What Dies in Summer (17 page)

“Your father was an alcoholic,” said Gram. “I didn’t fully comprehend that then and I probably don’t even now. Thomas himself certainly didn’t. I was raised
to expect men to drink; it was simply the normal thing. Even if it hadn’t been for the church and what people might have thought, I wouldn’t have left him. Not just for that. Not with
you two girls to support.” Gram slowly sat back down, accepting her glasses as I held them out to her. “But dear God, if I’d only known about the rest of it,” she said.
Glaring at her daughters one after the other, she said, “How dare you not tell me!” She slammed her fist down on the chair arm, her voice breaking. “How
dare
you!”

I saw Gramp again in my mind, this time on his tractor, dressed as he usually was at home in overalls and a railroad shirt, muddy brown boots on his feet and a straw hat on his head, his veined
hands big as catcher’s mitts and hard as hickory knots. Because I was so good at eavesdropping, I knew most of what had happened to him: it had been late in the year, on a clear, cold, windy
day. Coming home from her Eastern Star meeting, Gram had found him dead in the gazebo behind the house under the big willow that stood by the lily pond where he’d hung a swing for the kids.
After buying a new box of Federal shells at the Western Auto store in town he’d taken the old .32 revolver that he kept in his sock drawer out to the gazebo along with his whiskey bottle, a
glass, a green Scripto pencil and Gram’s stationery tablet, and sat in the wooden glider he himself had built for Gram. Before putting the muzzle of the pistol to his temple and pulling the
trigger, he’d used the Scripto pencil to write the letter L.A. and I had just read.

Aunt Rachel had arrived just after it happened, and she and Gram had come up with a story about a gun-cleaning accident that satisfied the sheriff, but they knew the truth then and we all knew
it now, even if none of us had ever spoken it.

And now it was obvious why Mom and Aunt Rachel had never seemed to want to go out to Rains County, where Gram and Gramp lived then. Thinking about all of it, I became aware that I couldn’t
look at Mom. I had an image of Hubert saying, “Ooh, sweet mama!” and grabbing himself as he grinned at her, and I clenched my teeth against the nausea that boiled up in my throat.

Gram said, “May God forgive me for my failures. I’ve been weak and I’ve been blind and I am sorry, but there is more than enough blame to go around. Except for these two
youngsters here, none of us is innocent.”

She looked at me and then at Mom, who concentrated on her fingernail. I didn’t know what was in L.A.’s mind, but I didn’t consider myself the least bit innocent. Maybe words
like that had different meanings at different stages of life.

“I realize that Jack may not face any legal consequences for what he’s done to James,” Gram went on. “But at least we’re going to function as a family this
time.” Her fierce gaze went around the room. “Aren’t we?”

Aunt Rachel had crossed one leg over the other and was waggling her foot up and down. She frowned at her Dr Pepper.

“And it’s not just what happened to you girls and to James,” said Gram. “Someone
will
tell me right now about Lee Ann and Camden.”

“What do you mean?” said Rachel.

“I want to know what has happened to this girl.”

L.A. and Jazzy looked at Gram. So did Mom.

Without meeting Gram’s eyes, Aunt Rachel said, “You mean why her and Cam couldn’t get along?”

“What little intelligence I have is battered enough, dear—please don’t insult it further.”

“Then what the hell
are
you trying to say?” Aunt Rachel asked, setting the Dr Pepper bottle on the floor. “Make sense, Mom.” Looking at her expression, I had the
feeling she knew as well as the rest of us how dumb and hopeless this sounded.

Gram ignored her. L.A.’s face was whiter than ever, and I saw that she and Gram were now looking at each other as if no one else were in the room—a full female eyelock. Large,
dangerous things were being decided.

“Your father used you sexually, didn’t he, Lee Ann?”

“Whoa,
HEY
!” Aunt Rachel yelped.

L.A. kept her eyes on Gram’s, breathing like she’d just run up a flight of stairs. Jazzy’s whiskers went on trembling and she glanced at Aunt Rachel, then up at L.A., then put
her chin down on L.A.’s knee.

“Is this what you got me over here for?” Aunt Rachel gritted out. “I’m getting sick and damn tired of this shit, Mom.”

But nobody paid any attention to her. Finally L.A. looked down at her own hand as it ruffled Jazzy’s fur and then looked back up at Gram. The silence was almost impossible to endure. After
a second or two Gram drew in a deep breath through her nose. The answer had passed between L.A. and her, and I knew nothing could ever be the same with us after this. Looking at L.A., seeing her in
a way I never had before, I remembered her curled up asleep in her clothes under all those pillows on the bed with the light still on and my Swiss army knife clutched in her fist.

Gram hung her head, weakly twisting the used-up tissue in her hand. Finally she said, “My God in heaven—the sins of the mothers.” She wiped at the corner of her eye with what
was left of the tissue.

Aunt Rachel said, “Goddamnit, Mom! How can you be
doing
this? Haven’t we got enough trouble as it is?”

Mom had been staring at Rachel, her mouth half open. She said, “So that’s why she—”

“Don’t you start up again, Leah!” yelled Rachel.

There was a strange kind of settled, broken look on Gram’s face as she watched L.A., the two of them totally disregarding the noise Aunt Rachel was making.

Gram put her hand on L.A.’s knee. “Have you told Dr. Ballard?”

L.A. gave one quick shake of her head.

“I think I can imagine why not,” Gram said in a shaky voice, trying without much luck to control her tears. “But at some point it’s going to be necessary, isn’t
it?”

Aunt Rachel paced around the room, running her hands desperately through her hair, as if there were things in it that had to be clawed out. She turned to Gram. “Mom, for God’s sake,
they’ll lock him up, don’t you know that? Is that what you want?” She faced L.A. “Is that what
you
want? Your own father in jail?”

L.A. gazed at her mother as the seconds went by. Finally she said, “I don’t have a father.”

“Oh, shit!” Rachel screamed. “Shit shit
SHIT
!” She held up her arms as if praying for rain.

For a while now Mom had been watching her with a funny expression. Then she said quietly, “Ray, you’re trying to act like you didn’t know, but you did. You had to.”

“What? What the hell’s wrong with you, Leah?” Aunt Rachel stopped pacing and glared at Mom. “Hell, no, I didn’t know. I
don’t
know. It’s not
true, goddamn it!”

“You knew,” said Mom.

“Jesus H. Christ!” Rachel yelled. “Can you please just shut the fuck up, Leah? For once in your goddamn life?”

“When you quit sleeping with Cam and moved into the other bedroom, Ray. Or didn’t come home at all. That’s when you gave Cam your daughter.”

L.A. turned her face away. I could see she was going to cry. I already was.

“You’re all goddamn NUTS!” Aunt Rachel screamed.

“You knew,” said Mom. “There’s no way you didn’t.”

“Shut up!
Shut up!”

“All those books and magazines full of naked kids stashed everywhere—I bet he whacks off a dozen times a day.”

“
No-no-no-no!
” yelled Rachel, covering her ears. She bent forward as if she were going to throw up.

Gram got to her feet. All of us but Aunt Rachel watched her walk unsteadily across to the telephone.

I DON
’
T
want to tell Dee Campion’s story, at least not this part, the part about how it ended, but I have to. And I
won’t disrespect him, or Gram, by saying this is what
happened
to him. Gram taught me better than that. I have to tell what Dee and his dad and I did. What it all means is probably not
for me to say, but it made me wonder for the first time in my life if it’s actually possible to sell your soul.

One of the most important things to know about Dee is that he was an artist, and the way I’ll always see him in my mind is standing at the easel in his room, painting some arrangement
he’s set up on a little card table in the light of the north-facing window. I see the same light surrounding Dee, making him glow like a religious painting himself as he moves the tip of his
brush around in the paint and water and then touches it to the paper to create a curled root hair or almost-transparent seed. As he works, his face becomes still and neutral and he seems to lose
track of the world.

I never spoke to Dee or made any unnecessary noise when he was like that, knowing he was in a place that wasn’t mine to enter or disturb. In that way he was like a placekicker or a diamond
cutter, impossible for regular people to really understand.

But Mr. Campion didn’t see Dee or his paintings the way I did. Sometimes he’d stand for a minute watching Dee at the easel and his face would go red, or he’d hitch up his pants
and march into his study, where everything was leathery and solid. On the study walls were what seemed like dozens of photographs of Mr. Campion smiling at the camera from between the horns of
downed game, or shaking hands with some ballplayer, or sitting on a horse, and at the center of everything, a rosewood-framed gold putter he’d won the year before last in the pro-am at Cedar
Crest. He’d rock back in the chair at his desk and twiddle a pencil or play with the letter opener as he looked up at the stuff on the walls.

Some days he’d take me out to the driving range to hit a bucket of balls, Dee not saying anything as we left, just standing there with a brush or paint rag in his hand. Sometimes I’d
look back at him as we walked out to the car, trying to understand his expression, half wanting him to object. Other times Mr. Campion and I would go into the den, find a game on TV and talk
defensive alignments and quarterback tendencies while Mrs. Campion did something in the kitchen and Dee painted in his room.

One day Mr. Campion came into the den with two Pearls from the fridge—Dee’s mom fussing along behind him about what Gram would say—then popped the caps and handed me one. After
calculating that there was no way I’d be seeing Gram in less than a couple of hours, I took it. It was cold and delicious, going down smoothly and warming me inside.

“Fuckhead,” Mr. Campion said to the wide receiver on the screen. “Third and six, guy runs a five-yard hook. See that, Jim?”

“Yes sir. It looked like he could’ve picked up ten, easy, with the corner playing that loose.” I burped. It was late in the second quarter, the Cowboys down 17–3 against
the Cards, no letup in sight.

“That’s the trouble with these assholes anymore,” Mr. Campion said. “Their mind’s on their contract and their endorsement money, they forget to play the goddamn
game.”

“I heard the other wideout had a groin pull,” I said.

“Yeah, delicate bastard. But he walks on out there and lines up just like everybody else, so I guess he earns his pay. Just too bad about them wooden hands.”

It was different when Dee and I talked. For instance, after he found out about Tricia Venables he fretted over how L.A. and I felt about it and whether it was going to continue to bother us, and
he worried himself sick about how Tricia’s friends and family were taking the loss. He even speculated about the right way to dress a girl her age for burial. That’s how he was, always
thinking about other people and always putting their feelings ahead of his own.

It was around this time that Mr. Campion decided to send Dee down to Halberd Academy, a military school outside Austin. It must have come up suddenly because one day Dee told me about it, and
the next thing I knew I was riding down to the bus station in the rain with Dee and his parents to see him off. Mrs. Campion was crying and so was Dee. At the station he got me aside and told me he
didn’t want to go, could I talk to his dad and maybe get him to change his mind?

“You know he’s not gonna listen to me, Dee,” I said.

“But I want to stay here—I just want to be with you, James, please . . .”

I told him I’d try, but when I spoke to Mr. Campion a little later I didn’t. I couldn’t think of a way to bring it up. A few minutes after that the bus hissed and rumbled as it
pulled out carrying Dee, his white face framed in the dark window, sliced into wavy sections by the rain streaking down the glass.

The call came while Gram and L.A. were out, and the second I heard the ring I knew what it was about. I had to force myself to touch the phone. When I picked up, all I could hear at first was a
man crying. I wouldn’t have been able to tell who it was from the sound, but of course I knew, and it sounded like the sobs were tearing his chest apart.

He said, “Jim, this—this is Joe Campion. It—oh, Jesus—it’s Dee, my God, he’s dead, Jim—”

Then nothing but more sobbing.

I slowly hung up the phone and stood for a long time looking at it. It didn’t seem to be an electrical or mechanical thing. It was like a creature from some unnatural place, alive and dead
at the same time, poison to the touch.

Later I learned that Dee’s squad leader had gone into the mess hall early that morning ahead of everybody else and found him slumped against a table, thinking at first glance that somebody
had left a duffel bag or something behind. But then he saw the blood. The dress sword Dee had stolen from the sergeant major’s quarters was rammed completely through his chest. I knew where
the idea for that had come from: Dee had once shown me a book about ancient Romans with an illustration of a general in a little dress falling on his sword.

“We lost him, Jim,” Mr. Campion said the next day, wiping at his eyes with a folded handkerchief. “How’d we do that?” He’d sent Dee to Halberd to make him
different, not to have to leave Mrs. Campion sobbing helplessly on the porch and drive two hundred miles down there on a normal-looking day to claim his son’s body.