Bonus Chapter First Christmas #2
She had not, in the year of her marriage, called him Dad.
She had called him Mr. Holt twice and your father in the abstract many times and Martin once, in a Christmas card she had written him in late November.
She had not called him Dad until that moment, in the doorway of our loft, and the word came out the way her mother's casserole had come out at Thanksgiving — by reflex, with no calculation, because the moment had asked for it.
My father walked across the room.
He set his duffel down. He set his cane against the wall. He took both of Alma's hands in his. He looked at her for a long second. He said, "Daughter. Thank you. Thank you for the year. Thank you for the son. Thank you for the home. Thank you for letting me come.”
Alma said, "Thank you for coming."
He let go of her hands. He turned to me. He did not say anything to me for a long second. Then he did the thing I had not seen him do in twenty years.
He hugged me.
He hugged me the way fathers hug sons when fathers have, for nine years, not hugged their sons.
He hugged me the way he had hugged me at my mother's funeral, which had been the last time.
He hugged me hard, with both arms, with his hand on the back of my neck, and he held the hug for four or five seconds, which was, by his measure, a substantial hug, and then he stepped back and cleared his throat and said, "Whose woodstove. Yours or the previous tenant's."
I said, "Mine. I put it in. Year three."
He said, "Liner?"
I said, "Stainless. Eight-inch."
He said, "Good."
We were going to be fine.
I had been worried — I had been worried, on and off, for two weeks — about whether my father coming to Ember Falls was going to be a strain.
I had been worried because he had not been to my town.
I had been worried because he was old and tired and his knees hurt and he was sleeping in a guest bed in a loft he had not designed and was eating food that was not the food he was used to.
I had been worried because the Christmas Eve before, our first Christmas Eve as a married couple, he had been alone in Banner Elk with my brother on deployment and my mother dead and no presents under the tree except the small box I had mailed him, which had contained a hand-forged set of fireplace tools that he had — Gunner had told me — set up in the living room and looked at for an hour without opening any other mail.
I had been worried, in short, that this trip was a thing he had agreed to do that he was not, in fact, able to do.
He was able to do it.
He sat at the kitchen table. Alma made him coffee.
He drank the coffee. He commented on the coffee.
He said it was strong, the way coffee should be in winter.
Alma told him about the chicory. He nodded.
He said his mother used to use chicory in her coffee in the Depression, because they could not afford to buy enough beans, and that he had grown up drinking it and had forgotten about it for fifty years.
Alma poured him a second cup. He drank that too.
We sat at the kitchen table for an hour.
He asked about the shop. He asked about the forge.
He asked about the third bay. He asked about the new lot and what I was planning to build on it.
He asked about Pilar. He asked about Diesel.
He asked about the brothers, by which he meant Gunner and the club, which were, in his head, the same thing now.
He listened to the answers. He did not give advice.
He did not, in the entire conversation, give a single piece of unsolicited advice, which was not, as far as I could remember, a thing my father had previously been capable of.
The change was a small one and it was very large.
At four-thirty, Alma said, "We have plans."
My father said, "What plans."
She said, "The compound is doing a small dinner. Christmas Eve dinner is tomorrow night with us up here, but tonight is the open house. Anyone who wants can come. Diesel and Sadie host it. We were going to walk over. It's only ten minutes."
My father said, "I can't walk ten minutes in this. The cane and the ice."
She said, "We'll drive."
He said, "I don't want to crowd. Maybe you two go. I'll stay. Read by the stove."
She said, "Dad. They want to meet you. Diesel especially. He told Beckett to bring you."
He looked at her. He looked at me. He looked at her again. He said, "All right, daughter."
We drove to the compound.
The compound, on December the twenty-third, was decorated in the way Diesel decorated everything, which was more lights than strictly necessary, and a fire.
The fence line was lit. The roof of the main house was lit.
The barn was lit. The fire pit was going in the upper meadow.
There were maybe forty people in attendance when we pulled in — the inner circle and the older patches and several of the wives' parents who had come to town for the holiday — and the air carried the smell of woodsmoke and roasting meat and pine.
Diesel met us in the driveway.
He had on a wool coat with the patch over the breast pocket, and he was holding a steaming mug, and he opened the passenger door for my father and put out his hand and said, "Colonel. I'm Diesel. I have been waiting nine years to shake your hand."
My father took his hand. He said, "Likewise. I have heard your name in my house for a long time."
Diesel said, "Whatever you heard, sir, it was probably accurate."
My father said, "It was generally complimentary."
Diesel said, "Then I'm in your son's debt."
My father said, "He is in yours."
The two men looked at each other for a half-second. Diesel was sixty-three. My father was seventy-one. They had both, in their long careers, run organizations of men. They recognized each other. The recognition did not need to be discussed. It was, in the small architecture of the moment, sealed.
Diesel said, "Come inside, Colonel. Sit by the fire. We have a chair for you."
He had a chair for him.
He had pulled the green leather wingback out of the front parlor — the chair Diesel sat in at chapter meetings, the chair nobody else sat in — and he had set it by the fire in the main hall.
He had set a small footstool in front of it.
He had placed a small side table next to it with a coaster and a glass of bourbon, which was the bourbon Craig had sent us, which I had brought to the compound for the occasion.
My father saw the chair. He looked at Diesel. He said, "Diesel."
Diesel said, "Sit, Colonel."
My father sat.
He sat in Diesel's chair by the fire in the main hall of the Iron Vow compound on the night of December the twenty-third, and the club came through to meet him one at a time, the way you go through a receiving line at a wedding or a wake, and each of them shook his hand and said their name and patch and, in several cases, a small specific thing about my work or about Alma's work or about something the two of us had done for them in the year of our marriage.
My father listened to each one. He shook each hand.
He said Thank you for what you've done for my boy approximately twenty times.
He said Thank you for what you've done for my daughter approximately twenty times.
He did not, in either phrase, vary the words. He did not need to.
At one point, Sadie came over.
She knelt next to the chair the way she had knelt next to my mother's chair when my mother had been in the wheelchair at the end. She put one hand on his arm. She said, "Colonel. We're glad you came."
My father said, "Mrs. Diesel."
Sadie said, "Sadie."
He said, "Sadie."
She said, "Your boy is one of the good ones. He has been one of the good ones since the day he showed up in this town. We have all known that. I wanted you to know that we have known that."
He said, "I know it too. I had to learn it a different way. But I know it now."
Sadie patted his arm. She got up. She went back to the kitchen.
My father drank his bourbon. He watched the fire.
He nodded at the patches who came through.
He spoke to Joey for ten minutes about the accordion, which Joey had brought, and which had — to my father's apparent delight — turned out to be a Hohner Verdi III from the 1950s that my grandfather had also played.
The two of them swapped half a dozen songs in the language they shared, which was Hohner accordion songs from before 1960, and Joey played a slow waltz for him that my father told me, later, had been a song my mother had loved, and I had not known that, and Joey had not known it either, and the not-knowing did not matter, because the playing had happened, and the listening had happened, and the moment had been made by the people who had been in the room.
We stayed at the compound for two hours.
When my father started, around six-forty, to flag — I could see it in his shoulders, the small loss of upright posture that meant he was running out of fuel — I caught Alma's eye, and she nodded, and we made our way back over to him, and he was ready to go, and we said our goodbyes, and Diesel hugged him at the door, and Sadie hugged him at the door, and we got him back into the truck, and I drove us home.
He was quiet in the truck.
He was quiet not because he was upset but because he was tired in the way men of his generation got tired when they had just been somewhere good.
He was processing. He was letting it settle.
He looked out the windshield at Mill Street as we drove back through town.
He said, once, That diner still looks like a diner. I said, It is one. He nodded.
We got him upstairs.