Chapter 5 - The Ledger of the Left-Behind
The post office on Federal Street in Waynesboro had three service windows, two of which were permanently closed with frosted-glass panels bearing the brass-embossed seal of the Post Office Department from nineteen-fifty-six.
The clerk behind the single open wicket was a man named Jesse Guffey, who had gone to school with my brother David and whose father had delivered coal to our grandfather's blacksmith shop behind the depot. He didn't look at the return addresses; he weighed each parcel on the iron beam scale, his thumb sliding the brass counterweight along the notches with a rhythmic, metallic click-clack-click.
"Seven pounds, four ounces, Arthur," Jesse said, spitting a shred of tobacco into a paper cup beneath the counter. "That's going to Maryland. Priority mail?"
"Standard parcel post, Jesse," I said, leaning my elbow on the worn oak ledge. "No hurry. The people on that end have plenty of knives."
Ethan carried the fourth box in from the rain. He stood six feet behind me, his hands tucked into the pockets of his old denim coat, looking down at the red-and-white linoleum tiles where three generations of Augusta County farmers had stamped the red clay off their boots before asking for their tax forms.
Jesse looked over his spectacles at the boy.
"Ethan," the clerk said, his voice completely flat, devoid of both malice and condolence. "Your uncle David said you were back in the valley."
"Yes, sir," Ethan said.
"State highway department is hiring maintenance inspectors for the district five resurfacing project," Jesse said, stamping the Maryland parcel with a heavy purple ink pad that made the counter shudder. "Pay's nineteen dollars an hour, four dollars less than the bank in Charlotte, but you don't have to wear a white shirt and nobody asks you to dance on a platform."
Ethan didn't blink. "I put my application in at seven this morning, Mr. Guffey."
"Good," the clerk said, sliding the box onto the rolling canvas hamper behind him. "Your grandfather helped pour the concrete on that bridge over the Maury River in fifty-two. The piers are three feet thick and they haven't shifted an eighth of an inch. A man ought to work on things that don't fall over when the wind comes out of the gap."
When we returned to the truck, the street was clearing.
The mountain wind had come around to the north, cold and dry, scouring the valley of its gray wool fog and leaving the sky that hard, brilliant cobalt blue that comes to Virginia only after three days of rain. The brick chimneys of the textile mills down along the river were throwing straight, pale columns of woodsmoke into the noon air, and the yellow leaves of the sugar maples were falling across the pavement in sudden, rustling drifts that smelled of tannin and sweet cedar.
"Dad," Ethan said as I turned the ignition key.
The starter groaned twice before the old straight-six caught, idling with that deep, familiar valve-ticking rhythm that had accompanied our family across two hundred thousand miles of county roads.
"Yes, Ethan?"
"Camille’s lawyer called my cell while you were inside," he said. He had his phone in his palm, the screen dark, his thumb tracing the beveled edge of the protective case.
"What did Gidley want?"
"He wasn't calling for Charles," Ethan said. "He was calling for the venue. Briarwood. Julia Marsh told him that if the eighty-four thousand dollars wasn't deposited by five o'clock on Wednesday, she’s filing a commercial lien against Camille’s father’s real estate holdings in Henrico County. The master contract had a personal guaranty clause that Charles signed when he wanted the private cellar access."
I pulled the column shifter into reverse, backing out of the stall with my arm over the bench seat, my eyes checking the clear street behind us.
"Charles Bennett has four hundred thousand dollars in capital commitments, Ethan," I said. "He told the judge so himself in chambers."
"The capital commitments were contingent on the marriage being announced in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on Sunday morning, Dad," Ethan said, looking out through the side glass at the bronze doughboy standing in front of the municipal building. "The investors were five partners from an equity trust who were using the Bennett family’s social register to front a development parcel on the James River. When the minister called the newspaper at nine o'clock last night to retract the registry notice, the partners pulled their signatures before the wire cleared."
"Then Charles has an educational opportunity," I said.
"An educational opportunity?"
"He has the opportunity to learn what concrete costs when you don't have an old civil servant from Augusta County to pay the mixer fee."
We drove south along Route 340, passing the cattle auctions and the apple packing sheds where the seasonal workers were loading bushels of Stayman and Winesap onto flatbed trailers.
At the crossroads by the old brick Presbyterian church—the church where Helen and I had been married in June of nineteen-sixty-nine, with two hundred people eating ham biscuits off paper plates on the lawn and my father playing the fiddle on the back of an International grain truck—Ethan turned his head.
"Dad," he said.
"What is it, Ethan?"
"Why did you bring the check?"
I slowed the truck for the bridge over Back Creek, the water brown and swift beneath the concrete deck, swollen with the mountain rain.
"What do you mean, why did I bring it?"
"You had it in your breast pocket," he said, his voice dropping into that quiet, analytical register he had used when he was twelve and trying to understand why the hydraulic pump on the tractor wouldn't lift the bush-hog. "You didn't leave it in the safe at the house. You didn't leave it with Harold Miller. You carried eighty-four thousand dollars in certified bank funds onto that terrace, knowing that Camille had called Mom a peasant three weeks ago."
I shifted into third gear, the truck climbing the long grade toward the King Street ridge where our chimney stood red against the hardwoods.
"Because, Ethan," I said, "a man who goes to an execution without the rope is just an observer. I didn't go to Briarwood to watch you get married, son. After that telephone call to your mother about the cascading centerpieces, I knew the wedding was already dead."
"Then why go at all?"
"Because," I told him, looking at the stone gateposts of our driveway where Helen was standing by the mailbox in her blue wrapper, her splinted arm resting against the cedar post, "your mother wanted to see whether you would reach down into the mud to help her up, or whether you would look at the photographers to see if they had the wide lens on."
He didn't answer.
May you like
He didn't look away from the road.
He sat in the passenger seat of the nineteen-eighty-four Buick with his hands flat on his denim knees, his jaw tight, his shoulders squared against the cab door, watching his mother’s white gauze bandage catch the autumn light like a small, clean flag of truce that had been planted in the Virginia dirt and wasn't ever going to be moved again.
