Tonight, as he heard the smooth, unhurried slice of the paddle into the lake, a sadness pierced him to the quick of his soul. How many times had Lucy sent him out to find their son, yet he never had? He’d driven Wyatt away from him right here on this spot, and he had never come back, not in all these years. He would soon turn eighteen. In September, the Nazis had invaded Poland and then France, prompting Great Britain to declare war on Germany. His old friend Jacques Martine, with whom he’d fought in France, predicted in a letter from Paris that America would be at war in less than two years. Two years… two years to find his son.
And what would he be able to give Wyatt if he should find him? Love? Did he love Wyatt? No, he did not love Wyatt, not the way he had loved Matthew, with that heart-stopping, throat-closing rush of feeling that had proclaimed him flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. He had no understanding why. Wyatt had courage and integrity, loyalty and perseverance. He was not a braggart or a snob, though he had cause to be both. He was strapping and handsome, envied and sought after, but he took no more notice of that than he did of himself as the son of one of the richest men in Texas.
“He wouldn’t,” responded Sara in a letter when he wrote to her of these observations. “He looks upon all that attention as a result of who you are, not him. Your being rich is a source for your pride, not his. I can’t believe he’s the same boy who was so cruel to Matthew.”
It was a thought that had often crossed Percy’s mind.
“Give you a hand?” he offered as Wyatt neared where he stood. Wyatt threw him the line, and his father tugged the boat into the small slip, holding it tight until he could jump to the bank.
“Party get dull?” Wyatt asked, taking the rope and winding it competently around the spike.
“No, that’s why I came to find you. Your mother and I thought you might enjoy it. You earned it.”
“Well, I’m not too much for parties,” Wyatt said in his slow drawl. “Rather catch croppy instead. Wish you hadn’t disturbed yourself to come out here to get me. You’re probably missing a good time.”
Percy tried to subdue the throbbing ache within him, a sorrow he hadn’t felt so acutely since Matthew had died. Impulsively, he clamped a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Son, how about you and me getting drunk together? It’s been a long time since I’ve gone on a binge, not in years, in fact.” The memories were stirring, would not lie still. He felt on the verge of tears.
“When was that, Dad?”
“Oh, it was a long time ago, before your mother and I married.”
“What caused you to do it?”
Percy hesitated, unwilling to answer but afraid to break the moment between them. He and Wyatt had never talked of his past. He could not recall a single question his son had ever asked about his youth, the war, life before him. Only Matthew had been interested in his memories. He decided to answer directly. Wyatt was a man now. “It was because of a woman,” he said.
“What happened to her?”
“I lost her to another man.”
“You must have loved her.”
His son was taller, more stalwart of build, than Matthew would have been. His presence was strong in the moonlight. “Yes, I did. Very much. Why else does a man get drunk?” He tried to grin.
Wyatt frowned. “So, for what reason would we be getting drunk tonight?”
Percy found it impossible to answer. The ache within him swelled, shutting off his breath. “I… don’t know,” he managed to get out. “It was a bad idea. Your mother would kill us both. She’ll be looking for us, by the way.”
Wyatt nodded and snapped closed his jacket. “Then we’d better go,” he said.
Chapter Forty-five
After Wyatt’s graduation from high school—because of his absolute refusal to go to college—Percy took him off the floor of the lumber mill and gave him a job as assistant to the production manager whose office was in his headquarters building. Wyatt accepted the promotion with his usual taciturnity and listened stolidly at company meetings, taking dutiful notes with a slow hand. For two years, he bore with patience Percy’s attempts to fit him into the company as heir apparent and Lucy’s ceaseless urging that he comply.
He was rescued in December 1941 when the United States declared war against Japan for the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Within weeks, without consulting his parents, Wyatt had joined the U.S. Marine Corps.
“You must stop him!” a wild-eyed Lucy begged Percy.
“How do you suggest I do that?” her husband asked, equally as distraught. In his sleep now, he heard again the roar of the guns, the cries of pain and death, knew again the sticky sweat of fear, the stench of horror and panic, woke again to the forgotten taste of ashes in his mouth. And in his dreams, in the midst of the swirling smoke, he saw not the combat-fatigued faces of his fallen comrades, but Wyatt’s, the blue eyes empty and staring in death, the question Why? still in them.
“He’s almost twenty, Lucy. A man now. I can’t stop him.”
“Would you, if you could?” she asked, the question fraught with anguish, not accusation. Such periods of pointless blame-laying were over between them. She knew he’d tried with Wyatt, and for a long time her oblique looks when he spoke of Wyatt told him that she was aware of his growing change toward their son.
“Yes, by God. I’d rather shoot him myself than let him go where he’s going,” he declared, confounded by his feelings.
“You felt you had to enlist this soon?” he asked Wyatt two weeks later as he packed his duffel bag. It was the beginning of January 1942. Wyatt had been ordered to present himself in three days’ time for induction into the United States Marines at Camp Pendleton near San Diego, California, where he would begin the first phase of boot camp. His train was due to leave from Howbutker within the hour.
“No reason why I shouldn’t,” Wyatt said. “Every able man will be needed as soon as possible to put an end to this mess.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Percy said, remembering his own arguments for signing up. He fell silent as he watched Wyatt stuff tightly rolled pairs of socks into the canvas bag, each spheroid rammed into its mouth bringing him closer to the time he’d pull the drawstring and hoist the bag to his shoulder.
There is no hell, Percy thought. Hell is right here on earth. What greater hellfire than watching the son you never knew go off to war, the uncertainty of his return? There had always been a vacuum in his heart where Wyatt should have been, an empty space where nothing of him had ever caught and hung—no memory of shared laughter, conversation, male confidences. They had never talked about him, his dreams, ambitions, ideas, philosophies. The shocking thought came to Percy that, beyond a general impression, he had never paid much attention to the individual details of Wyatt’s face. He remembered Matthew’s still—the way his eyes had caught variations of light, the position of every cowlick, the small, round reminder above his left eye of his bout with chicken pox. But Wyatt’s features had remained as indistinct and undefined as a face underwater, sure to be a struggle to recall almost as soon as he was gone.
“Son…” Percy stepped forward, desperate that the boy should not go to war without something of himself having found a peg in the void, something he could remember him by.
“Yes, sir?” Wyatt said, continuing his packing.
“Tell me something before you go?”
“Sure. What is it?”
“Why did you suddenly stop hating Matthew DuMont? Why did the two of you become such close friends, almost… like brothers?”
Seconds ticked by. Wyatt appeared unmoved, his thickset profile as expressionless as ever as he cleared the bed one by one of the necessities and belongings that would go with him to war. Shoving the last item into the bag, he said, “Well, because he was my brother, wasn’t he?”
A roaring silence filled Percy’s ears, as if he’d stood too close to a mortar blast again. His hands balled in his pockets. “How… long have you known?”
Wyatt shrugged without looking at him.
“I figured it out in the cabin that afternoon you knocked the crap out of me. You almost gave it away yourself, remember?” He threw Percy a wry grin. “You said, ‘If you so much as look cross-eyed at your—’ But you caught yourself in time. I guessed it then. It was instinct, but I was pretty sure you meant to say ‘your brother.’ I figured you might knock my teeth out for beating up another man’s kid, but you’d only threaten to kill me if I beat up the son you loved.”
Percy made a move toward him. “Wyatt—” he began, but a wave of bereavement overpowered his words.
“It’s okay, Dad. I never blamed you for loving Matthew. Hell”—he laughed shortly—“everybody did, even Maw.” He stopped his packing to level a gaze at his father that brooked no contradiction. “But nobody loved him more than I did. I want you to know that. I never hated Matthew. I envied him. You were right about that. But I didn’t envy him for being what I wasn’t, I envied him for having what I wanted… what I thought should have come to me. I punished him for winning your respect and approval when I couldn’t—a boy not even your son, was my way of thinking. When I realized who he was…” He set the cylindrical bag upright on the bed. “Well, it explained a lot of things.”
Percy itched to halt Wyatt’s hands, to stop him from drawing the bag’s cord. “And… you never had any doubt at all after that day?”
“No, sir,” Wyatt said, cinching the mouth of the bag closed. “Not since I heard you admit to Maw later that night that Matthew was your son. I had come down the hall to apologize and to tell you I’d never hurt him again, when I heard your row.”
Percy groped for the bedpost. “You… heard everything?”
“Uh-huh. Everything. That explained a lot of things, too.”
Percy swallowed in an ineffectual effort to clear his ears of the deafening absence of sound. “And that’s why… why you and I never… made it.”
“Oh, we made it, Dad—in the only way we could. And I don’t want to leave you thinking it was Matthew that had anything to do with the way things were between us. If he had never been born, it wouldn’t have changed the way you feel or don’t feel about me. Matthew just made things worse by comparison, that’s all. The way I saw it, by learning the truth that day, I picked up a brother.”
And lost a father, Percy cried to himself, paralyzed by a yearning to reach out and grab him for one minute before he could leave, hold him like the little boy he’d never held, never found, until now. I love you… I love you, he longed to cry. The feeling was miraculously there, released like a bird from lifelong captivity, but Wyatt would never believe the words came from his heart rather than the emotion of the moment. Forgive me… , he wanted to beg, but he feared Wyatt’s answer. He could not be left with that memento to hang in the void.
“One other thing,” Percy said. He had to know. “Did… did you ever tell Matthew?”
“Nah, and he never guessed. Matthew was never good at figuring out things like that. He took things as they were.” Wyatt gestured toward the bureau. “In that bottom drawer are Matthew’s jersey and the book he gave me for my birthday. I’d take them for luck, but I don’t want anything to happen to them. If I don’t come home, they’re yours.”
Incapable of speech, Percy nodded and watched as Wyatt, with one swift motion, swung the heavy bag over his shoulder. Knowing that any attempt at reconciliation would not only be futile, but appear as currying, he stood in helpless resignation as his son took a last long look around his room. Wyatt had always respected him. He would at least let him go with that.
“Well, I guess this is it,” Wyatt said, his glance coming to rest on Percy for a rare time in his life. His eyes, clear as a spring stream, were empty of accusation, guile, or condemnation. “I think it’s a good idea that you’re not coming to the station with us, Dad. You and Maw would just get in a fight, and I don’t want to remember you two that way. She’ll go to her card game afterwards. Those biddies she hangs around with will help her get through this.” He stuck out his hand, and Percy slowly took it and gripped it hard. To his horror, tears filled his eyes.
“I wish… I wish things had been different between us.”
Wyatt shook his head. “A man doesn’t choose his sons. Things happened the way they did. Matthew was a good boy. I’m glad he’s out of this business.” They released hands. “Take care of Maw the best way you can—if she’ll let you,” he said, his mouth quirking in a grin that made his rugged features endearing.
But Percy could not let it go. “When you come home, maybe we can start again.”
The head shake again. “It wouldn’t change things. I’m me, and you’re you. So long, Dad. I’ll write.”
And he did. Percy devoured his letters, following the course of his platoon in the South Pacific from Corregidor, through Guam, and finally to Iwo Jima. Wyatt distinguished himself as Percy had suspected he would, winning commendation after commendation for bravery on the battlefield. Percy read the letters and newspaper accounts of the jungle warfare, of heinous traps and Japanese atrocities, of the rains, mire, and malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and wondered if somehow, some way, Matthew was calling the plays for his brother from beachhead to beachhead, foxhole to foxhole, keeping him safe, keeping him whole.
And then, at last, it was over and Wyatt was coming home. But not to stay, he had written. He had found his niche. He was staying in the marines. He’d been commissioned on the battlefield and would retain the rank of first lieutenant. Percy and Lucy met him at the station. They hardly recognized him when he stepped down from the train, the left side of his uniform jacket a jaw-dropping testimony of the battles he’d survived. It had been four years since they’d seen him. Percy had passed his fiftieth birthday, and Lucy, already gray, was forty-five.
“Hello,” he said simply, his voice that of a stranger, the eyes foreign to them. Lucy was slow to embrace this man she’d raised. He was powerful in build, taller even than Percy, and awesome in presence. Battle-hardened, combat-fit, his visage was that of a warrior who had found his tribe, his destiny, his peace.
“So, you’re not planning on returning to the business?” Percy asked later.
“No, Dad.”
He nodded. There would be no starting over again after all. He extended his hand and clamped his other hard over Wyatt’s grip. “Then I wish you safe landings always, son,” he said.
Lucy blamed him for Wyatt’s decision. She knew by now that Wyatt had been aware that Matthew was his brother. “Why would he want to come home and work for a father who had preferred his first son?”
“I believe Wyatt has come to terms with that, Lucy,” Percy said.
Her eyes glittered with the old pain. Percy knew that she was hurt to the core that she’d been deprived of her son. She’d looked forward to having Wyatt home again, marrying, giving her grandchildren. “Well, maybe, but he hasn’t forgiven you for it, Percy,” she said. “And he never will. The fact that he’s staying in the marines is proof of that.”
One morning five months after Wyatt had returned to his regiment, Percy looked up from reading his newspaper at the breakfast table to find Lucy standing by his side. She was dressed in a suit and hat. A mink stole hung from her shoulders. “Where are you off to this early in the morning?” he asked in surprise. His wife rarely opened an eye before ten.
“Atlanta,” Lucy said, pulling on her gloves. “I’m going there to live, Percy. There’s nothing for me here anymore, now that Wyatt won’t be coming home. I’ve already leased a town house on Peach Tree, and I’ve arranged for Hannah Barweise to pack and ship my things.” She took a sheet of paper from her handbag and handed it to an astounded Percy. “Here’s the address and a list of my expenses. I’ll also require a monthly allowance for personal items. The total is there at the bottom. It may look outrageous, but you can well afford it, and I’m sure you’ll think it’s worth the amount to get me out of your hair.”
“I don’t want you out of my hair, Lucy. I’ve never said that.”
“You wouldn??
?t. You’re too much of a gentleman, but this is best for both of us. Now, for old times’ sake, would you like to drive me to the station?”
He did not try to talk her out of it, but at the station, he looked down into her plump, middle-aged face and remembered the girl he’d come to meet here over twenty-six years ago. “A lot of water, Lucy,” he said, feeling a pull of his heartstrings.
“Yep,” she agreed. “The only trouble was, you and I watched its flow from opposite sides of the bank.”
Her hat was a little askew. He straightened it and asked on a pensive note, “Don’t you want a divorce, while there’s still time to watch its flow on the same bank with someone else?”
“Not on your life!” She laughed sharply. “You can forget about that. My threat still holds. No divorce until I say so, and that won’t be while Mary Toliver DuMont is still alive.”
They did not embrace when it came time for her departure. Lucy seemed disinclined to put herself into Percy’s arms and offered her cheek for a peck instead. She allowed him to take her elbow to help her board, and as she started up the steps, she turned. “Good-bye, Percy,” she said softly.
“For a little while,” he said, and slid his hand down to her wrist in the old way as the train whistle blew. The gesture took her by surprise, and he heard a short hiss of breath before she jerked her arm free as though burned. After holding his gaze a fraction longer than she seemed to wish, she turned her back to him and disappeared.
Chapter Forty-six
After Lucy’s departure, Percy did what he’d always done when a hole opened in his life: He added more hours to his workday and expanded operations. He enlarged the pulp mill and gave the go-ahead to begin construction of an adjoining paper-processing plant on the acres he’d bought from Mary. In addition, he had land cleared nearby and blueprints drawn for a residential development that would offer affordable houses to workers and their families willing to live within smelling distance of the odorous emissions from the pulp mill. The proposed number were snapped up immediately. The sulfurous smell was by no means disagreeable to the soon-to-be home owners. The odor meant consistent paychecks handed out each Friday, health benefits, pensions, raises, and paid vacations.