“Four years later, when my son drowned, I couldn’t escape the feeling that his death was some kind of karmic payback for me not saving that Iraqi child. It may sound crazy, but I became certain of it. Obsessed with the idea. I’d let an innocent die, and my little boy had been taken as payment. A life for a life. The universe had balanced things out.”
My father looks into my eyes without pity. “You think you’ve been tormented by that for ten years. But you haven’t. You’ve been comforted by it.”
Anger flares in me. “Did you understand what I said?”
He nods solemnly. “Better than most. But you’re not looking hard enough at yourself. Believing your son’s death was a price exacted by fate, or karma, or God, lets you believe there was reason to it—meaning behind it, however hard to bear. The true horror is that you’re wrong. There’s no universal tally of good and evil, balancing right and wrong. The Christians with their God-has-a-plan fantasy, the Hindus with their karmic balance . . . it’s all wishful thinking. Primitive religious impulse. Linus’s damned security blanket.” My father’s eyes burn with hard-earned conviction. “The truth is infinitely simpler and harder to bear. Your son died because your wife had four glasses of wine instead of three. Adam died because you and he tried to swim that damned river down there when you were drunk and exhausted. No other reason.”
“Then why did you blame me for it?”
“Because it was your fault!” He shakes his head with what appears to be self-disgust. “But it was Adam’s, too. His more than yours, because he was older. Old enough to know better. But Adam was dead. You were still alive. That was your bad luck. I should have borne all the pain myself. I should have let you be a boy. But I wasn’t strong enough, Marshall. I’m so sorry for that.”
I never thought I would hear these words from him.
“After my first wife and child died,” he says, “I was lost. Searching for meaning, like you. But Adam’s death taught me the terrible truth. There’s no meaning to be found in tragedy. Only in our response to it. What we do matters, nothing else. That’s what kept me at the bottom of a bottle for fifty years. I wasn’t searching for an answer—I’d been given the answer. And I couldn’t handle it. It’s tough to look this life square in the face. The plight . . . the void. For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. That’s why your old man’s a drunk.”
“Ecclesiastes,” I whisper. “From my atheist father. All this time, I’ve figured you blamed yourself for some sin I never knew about and transferred your guilt onto me.”
Dad’s face fills with loathing. “Freudian claptrap. If that were the answer, I’d have shot myself and been done with it thirty years ago.” He squeezes my knee with surprising force. “You’re alive now because Paul Matheson shot that family in Iraq. If you’d gone back for that child, you’d have died. Your own son would never have been born. You’ll never penetrate the heart of that equation; the human brain isn’t up to it. The randomness will drive you mad. Those Poker Club bastards could put a bullet in your head tonight. What’s to stop them? Fate? Providence? Prayers? Hogwash. Maybe that deal you made today will save your life, or even your mother’s. I sure hope so.”
“That’s a pretty grim vision of the world, Dad.”
“Listen at your peril.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do after all this. My personal life’s a mess. And the country has drifted so far off course, nobody even cares about the truth anymore.”
“You’re right. We’re witnessing the last gasp of white America, and it’s a lulu. Our people think the land of liberty’s their God-given country club and the caddies have forgotten their place. But revolution’s coming . . . just not the one they think. I don’t envy you, son.”
“Things always come back into balance, though, right? Eventually.”
Dad goes very still, eerily so considering his disease. “Eventually. Balance came back in 1918 after twenty million deaths. It came back in 1945 after seventy million. It’s getting the pendulum back to the midpoint that’s the killer. And right now it’s being pushed hard right, all around the world. The last gasp of Ozymandias—once more, with feeling.”
“Take it easy. We can’t fix it from this hill.”
“No . . . hell. You’re right.”
This may be the only time I’ve heard him speak that phrase to me.
“I can’t fix it at all,” he says, obviously exhausted. “It’s your turn. But you can’t do it from Mississippi.”
“I thought you wanted me to stay here and run the paper. That’s what you said at the hospital.”
“Ah, hell. We’re nothing but a backwater now. Back in the sixties, this was the front line. But the war moved on. There’s still plenty of injustice here, but look at the rest of the country. I should have packed you boys and your mother up around 1973 and moved you to the new trenches.”
“I was one year old in 1973.”
“That’s what I mean. Doesn’t matter now. The Moving Finger has writ.”
This Khayyam allusion is a flash of his old character. “Nor all thy Piety nor Wit, Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,” I continue.
“Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it,” he finishes.
In this moment, a blessed memory returns to me. I’m sitting on my bed with Adam, while Dad reads aloud poems from The Oxford Book of English Verse. I don’t know how old I am, but even Adam is still a boy. Each week we must choose a poem to memorize. I usually pick some brief Byron or Shelley, but Adam has phenomenal recall. I’ve watched him recite all 109 stanzas of Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol without a hitch. I do, however, remember choosing The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tennyson on one ambitious night.
How could I have forgotten poring over that text before I went to bed each night for a week? Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward . . . And then the evening I recited it, after Dad got home from work. I’d never been so nervous. I sweated, turned red, worried I’d pee in my pants. But somehow I started, working through the lines, word by rhythmic word. I remember Adam’s glowing face, encouraging me all the way, just as he did by walking along the side of the pool when I practiced swimming. The rhythm helped me find the words: Storm’d at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well, Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of hell, Rode the six hundred. Behind Dad I could see my mother watching anxiously, worried I would stumble. But the words poured out with ever more certainty as I neared the end, like a horse running the last quarter mile to the barn. After I finished, Dad stared at me with a new emotion in his eyes: pride. He spoke not a word of criticism. Then he reached out and tousled my hair while Adam and my mother applauded.
How could I have forgotten this?
“Oh,” Dad groans. “No, wait—”
As I turn, he twists in his seat. Then his arm flies up as though he’s trying to reach around himself and grab his own shoulder blade.
“What is it?” I cry, my heart quickening. “What’s the matter?”