.” He paused. “Twenty-five years ago that was, and I never once saw myself sitting here.”
Despite the cold and the snow there was the damp, moldering smell of the graves, or Grant imagined there was, and he took out his cigarettes unthinkingly, and then returned them to his pocket.
“Go ahead and smoke.”
“I can wait.”
“It ain’t gonna kill me.”
“That’s not what I hear.”
“That wasn’t the smokes, that was the goddam chemo.”
Grant brought out the cigarettes again and got one lit and blew the smoke well away, Emmet watching him closely. Emmet sniffed at the air. He sipped his coffee. Then he reached two gloved fingers casually toward Grant.
“What?” said Grant.
“Give a man a puff.”
“Forget it.”
“Come on now.”
“No.”
“One goddam puff, God damn it. Night I had.”
Grant looked into his eyes and handed over the cigarette.
Emmet sipped at the filter, held the smoke briefly in his lungs, and exhaled it slowly from pursed lips. He handed the cigarette back, grinned, and pitched forward on the bench coughing with such violence that Grant reached over and took hold of his arm.
“Em,” he said. He tossed the cigarette and began to pat the old man on the back, unprepared for the slightness of him under the coat, the racking thin basket of ribs and spine. “You need water,” he said, and Emmet shook his head and raised the travel mug, or attempted to—black gouts of coffee leaping from the sip hole before Grant reached to stabilize it, guiding it to the gray, contorted face. Emmet sipped, swallowed, sipped again. Grant let go of the mug and sat back again.
“Lord,” Emmet gasped, wiping at his chin. “Holy mother,” he said.
When the old man was quiet again, and a long moment beyond that, Grant leaned forward and said, “Want to say I’m sorry, Em. About last night. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Emmet reached up and reseated the red cap, tugging it forward and down, as a man facing a gale might.
“I told him it was time for him to go,” he said.
“When?”
“Last night, after you left.”
“What did he say?”
“Don’t matter what he said.”
“I’m sorry about that, Em.”
“Don’t be.” He looked over at the rose stone. “Alice,” he said, and stopped. He shifted on the bench. “She’d tell you the same thing.”
Grant rubbed at his fingers, at the two knuckles that were now the tips, nailless and printless and bone hard under the skin; yet still sometimes when he reached for a coffee cup or to scratch his jaw, he would experience again as if for the first time the bewildering moment when fingers that had been there, indisputably, suddenly were not. The loss that was more than physical.
Emmet said: “I know I never said it, and I guess I should of. But that’s your home as long as you want it, Grant. You and Sean both.”
“I appreciate that, Emmet. I can’t even tell you.”
“But you’re leaving just the same. Ain’t you.”
Grant said nothing.
“And just where are you gonna go?” the old man nearly demanded.
“I don’t know.”
“Back to Wisconsin?”
“I don’t know.” Grant stared at his hands. “I haven’t taken very good care of that boy. If he got in his head to just leave again . . .”
There was movement and they both turned to see a pair of cardinals, males both, sitting bright red in the ribs of a birch. Beyond the birch was the rose headstone, the only one not snowcapped. Grant had seen the chiseled words but not read them. They named the woman whose remains lay there, ALICE MARGARET KINNEY, with her dates, and they named the man who sat beside him on the bench, EMMET THOMAS KINNEY, for whom there were no dates, for whom the stone carver waited, and below these were the words MAN AND WIFE and nothing more. The face of his own wife came to him then, Angela Mary Courtland, and a time of graves he could not imagine.
He turned back and Emmet was watching him.
“What?” Grant said.
The old man looked away and shook his head. “Leaving’s hard,” he said. “But it ain’t the hardest thing. Is it.”