It’s harder on Alcide, maybe. At twenty-seven, he wants to provide. The care Bessie gets at Charity is subsidized, and the trucking company’s good work, but what’s left of the bills still eats up Alcide’s pay. They’re guests in Lyle’s house, barely contributing to their keep. He tries not to let that burn him. He goes silent, too. He waits. Puts aside what money he can. Tells himself they’re young still, that there’s time ahead for a new beginning. When he stops for coffee on the road, the pamphlets of lots for sale that every truck stop diner has in a rack by the door must catch his eye. He must take the pamphlets to his booth and flip through them as the waitress refills his coffee. “You all right here, hon?” she asks. He nods at her distractedly, peering at the tiny grainy photos of rural lots, his mind already off somewhere else, into an imagined future. Maybe that thirty acres out by Moss Bluff, with long crabgrass and a creek running through the back. For a minute he pictures Bessie sitting by the creek. Not Bessie as she is now, braced against the crutch, her face in the grim line of pain, but Bessie as she was ten years ago, a girl of sixteen with hair the color of river reeds and teeth as bright as her white cotton dress. A smile that always made him remember laughing with his brothers when he was a boy. Or maybe this other ad—a small shotgun house in New Orleans, persuade Bessie to give city living a try. For an instant he has a flash of Bessie’s trying to make it from one room to the other with them all in a row like that. He can’t know yet that in a few years the doctors will amputate her leg, but even now it is constantly infected, hard for her to walk on. He sighs and puts down the flyer. Swigs back his coffee, feels the dregs’ bitter splash against his throat, swallows, puts down the empty mug. Fishes a dime from his pocket, slaps the coin down on the table, stands to go. The doctors say three operations a year are ahead, and already the pain’s like a fog over Bessie. Pain or grief, who can say. It’ll be a long time before he gets his wife back. If he ever gets his wife back. He puts the trucking company’s hat back on and gathers the pamphlets in his fist. Leaves them on the rack, a little crumpled. Let some other man dream.
So it’s a relief, it must be, to swing himself up into the cab of his truck, start the great growl of the engine, and ease the truck out of the lot. High in the cab, he lets the miles of black tar clear his mind. No past behind him, no future ahead. Only road. His only responsibility to go forward, clear as the bright white lines of the lane markers. Sometimes, maybe at night when there’s no distraction, or maybe when the afternoon sun is high and bright overhead, and the glass windshield again concentrates the heat until he sweats and he feels the hard nubs of the wheel go a little slippery beneath his palms again, sometimes then the crash must come back to him. The hot choked memory dream of that afternoon. His hand reaching up to wipe at his forehead. The concrete rushing at him through the windshield, as though it were the thing hurtling itself toward collision, not him. Not the car. Not his family. Then Bessie’s scream. The shock of the impact entered him through the wheel, up through his bones. The smell of burning. His last sight of Oscar.
But Alcide is a pragmatic man, proud of and defined by the way he can keep going. A skill learned young, after his brother’s death in the motorcycle crash. A skill he needs now.
So most days, he’s all right. He goes on the road; he makes his deliveries; he comes back when he can and he kisses his wife on her forehead and sits in Lyle’s house at Lyle’s table to eat the meal Lyle’s wife has made. When the grief comes, and when what the grief feels like is anger, he takes one of Bessie’s whiskey bottles and swallows the silence down. He remembers to kiss his daughters and he remembers to love his broken-down wife and he remembers to hide the empty bottles so Luann won’t see. These years are hard, but they have a kind of hope to them. He waits to make his new beginning. He waits to start anew.
*
Then Ricky turns four, and he can. There’s a new baby, Jamie. A son whose life has nothing to do with the crash. The doctors had to cut Bessie open again to pull him out, and Jamie will turn out to be blind in one eye and hard of hearing, but the child is perfection. Two boys, three girls, a raise that puts a little money in his pocket finally. Alcide sends away for the housing kit catalog, and he and Bessie choose the only kit they can afford. It’s nothing fancy—four rooms on a foursquare frame, no flourishes—but it will be their home. That fall is clear and bright, good weather for building. He’s not naive or reckless enough to think they can move far away. No longer does his head fill with thoughts of California. Someone has to take care of the children through Bessie’s operations. But they can get next door, at least. He’ll build on Luann and Lyle’s lot.
Alcide is still strong—the muscles in his broad shoulders will never leave him—just starting to go soft around the middle from the trucking. He and Lyle work long hours in the sun, laying down the frame for the house, building up the walls. With each wood beam, with each nail he drives through it, he is laying down the bones for their new life.
When I imagine him there, kneeling at the frame of the house, a nail gripped between his teeth, him hammering on a board while the broad sun beats and sweat runs rivulets down his forehead and his back, I see my father, a sawhorse erected in the backyard and one of the house’s repairs under way. I hear the din of an old boom box playing a ball game, the batter’s hit and the crowd’s responding roar. I stand at the edge of the grass, the blades coming up itchy yet soft between my toes, and it’s how Ricky would have stood, watching Alcide hammering in the heat. The eldest son. At four, Ricky is a normal-looking child. A little big-eared. A little skinny. But he laughs when Darlene or Judy tickles him. And he’s a big brother now.
Ricky pads over to Alcide, who must look up and see his son haloed against the high afternoon light. On the radio Waylon Jennings has just finished crooning a lonesome line, the strum of the guitar fading out to an audience’s applause. Ricky’s shy around his daddy still. He just stands there, waiting. Alcide has a flash of Oscar at four, the way Oscar used to run to greet him at the door and how he would fall to his knees to catch him and wrestle.
Now Alcide pinches the nail from his teeth and holds it out to Ricky. “You going to help me with this, Son?”
Ricky nods. He bends forward and takes the nail, his face serious and watchful.
“Hold it right there,” Alcide says. He gestures to the board. “That’s right. Just like that.” The child toddles closer.
Alcide brings the hammer down to the nail slowly and taps, careful not to clip Ricky’s fingers. “Good, good. Go get the next one, you hear?” He’ll have to go back over this later, driving each of the nails deeper into the wood. But for now the sun is high and the beer is cold and the music is good and he’s here with his son, his living healthy son. He waits for Ricky to fish another nail from the box. The afternoon could last all day. Alcide wouldn’t mind. Let the afternoon last right into a new life.
Alcide pounds the final beams into the frame of the house. He and Lyle dip brushes into sealant to protect the wood from the Louisiana humidity. As they stroke the vinegary liquid over the boards, and the sun begins to sink in the sky, bringing the afternoon to its close, and as Ricky heads back into the house to Bessie’s call, how much of the past are they sealing in? How many of the memories Alcide holds have made their way into this house he builds, how much has seeped in through its doors? Think what you will about the drink, about how lately it can’t hold back anger, grief slips out of him and blindsides Alcide. Those times he catches himself just as his fist slams into the table, aware, suddenly, of the vein in his forehead, of the rage in his throat, of Ricky cowering in the doorway, small and trembling. Think what you will about the way Bessie sometimes closes herself in the bedroom and sobs, and he doesn’t have to ask her why: Oscar’s smile ripples through Ricky’s, Ricky’s voice is an echo. The fact is, the same newspaper that printed the articles about the crash that might have killed this family will print notice of Bessie and Alcide’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. A haunted house, maybe. But they survive.