“Well, I’m glad you’re driving over to Madison so he can follow you. Didn’t know what you were talking about at first.” She was proud of her husband; it was in her voice.
“Don’t guess he’d take to me driving him. It was one thing driving him over here, but taking him on over to Madison would be something else. Old people like that can be stubborn. Like your daddy was. No, I’d guess he’d want to get there on his own, since he struck out on his own. Having him follow me was the next best thing I could think of.”
“He’s sure sleeping sound,” Mildred Cook said.
“Yeah. I can hear him snoring from in here,” her husband replied.
“Be a pity to wake him.”
“We can wait a little while. We’ll leave about ten-thirty. Give him plenty of time. Let’s get him up in time to wash his face and get dressed like he wants to.”
“I thought I’d iron out that shirt he had in the truck,” Mildred Cook said.
“He’ll appreciate it. Think I’ll go check out that old truck. See if it needs any oil or water.”
“Wish you’d call and see if you can find his people,” Mildred Cook said again.
“I’ll think about it,” her husband promised.
21
Clete Walton appeared at Sam Peek’s home at nine o’clock. An aging deputy named George Detwilder was with him. The two men waited in the living room for Sam Peek’s sons—Sam, Jr., Paul, James—and daughters—Alma, Lois, Kate, Carrie—to join them.
All except James quickly gathered.
“Maybe we got a little bit of a break,” Clete announced.
“What?” Carrie asked anxiously.
“Spencer Fields—everybody here knows him, I guess—anyway, Spencer called me this morning, right before I was getting ready to leave home. Told me he’d seen Mr. Sam’s truck going out over toward the Elberton road early yesterday morning. Said he wondered what Mr. Sam was doing, going out that way, but he didn’t think nothing much about it. Spencer was coming in from working the night shift up at the mill and he didn’t know nothing about Mr. Sam being gone, with him sleeping all day like he does. Said he heard about it up at the mill this morning, when he was getting off work.”
“The Elberton road,” Paul said, puzzled. “Why would he be going out that way?”
No one knew. There was no reason. He never drove to Elberton alone. He did not like driving among the huge trucks that transported slabs of granite from the quarries to the finishing sheds.
“Maybe he just got turned around,” George Detwilder suggested somberly. “Thought he was going out over toward Hartwell and took off in the wrong direction. Old people do that sometimes.”
“Well, they do at that,” Clete said. “They’s an old woman over in Bio—Harper’s her name. She’s always getting lost. Just gets out and starts to walking and goes anywhere her nose leads her. We had to find her a couple of times last year. Said she was out picking blackberries.”
“She was barefoot, both times,” George Detwilder added.
“She was,” Clete said.
“I don’t think Daddy’s that forgetful,” Sam, Jr. said. “As far as we know, he’s still got his faculties.” He looked at Alma, and she nodded confirmation. “What will you do, now?” he asked the sheriff. “Concentrate on the Elberton road area?”
Clete turned the sheriff’s hat he held in his hands and absently wiped at the brim with his fingers. His face was furrowed in thought. Finally, he said, “That’s what we’re doing. I already got some cars over there, looking around, and I called the sheriff in Elbert and Franklin County. Told them to start looking around. They all know Mr. Sam.”
“What about the State Patrol?” Paul asked.
“Did that, too,” Clete replied. “Told them what the truck looked like. It ought to be easy enough to spot.”
“If it didn’t blow up, like Neelie said,” Carrie murmured fretfully.
“For heaven’s sake, Carrie,” Lois said irritably, “you can’t go listening to everything that Neelie says.”
“That’s good advice,” agreed Clete. “That’s a fine old colored lady and I know your mama was partial to her, but she’s always going on about something or another. Best thing to do now is think we’re going to find your daddy, and he’s going to be safe and sound. More’n likely, he just got himself mixed up a little bit, but he knows how to take care of himself.”
“We’ll talk about it,” Sam, Jr. said. “Try to think of where he might be.”
“You do that. Maybe you’ll come up with something,” Clete replied. He added, “You know what I was thinking about this morning coming over here? I was remembering the time Mr. Sam stopped off at the house and told me to get out and hoe the grass from around some pecan trees he’d sold me. Said he didn’t sell them to see them go to waste. That’s a strong-minded man. He’ll be all right.”
The sons and daughters of Sam Peek thought of their father making a demand of Clete Walton. Their father was such a man. He had great nerve, great bravery.
Clete looked around the room. “By the way, where’s James?” he asked.
For a moment no one spoke. Then Sam, Jr. said, “He went for a walk early this morning. I think he needed to be alone.”
Clete wagged his head pontifically. “I can understand. You can tell them two is close. I saw them over in Hartwell not long ago, at the barber shop. The way James was watching out for him, I could tell they was close. Way it is sometimes with the baby of the family. They get attached, and it’s hard to let go. Wish somebody thought that way of me.”
James sat in a covering of trees on a knoll above Herman Morris’s home. The morning air was still cold and he folded the collar of his thin windbreaker around his neck. He had walked for miles, rapidly, calming himself. He had not slept. He worried for his father, but there was also another image that he could not free from his mind—Herman Morris. He knew that if Herman Morris had fired his gun, he would have fired back, and there could have been a death. What he had done was foolish, and it was not his training to be foolish.
He saw a string of smoke curling from the chimney in Herman Morris’s home. He thought: My God, the man must ache for his sons. His sons were worthless, made worthless by the lasting crush of poverty and by fear and by some primitive instinct for survival. I hope he understood me, James thought. I hope he knew that I was afraid for my father.
He watched as Herman Morris came out of his home and went to a stack of wood and gathered the wood in his arms. James could feel himself weeping.
22
Howard Cook watched in the rearview mirror of his car as the truck followed him, sputtering comically. He knew by the way the truck shook when it left his yard that Sam Peek was in third gear and had no intentions of changing. No wonder the gears were loose. But Sam Peek was an insistent man. Like Abraham leaving the land of Haran in the Old Testament, he was on a mission and would not let a few obstacles, such as first or second gear, stop him. Sam Peek was in his truck, sitting erect behind the steering wheel, elevated on his cushion, both hands clasped to the wheel as though driving at daredevil speed. Howard glanced at his speedometer. He was going thirty miles an hour. He thought: At this rate, it’ll take more’n a half-hour to get there. Good thing we left when we did.
The pace did not bother Howard. He was doing something that made him feel good, something that seemed to matter. He had not had time to think it out, but Howard knew there was a lesson in Sam Peek. Howard believed in divine accidents, or interventions. Sam Peek had not wandered aimlessly over a maze map of roads, passing dozens of deserted tenant farmhouses, to stop by chance, by coincidence, at the house of his childhood. No, not that. That would be too easy to understand, a statistical occurrence, like a lottery of numbers. The Lord had moved His invisible, beckoning finger in front of Sam Peek’s eye, guiding him through the maze, commanding him to stop where he did. The Lord had directed Kenneth’s attention to the car. The Lord had finally put Sam Peek and Howard Cook together, and there was a
reason for it, a reason other than helping Sam Peek find his way to Madison.
From the rearview mirror, Howard saw that the truck ran more smoothly, with only a shimmer of vibration, but Sam Peek had not relaxed his grip. The white dog was beside him, sitting in the seat, the cap of her head and ears barely visible over the window. The dog’s white fur looked like the sun’s reflection on the window. Odd dog, Howard thought. Came from nowhere when Sam Peek called for her in his yard. He had been watching from the window of the living room with his wife because Sam Peek had told them the white dog would not show herself if anyone was in the yard with him, and they had agreed with looks of agreement between them that they would do as Sam Peek wished. “That dog ain’t around here,” he had whispered to Mildred. “We might find it up the road, but it ain’t around here. Our dogs would’ve been barking.” And then Sam Peek had clapped his hands once and called, “Come on, girl,” and the dog had appeared beside him, rising up with her front feet on the bracing of the walker, and his wife had gasped in surprise.
Maybe the lesson the Lord had intended for him to learn was in the white dog, thought Howard. Maybe the dog was like the whale in the Jonah story, or like the lions with Daniel, or the doves of Noah’s ark. Maybe the dog was the message and Sam Peek only the messenger.
Howard shrugged away with his shoulders the possibility of mystery in the white dog. He rubbed the palms of his hands over the arch of the steering wheel. He was letting his imagination get the best of him. The Lord had delivered Sam Peek to him because the Lord knew he would help Sam Peek. It was that simple. No need to read anything else into it, like some preachers he knew, preachers who would take the simplest Bible verse—clear and lovely as the poetry of a nursery rhyme—and make of it a farfetched tale of doom, as vivid as Armageddon. Howard did not like such preachers. They feasted on the stench of fear, like the predator buzzard circling the rising odor of a killed, decaying animal. Howard had been a good neighbor, a good Samaritan. Nothing more. But that was enough in the Lord’s asking. He had taken an old man who was lost to his home, and he had fed him and given him rest, and his wife had put out a bath cloth and towel for a sponge-bath, and she had pressed the old man’s suit shirt, and now he was delivering that old man to the place he wanted to go. The Lord must be pleased, he thought.
He did not know why Howard Cook insisted on driving so fast, speeding along almost as recklessly as the other cars and trucks that shot past them in a blur of colored metal. If I’d of wanted to fly, I’d of taken an airplane, he thought irritably. No sense in going so fast. Howard Cook was a good man, but he was like Noah and Holman when it came to driving a vehicle. Noah and Holman drove like madmen. Noah and Holman never thought about looking at things on the side of the road, only about getting to where they were going. He liked to look. There were things to be seen on the side of the road that were worth remembering—like the Apalachee River they had crossed a mile or two back. As a young man at Madison A&M, he had often fished the Apalachee with Marshall Harris, bringing back strings of catfish for the farm workers to cook in a large black frypan balanced on the rock wall of an outdoor fire. Once he had found the shards of Indian pottery in the mudsand of the river, and a history professor from the school had delivered a lecture on Indians native to the area. Such things were worth remembering.
The truck hummed in a steady tremble running from the steering wheel into his hands and arms. He worried that something might suddenly fly off the truck or from beneath its rusting hood, and the truck would be as crippled as he was, or it would die in the road, steam spewing from its mechanical organs like a human soul passing into the ether of heaven. He looked at the speedometer. Great God Almighty, he thought. Howard Cook was pushing forty miles an hour. No need to be going so fast.
He saw Howard’s car slow in front of him and then saw the winking of the left blinker light. Howard had said they would make a hard left at a church and then turn quickly back to the right under a railroad trestle. He saw the church on the left of the road. Howard’s car slowed to a stop and then made the turn. He hesitated, watching for traffic. “It’s a hard turn,” he remembered Howard saying. “You have to be careful about traffic coming at you. There’s a curve there.” He did not see any cars or trucks, and he pushed on the accelerator and the truck jerked forward in slow, laboring spurts and he guided it behind Howard’s car, following Howard in the right turn on the road beneath the railroad trestle. He did not see Howard Cook shaking his head in disbelief, and he did not hear Howard Cook offering a prayer of gratitude to God for the braking power of the tractor-trailer truck that had slowed miraculously in time to allow Sam Peek’s sputtering truck to cross in front of it.
“Thank you, Jesus,” Howard said with a dry mouth.
The landmarks leading into Madison were no longer familiar to him, but still he knew he was nearing the land he had farmed at the school of his youth. He knew intuitively, like birds with the unerring radar of familiarity returning to distant places, following memories so splendid they could not be resisted. He slowed his truck and, ahead of him, Howard Cook slowed his car. “We’re almost there, girl,” he said to White Dog. The dog looked at him and whimpered. “I know that land over there. I used to plow that land.”
In the distance he saw the rust-red brick of buildings off to his right. “Up there,” he said, “that’s where the school used to be. They tore it down. Put up a high school. Don’t know why they tore it down, but they did.”
Howard looked at the speedometer on his car. Twenty miles per hour. He knew that Sam Peek had recognized, at last, where he was. He glanced at his watch. It was eleven-thirty. Sam Peek had said the lunch was at twelve. We made it in time, he thought. He would pull off at the road leading to Morgan County High School and bid farewell to Sam Peek, then he would drive into town on his pretension of business and wait a few minutes before driving back to his home. And he would do one other thing: he would call Sam Peek’s family in Hart County and tell them what had happened and advise his preacher sons to come for their father. If Sam Peek had gotten lost coming to Madison, he would get lost going home.
“Glad I got to know you, Mr. Peek,” Howard said to him, shaking his hand through the opened door of the truck. “Hope you enjoy the reunion. You ever get back down this way, we’d be glad to have you stop in.”
“Wish you’d let me pay you,” Sam Peek said. “You and your wife went out of your way helping me out.”
“No sir,” Howard said pleasantly. “Couldn’t take nothing for what little we done. Just glad we was there.”
“So was I,” he said. “You come up to Hart County, we’ll repay you for the kindness.”
“Maybe we’ll do that someday,” Howard replied. “Not far away. Maybe I’ll come up there and get me a couple of them trees you was telling us about. Wouldn’t mind having me some pear trees.”
“You let me know, and I’ll have them up and heeled in for you,” he said. “Pick out the best I got.” He did not have pear trees, but he would order them from another nursery and pretend that he grew them.
“I’ll do that. You take care of yourself. You need anything, you have somebody call Howard Cook. I’m in the book.”
“I appreciate it,” he said. He shook hands again with Howard and watched him get into his car and drive off. He would write in his journal of Howard and he would send a check to Howard’s church. He would do it in Cora’s memory.
He drove his truck down the short road leading from the highway to the school and turned into the middle driveway and parked beside a flagpole, across from the row of cars already there. The cars gleamed from being washed clean and waxed and his truck, among them, would be an eyesore, an embarrassment. He felt displaced. He sat in the high cab of his truck, rubbing his dog at the neck, looking at the school and the row of gleaming cars. He had traveled a day and a half to get there, and now he was uncomfortable. No one else had arrived in an old junk-heap of a truck and no one else would have a dog with them. The dog moved restlessly fr
om his hand and looked over the edge of the window to the outside.
“Guess maybe you want to get out and run,” he said to the dog. “In a minute. In a minute, maybe. Let’s just sit here for a little while.”
Another car—white, long as a limousine—moved down the driveway and parked beside the other cars. A woman—young, energetic, lithe—got out of the car from the driver’s seat and hurried to open the passenger’s door. A frail, bent man emerged hesitantly from the car. He wore a light blue suit. His white hair fluttered in the easy breeze. He was thin, fragile—so delicately fragile a strong hand might shatter him. He had a cane, and he slipped forward a few steps on the walkway, scraping forward, never lifting his feet, and then he stopped and propped both hands on the nob of the cane. He turned slowly in a half-circle and looked around, as though looking for something he could remember. The woman stood near him, her hands lifted, ready to catch and steady him. She laughed gaily and said something to the man.
Who could that be? he wondered. Who could be that old and come back for the reunion? He tried to remember a body that would match the frail, bent man, tried to have the man stand straight and young and powerful in his imagination, but he could not. Lonice Carswell? Lonice had had blond hair, and it was always wild on his head, as though he had been running in a windstorm, but Lonice was dead. Or was he?
He watched the man and the woman—the man’s granddaughter, he reasoned—make their way up the walkway and into the building, the woman chattering cheerfully, directing her fragile grandfather, on guard against a stumble that would send him crashing to the ground, shattering him. My God, he thought, are we that old? Are we all that old? He thought of one of his own granddaughters, one who had always tugged at him for attention. If he had asked, she would have driven him in her car to the reunion and she could have walked with him into the building, holding the door for him, watching that he might stumble.