Epilogue #2
I want to record that, because I want to remember it.
The dinner was good. The turkey was on the dry side, because my father had cooked it the way he had always cooked it, which was twenty degrees too hot, but Gunner had made gravy with the pan drippings and the gravy was excellent, and Craig had brought a bottle of bourbon from a distillery near Pendleton that I had never heard of and that was, when we tasted it, better than any bourbon I had drunk in six months.
Alma's casserole was a hit. My father had two helpings.
He said, on the second helping, Tell me about your mother again, and Alma told him about her mother — about Denver, about the divorce, about the magazine recipe from 1986 — and my father listened with the careful steady attention he had given my mother across forty-three years of marriage, and which I had not seen him give anyone since she died.
We ate the pie.
We did dishes. Gunner washed and I dried and Craig put away and Alma sat at the kitchen table with my father and the second pot of coffee, and they talked about the chimney — my father had been telling her about the year he and my mother had bought the place — and they talked about the shop, because Alma had brought photographs, and my father had wanted to see them, and they sat at the table for forty-five minutes going through the photographs while my brothers and I did the dishes and pretended we were not listening to every word.
Then it was time.
My father said, "Beckett. Walk with me."
I had not heard him use only my given name, without a son attached or a tone attached, in many years. I set down the dish towel. I followed him out the back door.
The back of the house ran down to a small creek that had no name on any map and which my mother had called, on the day they bought the property, the brook, because she had read too much Robert Frost in college and had wanted, my father had once told me, to be a person who lived near a brook.
The brook was running low for November. The leaves had come down.
The water was the dark glassy clear of mountain water in late fall.
There was a flat rock at the bottom of the slope, and my father walked us down to the rock, and he stood on it with his hands in his coat pockets, and he looked at the water for a long time, and I stood next to him and did the same.
He said, "I have rehearsed this nine years."
I said, "I have too."
He said, "Mine's probably better, then."
I almost laughed. I almost laughed, because my father had not made a joke in my hearing in approximately fifteen years, and because the joke was funny, and because the joke was, in its small particular way, the white flag.
He said, "I want to start with the thing I have not said. The thing I should have said the night you told me you weren't enlisting."
I waited.
He said, "I should have said I'm proud of you."
The water made its small quiet sound at our feet.
He said, "I had a plan for you. I had a plan for all three of you.
Gunner went his way. Craig went mine. You went yours.
The one I had the worst time with was yours, because yours was the one I understood the least. You went toward something I had never made anything with.
You went toward your hands. You went toward fire.
You went toward the slow patient thing your mother had loved about you when you were a boy and which I had told myself, to my regret, was softness and not, as it turned out, iron of a different kind.
I had it wrong. I had it wrong for nine years.
I am telling you now, because there is no other time left to tell you, that I had it wrong. "
I did not speak. I could not speak.
He said, "Your mother knew. She told me before she died.
She told me, two weeks before the end, that I was going to have to find a way to apologize to you for the way I had walked out of that conversation when you were eighteen, and that I was going to have to do it before it was too late, and that if I waited too long I was going to be apologizing into a void, and she was not going to be there to make me do it.
I waited eight years anyway. I waited because I was a coward.
I waited because I did not know how. I waited because I am, as your mother once told me in one of our few real fights, a man who would rather be wrong forever than wrong out loud. I am telling you out loud now."
He turned and faced me. His eyes were wet. He was not crying. My father had cried twice in my life, both times at funerals, and he was not going to cry on the bank of a creek on a Thursday afternoon. But his eyes were wet.
He said, "I'm proud of you, son. I have been proud of you for longer than I have been able to say so.
I am proud of the work you do with your hands.
I am proud of the man you have become. I am proud — and this is the part I want you to hear most — I am proud of the woman who is sitting in my kitchen right now, because the man who chose her is a man who chose well, and the man who chose well is a man your mother would have been proud of, and that is, in my own small way, the thing I am trying to tell you.
Your mother would have loved her. Your mother would have looked at her and looked at you and looked at me and said, Martin, the boy did the thing right. And she would have been correct."
I did not speak. I could not speak. The brook went on doing what the brook did.
My father said, "I am going to say one more thing, and then I am going to stop, because if I say more than this I am going to ruin it.
The thing I want to say is this. I have a piece of your mother's that I have been holding for nine years for you.
I would like to give it to you now. I would like to give it to your wife, actually, with your permission.
It is, I think, the kind of thing your wife should have. "
I said, "What is it."
He said, "Your mother's grandmother's wedding ring. The plain one. The one she wore on her right hand because the diamond your grandfather gave her didn't fit her. You used to ask about it. You used to say it looked like a forge ring. You were seven."
I had forgotten.
I had forgotten saying that. I had forgotten about the ring.
I had forgotten that there had been a small gold-and-iron-colored band on my mother's right hand for the first decade of my life, that I had asked her about when I was a child, and that she had told me had belonged to her grandmother, and that my mother had then taken off and given to her own jewelry box because, she had said, Beckett is going to want this someday.
I had forgotten the whole thing the way I had forgotten the drive — the way the body forgets what the mind has decided not to look at.
I said, "Pop."
He said, "Yes."
I said, "Give it to her."
He nodded.
He walked back up the slope toward the house.
I stayed at the brook for a minute longer.
I needed the minute. I stood on the flat rock and I watched the water move and I thought about my mother, who would, in fact, have looked at Alma and looked at me and said, Martin, the boy did the thing right.
I thought about her saying it. I thought about her not getting to.
I thought about the fact that my father, eleven years after her death, had finally found the language she had asked him to find.
I thought about how language is a kind of forging — slow, patient, the heating and the cooling and the hammering and the heating and the cooling again — and how some pieces take longer than others, and how my father had been working this particular piece for nine years and had brought it, today, to its final shape.
I went back up to the house.
Alma was at the kitchen table. My father was sitting across from her.
He had a small wooden box open between them — a box I recognized, because it was my mother's jewelry box, and it had sat on her dresser for forty years — and he was placing something into Alma's palm.
He had her hand. He held her hand the same way he had shaken mine on the steps.
He said something I did not hear. Alma's eyes were full. She nodded.
She looked up when I came in.
She held up her hand. She had slid the ring onto her right ring finger. The gold band of my great-grandmother's plain wedding ring sat there, soft and worn and the particular color of a thing that has been on a woman's hand for sixty years.
She said, "Beckett. Look."
I looked.