Distant Blood (17 page)

He died two days later, adrift in a delirium of painkillers. I had not been able to eat or prepare blueberry pancakes since—a silent salute to my father's memory.

Candace saw I was lost in a maze of memories. She touched my arm gently and I focused on her face as she spoke. “Was Lloyd Poteet so perfect? Talk about pedestals, Jordy. If Bob Don puts you up on one, you've got your daddy up on the World Trade Center.”

I sat up. “That's not true.”

“I've never, ever heard you mention one incident where your father ever annoyed you.
Not one time.
Lord knows that's not normal. I wonder if you ever think about anything wrong that he did.”

“I won't betray my father's memory by badmouthing him.”

“You really are a piece of work. How is Bob Don supposed
to compete with your perfect father? He can't. He shouldn't have to. Does he have to measure up to Lloyd Poteet for you to care about him? To love him, or acknowledge him fully?”

I stood and rubbed my eyes. “This discussion is pointless. You can't understand.”

“Horse hockey.” Candace crossed her arms. “Stop beating everyone with this poor-little-old-me crap, Jordan. I suggest you just be yourself, let Bob Don be himself, and quit dwelling on your father all the time. You have another father—get used to it.”

“I have a new uncle, too,” I retorted. “I mean, isn't that the real reason that we're here? Do you give a crap about Bob Don, or do you just want me to suck up to Mutt for his money?”

“Jordan! Good God—”

“I talked to Sister this morning. She told me about the two of you thinking it might not be half-bad for me to ingratiate myself with Uncle Mutt so a little of that money'd head my way.”

“Your sister,” Candace said slowly, “felt sick and jealous and scared at the idea of you getting a whole new family. I told her that Mutt was wealthy because it seemed to make her feel a little better. I don't give a rat's ass whether or not you get a cent from him. And I can't believe you think so little of me.” She stormed to her door and opened it. “Would you mind? I'd like to be alone for a while.”

“Candace—” I tried. But I could see she wasn't in a chatting mood. I left.

Like a sulky teenager, I took refuge in my room. The down pillows were soft against my face and smelled pleasantly old. I tossed and turned, wishing I could find solace in a nap. But sleep eluded me as much as deciding on a course of action.

I hated to admit that Candace had a point. But I couldn't easily jettison the memories of Lloyd Poteet as my one and only father. He had been too good to me, too kind, slaving away at a job he didn't care much for to help send me to the best university in Texas. Did I have to besmirch his memory to let Bob Don in? No, I wouldn't. Her argument made no
sense. My father had been perfect. He had been. A whirl of memories danced through my head: my father's beaming pride at my graduation from Rice, joy lighting his face when I won a track medal in district competition, his easy grin when I told him a new Aggie joke. I wanted my daddy back, and not to be among these mean-hearted, sniping, difficult strangers who treated me like the plague.

I chided myself for childish silliness.

I heard the creak of a door down the hall and thought maybe Candace was coming to talk again—or to let me apologize. I hated fighting with her and decided to meet her halfway. I opened my door slowly, a crack, to see if it was her in the hall. It wasn't.

Deborah Goertz, on tiptoe, paused before Aunt Lolly's room. I watched her gingerly open the door so it wouldn't creak and duck in quickly, easing the door shut behind her. I wondered why she was prowling so quietly; if she was just fetching some item from Aunt Lolly's room, why bother with stealth? I shut my door to its barest crack and waited.

A few moments later Deborah stepped out of the room, inched the door shut, and rapidly stole down the hall. I counted to ten then opened my own door. No one was taking a nap as far as I knew, so I couldn't imagine why she crept. Unless it was because she didn't want to he heard or seen.

I went to Aunt Lolly's door and nudged it open with my fingers. The door didn't creak; Deborah needn't have worried. I entered and shut the door behind me. I considered locking it for a moment and decided against it; if someone found me snooping in here, I couldn't explain why the door was bolted.

Lolly kept her room ornately decorated. A plush dog's bed with
SWEETIE
stenciled on the downy pillow sat in a corner, a small water bowl and food dish nearby. On one bureau a box of doggie treats stood, open. I could envision Lolly sitting on her bed, cajoling her precious pet with a treat and giggling with delight when she dropped it and Sweetie jumped in midair. Of course, this was entirely my own conjecture; she might have just dropped the morsel on
the floor while Sweetie sauntered over and gobbled it at his own pace. But I thought that Lolly, who did not seem to take much pleasure in other people, and her pet must've shared many happy moments together in this room.

Linen curtains decorated the window, and the furniture looked antique. A side table held a lamp, a worn back issue of
Southern Living
, and an intercom system—probably to summon her to Uncle Jake's first-floor room if he needed help. A notepad sat by the combination phone/answering machine, with scribblings such as
Philip
—
arrives 2:00
PM
, Call Jake's doctor
, and
Call Aubrey (713) 555-2344.

Photos covered much of the floral wallpaper. Old pictures, their edges brownish with age, mixed in with newer snapshots. There was a photo of a far younger Lolly and Mutt, wind blowing their hair as they leaned against a car that looked like a '40s Ford. Lolly's smile was lazy and sweet, full of promise. She had been a decidedly pretty girl, with darker features than I'd come to think of as being classically Goertz. Mutt looked handsome and tough. I would not have tangled with him in a bar fight; and I'm sure that women found him exceedingly attractive. Sandwiched between the two of them was a handsome woman with lightish brown hair and a merry grin. Their mother, I guessed. I recalled from one of Gretchen's interminable monologues that her name was Claudia and she was from Louisiana, my great-grandfather's second wife. Her teeth were beautiful, framed in a touching smile. She was enjoying a good day with her beautiful children. Why shouldn't she be happy?

A photo next to this contented picture was of a rakish fellow with dark hair and eyes, his hair slicked back and his shirt collar not entirely clean. He did not look like a Goertz or a Zimmerhanzel or a Bedrich; I guessed that he might be Charles Throckmorton, Lolly's deceased husband. He smiled pleasantly, as though having a picture taken for his wife was a right likable chore. My great-uncle. I felt an inexplicable relief that he had not seen Lolly, her face purpling, her chest shuddering. He looked like the kind of man who would never recover from such a deepening shock; he
would have held her dying body in his arms and cursed the gods for taking her from him, grief molding an anger that would never relent.

I shook my head; I was filling my mind full of nonsensical fantasies based simply on old photographs. Claudia Toussaint Goertz could have been an unfeeling witch who posed well for the camera and Charles Throckmorton might've been a bear of a man who never showed a glimmer of real affection to his wife. I had to stop inventing stories to go with faces; such flights were stumbling blocks to truth. I glanced back at both photos and found I couldn't shake my initial impressions.

The next picture made me pause. It was yellowed with age, taken perhaps in the early twentieth century. The gentleman's clothes certainly suggested the time of World War I. The face was very much like my own: wide-set, pale eyes, high cheekbones, a lock of heavy blond hair falling across the temple, much like that damnable curl that I could never keep combed back. The jaw was heavier, stronger than mine, and the nose wider, but the smirkish half smile the subject allowed himself was one I'd seen on my own face. I touched my finger to the cool glass that covered his countenance.

This, I felt sure, was my great-grandfather, Thomas Goertz. He had been born over a hundred years ago and he'd died years before I was born. His eyes stared into mine, the arch grin he wore wrinkling the corners. I felt his smile's twin creep into its familiar bed on my face. I let fancy take my mind again; had he had a raspy drawl like mine, one that charmed ladies and befriended a rambunctious rebel like Uncle Jake? He had died, I remembered, when Bob Don was twelve or thirteen. Had he hugged his grandson, dreamed great dreams for him, let him play with his pipe?

I suddenly felt dizzy and I sat on the springiness of Aunt Lolly's cold bed. What on earth was I doing, strolling along this rogues' gallery of photos and inventing stories to go with each picture? These people were my family, but they were also strangers.

It didn't matter that I was Bob Don's bastard child.

Thomas Goertz had died years before I first drew breath. He never would have known me, legitimate or illegitimate. And I knew nothing of him; my childhood had not been filled with amusing or tragic stories about Thomas Goertz. I was composing my own family history for these faces too achingly like mine. I realized, with a soft laugh, that I did not even know what his grandchildren and greatgrandchildren called him: Papaw Tom, Pop-Pop, Granddad, Gramps, Big Daddy, or any of the other mutated endearments I'd heard uttered for a patriarch. I studied his face for a moment and decided I would have called him Pop-Pop. Don't ask me why.

This was stupid. I ignored the other pictures: I could see some were of the twins, Bob Don and Gretchen, Aubrey and Sass, and Deborah, in various ages and stages. Those folks I knew enough about not to linger on. Only two other photos made me pause. The first was a picture of a rather plain young man, perhaps in his mid-thirties, with straw-colored hair and wire-rim glasses. He sat on a stool, food piled up on a table behind him, a beer bottle in his hand; no doubt some family function from years ago. His clothes were of the Sixties (a copper peace necklace adorned his neck) and he did not want his photo taken. His reluctance was obvious, a half sneer marring his mouth as the flashcube detonated in his face. I wondered who he was and why he earned a spot on Lolly's wall. His picture frame was grimed with dust, the others were clean.

The other photo was of a young boy, buck-toothed, perhaps nine or ten, with blondish bangs and a wide smile. His clothes suggested the photo was from the early Eighties. A distant cousin, perhaps.

I looked for photos of Deborah with her dead parents, but I did not see any. There were only two photos of Deborah, one as a skinny but pretty teenager, and another from her graduation from nursing school. Deborah looked miserable in every photo, as if that was the only way Lolly wanted to remember her face.

I gave the rest of the room a cursory glance, wondering what Deborah had done in here. Nothing seemed to be dis-
turbed, although I'd never been in the room before and had no point of reference. But Lolly seemed a tidy woman (unless someone had neatened up her room since she died, which appeared unlikely) and no object called attention to itself by being glaringly out of place. Why had Deborah come in? What had she taken? Or had she possibly
returned
some item?

Feeling uneasily like a burglar, I opened one of the drawers; Aunt Lolly's underwear. This I could not do. I shut the drawer and opened the one below it. Pullovers and sweatshirts. I ran my fingers through the garments, not sure of what I was looking for. Nothing.

The third drawer also offered no items of interest—it was mostly folded-up slacks and shorts, along with an assortment of decorative collars for the well-dressed Chihuahua. I stood, shaking my head. I was jumping at shadows here. Deborah probably had some completely justifiable reason for coming into Aunt Lolly's room.

Then why the sneakiness?

I glanced quickly through her closet. Nothing hung there but orderly rows of dresses, all ironed. I wondered how Lolly's mind could have lent itself to such groomed order while embracing the ludicrous fiction that Sweetie possessed her husband's spirit. Compare that childish confection of fantasy with the hard-edged voice that had dissected Deborah so vengefully at the dinner table. Or the slowly maddening woman that Jake described. What kind of woman had Lolly Throckmorton truly been?

A shelf above the dresses held a menagerie of colorful shoe boxes. A quick exploration of these revealed nothing but paper and worn shoes. She'd had small, delicate feet, befitting the smiling, pretty girl in the weathered photo. The next-to-the-last box I took down contained letters. Lots of them. They were postmarked from Port Arthur, Texas, and the name on the return address was that of Charles Throckmorton and the letters were addressed to Lolly Goertz. The dates on the faded, whisper-thin envelopes suggested this was their courtship correspondence. I felt the sharp distaste of having pawed through someone else's memories,
dirtying them, and I did not open any of the letters. I quickly returned the box to the shelf, pushing it back with my fingers, nearly turning the box on its end to boost it up. I was clumsy, though, and the box tumbled end over end, spraying out a fan of old, weathered papers.

I cursed myself and began to gather them quickly, feeling even more like an intruder. The aging paper felt dusty and smooth at the same time, crusted with its presence near the sea and worn with handling. I abandoned sorting the letters, gathered them in a fist, and shoved them back into the box. I stood to replace the box on the shelf and only gasped when I looked down at the ground to see if I'd missed any correspondence.

A couple of stray words, pruned from magazines, lay on the floor. I knelt down on the ground again and began to paw through the box, my breath feeling tight in my chest. I found the first card wedged in a rubber-banded mass of old love letters to her husband.

The card was a festive one, a gaggle of puppies and kittens gathered around a humongous birthday cake. The preprinted message on the inside read: