real laugh, a poor substitute for the way he used to throw his head back and let loose. His first dinner home he said, “There was one night when the guys and I were crawling through some mud—” And my father cut him off and said, “Son, I don’t think your mother and sister want to hear that.” Then we all sat silent until my mother put butterscotch pudding, Tommy’s favorite, on the table, but he pushed back his chair and said, “I’m going over to see Jackie.” In the middle of the night he came in and started crashing around his room, banging his knee on the playpen. “Goddamn,” I heard, and then a thump, and silence.
When it was time for him to leave again my mother hugged him hard in the kitchen while Tommy sobbed on her shoulder like some tormented version of his old self. For weeks afterward I could hear that sound, the hoarseness like his guts were coming up, the gasps like his heart was going to explode. I’d been waiting for Tommy to tell me what to do with myself, but as his tears turned the shoulder of my mother’s plaid shirt black I knew that he was more lost than I was. He pulled himself together and tried to pretend like nothing had happened, but it was one of those moments you can’t ever take back, that you remember forever.
I was crying, too, and Tommy said, “Hey now,” like there was no reason for it. He kissed Clifton on the forehead and said, “Stay cool, little man,” but he hadn’t really seemed to know what to do with his son when he was home, and Clifton didn’t recognize him and kept pointing to the picture in the bedroom and saying “Da.”
After Tommy left, my father must have realized that I was having a tough time, or maybe he was having one, too, because he started to take me along on some of his fix-it trips when I wasn’t working or at school. He said he liked the company, but I think it was more for my sake than his. He wasn’t much of a conversationalist, my father; when people would stop by to have something fixed he would mostly listen. But he liked telling me stories. He would talk about being in the service, not about fighting but about being on KP and meeting men from Brooklyn and Tulsa and other places he’d scarcely known existed. “There were two Jewish boys,” he once said, as though you couldn’t get more exotic and unexpected than that. He talked about how his father decided dairy was too much work and switched to beef cows, and how his mother’s father had trained as a taxidermist and how my mother’s grandmother had been a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse up the slope of the mountain.
My father told me a story about a great-uncle of his who was a dowser, who could stand in a yard and sniff long and hard, the way Clifton sniffed my uniform dress, and then tell you where to sink a well. Sometimes I thought Winston Bally could do that, too, sniff out, not the water, but where the water was causing trouble. As far as I knew he hadn’t ever come back to our place, hadn’t talked to my father since I was an eleven-year-old kid selling corn out front. But sometimes I’d see him driving on the back roads of the valley, in his navy blue government sedan, and sometimes I’d hear that he had been around, telling people that plans for the reservoir were moving ahead slowly but surely. There were two farmers at the other end of the valley who had already agreed to sell their places if the government plan went through, and a husband and wife who had taken over his mother’s place and had plans to finish the basement until they found out that no builder could keep the water out. They put a For Sale sign at the end of their driveway, but it was hard to sell a house in Miller’s Valley, and they were talking about discussing some kind of deal with the state.
Mr. Bally showed up at my aunt Ruth’s door one day when it was in the nineties for the second straight week and she was sitting in front of a fan watching Days of Our Lives. Nothing irritated her more than having someone interrupt a soap opera, and nothing unsettled