The Four Corners of the Sky_ A Novel - Michael Malone [221]
But all her mother said was, “Sam’s not going to sell that junk. And besides you never know when you might find something you really like up in Sam’s attic. Like how about that pink baseball cap Sam gave you with all the jewels on it?”
“Sam said they’re really real jewels.”
Annie fastened the strap on one of Samantha’s gloves. “They are real.”
Her daughter was distracted by the appearance of a family, a young mother and father with a little girl of about her age. They were walking up the hill to the graves. Their voices carried through the bare winter trees. They were talking about something they’d heard today on the news. The young man said, “Did you ever think they’d indict McAllister Fierson?”
The young woman said, “See, there’s hope.”
Annie smiled wryly. Fierson was one story of many that the news reported on, casually and with an ephemeral interest in its truth. Ruth Nickerson’s part in the story would never be told.
Samantha ran down the path and stared at the other little girl from behind a large gray, pitted obelisk, the tomb of some Emerald soldier named Peregrine, long dead in some long ago American war fought for some reason or other.
“Come back here, Samantha.”
Annie saw the couple noticing her Navy uniform and the braided cap she held in her hands. Instinctively she braced herself for a certain look from them, suspicious, distrustful. But instead they politely waved.
Only a month earlier she had worn this braided cap at the funeral in Arlington Cemetery of her former husband, Brad Hopper. Brad had died in a car bombing, on the road from the military airport into Baghdad. For his actions in rescuing a fellow officer, he had received posthumously the Navy Cross, accepted at the ceremony by his mother. After the service, Annie made her way to Mama Spring while Brad’s sister was helping the trembling woman into the limousine. Annie said that Brad’s family must be very proud of him, and rightly so. He was the hero he had always wanted to be.
Annie was thinking gratefully about Brad and the last time she’d seen him. At her request, he’d flown one of the new Hopper jets to Emerald so that she could take her uncle, Clark, up for a ride.
While they knew Clark was dying, they didn’t think the cancer would take him so quickly, only six months after he’d diagnosed himself. He had hypothesized that the source of the malignancy might be the damage caused by particles of the incendiary weapon white phosphorous, used by the Army against enemy insurgents in Vietnam.
“But please don’t ever mention this to Sam,” he asked Annie. “It’ll just drive her nuts. And smoking didn’t help.”
Clark waited until Annie’s visit on her birthday so he could tell her face-to-face. He told her it was the last of her birthdays that they’d share, “at least on this side of the grave, which is not to be taken as a grave matter, Annie.”
Inside the house, Dan and Samantha sat watching The Wizard of Oz with Sam. Clark sat with Annie on the porch. They watched the sun fall, reddening the river that the Indians had named Aquene, peace. He told her the news he’d confirmed only a few weeks earlier. “Now, is this fair?” he joked. “Your dad gets pretend cancer and I get the real thing?”
Annie reached to Clark’s rocking chair beside her to touch his thin knobby hand. “No, it isn’t fair. But isn’t that always the way it is with you?” He looked at her, puzzled. She smiled at him. “You’re the real thing. Cancer. The real Ruthie, the real me. At least that’s what Ruthie told me in Havana six years ago. She was still mad that you went back to Vietnam, when she loved you so much.”
“…Hmmm.” He rocked slowly, three taps of his foot on the floor. Then he slowly smiled back at her. “Thank you for telling me that.”
She held his hand.
“Well,” he said, “Your dad was a real flyer and I’m sure not that.”
And so at Christmas, Annie asked Brad to lend her a jet and she took Clark up for a ride from Destin Airworks. “We’re going to go fast,” she told him. “Faster