“Well, I’m proud to do my part for the war effort, Dad.”
“Didn’t put batteries in it. I figured you had electric in that shack of yours or you wouldn’t be painting at night.”
“My neighbors don’t have it, but I do.”
Atticus said, “You got a mike built right in it so you can record, too. What I planned on was to have you mail us tapes of yourself talking into it. And we’d do the same for you, of course, any time we have family occasions. Wouldn’t be like we’re all so far away.”
Scott grinned hugely at him and said, “I love Christmas!”
There was talk in the air when Atticus woke up for Mass on Christmas Day; and Indian speech that was like the hissing, popping noise of flames creeping across damp wood. And then there was silence. Atticus got into his clothes and stood just outside his son’s upstairs room, trying to decide if he ought to go in and then gently nudging the door ajar and holding there before he understood that Scott was gone, the gray smoke was incense, and the harsh smell that of whiskey. His son had taken Mary and Joseph and the Wise Men from the Nativity set in the dining room and put birthday candles around them on his schoolboy desk. And underneath them on the oak floor Scott had arranged a half dozen more birthday candles on bricks that he’d blessed with Jack Daniel’s.
Atticus walked into the kitchen and saw the ceiling light was still on and the teapot was simmering hot water on top of the stove. A Christmas snow put round caps on the fence posts and lay in the jack oak like socks and mittens. Scott’s shoe prints slued bluely across the yard to the yellow barn and then to the quarter-mile windbreak of loblolly pines and crabapple trees where Atticus kept the older farm machinery. Atticus put on his Army Air Corps jacket and cattleman’s hat and went out. Cold snow crunched beneath his gray cowboy boots with the toothgrind noise of cattle chewing. Jewels of sunlight sparked from the whiteness everywhere. And there under the green pine limbs was the red hay baler, the yellow crawler tractor and bulldozer blade, the plows and reaper and cultivator that were going orange with rust, and the milkwhite Thunderbird just as it was sixteen years ago when Scott took Serena to the store. The high speed of the accident had destroyed one headlight and crumpled up the right fender and hood like writing paper meant to be thrown away. The right wheel tilted on its axle as though it had not been fully bolted on, and the rubber tire shredded from it like black clothing scraps.
Atticus walked around to the driver’s side and opened the door. The iron complained at his pull but Scott did not look up, he stayed as he was, in his father’s red plaid hunting coat, just sitting there, one wrist atop the big steering wheel, his right hand gingerly touching the windshield glass where it was crushed and spiderwebbed on the passenger’s side. A milky light was filtering through the half-inch screen of snow. Atticus asked, “You okay?”
Scott pressed his cold-reddened fingertips into a crack and said, “Wondered if her hair was still there. Crows must be nesting with it.”
Atticus could only say, “I should of got rid of this car years ago.”
Scott dropped his hands and forearms into his lap. He said, “A great thing about Spanish is that there’s so little responsibility in it. You don’t have to take the blame. You don’t say ’I cracked the plate.’ You say ‘The plate cracked itself.’” Scott paused and just stared at the grayly misted speedometer as if there were ugly pictures there.
And Atticus said, “You don’t say you killed your mother. You say your mother was killed.”
Atticus nipped off a green cigar’s end and spit it into the wastepaper basket as Scott stooped toward the gas flame of the stovetop to get his own cigar going. Then Scott got his bottle of Armagnac and they walked out into Christmas night.
The moon was high and the night was sugared with stars. An Antelope County road plow had again scraped the mail route
s to a shine, and zero cold made the snow underfoot as hard as linoleum. Scott tipped up the Armagnac and Atticus waited and stopped himself from giving his known opinions about it. Soon Scott was walking again and saying, “She once strolled into the dining hall at Hirsch in nothing but a bedsheet.”
“You’re talking about Renata?”
“Right. Attendants tried to herd her out but Renata did this fantastic pirouette, the sheet swooshing off her, all the guys howling, and she’s standing there in the altogether with the orderlies rushing to haul her out when she flings her hands high and says, ’But people like me this way!’”
“She fine now?”
“Oh yeah; better than me. She tried acting in New York for a while—that’s as crazy as she’s been.”
“Huh,” Atticus said.
“She’s got a room in this pink villa owned by a Brit.”
“In Mexico.”
“Yep. The friend is Stuart Chandler. Runs the English-language bookstore, grows orchids, holds forth on sundry topics. He’s the American consul there.”
They walked fifty yards without further comment, and then Scott teetered as he tainted the road with gray ash. “Enjoying your cigar, Dad?”
Atticus turned and talked through his teeth. “Isn’t lit.”
“Like mine a little hotter than that.”
“It’s nearly tolerable this way.”
Wheeling snow twisted by in a sudden gust and then flattened on a highway that shone in the moonlight like wax. Atticus heard Scott finish a sentence with, “Went native for a while and got into shamanism.”
“Renata did?”
“Me.” His son looked at his cigar and then huddled over it as he lit it again.