The Patron Saint of Liars (26 page)

I was entitled to a disability check. Seventeen dollars a month.

My parents drove all the way to South Carolina to pick me up. It took four marines to get me into the back of the station wagon, my leg stuck out straight. One of them was Perry, from the bunk next to mine. All the guys had been real good about coming to see me in the hospital.

"I know it doesn't seem like it now," Perry said, "but it'll turn out that you're the one that's lucky. You wait and see, the rest of us will go over there and get shot in places a whole lot worse than the knee."

"Don't say that," I told him. "This is good luck for all of you. Now one of us has been shot, the rest of you stiffs get off scot-free."

Perry asked me if I'd write to him every now and then. He didn't say it, but I knew it was because he didn't get a lot of mail, and I did write to him, pretty regular, until he was killed in forty-five. He survived several landings in the Pacific, but his luck ran out on Okinawa. He stood at the gates of the base and waved good-bye as I drove away with my parents.

"Everybody at home's been worried sick about you," my mother said. "It was in all the papers, even in Nashville. That boy, Bill Lovell—"

"Don't," I said.

"That's the last person he wants to talk about," my father said.

"It isn't that," I said. "It's just it was an accident, is all." I looked out the window and remembered everything we passed from the bus ride coming up. I hadn't even been gone long enough to forget the landscape. "There's no sense looking to place blame."

"Cecilia'll be awful glad to see you," my mother said.

"I got her letters."

"She said she was going to wait at our house until you got home, that she'd stay there all night if she had to."

I wanted to see Cecilia. I wanted to press my face into her hair and close my eyes. That was the part that made it all so crazy. Here I'd been waiting all this time to go away so I could get back and marry her and now I was coming back and I didn't want to be. It wasn't that I didn't want to marry her, I did more than ever. But I felt like I'd let her down, her personally, by getting shot in Parris Island instead of some island in the Pacific. I was never such a fool that I didn't know it was my enlisting that made her want me. We had a deal in a way, even if neither of us came out and said it. You make me proud and I'll be yours. Now that I wouldn't be living up to my half, I wondered if she was planning on living up to hers.

"You suppose she'll still want to go through with the whole thing?" I said.

"The wedding?" my father said.

"The wedding, sure, what with all of this."

My mother craned around in her seat so she could see me. "Oh, Son, you don't know what she's been through. You don't know how she's cried. We've all had our doubts about Cecilia, but I can tell you, things are different now."

"It's all made her grow up a lot," my father said.

"You wait and see," my mother said. "That's one thing you won't have to worry about."

I leaned my head against the backseat window and closed my eyes. Me and Cecilia getting married. I believed them, you know, I really did.

When we got home it was nearly three in the morning. It was a little harder getting out of the car than it was getting into it, on account of the fact there were no marines around to give us a hand, but we did it and I was up on my crutches and standing in front of my house. That's what I remember, trying to get up those steps the first time. I came into the living room and Cecilia was asleep on the sofa and I felt like it had been years since I'd seen her and for a minute I was glad about the way everything had gone because it meant I was getting to look at her asleep.

My mother went over and shook her shoulder gently and said, look who's here. Cecilia sat up and smiled faintly and looked around like she didn't know what she was supposed to be looking for. "Son," she said, almost surprised. "You're home."

I nodded, too glad and tired and miserable to say anything. She got up and put her arms around my waist and held me, and my parents stood and smiled. She felt warm, like a blanket wrapped around you in one place. Then my mother drove her home to her own house, her own bed, and my father helped me up the stairs to mine.

I hadn't been gone ten weeks, but when I woke up the next morning from a dream of Billy Lovell crying over me in the dirt, 1 felt too old to be in that room again. Nothing had changed, my high school pennant and one from Vanderbilt, the maple bed, the red bedspread, the rug and the curtains and Cecilia's junior class picture framed on the nightstand. I'm not saying I'd grown up so much since I'd been gone, though I had some to be sure. It was more that I didn't think I'd be back this way. I was going off to war and now the room was someplace I was supposed to visit and not live. I would come home from the war and marry Cecilia and we would live in a house of our own, a double bed, pots and pans, a radio. It was past ten o'clock, I had slept so late. I thought of all the guys, having run already, through with breakfast, and drilling on the grinder by now.

My mother knocked once on the door and then came in and sat on the edge of my bed. "You sleep all right?" she said.

I nodded. "Yourself?"

"Fine, having you back." She patted my hand. "I have some good news. I called Mr. Franklin, the principal, last week, once we knew for sure when you were coming back, and he said you can come back to school. The teachers will help you make up the work you've missed so that you can graduate on time. Truth is, they probably won't make you do all of it. He didn't come right out and say that, but it was the feeling I got."

"I can't go back to school," I said, not even thinking about it.

"Why not? You're home now."

"I'm too old to go back to high school."

"That's ridiculous," my mother said, standing up. "You aren't any older than you were when you left. You won't be any older than any of your friends. You'll graduate with your class, Son, right on time. You're going to have to make the best of what's happened."

But my friends, Joe Logan and Gary Allbrittan and Randy Todd, would all be gone. They left when I did, or a few days after. By the end of the year pretty much everyone had signed up. "I'll think about it," I said.

"There isn't anything to think about," she said. "Now come on and get up and get dressed. Cecilia called and she'll be here before too long. Do you need help?"

"No. Why isn't she in school?"

"It's Saturday," she said, and shut the door.

I struggled around with my clothes for a while, but it was all a little harder than I thought it would be. I was used to the nurses being there. Once you get over feeling embarrassed all the time you can see they're a whole lot of help. My leg liked being left alone, me on my back, it up on pillows, and no more movement than whatever breezes came through the room. The business of getting up and getting my clothes and twisting myself around trying to get into them set off a pain I hadn't felt in weeks. I sat back down on the bed and lifted the heavy cast up with both hands. I looked at it, lying there on the unmade bed. It wasn't my leg at all.

Then my father came in and he looked at it too. "Come on," he said, and he looped one of my arms over his neck and pulled me up slow. "Girlfriend's coming over," he said. "We might ought to get you in a tub first." My father was a big man, though not as big as I turned out to be. That year he would have been thirty-nine, since he was only twenty-two when I was born. It's something, to remember my father young like that, knowing I'm so much older now than he was on that day. We crowded into the bathroom, him and me and my cast, and he shut the door.

"Don't think I don't have any idea what I'm doing," he said, pulling my pajama top over my head. "I gave you plenty of baths in your day. Course, that was all a long time ago." He leaned over and turned on the water, slipping the little rubber stopper into place. He kept checking the temperature with his wrist. "Sit down here," he said, and eased me down onto the edge of the tub. "We don't want a lot of water."

The room must have felt good, it must have been warm, with the heat on and the steam from the bath and two grown men, but the only thing I remember feeling was ashamed. I don't know why now, because it was only my father, but at that moment I had let him down, too. Sitting half naked on the edge of the bathtub I wanted to cover myself. "I think I can take it from here," I said.

My father stepped back to get a good look at the whole picture. He was a contractor, he knew how things worked. "I can see you getting in okay, but I can't see you being able to get out."

"I'll manage."

"Well, chances are you would, but here's the thing, your mother was going to do this first and I stopped her, said I didn't think it was such a good idea. So if I mess it up, you know who'll be raising hell."

I nodded my head. He was right. I got good at doing things for myself, once the leg could stand to be jostled around a bit, but in my first week home I was dependent. I needed help. "Get out of these," my father said.

I lifted up my hips and he pulled down the bottoms of my pajamas and then carefully took them off my foot and then the cast. Then he put his arms around my chest and helped me to lower myself into the water, being careful not to get the cast wet. It wasn't hard, it didn't go much past my knee. "What in the hell is that?" my father said.

I looked over and saw him staring at my shoulder, at Cecilia's name. All the scabs had come off it while I was in the hospital. The nurses, who liked to tease me about it, took real good care to keep it clean. I thought that even as they said they didn't approve, they wouldn't have minded seeing their names on the arms of fellows they knew. "I got a tattoo," I said.

"I can see that."

"It was first liberty," I said. "We'd all been drinking."

My father sat back on his heels. "I thought about getting one of those, long time ago. Never got around to it." He looked again. "I wouldn't show your mother anytime soon, least not till she's through worrying about your knee." He smiled and shook his head. "You go off to boot camp and get yourself tattooed and get yourself shot. Most people don't do that much in a whole war."

By the time Cecilia came I was dry and dressed and sitting on the couch downstairs with my leg up. I wanted to run to her, pick her up and hold her, take her places we could be alone, tell her every thought I'd had those last ten weeks, every time I'd said her name aloud. But my mother came in with a tray of coffee and my sister Martha ran into the room to say hello. Cecilia was wearing the sweater I had given her for Christmas last year.

"I'm sorry I was so asleep when you came in last night," she said, sitting down on the edge of the couch, near my waist.

"It was late," I said.

"I barely even remember you coming in. I'd been waiting all that time and then when you finally came home I didn't even wake up all the way."

"I was pretty tired myself." I wanted to kiss her.

She looked at my cast for a minute, tapped the plaster lightly with one fingernail. "Does it hurt much?"

And I knew right then, though don't ask me how. She was planning on calling it off. I don't think she even knew it yet. My eyes kind of lost their focus, like she was still sitting in front of me but I couldn't quite see her anymore. "No," I said. "It's fine."

"Everybody at school's been worried. Your mom says you're coming back."

"I don't know yet. The leg's better off staying still."

"I could bring you the work," she said, and then for a second she caught my stare. It was right there. When a person has left you as many times as Cecilia left me, you could see it coming from miles away. The first thought of going makes a sound as clear as somebody saying your name. She laughed and turned her eyes up to the ceiling. "Stop that," she said, "you're embarrassing me."

"You're still wearing your ring," I said.

She held up her hand so that the stone caught the sun and let it go in little white circles around the room. "Why shouldn't I be?"

"You should be. That means we're going to get married. I want to get married now," I said. I wanted to keep saying it, like reminding her would make a difference.

Cecilia ran her finger up and down my cast. "We'll get married," she said. "Don't worry about that. Just worry about getting better. Once this is off we can talk about getting married."

"This isn't going to be off for a while," I said.

Cecilia just smiled. "What difference does it make?" she said. "We're not going anywhere."

Sometimes I try to imagine what life would have been like had I married Cecilia. I believe, in my better moments, that there is a plan and things go not the way we want them to but the way they should. If my life hadn't gone the way it did, with me finally leaving Ashland City, I never would have come to Habit. Then maybe Rose wouldn't have found someone to marry and maybe she would have given Sissy up and that was the thing that made all the events in my life up to the day she was born make sense. Before that, it hadn't come together, I hadn't been able to see things as part of something larger, the way my father would have. I could only see my own grief. But Sissy made everything worthwhile, suffering in the past, hard times ahead of us. It all made sense because it meant she stayed with us. Before, the only thing I'd wanted was a life that God did not intend for me to have. I suffered the loss of things that were never mine, a house with Cecilia, children and neighbors and anniversaries. Until I met Rose, I could never see how the whole thing fit together.

How much trouble my leg gave me exactly is hard to say, because I told everyone it gave me so much I might have come to believe it. Too much to go into town, too much to try and drive, and too much to go to school. We were in the war now, and one by one there were names in the papers that we knew or the name of someone we didn't know but who lived in the next town, or dated your cousin once, or had your same last name. These were the ones who died, whose bodies came back or didn't. Every day I read the paper I would feel ashamed all over again, not so much for being alive, but for not having taken my chances rightfully. No one ever said this to me, even gave me the smallest cause to think it was true, but I was sure that people were thinking by now that I had shot myself as a way of getting out. Some days I half wondered if I had.