The Surrogate

by Hunter James

In the mountains that time he sat with Aunt Frances on the veranda of her lovely old vacation home, with its great porches and intricate Victorian baluster work, looking out at the road and the white fence and on out toward the long line of apple trees (the baskets already brimming with apples), watching his uncle come back up the hill from the lake and listening as his aunt began to cry softly:

“How lovely,” she said almost to herself. "How very lovely it is at this time of year. Yes, how lovely that there is no death."

Ryerson was never sure exactly how to act when she began talking like that. He knew that soon she would be crying. She had been a little wild and crazy ever since Telford's death. Telford was her only son and for a long time he had been Ryerson's closest friend, as well the only male cousin on his father's side. And for years everybody had been saying that his aunt would never truly get over her great loss.

Her face would be bleary with old crying and sometimes the tears would start up right in the middle of her crazed laughter: Only one more echo of that long ago winter day when he made one with the eight pallbearers carrying the coffin down the steps of the church as she came heavily out behind them, sobbing: "My god, don't drop him! Oh, my god! Don't any of you understand! Just please don't drop him! Please!"

How many times had she said that at the church and later at the cemetery? A dozen? Two dozen? Maybe that's when he first realized that the pain was much too deep for her ever to shake it off. He had ridden out to the cemetery with the other pallbearers, most of them Telford's friends from the big city high school and all of them the sons of tobacco millionaires. In that whole crowd he was the only one who did not enjoy great wealth.

They went out the narrow valley road almost ten miles beyond the town limits to the great arched drive that marked the entrance to Memorial Gardens. More tears and cries of agony as the sun and wind came over the hill and as the coffin dropped at last among the clods.

Don't put him in there. You see, you've dropped him now. I told you not to drophim. Oh how could you be so careless how could you care so little for my feelings!

It was always like that, even after Ryerson had married and taken his wife and later his three children up to visit the old mountain home. A truly marvelous old place, with a good view of the Blue Ridge Parkway and the higher mountains beyond and the fruit trees below them on a hill above the lake. He would say little, but he could never stop remembering how far apart he and Telford had grown as teenagers.

In their early years they had been much closer than mere brothers, spending nights and weekends and sometimes whole weeks together. But there had come a time when they almost never saw each other anymore. Not at his own house, not even out at the farm. Those had always been the best times. Out at their grandfather's place on the Big Grassy Fork. In those first days after World War II they would romp all around those old bottoms, far from the farm itself, looking for Cherokee artifacts and soon lose themselves on land that back in those days was much like the wilderness the first settlers had known.

Telford no longer cared about that part of his life. All he cared about now was money and riding around with his well-to-do friends from the city high school in the new Kaiser sedan his father had brought him soon after old Tojo had laid down his arms.

Telford Senior, a grocer down in "colored town" during the early years, had made most of his money during the Depression on the wartime black market. He and his wife Frances began to move in the best social circles even before the end of the war. They had moved constantly from one vacation home to the next. By that time he had begun to see a whole lot less of his cousin—and for a lot of reasons began to dread those times when they were unavoidably thrown together.

Telford had always had the best of everything, even during those early years when for all anybody knew his father was just another honest grocer. Back then Ryerson knew nothing about his big bootleg operation, which he ran mostly out of the back of his store. The Depression lay heavily on the land; yet his uncle prospered mightily during those years. His wife had brought both the store and quite a sum of money—nobody ever knew exactly how much—to the marriage. Thanks to his illicit enterprises, he had been able to turn her patrimony into a real fortune at a time when the rest of the family had almost nothing.

Selling liquor in a dry town. That was what got him started on the path to real wealth. Very shortly he would be counted among the very rich, and the very rich in that town were very rich indeed, millionaires who had made vast fortunes out of tobacco and underwear and rayon stockings. No one would ever have predicted that his uncle would rise quite that high. But by the end of the war, after dabbling in the black market, he gained a status that put him right up there among the city's elite. One hundred millionaires and no middle class. That's what everybody said about the town in those days. Maybe it wasn't quite true, but by the late forties his uncle was quite definitely a man on the way up.

He began to buy rental property, as had Ryerson’s own father, and expensive antiques and to speculate in land. He and his wife began to be mentioned more frequently in the society columns. None of his brothers had made it so big, and that was a constant worry to Ryerson's Baptist grandmother, who often looked up from her knitting to mourn for her son: "You know, I worry so about Telford. He was always such a good boy, but I truly fear for what lies ahead. I'm afraid he has grown much too fond of money."

It was a long time after the death of Telford Junior before Ryerson could be around his aunt and uncle with anything like a feeling of belonging, with anything at all like the feeling he had had for them before the war. For a long time he had thought he would never have that feeling again, and the truth is that he never did regain it entirely—for his uncle maybe, though never for Aunt Frances, who spent her time either sobbing alone in her room or preaching to him about the sorry state of his soul.

She had lost too much in her only son, and her face had taken on the never-changing look of crying even when there were no tears, even when there was nothing but laughter, almost the same laughter of that long ago time when he and his cousin were nine and ten and she was still a young woman of thirty. Now she looked sick all the time, her flesh like moldy old dough, a kind of pasty look that had become almost as much a part of her as her dark auburn hair or the great swell of her bosom under her loose-fitting matronly gowns.

Before he learned the whole truth about Uncle Telford's trade in liquor and in the black market he could not understand, as his grandmother never did understand, how everything his uncle touched "just simply seemed to turn to money."

Even before the war he had bought a new Chrysler every year and when he bought the 1939 model, with the gear shift on the steering wheel, Ryerson knew that his cousin was destined to know heights of wealth and social standing he could never hope to attain.

They were still friends, after a fashion, although it was never quite the same after the war as in the days when they were playing around the farm and among the feed sacks in the grocery store. Soon after the war Telford and his family moved out of the brick bungalow on Patterson Avenue, only a moderately well-to-do street, and into a pillared mansion way out on Robin Hood Road, directly across from a vast estate built by tobacco millionaire R. J. Reynolds Jr.

Before his cousin's death he still rode out with his parents occasionally for Sunday afternoon visits. That was before he realized what a difference all that money had made in Telford's life. It was sure something to drive out to a place like that and spend long balmy afternoons running around under those big trees and wide lawns and sneaking onto the Reynolds estate and getting thrown out by the groundskeeper and then turning to taunt him through the fence.

After so long a time he came to realize that his cousin had grown arrogant, now that he was attending the big city school with the sons and daughters of all the tobacco parvenus, and had grown contemptuous of Ryerson's inferior status. Still there were good times even then, though more frequently now something would happen, suddenly, without notice, and everything would turn ugly, nasty.

There would be bitter fights, anger, shouting. Fights that began over nothing. Over Ryerson's right to use Telford's catcher's mitt or swing his golf clubs or ride his spiffy new motorbike. He never had much trouble disposing of the awkward Telford when it came to a real showdown. His cousin would soon get over it and they would quickly make up, but he came to realize more acutely than ever that things would never again be quite the same.

Even in those last days they still saw each other occasionally, usually at the big house on Robin Hood Road and, less often, out at the farm. Ryerson would find himself wishing that it could be like the old days only to realize anew how far apart they had grown.

Out of his grandfather's ten children they were the only male heirs bearing the Goode family name. That made them kind of special even if one of them did have money and the other was less well off (not that Ryerson’s father was a pauper or anything close to it) and they would have to keep up the pretense of being close for that reason if for no other. But Ryerson truly did not much care for him anymore. The whole family could see that his parents had simply given him too much and indulged him too much and were beginning to turn him into a kind of monster.

-*-

After the war his uncle bought a fine old resort hotel up at Healing Springs. Another splendid investment that yielded a whole new fortune. It was some place, that old hotel. Back around the turn of the century rich Yankees had come there to "take the waters." But the Depression brought hard times even for many of the favored rich, and the former owner died and the hotel had been closed for years. His uncle bought it at a real bargain from the heirs, the way he seemed to buy everything else, and had again turned it into a profitable enterprise. That's just the way it was with Telford, everybody said.

"Everything that old boy touches just turns to money."

There was a wide veranda with rocking chairs across the front of the hotel and a croquet lawn down across the graveled road and at one end of the playing area a bathhouse with a concrete cistern where the fraudulent healing waters came out. You could drink from the spring and be cured of almost anything. Arthritis. Lumbago. Cancer. A lot of exotic diseases for which medical science as yet had no name.

Such was the propaganda that his uncle was putting out. Anyway, the old hotel had again become a popular stopping off place for rich Yankees on their way to Florida and the Caribbean. He would sometimes hear them talking in their alien, clipped accents on the veranda in the evening after a big supper of fried chicken and country ham and sweet potatoes and huge bowls of succulent vegetables and great platters of strawberry and apple pie.

Why this old mountain water is just about the best medicine I’ve ever found. I know it's been a real help to this old gout of mine.

Sure am glad we found out about this place. We might just try it for another week or so.

Some would stay and drink the water all summer, looking out over the dry fields of the harvest season and talking about how much their health had improved since they had come to Healing Springs and what a shame it was to have to leave the marvelous old place. And all the other guests repeating, "Yes, it is something all right. That water certainly has miraculous properties. Why, my old lumbago was cured in three days time!"

During the late forties the mountain place was a huge success and his aunt and uncle kept getting richer than ever, with his cousin year by year growing more distant. In those first days after the war there were still good times at the farm and even, occasionally, up at the hotel. Ryerson would go up there summers even though his mother would always explain it was only because his aunt felt under some obligation to invite him.

He did not quite understand at first, maybe because he was too young and naïve to understand, as he was later to learn from Fitzgerald, that "the very rich are different from you and me."

During one of those first summers after the war he spent almost a week at the hotel. It was then that he learned the terrible and unforgettable truth about his cousin, the dark secret that would haunt him all the way to the grave. That's when Ryerson really knew it was all over between them.

One afternoon they had gone swimming in the big lake in a valley behind the hotel. To get there you went up through the oak timber and then down past great groves of laurel and rhododendron and then through more woods to the water. The lake had been well stocked with bass, and sometimes the deer and bear came down out of the woods to drink. But they were all alone that afternoon: the rowboats all tied up at the dock, with a stillness almost eerie from the far off cooing of the mourning doves in the pines.

He kept thinking about the change that had suddenly come over his cousin—the huskiness in his voice, the pleading in his eyes as he unzipped his trousers, saying, "Looka here. Look It's OK. We can have some fun now. No one has to know."

They swam to the opposite shore and then back to the boating dock. Ryerson dreaded his cousin's next move. Telford had talked about it on the opposite shore, and Ryerson kept wondering if he had mistakenly encouraged him in some way, maybe by his failure to say anything either for or against his idea of "having fun."

Yet what was he to say? What was he to think when he found out that his own cousin was "like that?"

He had just started to get dressed when Telford came toward him walking awkwardly because of the great swelling in his trousers. "Why'd you want us to put our clothes back on? C'mon. There's no hurry. Whatsa matter? Like I been telling you: We can have some real fun now."

He massaged his phallus with growing admiration and wanted to compare sizes. Ryerson's had shrunken until it was almost invisible, as if trying its best to hide from the whole deadly encounter. Looking back years later, he wondered if he should have taken the challenge —up to a point. Maybe he should have swung round at him with his own implement and flashed him as though commencing the last great battle of the Titans; but he never even wanted to think about it at the time.

“What about it?" Telford said. "You ever seen one this big?"

Ryerson knew that every word he failed to say only encouraged him the more. Telford had hardly been able to find his voice since he had come from the other side of the lake. The only perverts Ryerson had ever known were those slimy creeps who came and sat beside him in the Crumb back home on Saturday afternoons when he was taking in the double feature or who approached him in the smelly bathrooms. Some slicked-back greaser would come and lay a hand on his thigh and he would always escape by going off to another part of the theater.

Now here he was: facing the terrible realization that his own cousin was part of that strange breed. A real shock, and he just didn't know of anything that could quite have prepared him for it.

He again looked without interest at Telford's implement and then up at the darkening sky. "We can have some real fun now," his cousin said again. "C'mon, you do it for me and I'll do it for you. Nobody ever has to know. Me and a guy back home, we do it all the time."

He looked at it again, not caring about it at all, not wanting to see it, feeling a great coldness inside and wanting only to get back to the hotel.

C'mon. You ever seen one this big? Nobody has to know.

Maybe he was all wrong. His best friend in high school had turned out to be “that way.” Not that that had stopped him from trying to steal from Ryerson the first girl he had ever loved. Telford kept clamoring after him, talking up the “game;” but he just felt himself shrinking all up inside and walked hurriedly and doggedly back along the path, hastening his step every time the clumsy Telford ominiously closed in on him.

Quickly now. Quickly.At least at the hotel I'll be safe from whatever it is he thinks he wants to do to me and maybe even have time to figure outhow to talk him out of even trying

“C’mon, Hezekiah, old boy. We can do it now. C’mon.”

Hezekiah would live to see the day when people like his cousin would gain a certain heroic status that would eventually make them popular with political and social uplifters. Sometimes he would mange to convince himself that they actually could not help themselves. At the time he could only think of his cousin as a kind of monster.

Telford kept close in beside him as they walked back through the woods.

"You mean you don't care nothing about girls?" Ryerson finally asked him.

"Sure, girls, too. But this is even better. C'mon. Ain't you ever tried it? It's a whole lot better than girls. C'mon, be a sport. What harm can it do?"

Again his voice had grown husky and strange. "C'mon, just loosen up a little. Ain't nobody gonna know. We don't have to tell nobody about it."

He fell a little behind. The whole idea had simply become too much for him to bear. "Well," he said. "Wait up anyway, won't you?"

Ryerson turned to see him inside a grove of pine saplings, the trees shaking wildly and Telford lifting his crazed moan to the skies as the saplings abruptly fell still. He came out, wiping himself with a handkerchief and they went on in silence until they came in sight of the hotel.

"It's a lot more fun when you got somebody to do it with. I guess you never had anybody to teach you, huh?"

He just wanted to go on and get out of there. He'd never done it with anybody either. He thought about the girl Susan Musgrove, whose father ran a filling station not far from his house—that was before he and his parents moved into town—and had sold him cigarettes all during the war even though he knew he was under-age. He kept thinking about the big chance he had missed one night during the last year of the war when she invited him to meet her across the road from the service station in a broomsedge field behind a huge billboard that said: LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS.

He'd always hated it how he had fouled up the best chance of his life; he could have been with her every night if he had chosen, but he was only twelve and she much older and he was never able to get over his fright or confess it either. She must have decided, as best he could figure it, that she had got the wrong idea about him and eventually found someone else. No more Susan Musgrove. No more anybody. Still a virgin and so he would remain if Telford’s “solution” were the only way to escape his dreadful infirmity.

He already knew it would be his last night at the hotel, although he was not sure as yet just what excuse he would make to his aunt and uncle. He knew it would be impossible to avoid his cousin that evening. He went out to the veranda and sat down at one end watching the dark come on, a piece of verse he had learned in school that year running through his mind:

Light thickens and the crow

Makes wing to the rooky wood . . .

Moments later, with the radio blaring inside, and the guests playing gin rummy or canasta or rook in the big game room, he felt Telford beside him, his voice plaintive, pleading. "C'mon, let's take a walk down to the bathhouse. Nobody down there now. Dad, he locks it up at six, but I've got my own key. We'll be safe there. I can show you lots of tricks, and there's lots of guys back in Winston you can do with."

He wasn't sure why he let him talk him into going down there. A devastating chill ran through him when he momentarily wondered if he, too, was secretly "like that." He immediately dismissed the thought, wondering if he might still find some way of reconciling himself with Susan Musgrove. He still had the good strong face and physique she admired. Some few good years left for him anyway.

It had been quite a while since Telford had been as friendly as he was that evening. As soon as they had gone inside to take another look at the fraudulent waters he started again. "C'mon, be a sport. What harm will it do?"

Ryerson looked at him, the pleading face, the eyes almost in agony.

"C'mon,” he kept saying. “Be a sport. It can't hurt anything, can it?"

He felt a little nauseous and he knew he had to get out of there before there was another fight or something. He left him there in the dark, though not for long: only moments later he was again sitting beside Ryerson on the gallery.

They were out there with all the other guests, the old men and women who had come to drink the miraculous waters, some of whom had decided to stay on all summer. Ryerson could hear them talking again about the marvelous reports they'd heard from all the many people who had found a new life at Healing Springs, some cured of diseases so horrible and disgusting that one hesitated to speak of them openly. Like lepers in the Bible, they had come into these mountains, to this tiny hotel just south of the Virginia line, to find the remedies and palliatives that would rid themselves of illnesses against which the most advanced medical knowledge had been utterly helpless.

He heard them talking almost conspiratorially in the shadows as his cousin moved his chair closer. Then he felt the hand on his thigh.

"Not out here. For god's sakes."

"Later, then. In my room?"

Ryerson moved over to the baluster and lit a cigarette even though he knew he was taking a big risk at being found out, with his aunt or uncle liable to come out at any moment. He could think only of getting away. He could be home before noon the next day and put those terrible last hours at Healing Springs forever behind him.

He still had to get through the night, though; and Telford sure wasn't about to give up. Why not go ahead with it right there on the gallery? What about it, huh? Don’t matter none about all the others, not even his parents. It was full dark now; nobody would be able to tell what they were doing.

He persisted on into the early morning houses "about all the fun things we can do together" until Ryerson finally broke down and told him that he would be leaving the next day. His uncle had to go into West Jefferson on business and had promised to drop him off at the bus stop after he explained that his mother was ill and needed him at home.

"That's two days earlier than you planned. Whatcha wanta do that for? C'mon we could have a lot of fun together if you'd just let me show you how it's done."

When Telford finally saw that it was useless he began to whine and plead again. He was really almost pitiful. He was afraid Ryerson would give him away to his parents or to his schoolmates who did not at all care for that sort of thing. Worse, he was not above getting revenge any way he could, even if it meant spreading rumors that Ryerson Hezekiah Moffit Goode, his own cousin for god’s sakes and a future all-star high school athelete, was “like that.”

-*-

Their rooms were right next to each other, upstairs, isolated from most of the others. Ryerson could hardly sleep at all that night. He kept waiting for the knock on the door, the whispered assurance that "nobody would have to know."

He had taken up smoking way back during the war, as a really sporting thing to do, and he went though almost half a pack that night, sitting on the edge of the bed and staring out at the dying moon as it threw a thin sliver of light across his bed and carpet.

He kept waiting for his cousin to try his door, but along toward daylight he figured he was safe and was even able to get off to sleep for a couple of hours. He was up before the call for breakfast, with his bag packed.

Telford followed him to the car. "You ain't gonna say anything, are you? I mean, you won't tell anybody? I won't say anything if you won't."

"Naw. I won't say anything. Besides, what is there for you to say?"

He didn't have to worry. Ryerson sure wouldn't want anybody to know that his cousin was nothing more than a wormy little deviant. He also knew the dirty little bastard would do all he could to incriminate Ryerson himself as the real instigator of their backwoods “tea party.” His only hope at that moment was that he would never have to see him again. How could he have known that in years to come would be deemed a special breed deserving of high honor and would adopt quite a supercilious air toward the rest of American society? You sure couldn't have guessed anything like that in 1946.

-*-

Autumn came and with it Telford's constant boast that he had earned a spot on the Reynolds High football team. "Nobody young as I am ever made the Reynolds varsity," he kept boasting.

He had grown fast for his age, taking after his mother's side of the family, and at first there had been great hope for him—that with his great bulk he might prove to be a real force at tackle, anchoring the whole right side of the line. But Ryerson had made his own less-classy county football team and he knew that his cousin was way too slow and clumsy for his size to be much of an advantage.

He never said anything, but he went to a couple of games to see how the big sap was working out. It was just as he thought. Telford didn't get into a single game that first year or the second. He never gave up talking about it, though. He was sixteen now and had convinced himself that he was finally destined to inherit the coveted right tackle position. Ryerson still didn't say anything. But sure enough, there he was, still warming the bench. Nothing to do but sit there and think about all the money he had, and it looked as if he had more of it all the time.

Despite his failures at football he was still a kind of idol among all his friends, because of the big cars and all that money. Long after his death Ryerson began to hear stories of how often his cousin had bragged of his riches, of the big bills he carried around to display ostentatiously before his friends, saying, "Right there is the only important thing in this world, and I'm sure gonna have me a whole lot more of it."

There were still times, mostly out at the farm, when the two still bumped into each other, but they were never really friends again; and he was always careful to stay away from him when there was any chance they might find themselves alone. He often thought of that last summer at the hotel, how far they had drifted apart, but neither of them ever again spoke of it. Their conversations would be reserved and distant. He often wondered if his parents realized they were raising a slimy little pervert.

His cousin had been dead for many years before he found out from the "new politics" that he had it all wrong and, as he had been telling himself for some time now, that Telford had actually been a member of a heroically oppressed underclass.

-*-

His grandmother had died only four years after the end of the war, worrying even at the last about her youngest son's obsession with money and the great affliction it was likely to bring upon him. He was different from all her other children in that way.

"Poor Telford," she would say. "He's still never gotten over that love of money. He's learned nothing, I'm afraid."

Nobody paid her much mind. That was just the Baptist in her, everybody said, but on a cold December night just two weeks before Christmas all her talk about the evils lying in wait for her son and his family took on a shattering truth and she was suddenly a prophet.

His aunts would gather and talk about it in whispers. "You know, mama saw all this coming. Somehow she just knew."

Telford had just got his driving license and on that night he was in the Kaiser sedan his father had given him for his sixteenth birthday. He had revved the big car up to more than one hundred and twenty, so some said, and skidded into a massive oak overlooking the intersection near the county school where Ryerson had long starred at football and basketball.

Although he was dead by the time the ambulance got there, his four companions were still alive—barely. Broken legs and crushed spines and broken legs and ribs. Yet still alive. They lay there on the highway in the icy rain until the other ambulances came out from the city.

It was past midnight when Ryerson’s father shook him awake with the news. "Telford Junior has been killed," he said almost too matter of factly. "Big crash out on the Old Fork highway. Your mother and I will have to get over there at once. You go on and try to sleep for a while. We'll be back to get you in the morning."

As they went out he heard his mother say: "I feel strongly that the Lord must have been speaking to Telford Junior for a long time."

Did he later feel his cousin's presence in the room after his parents had left, or was it only his over-wrought imagination?

C'mon Ryerson we can do it now nobody has to know wedon't have to tell anybody.

The sensation lasted for only an instant, yet the reality of it stuck with him for a long time after. He lay back down and tried to sleep. It was no good. He was dressed and ready to go when his parents got back the next morning. Everybody blamed the wreck on the icy roads. It wasn't until later that he began to hear all the other stories, some from friends who had been idling away the time at a nearby restaurant and had witnessed the accident.

"Musta been doin' at least a hundred and twenty," everybody told him.. "Boy, I''m telling you: them big ol' Kaisers will sure git down and scat!'

Sometimes the voices would drop an octave and take on an air of disbelief as they talked about how Telford had tumbled out from behind the driver's seat onto the icy street, the blood already rising in his throat and him laughing and saying ha ha ha ha ha ha I knew it was onlya dream all along how glad I amto find it is only a dream and him shouting for his mother and still laughing and talking about the strange dream he'd had when the ambulance driver leaned over and then stood and looked around at the others:

"He's gone."

Dead and him an only child, everybody said. How devastating, how utterly tragic! Ryerson could hear his aunt's wildly incoherent sobs and screams as he came up the wide paved walk outside the pillared mansion on Robin Hood Road. It would be like that all day. She would rise and come toward him with those insane cries as she hugged him, saying, "O my god, child, your dear cousin is gone. Our only son is gone. Gone! How could this happen, how could the Lord allow this to happen, how . . . "

His uncle said very little. He just sat there on the long sofa under the big picture window that had been installed during a recent restoration, nodding his head and looking ashen and remote and maybe thinking (as were now all the others) of what his mother, in her last days, had always said of him and his love of money.

I really fear for him. I really do. He cares for nothing or no one, only money, only money—and I dread the day when it will all come back to haunt him.

The next day, in church, the preacher had said: "In my father's house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you . . . "

Then came the long walk down the center aisle, with Ryerson scrunched in among the sons of the tobacco and underwear millionaires, and his aunt coming along heavily clumsily behind them, still sobbing, saying, "O my God, please don't drop him please. . . "

-*-

He saw little of them after the funeral. They tried to lose themselves on the back roads of the nation. They tried to forget their life in North Carolina on the long hot highways going west through Texas and Kansas to California. When, on occasion, they did come back to Winston, it was not to the pillared house on Robin Hood Road. They had sold that place, with all its bad memories, soon after their son's death and bought another, a brick rancher full of fireplaces and paneled dens and a picture window that looked directly down a long hill to the cemetery where Telford Junior lay buried.

They had chosen a house precisely situated so that it would give them—or his aunt, rather—the very best view of his gravestone, the tall marble and granite slab that had cost more than a thousand dollars, everyone said: the only tombstone in the entire cemetery that was never without flowers or a wreath or a piece of greenery of some kind. All the flowers in their season. Artificial flowers when no fresh ones could be found.

It was a long way down the hill and across the valley and the highway to the cemetery. But it was a good clear view, and for hours each day, morning and afternoon, his aunt would stand there just looking, often silent, yet the look of tears always in her face. They had paid way too much for the house, everybody said—but what did that matter now? As for his uncle, he no longer worked at all. He had sold most of his real estate interests and resigned as president of his automobile dealership.

Actually, it had been a long time since he needed to work, and he had only done so to keep up appearances. He’d had such uncanny luck with his many business ventures he did not find it easy to sit around and do nothing and him not yet out of his forties. At least on those rare occasions when he and Aunt Francis were not off in some distant part of the country.

So much luck in all that he undertook, everybody said, and maybe a little more than luck—maybe even up to the point of getting the hotel burned so that he could collect the insurance.

There were a lot of rumors about that. Almost nobody pretended to believe that he would resort to so devious an act, although some would always say that, really, there were often times when one did not know what to believe. But these were only those few who believed he might have inherited some of the bad, niggardly blood that had come down in his mother's side of the family.

He had put the hotel up for sale only a month or so before the fire and had moved back to Winston when, like everybody else, he picked up the paper one morning and read that the old place had burned to the ground. He had made up his mind to dump the old place even before Telford's death and only a month or so before it burned under mysterious circumstances. So it was only logical to expect a lot of talk. Rumors of insurance fraud and the like. But nobody could ever prove, or ever tried to prove, that his uncle had anything to do with it.

"I'll declare," said one of Ryerson’s other aunts about this time, "I've never seen anyone with an instinct for making money like that brother of ours. Knowing when to make an investment and when to sale. It must really be a gift."

He did know that by that time people had begun to realize that there was nothing miraculous about the waters at Healing Springs and that profits had begun to drop off. Still, he simply could not believe that his own uncle would have had anything to do with burning it down, when, after all, he really didn't need the insurance money.

So it went for ten years or more: his aunt and uncle continually on the road and never at home in December, on the anniversary of their son's death. They would often drive out to visit kinfolks in Kansas City. Where else they went no one ever knew until they bought the big eighteenth century farmhouse in the mountains of Southern Virginia. A lovely spot with the great hills on every side and a mammoth apple and peach orchard covering almost half of a long treeless slope that ran down to the lake.

That was where Ryerson first began to visit them with any sort of regularity, at first with his parents and later alone, or with his own family. His uncle was lonely and seemed to enjoy the company. They would talk of the old days in Winston and sometimes go off for long walks through the hills. That was when he began to hear talk of the inheritance. The family just naturally assumed that Ryerson would get everything now that he and his uncle had become so close.

He knew that his aunt would never completely get over the loss. The old sorrow was still there, the old look of tears. Her grief had become its own monument, a fixed part of every look and every gesture. When she spoke to her nephew at all, on the good days, which came all too rarely now, she would sometimes laugh and make jokes as she had in earlier and happier times back home in Winston.

More often there would be a flurry of brief almost maniacal laughter, haunting, mocking, perverse, before she lapsed again into those dreadful torrents of wrenching sobs and grief. Yet there were times when she seemed almost happy to have him there, not like those first months after the accident, when she still seemed to blame him for daring to have had the audacity to survive that cold icy evening, to be alive now that Telford was in his grave.

Why him, a young man with no great fortune and no great promise in the world? Why him, when they could have offered their own son so much?

The family often spoke of how "strange and ironic" it was for his death to have occurred just when it did, only a week before Christmas, when for the first time in Telford's sixteen years his parents had bought no presents and made no preparations for the holidays. Almost as if on some level they already knew that for them there would be no Christmas that year. His aunt Frances herself had sometimes spoken of that in her hysteria, almost as if something had been trying to warn them of what was about to happen.

If only we had listened, Telford. If onlywe had listened we would have known

It was the same when Ryerson began to visit them at their first new home in Winston, the rancher high on a hill north of the cemetery. They could stand together at the picture window and look down the long hill at his grave. He never knew what to say, and she seldom said anything at all. The old sorrow was always in her face, yet she was not crying now, not as before, and she would talk of his own plans for the future—his ambition to take up law or newspapering as a profession; she even seemed happy when he won his first small writing award. Now for the first time he began to hear his other aunts say: "Well, you know, Frances does seem to be so much like her old self these days. Do you think she is getting over it at last?"

-*-

All that was before the bulldozers and gravediggers had come.

Why must they dig there? Why, Telford? Will you tell me why?

She would still spend great parts of every day standing at the picture window and looking down the long hill toward the cemetery. By that time Telford had been dead for more than five years.

Why? If only someone could tell me why.

Then the low inward sobbing would begin, rising at last into a loud moan and finally in to a great horrific cry that seemed to have been torn from her almost as the coffins themselves had been torn from the ragged and tormented winter earth and hauled like ruined merchandise to a far place on the hill, barely visible from the house. It was almost as it had been in those first days after the funeral. She would stand there shaking and crying until she could no longer stand at all. Then uncle Telford would lead her off to the bedroom and ladle out three spoonfuls of the red medicine one of her doctors had prescribed for rest.

Ryerson was sure his uncle must have known about the new road long before he said anything to his wife. He would have seen the surveyors as they worked around the edges of the cemetery all summer. He knew that a new road to replace the old section of narrow, broken, twisted U. S. 421 had been talked about for years. But he would have said nothing about that, nor about the day the two men had come from the highway department with rolled-up design charts in their hands.

Yep. The new road would cut through the lower northern half of the cemetery. His son's grave was one of sixty or seventy that would have to be moved to a new section beyond the southern-most ridge. A real shame to have to bring the news. But they sure needed to replace that old road. Should have been done years ago. Counted six bad wrecks down there just in the last year.

They had explained everything in detail, how all the coffins and grave markers would be moved way off to the other side of the hill, a lovely spot that had would have all the advantages of the old. His uncle was never one to make a fuss. He would have listened politely as they explained all the fine advantages the new road would bring, and would have said nothing about its one horrendous disadvantage: the gravesite about which his wife had built her life would no longer be visible from the picture window that spread across the front of their rancher like a blind eye searching for sunlight.

Probably he did not mention it at all until they had closed up the house for the winter and left for their long holiday excursion to Kansas. They had gone away much earlier that year—the builders wanted to get a good start on the new road before the bad weather set in —and did not come back until late the next spring, long after the highway project was underway. Maybe that was actually the first she knew of it. Maybe Uncle Telford had hoped that the worst of it would be over by then. But the winter months had brought some of the rainiest, nastiest weather in years. Many of the graves still lay open to the rain and the sky, like neglected and festering sores, the raw wet innards of the red earth left to frighten with savage innocence the dreary sky of the March afternoon, the marble slabs piled in great heaps near the old road, to be hauled six and seven at a time to the lovely new gravesite on the opposite side of the ridge.

For weeks it was like that: the earth-moving machines parked alongside the construction shacks and the operators huddled inside and sometimes coming out to scan the sky, grimly waiting for the weather to clear.

Why, Telford? Will you tell mewhy?

By then all the old grief had come back in all its fury.

"Poor Frances," everyone said. "Such a shame that this had to happen. And just when she was doing so well. Now I suppose she will never be the same again."

-*-

Late April and still no let-up in the rotten weather. The bulldozers and forklifts stood idle on the dark, rainy slopes. Every time Ryerson went out to visit he would see the graves standing open amid the heaps of marble slabs, the idle and somehow menacing bulldozer poised to resume its work of desecration. That is what his aunt called it when she talked about it at all.

"A terrible, terrible desecration, Telford. Will you tell me why?"

He would always explain why, but it never seemed to make any difference. The rain fell steadily on into early May, and the marble slabs that had marked the graves still stood in great unseemly heaps along the ridges.

Perhaps she’d had to see all that for herself before she fully understood the truth, if in fact she ever understood it at all. For a long time she had not gone anywhere near the window. She had taken to her bed to live again with her grief and memories. Everybody already knew it would be their last winter in the house. What good was it to them now? Only a matter of waiting for summer, for the bad weather to end, for them to be out on the move again, except that this time they would not be coming back.

They would never really be settled again, except toward the end, for a little while, in their mountain home, living year after year for nothing except to be perpetually on the move, into the suburbs, and out of the suburbs into even newer suburbs, part of which his uncle himself had developed, into the mountains and back again, never staying more than three or four months in any of the new houses.

No one only spoke of it openly, only the grief, the terrible turn of fate that had brought back all of the old bad memories. She was on new medication now, green and yellow pills to go with the red nerve medicine, the contents of which would vanish almost as soon as Uncle Telford set it beside her on the table. The doctors were keeping her doped up almost as they had in those first days after the accident.

Again his sisters talked among themselves: "Is that good for Frances? To keep her in such a stupor like that? She seemed to be doing so well for a while."

"Yes. But now the new road is coming through."

"Well, that changes nothing. Frances really needs to get hold of herself now. She has her own life to live."

In time she began to sit up again and even at times to stand by the window and look down toward the ruins of the old cemetery. Nothing ever changed; she would inevitably start crying again.

On weekends home from college Ryerson would almost always go out there for a while and would often hear her sobbing softly behind the closed door of the room. He would go in to make his presence known and find her lying there with staring eyes, a thin blanket tossed lightly over her, speaking mechanically if at all, not looking at him, no longer the woman who once had seemed to welcome him almost as a second son.

She would have taken all the pills and yet sleep would not come. She would say little and just stare up at whatever she had been staring at before he came in. Or if she were in the den she would look up and speak in that same mechanical voice, hardly looking at him, no longer the woman who briefly—not so long ago— even after her own son's death had sometimes engaged him in long talks about what sort of future he hoped to make for himself. If there was to be any future, and maybe there wasn’t, because she could never discuss his future or any other kind of future without eventually reminding him of the coming hard days of the end-time and all the sorrows that would rain upon the earth.

“And what have you done to prepare for those days, Ryerson? What have you done to prepare?”

His uncle would often be beside her, sometimes in a lounge chair by her bed, other times in the den in front of the fire as she sat just behind him on the sofa. Other times he would be sitting there alone, staring into the fire, perhaps with a book or a copy of Look open on his lap, never reading from it, just staring into the fire and reaching over ever so often to stab it angrily with his poker.

Those little jabs of the poker—almost the only kind of anger Ryerson ever saw out of his uncle. He spoke little, never of the place they would next call home, whether in the mountains or in one of the new suburbs now sprouting up all around the town, or in some distant part of the country they had yet to visit. Only a matter of waiting for Aunt Frances to decide she was finally well enough to travel again.

In those first days after the bitter exhumation of their son’s grave he could never be sure what his uncle was thinking, only that he always seemed to welcome his company. Ryerson felt closer to him now than ever when Telford was alive, his uncle seeming to draw him ever more into his confidence even as his aunt began to treat him more than ever as a stranger.

“Poor Frances,” everyone said. “To have all this happen, just now, and just when she seemed to be doing so well!”

-*-

Dark, and a big fire going again in the lovely cherry-paneled den, a smell of apples and pears, and his aunt sitting on the daybed with the lights turned low, a shawl draped over her shoulders. Ryerson had not known when she came in. His uncle had been more talkative than usual and at last had said, after all these years, what everybody else had been thinking: that they had given their son too much, pampered him to much, and destroyed him long before that rainy night out on the Old Fork highway.

His aunt said nothing. Perhaps she did not hear him at all. She sat in deep shadow, sobbing softly, with the lamps extinguished. His uncle had gone out to get more wood for the fire and came back dripping from the rain.

By now Ryerson's visits with his aunt and uncle had become almost a weekly habit. Sometimes he would sit with his uncle for a long time in front of the fire without talking, the two of them more than ever before like father and son. In the early days his uncle would ask about college and all about his plans for the future. Later, after Ryerson had joined the newsstaff of the local paper, the older man would express intense interest in his nephew's work.

When he left the paper to undertake graduate work in literature and the humanities, his uncle was anxious to be of help financially if ever it should become necessary. Ryerson assured him that the money he had left from his inheritance would get him through the early stages of his studies. Then he would see. Perhaps he might win a teaching assistantship that would give him a certain amount of independence until after he had earned his doctorate.

Sometimes as they talked or sat there not talking Ryerson would only gradually become aware of his aunt's presence. She would have come in softly and taken a seat on the daybed with the thin shawl draped over her shoulders, saying nothing, barely answering even when his uncle turned to speak to her directly. It was such a wonderful old den, with the fire going and the smell of fresh fruit, and the glow of the embers against the rich cherry paneling. He hated to think about them leaving it.

He would hear the sobs before he saw her, low and soft and unchanging, and then he would turn and see her sitting on the sofa in the dark, always with the same shawl over her shoulders, never speaking unless her husband spoke first, and only with the words she had uttered a thousand times before, always the same words, the same accusing voice.

Why must they digthere. Why?

There were than three weeks of rainy days before she could force herself to stand again at the picture window and look down where the men were working. When she spoke to Ryerson at all, on the good days, which came all too rarely now, she was sometimes almost pleasant; at times there would be another flurry of that maniacal, haunting laughter before she lapsed again into sobs and asked for her pills in the voice he had heard so often before—the same words, the same pitiful, accusing, almost pleading tone as her husband brought the medication: “Why, Telford? Will you tell me why?”

Other times Ryerson could almost feel her eyes on him in the dark, the hard bitter stare, wondering no doubt, as so often before, why he was there instead of her own Telford Junior. Maybe she was not really thinking that. He could never be sure. He only knew that it was different now from the way it had been before the gravediggers had come. She would just sit there quivering in the too-warm room, the shawl over her shoulders, seldom speaking at all unless he or his uncle spoke first.

"Do you think she will ever be any better now?" he once asked his uncle, not realizing she had come into the room.

"Don’t know, son. Just don't rightly know whether we can ever expect any real improvement or not."

"A shame about the new road."

"Couldn't be helped. Old road was mighty dangerous. Too many wrecks, too many people getting killed down there."

"Will you find a new house now?"

His uncle was silent for a long while, staring into the fire. “I’d hoped she would be a little more her old self before we had to make a decision about that.”

Though it was still a little too warm in the room, his uncle threw another log on the fire before going over to stand by his wife. Ryerson could see him with his hand on her shoulder as she sat there shivering in spite of the cheery blaze.

"Still cold? I can turn the heat up."

"No," she said. "I'm not cold. I'm not anything."

"Can I get you something? Some fresh coffee might help."

"No. I'm not anything and I don't want anything.

"Feeling worse, aren’t you?"

Her voice had begun to tremble. "No, I feel the same. Did Willie come today?"

"Willie? Don't think so."

"He was supposed to bring some things from the store."

"Don't think he came."

"He was supposed to do some other things in the yard as well."

"Haven't seen him. No, I really don't think he came."

"Can we go somewhere?"

"Where?"

"Anywhere we haven't been before."

"Perhaps. Would you like to go back and lie down now? You seem really very tired to me."

"I told you. I am exactly the same."

It was the first time Ryerson had heard her speak of anything except the new road and the gravediggers and where she and her husband would now have to go to put the flowers. She sat there quietly a moment longer before struggling to her feet.

"I want you to with me now, Telford. I want you to go with me to his little room."

It was part of an old ritual. She would visit his room, or rather the room that had been set up as a kind of shrine, identical to the bedroom he had occupied as a child, with all his books and games and knick-knacks placed exactly as on the night of his death. Unable to live with her early memories of the big house on Robin Hood Road, neither could she live without them. Many years later, sitting with her on the porch of their mountain home, Ryerson would think of the dozens of houses they had bought and sold, each with its identical shrine to Telford’s memory, or to her memory of the good days in the big house after the war.

Uncle Telford guided her down the hall and Ryerson followed at a discreet distance, watching as she went in and turned on the light. She went to the bed and plumped up the pillow and set the checkerboard on the covers exactly as it had been found on that terrible night. She looked up at the clock to make sure it still had the correct time. Eleven fifteen. The very moment that the news had come, the voice on the other end of the line remote and strange: Yes there has been an accidentwe'll send someone over at once yes don’t try to come on your own. It is important for you to understand that it was instantaneous. He did not suffer. Please try to understand that he did notsuffer

She looked at the calendar to make sure that it still said December 14, 1948. Then at the little table clock to make sure it matched the other. The time and date always the same. The night and his room still the same after all these years even though the house was different. Ryerson went back to the hearth and sat alone until almost midnight.

His uncle came back after helping Aunt Frances to bed. He stirred the fire again. Ryerson knew it was past time for him to go and wondered how long his uncle would sit there before going to bed. More often now Ryerson found himself wondering why he was there at all. He kept thinking about that afternoon at the Healing Springs resort, how little his aunt and uncle had known about their son, how much they had given him to feed his greed, how on the very day of his death they had been in traffic court to pay off a speeding ticket he had got the first time he took his Kaiser out for a drive.

So why had Ryerson made it almost a weekly habit to come back? Was it only because of the inheritance? He tried not to think about any of that. No one ever spoke of it. Yet he could never entirely get rid of the thought. His own money might get him through graduate school or it might not, and, at best, there would be little left when he had completed his work at the university. Without extra income or the good pay that would come only after years of teaching and free-lance writing he would be a long time seeing Paris and Vienna and Rome or the ancient pastures and woodlands his ancestors had known in their youth.

He got up to go.

"So good of you to come."

"Wish there was something more I could do."

"There isn't anything. Nothing anybody can do. But it’s always good to have you here. I know she enjoys your visits even if sometimes it isn't completely evident."

His uncle walked him to the door. "Yes. Almost every weekend she will ask if you are coming. I know it does her a great deal of good to have you here even if she finds it difficult to show her true feelings."

-*-

So he would always go back and try not to think about the inheritance. It would be well over a million dollars. Everybody talked of it now. His uncle could give half of it to charity (as he had sometimes hinted) and still have more than a million left. Ryerson tried not to think about any of that, and neither his aunt nor uncle ever spoke of money, only of going away somewhere, maybe to Canada or Mexico—a real trip this time—and maybe building a home in some other part of the city.

He came in one afternoon as his uncle was preparing to go out. "She's asleep now," he said. "I thought this would be a good time."

He didn't need to ask where he was going; he already knew—to see the grave again, to see if the coffin had finally been moved to its new resting place, perhaps because Aunt Frances had wanted to know, or rather had insisted on knowing without really wanting to know at all.

The wind came up sharply as the dark closed in. Ryerson followed him around the house and down the long front yard and on down the graveled road toward the main highway. Or toward what had been the main highway until they had cut the new road through, neither of them speaking as they crossed to the cemetery. After all those weeks of rain the bad weather had turned and now the sun lay all across the wide valley.

Ryerson followed him on across the old road and up one of the winding cemetery lanes that had been unaffected by the highway project. They went to the top of the hill and down again, on down to where the men and machines were, where a raw gleaming stretch of red dirt marked the path of the new road.

The men worked in the graves without looking up. His uncle stood watching them for a moment. Other men stood farther along the hill; they looked as if they were matching coffins with tombstones and then putting them in pickups and hauling them to the other side of the ridge. That's where the new section of the cemetery would be: a long green swale dropping slowly toward the creek. It would all be quite lovely as soon as the graves were laid out, the new lanes cut through and the grass trimmed and the shrubbery planted.

His uncle walked over to one of the men who stood leaning on a shovel and watching the others work. "You the head here?"

"The head? No, I'm Weathers. Guess you might be wanting Unkers. He's the head. Over thataway."

The man motioned them toward a tool shed where three other workers stood talking, clanging their shovels together as they flung them into the back of their pickup.

Uncle Telford looked as if he couldn't make up his mind whether to walk over to the tool shed or to go on back down the hill toward home. The dark was coming fast, and it would be good dark before they got back to the house and now his uncle seemed to be worried about leaving his wife alone for so long a time.

Ryerson knew why he had come, but he wasn’t at all sure about the point of it all: what possible difference it could make in the way she or he felt about the bad way things had turned out. He looked all around before walking over at last to the shed. On the side of it was a sign that said: UNKERS'S WRECKING SERVICE.

One of the men came out and stood leaning against the door frame.

His uncle took a couple steps toward the shed. "You the head here?"

"I'm Unkers. How can I help you?"

His uncle was almost apologetic. He explained that he had a son buried there and had just wondered how the work was coming. "Know you've had a lot of bad weather. Hard to get anything much accomplished with all this rain we've been having."

"Ain't that the truth? And they're calling for more tomorrow. Sorry about your son, though."

"Ten years ago. Killed in an automobile accident. Awfully hard on my wife to see his grave dug up."

"You live around here?"

His uncle pointed to his house way off on the opposite hill.

"Yeah," Unkers said. "Must be a terrible thing. Mighty sorry to hear it."

"Well, we'll be getting on back. Just wondering how you men were getting along with the work."

Unkers looked up at the sky. "If we could just get a couple more weeks like we've had today I think we'd have it licked."

"Well, the best of luck to you."

"Yeah, same to you," Unkers said, a little foolishly.

Ryerson looked back at all the idle machinery as they started off. It would take another day or two or drying out before the road-builders could start again. Maybe by then Unkers and his crew would have most of the coffins moved to their new grave sites. Would it make any difference to Aunt Frances?

-*-

She was to live for another fifteen years, sometimes behaving almost as if she had recovered entirely from her old grief, and yet always, at unexpected moments, falling into black moods of terror and grief. They sold the house above the cemetery long before Unkers and his crowd finished work on the new grave sites. They moved from place to place. His uncle had gone back into real estate development almost full-time; he would build a house, move into it for a while, then sell it for an immense profit and move on.

Later they were spending almost all of their time at their mountain home. His aunt had gone back to cooking the great meals of ham and chicken and sausage and cakes and pies that had once made her famous at the Healing Springs Hotel and that, as a diabetic, she had never been allowed to eat.

Yet she ate and drank as she chose and lingered on, sickly and frail despite her great bulk, on into the mid-seventies, forever drugging herself with pills and shots and strange nameless liquids that nobody wanted to talk about. There was no doubt that she was trying to hasten her death; still, death did not come. His uncle never tried to persuade her to improve her diet. He seemed to know that nothing he said would make any difference.

Even after all this time Ryerson was never able to feel easy in her presence. It was always, somehow, as if she were measuring him against what her son might have become. He had drifted into newspapering, first in Florida and then in his home town, mainly because there were plenty of jobs in those days if you weren't obsessed with money. He won a couple of small prizes and, after completing graduate school, published a small book on the old German-speaking Moravians who had first settled their part of the world. He had also published poems in small literary magazines nobody had ever heard of and wrote short stories that found no takers. He often thought of doing a novel, not realizing that the time when novels could be written and published with relative ease had long passed him by.

During his Florida years he had not seen his aunt and uncle at all. Hard, uncertain years, full of defeat, destruction, death. Also years full of a glorious, dangerous and illicit love with his own half-sister. Then came her betrayal with the Haitian voodoo queen, and his own flight back to Carolina. He had even been in jail a couple of times and for a while he thought that he had no future except the future of a decadent and broken messenger of doom, haunting the streets of a thousand towns, looking for his old lover, who he never found, who had never even written to him in all the years since he walked out on her.

His uncle could never have guessed any of that. He knew little, perhaps nothing at all of how his nephew had spent his time in Florida, and Ryerson for his own very good reason never spoke of it at all. He had nursed a secret that was almost as dark and fateful as that of young Telford himself.

-*-

So they drifted on through the years. He and his uncle became much closer as his aunt sank slowly toward the grave. They talked real estate and Democrat politics and often about Ryerson’s literary ambitions and sometimes went for long walks in the balsam forests above his mountain home. Once they spent the entire day together and climbed on up into the dim and misty upper reaches of the balsams, where it was cool even on the brightest, hottest days of midsummer, where you could see thunderstorms and rainbows developing and vanishing way off beyond the Blue Ridge Parkway.

He wondered at his uncle's stamina, and could readily believe that there had been talk among some of the chief men of the town about persuading him to run for mayor. Uncle Telford mentioned the idea almost incidentally one day before laughing it off as a joke. Ryerson tried to persuade him that it would be a very good thing for the city, but he wasn't sure his uncle was even listening, much less trying to pretend that he was taking the idea seriously. No, all those ambitions had faded with his son’s death and even more so now that his wife was in her last days.

He buried her in the new part of the cemetery next to her son. So that part of it had worked out well enough. After that he just seemed to withdraw ever more deeply into himself. He looked a whole lot older than his sixty five years. But he lived on into his late seventies.

Ryerson would try to get out to see him as often as possible, now that he was teaching regularly at his alma mater and doing as much newspapering as time would allow, always trying not to think about the inheritance. That pile of money everybody said that Ryerson would inherit some day was getting bigger all the time. His uncle spent very little of it. In his last years he lived frugally, staying mostly to himself, seeing almost no one except Ryerson and other members of the family So whatever money he had was just lying off in a bank vault somewhere collecting tons of interest. Ryerson just tried not to think about that at all.

By that time he had written his book about the old Moravians and got married and raised three children and had moved permanently to into his grandfather's old farm on the Grassy Fork, where he and his sister Deni, daughter of his father’s brief first marriage, had spent their first summers together, days spent wandering through old orchards and down wagon roads through great hardwood forests, long before the fateful August that found them in each other’s arms.

When the book reviews came out his uncle seemed genuinely pleased and more alert than at any time since Aunt Frances’s death. "Why, son, you're just about the first Goode that ever accomplished anything worthwhile in life.”

"You have accomplished a great deal more."

"Money. It is nothing. We have seen in our lives how little it can buy. You can see what it has meant in our lives."

More than ever now the young man felt the warm hand of acceptability on his shoulder. Sometimes he would ride over to the two grave sites with his uncle and they would strew the tombstones and graves with laurel and yew and roses. Then, if it was winter, they would come back and sit by the fire and again the talk would turn to Ryerson’s work. Did he have another book planned? What about all the book reviews and occasional columns he had written for some of the biggest papers in the country.

"Always had a hankering to go abroad,” he said once. “Maybe try my hand at being a foreign correspondent. Tough to get into that. Getting tougher all the time to leave teaching, now that I’ve got tenure and all the security that goes with it. I’d still like to get that novel written, though.”

"If it's what you want I have no doubt that you will succeed completely."

He talked vaguely of their taking a trip together, perhaps out to Texas to visit his in-laws. He had grown so frail and wheezy Ryerson feared he would never survive to make the trip. He talked about it each spring; each spring the idea seemed less likely than ever to work out. He was almost eighty now and had suffered two small strokes, the last at a bank where he was trying to cash a check. Later he laughed about it—the blackout—as though it were some sort of joke.

They were now into the winter of 1976, and his uncle was only three years older than the century. He seemed listless and almost shabby as they sat by the fire at nights, and Ryerson was never sure he would make it till another spring came round, and he found himself trying harder than ever not to think about the inheritance. He tried not to think about all the big headlines, the boards of directors he would be invited to join, the big houses, the cars, the trips abroad, the books he would be able to write without having to worry about whether they brought in any money, his future as a U. S. Senator or ambassador to the Court of St. James.

Like always, he just tried to push all that aside and pretend he was nothing more than the dutiful nephew friend his uncle so badly needed.

Uncle Telford would visit him at the farm as often as possible and explain how genuinely happy he was that he had been able to take over the old place and how good it was to see all the work that had gone into keeping it up. Otherwise, the bulldozers would have had it by now.

"These old places can eat you alive,” he would say, “and you’re gonna need money to stay ahead of the game. Why, the city’ll soon have this whole place on the tax books. And if the upkeep doesn’t eat you up, those taxes sure will. Yep. There'll be a lot of pressure on you to sell, because there just isn't any kind of living in farming any more. Reckon you've already found that out for yourself."

Naturally Ryerson felt more relieved than ever to know that he was planning to help. He had said as much in a hundred different ways. The years had drawn him ever more closely to his uncle. Once, the old man talked of selling his mountain home and asked his nephew to come up and offer his opinion as to its value. He knew Ryerson had no training in real estate; Ryerson figured he mostly just wanted the company. But they talked about it for a long while one summer afternoon.

His uncle even asked him to join him in a rare drink—he had drunk almost nothing alcoholic since he was a young man—and wondered aloud whether it would be wise to sell the old place after all. Ryerson tried again not to think about the inheritance and how it would be when he had become one of the chief men of the city. Some of it he would not care for at all. The speeches he would have to give. All those long, tedious board meetings.

He knew what all the other relatives were saying: that he was spending so much time with his uncle simply so he could assure himself of the inheritance. But Ryerson had never felt he owed anybody an apology. His uncle really had no one else. And he had never gone over to visit without being made to feel welcome.

In his last days his uncle began to talk even more meditatively about the future of the old homeplace, and about all the money Ryerson would need, he and his wife, if they were ever to put it back in first-rate condition and pay all of those onerous taxes.

"Sometimes I think my first answer was the best,” he would say. “Simply to bring in a bulldozer and raze it to the ground.”

"I’d hate to see it come to that," Ryerson would say. "It was a very important house to a lot of people at one time. All the memories there. It would really be hard to see it go."

"Just as long as you realize what you’re letting yourself in for. You'll need plenty of help, and if you really feel strongly about it I hope I can be there to help."

-*-

That was before he decided to leave all his money to charity. They had become so close, he and his uncle, that he was a little surprised he had not at once learned of his death—and even more surprised to learn, on one cold winter day, that the inheritance he had tried so often not to think about had gone to faceless foundations unfamiliar to anyone in the family. His uncle had once talked of throwing his money away in some such fashion, but Ryerson thought he had long ago given up on that idea.

Most of it went to a boy's home in Virginia. Proceeds from the sale of his mountain home and the house in Winston and all his other properties would go toward the establishment of something called the Telford Junior Memorial Fund. Deserving graduates of the city high school could tap the fund for scholarship funds. There was talk of building a monument to his cousin on the grounds of the boys home that had got the first big batch of funds, but nothing ever came of that particular idea. The money that would have gone into that project, together with his uncle's other property—the land and rent houses yet to be sold, the excess funds, his priceless antiques —he had left to his executors to dispose of as they saw fit.

Ryerson? Not a cent. Not even a memento to remember him by. Not even Telford's old motorbike or his checkerboard or the ragged T-shirt he had worn when he was a member of the Royal Ambassadors. He tried to pretend that it was nothing when his other aunts and uncles expressed shock at Uncle Telford's failure to leave him anything. He knew that secretly they could not have been more pleased.

He often cursed his uncle privately, as he walked around in a great gloom or resentment, was only sorry he had not found a way to let him and Aunt Frances as well know what a monster their son had become. All the time he had spent trying to make their lives a little better! He knew now he should had paid closer attention to something his grandmother was always in the habit of saying: "Poor Telford. Nothing but money, money, money. I worry about him so. He seems to think only of himself and no one else at all."

Well, he sure didn’t like feeling that way about it. Still, he couldn't help wondering sometimes why he hadn't told his uncle about that episode with Telford at the lake, and about some of the other tales he learned about later—just so he could have completely destroyed the old miser by explaining that his son had become a stinking little pervert who would have ruined everything and everybody he ever touched if he had lived long enough to do so.

Not that he would ever have actually done anything like that. Yet he couldn’t help feeling sometimes that it would have been much better for his uncle, and maybe his aunt as well, to have known the truth about their son than to have lived with an illusion. What harm would it have done? Their lives were ruined anyway. A simple little thing and then he wouldn't have had to feel like such a hypocrite and he could have felt a whole lot better about not getting anything because he would have at least had the satisfaction of knowing he had done a little something not to deserve it.

Ryerson kept asking himself if maybe he had secretly known all along, without ever admitting it to himself, that he really wouldn't get very much, if anything, out of his uncle. Another of his uncles had given away all his land to the church to save his soul from hellfire. Maybe it was the same with Uncle Telford. An errant gene that had found its way into the emotional makeup of certain members of the family. Or maybe a trace of that old bad blood his mother always talked about. Or maybe he was just plain scared.

Maybe in those last hours, confronted with the thought of death and Hell, his uncle had given the money to charity simply for the good of his soul, to make up for all the thieving he had done during his halcyon days as a bootlegger and black-marketeer. Too bad Ryerson had had no inkling of what lay ahead. Too late now. Dead and in the ground. Maybe he should have written a little verse to capture the spirit of the occasion.

Well, anyway, Ryerson’s grandmother, dead now for a quarter of a century, would at last have had reason to be proud of her youngest son. She had always been a great believer in death-bed conversions and would have been the first to suggest that her church dedicate a special plaque or build a monument to his memory. Let them go and plant their flowers, monument or not, plaque or not. Ryerson Hezekiah Moffit Goode, true to the precepts of his upbringing, could still bring a big juicy cowpie and place it among the garlands: a apt symbol of new life flourishing in the midst of death.

Just like in all the old myths.