When he finishes dinner, Dad slides his plate to one side and strikes a match. The scent of another Primo del Rey cigar mingles with the perfume of soaked earth and wet tree bark. He leans back in his chair and folds his hands on the table, holding the cigar between his teeth.
My father’s hands are scarred, sunburned. Dirt under every nail. Bandages on two thick fingers, probably from repairing the barbed-wire fence at old Mr. Halleck’s estate, where he works.
Mr. Halleck is a rich old man, with hair like downy fluff and breath that smells like sour mash whiskey whenever he bends down to talk to you. He keeps strange animals on his estate: peacocks, flamingos—even an ostrich. There’s also a pair of antelope all the way from Africa. He has special people care for them, but Dad does just about everything else.
I want to ask Dad how he cut the fingers, but I don’t.
Ma asks instead, in her roundabout way.
“Did it take long with those pines on the north slope?”
Dad puffs on the cigar. Smiles. “My fingers are fine.”
Beyond our porch, lightning chases black treetops.
“Jack,” says my father to me, “if you do not finish that meat loaf, you will get no blueberry cobbler.” He taps the cigar and a bit of ash drops over the railing, sizzles in the rain, and is gone. “And that would be a shame.”
I’ve spread my meat loaf pretty good across my plate, one of the fancy porcelain ones Ma set out in honor of Frankie. But it’s plain to see I haven’t had more than a mouthful since we sat down. It’d be easier if Butch was under the table where he belongs, instead of hiding in the barn like a big baby. Dang dog is terrified of thunder.
“Dad, can I have the paper?” Will asks. The Evening News, folded and damp, sits at Dad’s left elbow. Will’s been eyeing it all dinner long, hungry for news about his hero, Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
Dad gives the paper a toss. Even in green storm light I catch sight of the photograph on the front page as it wheels by: boys in the jungle, in uniform. Soldiers.
“You’ve brought cooler weather with you, son,” Dad says to Frankie—as if he didn’t see the photograph, as if he don’t know his oldest son is only a few weeks away from a letter saying he’s got to go to war in some jungle far away where nobody can look after him.
Ma joins Dad in talking to Frankie about the weather. “It’s been miserable hot lately,” she says.
“It’s been hot at home too,” Frankie tells her. “The thermometer read a hundred and one degrees when I left.”
“Is that because of all them fires?”
Ma’s fork makes a tiny clink as she sets it down and glares at me.
Dad frowns.
The one thing Ma told me not to talk about was the fires in the city, and I went and did it. Suddenly the smooshed-up meat loaf on my plate is the most interesting thing I have ever seen, and I stare at it, wondering who on earth came up with a name like “meat loaf” in the first place and knowing all the while that I’m a fool—and what’s more, that I’m a dead fool.
I feel Ma’s eyes drilling holes in my head. She wants me to look at her, but I don’t. I keep staring at my meat loaf and no place else. I force down a fork-load and chew and chew and chew. Meanwhile nobody’s said nothing, and I hear the blood pounding in my ears, and it sounds like the rain that’s still coming down around us and—
“Aunt Addie, can I have some more meat loaf?”
Frankie’s voice is so soft I can hardly hear him over the rain. At his question, Ma’s mouth opens. I hold my breath for a whole minute while Ma ladles more of the loaf onto his plate. Next thing I know, Frankie’s telling her how good it is and asking for more carrots. By the time Ma’s done telling him they come from her garden, and how the rabbits have been after them all spring, she’s forgotten me and my question.
I throw a sideways glance at Frankie, but he keeps on talking. I never heard him talk so much. Didn’t know he could.
“It’s beautiful here,” Frankie says, again in his small, quiet voice. “I’ve never been anyplace like it. And it’s so . . . far from anybody else.”
That ain’t true. Old Sam Williamson’s trailer is a mile down Hopkins Road, and the Glattfelders own a farm five miles beyond it. And there’s one more family, across Apple Creek on the other side of Knee-Deep Meadow: the Madliners. We don’t see too much of them. That’s fine by me because Mr. Madliner is as sour-faced a man as you’ll find. His wife, Elmira, is awful sick, so that she can’t hardly walk. And their son, Caleb . . . well, there’s some people you just steer clear of.