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On a Wednesday in February, Atticus listened to the public radio station for company as he cooked up an onion stew and poured it over rye bread, slowly eating it in the dining room with The Denver Post propped up on his milk glass. Marilyn would be stopping by at noon with her own philosophies of good housekeeping, so Atticus only rinsed off the pan, the plate, the milk glass and spoon, then completed some government accounting forms at his rolltop desk and went upstairs at nine. Howling winds rattled the windowpanes and piped like a hot teapot at every wooden gap in the house. His upstairs radio was tuned to opera, La Bohème, and his wife was still not there. He slanted into heaped pillows in his pajamas in order to read petroleum reports and then woke up with the side lamp on and loose pages sloppily pitched to the floor. He couldn’t get back to sleep, so he put on his Black Watch tartan robe and slippers and walked through all the upstairs rooms, stopping especially in Scott’s. His paintbrushes were in a red coffee can just as they’d been for over twenty years and his child
hood sketches and watercolors overlapped on the walls, but Atticus could no longer smell the linseed oil and turpentine and paints that used to mean his son to him, he could only smell whiskey and tobacco and the harsh incense of his shaman rites.
Atticus turned up the kitchen radio so he could hear people give their hasty opinions on a nighttime phone-in show while he peeled a Washington apple at the stoop window and looked out toward the machine shed. Horizontal snow was flying through the halo of the green yard light and carrots of ice were hanging from the roof’s iron gutters. Atticus ate apple slices off the sharp blade of his paring knife. Without knowing why, he looked to the pantry, and just then a milk pitcher slipped off its hook and crashed onto the pantry floor.
Hours after sunup Atticus carried a tin pail of hot water out to One Sock and Pepper, scooped oats into a pan, and then crouched quietly in a stall corner, looking up at the horses’ slow chewing. A sparrow flew in an upper window and got lost in the night of the barn, slashing among the high rafters and pigeon roosts and loudly rapping into a penthouse window before swooping low enough to veer out through the great door and rise up.
Atticus petted One Sock along the withers and went outside to his snow-topped Ford pickup for his daily trip to the Antelope truck stop. And then he got the feeling that the house telephone was ringing. He argued with himself about whether he ought to go to it or no. The truck’s ignition ground like an auger in iron and the engine caught and Atticus gave it gas for half a minute, looking out at the yellow barn and silo and unhenned coop, Serena not putting eggs in her gray sweater pockets as the white chickens strutted away, Serena’s peacock not jerking its glare at the dog and making its glamorous tail display. Weather reports on the truck radio said the temperature was up to fifteen degrees, but his bare fingers were still pretty sore, so he got out and went back inside to get his yellow gloves.
Atticus stopped by the house telephone and looked at it, and the telephone began ringing. He hesitated and then picked up the receiver and heard Renata Isaacs. She first reminded him of who she was. “I haven’t forgotten,” he said. She said she was calling from Resurrección. And then she talked to him about Scott. Atticus pulled over a spindle chair, and she explained the circumstances. She was trying not to cry. Atticus was sitting there, not saying anything he meant to, and wiping a porthole in the steamed windowpane with one yellow glove. The truck’s engine was running at high speed, and the smoke from the tailpipe was shaping gray people that a hard wind ripped away. She said how terrible she felt, she was as upset as he was, she hadn’t known his son was that depressed. Atticus accepted her sympathy and he wrote down her telephone number and then he lost himself until he heard her hang up on the other end. Atticus couldn’t get up without gripping the crosspiece on the spindle chair. He went out and switched off the truck’s ignition, and then he telephoned Frank in his Antelope office, giving him the news.
***
Upstairs in Scott’s room was a green wall shingled with high school and college paintings, all created in those happy times when everything that Scotty touched seemed to turn into a picture. Atticus stared at the portrait of himself as he was twenty years ago, forty-seven and finding wealth in oil, his hair and great mustache a chestnut brown, his blue eyes checkered by the stoop’s windowpanes, the April sunlight like buttermilk, just back from Mass in his blood-red tie and a hard-as-cardboard shirt that was so blazingly white it glowed. His son had titled the picture “Confidence.”
Atticus sat at his son’s oak desk and pulled out a lower right-hand drawer jammed with manila folders upon which Scott had printed, in a fine draftsman’s style, Art Schools, Banking, Credit Cards, Fellowships and Grants, Medical, Taxes, and Vita. As organized as an engineer. Atticus lifted out the Vita file and slumped back in a tilting chair to page through it. Eight years of report cards from Saint Mary’s Grade School were on top, then white First Honors cards and typed grade slips from Regis High School in Denver, followed by his senior transcript from the office of the registrar at Stanford University. The Royal College of Art in England had sent correspondence to accept him, then provided the financial terms of his stay, and then forwarded a letter in which one of his British teachers appraised Scott’s failing studio work over the year: “Skilful, safe, formulaic,” he’d written, and “You lack nothing in terms of technique, but is it art or illustration?” Scott had four photocopies of an old curriculum vitae that he used to send out in hopes of employment as an art instructor, that provided a home address in care of Atticus Cody in order to avoid mention of the New York hospital he was staying in. Under “teaching experience,” Scott had recorded giving art therapy at Hirsch Clinic and then still-life painting sessions at the Self-Help Center. His age was then thirty-three, and his health, he’d said, was fine. And to that information, he’d added in pen on all four copies: “I dress myself, do not act out, and am never tardy. I believe we all should help one another find our controllers. We all have functions in the machine.”
Alongside his Vita file was a sheaf of his poems from one of his times at the clinic. The first one went:
Here it’s fall.
I feel no pain.
I hate you all.
I’ll kill again.
Atticus heard the kitchen door open and he put the files away. And he was dabbing a handkerchief to his eyes when he heard Marilyn in the hallway.
“Dad?” she called.
“Good morning!”
Frank’s wife hit the light switch as she walked inside the room in her navy blue parka and ski pants and gray over-boots, his infant grandson against her right shoulder, a blue blanket capping Adam’s head. Marilyn’s aviator glasses grayed with the temperature change. She said, “Frank’s talking to the American Embassy in Mexico City. We’ll have trouble getting his body back right away.”
Atticus got his grandson from her and grinned down as he gentled and cradled the boy. Adam struggled to look at the overhead light, at the ceiling, and then gazed for a long time at his grandfather’s big gray mustache.
Marilyn lifted her aviator glasses and pressed a balled-up tissue to her eyes and nose and then pushed the tissue inside her parka sleeve. Her lipstick was slightly awry. She looked at Scott’s desk. “Are you hunting for something?”
“Explanations.”
She smiled uncertainly and said, “I have that new priest from Saint Mary’s here.”
“Good.”
“First The Denver Post looked us up. And then the Rocky Mountain News. Him being the brother to a state senator. Woman in Mexico called them, I guess. Seems to me that’s the family’s job.”
“Well, she probably figured she knew firsthand how it happened.”
“I knew his birthday and high school and college, but that was just about it. You know so much about your family, and all the obituaries seem to want is dates.”
Adam reached up and patted Atticus on a windburnt cheek that was scattered with lines. Atticus kissed the boy’s tiny hand and said, “Expect Frank’s taking it pretty hard.”
“Well, it was the shotgun he gave him at Christmas. We always thought, though … you know, that he’d put all that behind him.”
Marilyn collected her son again as Atticus got up from the chair. He said, “How would you like some coffee?”
***
