Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [189]
To see her and Pop together was to see a couple. They teased each other and laughed. Sometimes she’d make him a plate of food and bring it to wherever he sat, and he’d smile up at her brightly and squeeze her hand, sometimes lift his face for a peck on the cheek. Whatever had ended their marriage was scar tissue no longer even sensitive to the touch, and Bruce was fine with this; he’d been living with my mother thirty years, three times longer than my father ever had. He’d go get his own plate of food, and some of us would sit at Pop’s small dining room table, others on chairs against the wall or on the couch beside the wheelchair ramp. There’d be Jeb and his wife Victoria. Suzanne and her husband Tom. A few times a year Nicole would fly out from California with her girlfriend, then later her baby son Theo. There would be me and Fontaine, our three kids, Austin, Ariadne, and Elias, who over the years, one at a time, Fontaine would be breast-feeding while she ate. Cadence and Madeleine might be sitting in the laps of one of us older brothers or sisters, and friends would drop by: Lori, Jack and Joe, Sam and Theresa, and their son and daughter too.
My father’s house would be loud with talk and laughter, Ella Fitzgerald singing on the stereo, the phone ringing, the clank of silverware, the toilet flushing, the hollow roll of sliding doors opening out to the deck where Pop and Jeb and Mom might go to smoke. There was the creak of the oven door, the spray of water on dirty plates, the smell of coffee and wine and hot olive oil. There was the late-afternoon light coming through the bank of windows that looked out over Pop’s pool and the road below, the rising field of wheat-colored grass, the ridge of bare trees. In Pop’s small house, the light was the color of fire, the kind that came from a hearth this family sat around as if we’d never been fractured, as if we’d never been broken up into pieces that had also, somehow, found their way back home.
ON ONE of those Sundays, Pop and Jeb and I sat at the end of the Cajun Boardwalk sipping drinks and shooting the shit. The sky was gray, the leaves beginning to yellow. The air smelled like rain and the cigarettes my brother and father were smoking. Pop had just written a new short story that was also a western, and Jeb and I were teasing him about some of the practical details being off: in the story, the protagonist builds a coffin for a dead man, then digs his grave near a stand of trees, and he does it all in a three-hour afternoon.
We told him that even with power tools, there was no way his character could build a coffin so fast. And that six-foot grave was near trees with roots. The hole alone would take two to three days for one man to dig with a pick and shovel.
“Old man,” Jeb said, smiling, “do you even know what real work is?”
“Not manwork,” I said. Jeb and I shook our heads and sipped our drinks, and Pop was laughing, clearly enjoying himself. “Well, I’m declaring poetic license, damnit. All the wood and tools were already in that barn ready to go, and there was sand near those trees.”
Sand. Jeb and I kept shaking our heads.
“And when I die you boys can build my coffin and dig my grave and then you can see how long it takes.” He laughed and raised his drink and sipped from it, his eyes bright and mirthful, his cheeks a deep red, his whiskers thick and gray and white.
IT WAS true, he never had done any work with his hands. We never once saw him push a lawn mower or even change a lightbulb. But he seemed proud that his sons were carpenters, and now it was late at night in February, and I was sitting on his couch in damp clothes because I’d been working the wet saw most of the night in Suzanne’s new house five miles down the river. It was a project Jeb and I—and even Pop—were doing together.
Suzanne had bought a house in Amesbury up the hill across from a brick hat factory on the Merrimack. Her house was old and only had three