The Caped Duo

There is, on every farm worth remembering, one gate that matters more than the others — not the biggest, not the newest, but the one somebody thought to build at the exact place where the coming-in and the going-out have to pass each other, single file, and account for what they are carrying.

This story has such a gate. It stands at the end of a dirt drive in a county too small to trouble a road atlas, hung on posts an old man set by hand, latched every evening by a boy who took the job as seriously as any charge ever given him. Between them they closed it several thousand times over the course of one American boyhood, and never once — not on the night everything nearly ended, not on any of the ordinary evenings that came before or after it — did either of them forget.

It is a story about catching. About a man who made it his life's second business, after farming, to be standing under a tree with his arms open every single evening a boy in it decided the day had come to jump — and who never let the boy learn, because the man never let it be true, that there was any other way it could end. It is about a family that took in a fatherless grandson the way you take in weather, without complaint and without exception, and about a small Georgia town that spent a summer changing its mind, one answer at a time, about who got to be worth catching.

It begins with a car coming up a long dirt drive that does not belong to the road, and a man getting out of it who does not look at his phone.

He has come a long way to see this place again.

Let him in.

The car that came up the long dirt drive did not belong to the road. It was black and quiet and washed somewhere expensive, and Dale Pruett watched it come from the shade of the porch, where he had walked down to wait after leaving his own car outside the gate — a hundred yards up the drive, because a man likes to see a place on foot the first time he shows it, and because the gate had been standing open and Dale had not liked to presume.

He had been told two things about the buyer. That he owned a large company. And that he was from Atlanta. Those two facts usually traveled together and usually meant a weekend man, and Dale had made his peace with weekend men, because this listing had sat on the books the better part of two years.

The man who got out did not look at his phone. He stood a moment with one hand on the open door and simply looked at the place — the long sweep of fields gone fallow and gold, the gray barn with its swayed spine, and beyond it the house, the tall white Victorian standing among its oaks the way an old woman stands among her grandchildren, dignified and a little tired and certain of her welcome.

"Mr. Crittenden." Dale came up with his hand already out. "Thank you for driving down. I know it's a haul from the city."

"It's no trouble." The grip was dry and unhurried. "I've made it before."

Dale took that for the kind of thing buyers said. They had all, to hear them tell it, been meaning to get out to the country for years. He let it pass and turned toward the house, because a tour starts where the buyer's eye has already gone, and the man's eye had gone to the front door —to the wide plank door under the gingerbread eave, its paint gone soft, its threshold worn into a shallow trough by a hundred years of feet.

"She's an old one — 1860, I'm told, which is older than the town, if you can believe it." Dale warmed to the one piece of history he had. "Whole place started as a railroad water stop, you know. Fella named Thomas Ward worked for the line, picked the spot, and they hung his name on it — Ward's Station. They say the lumber for this house came in on that same rail, all the way down, back when getting anything down here was a feat. The folks I sold it for were the Cummings family — had the farm next over too, and took this one in, before the bottom fell out and the bank got it. Before them I couldn't tell you; I'm new here myself." He glanced at the name on his clipboard, then at the buyer, and a thought crossed his face and went nowhere. "Crittenden — that's a county name, come to think. No relation, I don't expect. Common as dirt around here." He patted the doorframe. "That door's the original. They don't —"

But the man was not listening to Dale anymore. He was looking at the door, and the door was opening — not now, not for Dale's voice, but in the only place doors like that still open, which is backward, into the rooms of the people who are gone.

⁂

A girl comes out of it. Seventeen and tall and fair, in a dark dress let out at the waist as far as it will go, and she comes out slow because she is carrying low now and because she does not want to go where she is going. Behind her a small straight-backed woman in a good hat, and a wide unhurried man turning his keys over in his fence-post hands. The screen door claps shut behind them the way it always claps, and the three of them go down the porch steps into the pale April light and cross the yard to where the Chevrolet waits — a '57, ten years old and kept like new, its chrome cold in the sun — and they get in without a word among them, because there are no words for the road they are about to drive.

The cemetery is off Pearl Street, on the town side of Ward's Station, and they are driving in to bury a boy who is not there to be buried.

⁂

They buried Jake Harlan in early April, when the dogwoods were already past and the first real heat was settling into the afternoons, and they buried him without a body — only a flag folded into a triangle and a letter that called him a credit to his country. He was nineteen. He had been gone since the fall. The telegram said Hue and it said Tet and it said regret to inform, and in Ward's Station those words meant about as much as words from the far side of the moon, except that Stacy Crittenden understood them, because she was carrying his child and had been waiting on a letter of a different kind altogether.

She was seventeen. The whole town had watched her grow up tall and fair on the Crittenden place, the kind of pretty that made grown men careful with their words and made the church ladies watch her sideways, and now the same ladies watched her belly instead, and did their arithmetic on the church steps, and were satisfied with the answers they got. There is a particular cruelty a small town keeps in reserve for its prettiest girls when they fall, and Ward's Station spent it freely that spring. But Jake had loved her, and she had loved him, and they had meant to marry on his first leave — a thing the church ladies did not put into their arithmetic, because it complicated the sum. He was gone now. What he had left behind was coming in the fall, and Stacy meant to keep it, because it was the last of him there would ever be.

Her father felt the same, though he was slower to say so. Jack Crittenden, Sr. was a wide, unhurried man with hands like fence posts and a voice he rarely raised, and he had liked the Harlan boy — had liked his nerve, and the plain way he'd come to the porch to ask for Stacy before he shipped out, scared to death and doing it anyway. A boy who would do that was a boy who would have done right by her. The war had seen to it that he never got the chance. And so the child that was coming was not, to Jack Crittenden's way of thinking, a shame to be managed. It was a promise somebody still owed the world on Jake Harlan's behalf, and the Crittendens would be the ones to pay it.

"It's what Jake would've wanted," Emma said one evening, settling it the way she settled most things — not loudly, just past the point of further discussion. She was a small, straight-backed woman, Jack's wife of thirty-one years, and what she lacked in size she made up for in certainty. "That baby is a Crittenden, and Crittendens keep their own."

Nobody argued. There was nothing to argue.

⁂

The boy came on the Fourth of July, in the back bedroom with the doctor driven out from town and the midwife who had brought half the county into the world, and he came hard, and when he came there was a silence in the room that Stacy, exhausted as she was, knew to be afraid of.

The doctor was not an unkind man, but he was a man of his time, and the medicine of his time had a vocabulary for what he saw and very little else. He looked at the soft features and the upward cast of the eyes and the single deep crease across each small palm, and he used the word that was used then, the word that is not used now, and he said it the way doctors said it then — as a diagnosis and a sentence in the same breath. Mongoloid. He was gentle about it. That was the cruelty of it; he believed he was being kind. He told them that children like this did not generally live long, that they would never be right, never learn, never amount to anything. He told Stacy there were places now, state places, clean places, where such a child could be left and cared for, and where a girl of seventeen with her whole life ahead of her need not be burdened. He said burdened. He wrote down the name of a place in Milledgeville on a slip of paper and set it on the bedside table as though he had done them a service.

It was Emma who picked it up. She read it once, and her face did not change, and she folded it in half and then in half again, and she did not hand it back.

"Doctor," she said, "I thank you for coming all this way. There's coffee in the kitchen and it's a long road back to town."

"Mrs. Crittenden, I don't believe you understand what you're taking on. A child like this —"

"A child like this," Emma said, "is my grandson."

Jack had said nothing. He stood filling the doorway with his hat in his two hands, and he did not need to say anything, because Emma had said it, and Stacy from the bed had already turned her face down toward the bundle in her arms with a fierceness that answered the question better than words. Three of them in that lamplit room, and not one square inch of give among them. The doctor was a reasonable man. He recognized a wall when he walked into one. He took his coffee, and he took the long road back to town, and the slip of paper went into the pocket of Emma's apron and from there, eventually, into the stove.

⁂

"What's his name?" Jack asked, when the doctor's headlights had swung off down the drive and the house was quiet again.

Stacy looked up at her father. "Jack," she said. "After you. Jack Harlan Crittenden." She said the middle name carefully, laying Jake into it, and the old man understood and did not say a word about it for fear of what his voice would do.

He reached down one enormous finger instead, and the baby's whole hand closed around it, the way babies will, gripping with that fierce blind strength they are born with and lose, and Jack Crittenden, Sr. stood there in the lamplight letting his grandson hold on to him.

"He's got your name, you know," Stacy said softly from the bed, watching the two of them joined at the finger. "A Jack, same as you."

The old man looked down at the small fierce grip on his finger, and at the small fierce face above it, and something worked in his chest and came out gentler than anybody in that room had ever heard him. "He's got a good grip on him," he said. And then, quieter, trying it: "He's a little Jack. My little Jack."

And it was Emma who finished it, because Emma finished most things. She heard her husband say little Jack and she saw at once what the whole rest of their lives was going to need — that a house cannot run with two Jacks answering to the one name, and that if the baby was to be Little Jack, then the man had just, in the same breath, become something else. "Then you're Big Pa," she said to him, plainly, settling it. "Big Pa and Little Jack. One of each, from tonight on." And so it was. The boy had named the old man simply by being named himself, and Emma had only said out loud the thing that was already true, the way she had a gift for doing— and the two of them went by those names, Big Pa and Little Jack, the matched set of them, for all the rest of their lives together.

⁂

The doctor had been wrong about the living; the boy lived, and grew, slower than other children but steady, the way the artesian well ran out behind the barn — not fast, but it never quit. He had been wrong about the rest of it too, though it would take years for the wrongness to show itself, and it would take a grandfather paying a kind of attention the doctor never learned to pay. But that came later.

What came first was the talk. Ward's Station had said its piece about Stacy, and now it found new arithmetic to do, and the word the doctor used in the bedroom found its way out into the street in uglier forms. There were mothers who steered their children wide. There were men who lowered their voices and then laughed. The Crittendens heard it the way you hear weather, and minded it about as much, and on the Sundays they carried the boy into town they carried him with their heads up — Emma in her good hat, Big Pa's broad hand spread across the small of the boy's back — daring the whole county with their eyes to say one word where they could hear it. None of them ever did. There is a kind of quiet strength that even cruelty knows better than to test, and the Crittendens had it the way the old house had good bones.

He was theirs. He was a Crittenden. That, as Emma had said and would go on saying for as long as she lived, was the end of it.

Five rows of brick stairs led up to the porch, wide enough — eight feet if they were an inch —that a man could climb them two abreast and never feel crowded, and the man climbed them slowly, letting his hand trail along the rail the way you do a thing you are in no hurry to finish.

The porch ran around two sides of the house under a deep roof, and at the corner it swelled into a round turret like the prow of a ship, and there the old life of the place had gathered itself and stayed: a swing on its chains, a half-circle of cane-bottom chairs, potted geraniums gone leggy for want of pinching, and ferns hung in baskets from the rafters, browned at their tips but living still, which meant somebody had been out to water them, which meant the place was not so abandoned as the two-year listing made it sound. Dale noticed the man notice this and said nothing. He had stopped, somewhere on the stairs, trying to sell the place. The man did not appear to require selling.

"She's a Victorian," Dale said, because something ought to be said, "but she sits all on one level — fooled me too, first time. You get the steep roof and the gable windows up top, all that gingerbread, but it's an attic under there, not a second story. Everything you need is on the one floor. Easy on the knees, when a fellow gets to where that matters."

The man was not looking at the house. He was looking at the tree.

It stood at the very edge of the porch, directly off the turret corner — a magnolia, a hundred years old if a day, broad and black-limbed and glossy, and it had grown, or been grown, into the house's own shape, so that its lowest limbs came in over the porch rail near enough to lay a hand on and its higher ones brushed the eave when the wind moved them. It was a tree built for climbing. Anyone could see that. The limbs came off the trunk in a stair of their own, low and thick and spaced like rungs, rising up and up toward the roof, and a boy who got into that tree could go as high as his nerve would carry him and step off, if he had a mind to and nobody was watching, onto the roof of his own house.

"That magnolia's older than the porch," Dale offered. "Most folks'd have taken it down, this close to the structure. Roots, gutters, all that. But somebody loved it, I guess. Left it be."

"Somebody did," the man said.

⁂

Dale put his shoulder to the front door, the way you learn to with old doors, and it gave with a sound like a held breath let go, and they stepped in out of the light.

The hall ran straight through the house, front to back, the way they built them then — a shotgun hall, Dale called it, on account of you could fire a gun in the front door and out the back and never touch a wall — and the light came down it long and gold from the far windows, laying the shadows of the balusters across the floorboards. It smelled of old wood and cold ash and the particular still air of a house nobody had breathed in for a while.

"Four bedrooms, all on this floor," Dale said, and began to walk it, naming rooms off the hall as he passed them like a man calling stations. "Your bedrooms run down this side. Living's through here — good big room, that fireplace draws like a dream, I'm told. Kitchen's back yonder with a little breakfast nook tucked in the corner, catches the morning. Formal dining across from it, for your Sundays and your Christmases. And up front here's the parlor — study, sitting room, whatever a man wants it to be. Two baths. It's a lot of house for one fellow, Mr. Crittenden, I'll say that."

"It was a lot of house for four," the man said, and then, before Dale could fix on the strangeness of it, "It's a good floor plan. Honest. You always knew where everybody was."

Dale laughed. "That's the truth. No hiding in a house like this." He moved on toward the kitchen, talking of the work it needed.

But the man had stopped at the mouth of the hall where the bedrooms began, and the gold light was lying on the floorboards just as it had lain there on a particular morning he had not thought of in years and now could not stop thinking of, and somewhere down that hall a screen door was clapping and a young woman was calling a name, and the name was his, and he was five years old.

It was the suitcases he saw first. That was how he always came back into it, even now — not his mother's face but the two suitcases standing in the gold light of the hall, packed and buckled and waiting, and the wrongness of them, because suitcases that stood like that in the hall meant the car, and the car meant going, and nobody had told him anybody was going.

He was five. He stood where the bedrooms gave onto the hall, in his socks, and his mother came down to him and went to her knees so they were eye to eye, and she took his face in both her hands the way she did, one warm palm to each cheek, holding him still so he would hear her.

"Little Jack, listen to me." Her voice was doing something he didn't like. "You be sweet to your Grandma and Big Pa. Mind what they say." Her thumbs moved on his cheekbones. "I'm gonna call every day. Don't climb too high in the big tree. I love you."

He would keep that, all of it, for the rest of his life — the warmth of her hands, the smell of her, the careful row of things she asked of him, laid down one after another like stones across a creek so a body could get across. Be sweet. Mind them. I'll call. Don't climb too high. I love you. He was too young to know that people only build a bridge like that when they are about to be on the far side of the water. He only knew the hands on his face, and that she was saying these things slowly, and that her eyes had gone bright and wet at their edges.

Then Big Pa came through and took up the two suitcases, one in each fence-post hand, and carried them out without a word, and the screen door clapped behind him, and that clap was the sound the whole morning would hang on ever after.

Grandma hugged her on the porch. She hugged her so long that Little Jack, watching from the doorway, began to hope — began to believe, with the whole hot sudden force of a five-year-old's believing — that a hug that long had to mean his mother had changed her mind. That you could not hold a person that tightly and still let them go. He watched his grandmother's shoulders and waited for the hug to end with Momma laughing and the suitcases coming back in. But Grandma was crying. He could see it now, the way her back moved, and Grandma did not cry, Grandma was the one who did not cry, and the sight of it turned something cold over in the boy's stomach.

Big Pa was not on the porch. Big Pa had gone down to the car and was doing something to the suitcases in the trunk that did not need doing, his back to the house, his hat down, a big man making himself busy at the far edge of a thing he could not stand to watch. That was how Big Pa wept, though it would be years before Jack understood that that was what he had been seeing — a man with his back turned, very occupied with luggage.

It went on too long, the crying and the holding, and it was Big Pa who finally ended it, because somebody had to, and because he was the one who always did the thing that had to be done. He shut the trunk. He looked once at the porch and then away.

"Let's go," he said, "if we're going."

And they went. Stacy came down the five rows of brick stairs not looking back, because not looking back was the only way she had left to do it, and she got in the car, and the car went up the long drive raising its slow tail of dust, and the boy stood in the doorway between his grandmother's grief and the empty hall and watched the dust hang and thin and settle until there was nothing on the drive at all.

She called that night. She called the next night too. For a long while she called nearly every night, and her voice came small and far down the wire and he pressed the receiver to his ear with both hands. He did not know yet that the calls would thin — that a day would come when they were weekly, and then a day when they were monthly, and that the monthly would settle in and stay like a watermark. He only knew, that first night, that she had kept the first promise, and so he trusted all the others, including the one about loving him, which she had meant, and the one about coming back, which she had not quite made, though he had heard it anyway, the way children hear the things they need.

He minded his grandmother. He minded Big Pa. He was sweet, mostly.

He did not always mind the one about the tree.