Wayfaring Stranger (Holland Family Saga 1)

“I’ll say good night to you now, Roy. I wish you well. I don’t think I’ll be in contact with you again.”

“You’re disappointed in me?”

“Who am I to judge?” I replied.

Typical of Roy, he didn’t let go easily. He walked to the porch and leaned the gift for Linda Gail against the bottom step. “You’re a heck of a guy, Weldon. Make them wince,” he said.

“That last part is your father’s mantra.”

“Sometimes the old man gets it right,” he replied. “By the way, in case you didn’t read it in the paper, Lloyd Fincher died of carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. It’s a great loss. Half the hookers in San Antonio will be out of work.”

LINDA GAIL ALWAYS loved books and did well academically. Even after skipping ninth grade, she was placed in the high school honors program. Her favorite treat during the summer was the visit of the old WPA bread truck/bookmobile to her rural neighborhood, where many of the parents were barely literate and her peers spent their spare time shooting songbirds with air rifles or making what they called “nigger shooters” from willow forks and strips of inner tube. Her favorite books were the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series, Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels, Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, and The Yearling by Marjorie Rawlings. Rarely did she get to read books like those in Honors English. In her sophomore English class, the students memorized and recited long passages from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Evangeline.” Linda Gail made up for her lack of interest in the material by outdoing everyone in the class. While others barely got through a recitation in front of the class, Linda Gail memorized twice the number of lines and kept going until the teacher had to stop her, out of fairness to the student who was supposed to follow her, whose recitation Linda Gail was making redundant.

The third time she did it, the teacher had her dropped from Honors English. When the principal told her to report to a class filled with students who could barely stay awake until three P.M., she charged into the office of the teacher after school, crying and in a rage. She called him a snarf and a jerk and a dog turd and said she was going to write the governor about him.

“What’s a snarf?” he asked.

“A guy who gets off on sniffing girls’ bicycle seats,” she replied.

He placed a box of chalk on the desk and told her to write “I will not call Mr. Shepherd a snarf” one hundred times on the blackboard. She picked up the box of chalk and threw it at his head. “You were born for the stage, Linda Gail,” he told her. “That’s not a compliment.”

As she fixed dinner for Hershel and herself, she wondered why, at this time in her life, those memories from her adolescence seemed so important. Unfortunately, she knew the answer. The best moments in her young life had been with the books she discovered on the shelves of the bookmobile. Roy had told her he loved her for her innocence. That was the way she wanted to remember herself, as Judy Garland singing among the Munchkins. She knew the reality was otherwise. Even as a child, she had always been self-centered, never passing a mirror or a store window or the glass trophy case in the school hallway without looking at her reflection. Linda Gail not only stole the lines the other students had stayed up all night memorizing, she committed an act of theft upon herself. She had lied about who she was all these years. The innocent child she wanted to remember had never existed. She was a fraud then and a fraud now.

She wanted to talk honestly with Hershel without hurting him more than she had hurt him already. How do you tell someone you don’t love him, that you are not drawn to him physically, that even during your most intimate moments, images of other men have always lived on the edges of your consciousness? Is that person supposed to be consoled because you add that you admire and respect him? There are certain things you never say to another human being. An apology from an adulterer is an apology from an adulterer. Telling the person whom you married and slept with for years that you never loved him was nothing short of calculated cruelty.

Her own thought processes were driving her crazy.

She fixed his favorite dinner—pork chops and sweet potatoes and canned spinach mixed with mashed-up hard-boiled eggs. She set out clean place mats and the good silverware and lit the candles on the candelabra and set it in the middle of the table and sat down across from him. She ate in small bites, her eyes on the plate, wondering what she should say. “Did you know your color has come back?” she asked.

“Think so?” he said.

“I believe it’s because of our visit with Weldon. Gathering pecans and sitting on the gallery, like people do in Louisiana.”

“Yeah, I’m glad we did that. It was nice, the weather and all.”

“He was proud you remembered the time in the Ardennes when he was kind to you. He thinks very highly of you, Hershel.”

“You ever notice how your accent comes back all of a sudden?”

“Did you know I have the same speech coach as Audie Murphy?”

“That’s something, isn’t it?”

“We’ve gotten ourselves in a mess, haven’t we?” she said.

“I want you to go back to Hollywood and finish your picture. I can take care of myself. There’s no problem here, Linda Gail.”

She touched the tip of her fork to a piece of pork chop but didn’t lift it from the plate. Nor did she raise her eyes. “I don’t believe I’m cut out for Hollywood. Even if I were, I think they’re pretty well done with me.”

“No, ma’am, they’re not. I always believed your name was going to be up in lights. You were born for the screen.”

“My Honors English teacher said something like that years ago.”

“He was a smart man.”

“He was telling me I was a self-centered brat.”

“He was probably jealous, that’s all. Sometimes prophecy can come from the mouth of a fool.”