Shame (2 page)

“He was murdered,” Lauren theorized from her spot on the love seat. “Or kidnapped, maybe.”

“By aliens,” B. W. said, his mouth full of popcorn. I reached down and took a handful for myself.

“He ran out on them, Lauren,” Michael muttered from the floor.

“How could anybody do something like that?” Lauren shot back.

“Maybe he just thought if he plowed one more row it'd be the death of him,” I said quietly, my mouth full.

Michelle glanced across at me, but with the kids present she didn't dare ask whether I spoke from personal experience. Not until later.

Not until bedtime.

One of the rules of our marriage had always been that when we talked at night, after the kids were in bed or otherwise absent, we would be totally honest with each other. I am not a compulsive truth-teller—I believe that there are sometimes situations in which a lie is less harmful and certainly kinder than the truth—but over the years, I had never told Michelle an out-and-out whopper at bedtime, and I felt confident she had been equally forthcoming with me. I would not say it had always been easy or that it had bound us together in unbreakable chains of marital trust, but certainly it had never done permanent damage to our relationship, although it might occasionally have altered—or eliminated outright—the cuddling or other activities that might reasonably be expected from a married couple at bedtime.

“J. J., what did you mean, earlier this evening?” she asked, sitting down on my side of the bed, still fully clothed. I generally went to bed after hearing the weather on the ten o'clock news, sunup coming awfully early, but Michelle was a night owl and often stayed up to read or work or listen to music.

“Sometimes,” I said, “I can understand how people might want to get out from underneath all that. It's not always joy and bliss being Farmer Dad.”

She ran her finger lightly down my arm. “Bad day with Michael?” It was a logical question. Our eldest supposedly had a job working the closing shift at the local Pizza Hut, which would account for his being gone all night and sleeping all day. When he was here and awake, he was surly, if he bothered to speak at all. Still, that wasn't it, and I think she knew it.

“No,” I admitted. “I didn't even see Michael until I sat down in front of the TV tonight. I wasn't one hundred percent sure he still lived here.” I reached up to her, tried to pull her toward me, and she did lean a bit closer, although she made me come up the rest of the way to meet her. After she kissed me once, softly, and nuzzled my cheek, she stood up, walked to the door, and hit the light, leaving me in darkness.

“You know, I do understand,” she said as she closed the door, and maybe she did, although it was also true that late that night when she came to bed and snuggled close, rousing me from a light sleep and dreams of far away, she whispered into my ear, as she sometimes did at such times, “J. J., do you love me?” and I muttered back, somewhat less than half-awake, “You know I do, Shell.”

And this, I swear to you, was gospel truth, for however it was that we began our life together, Michelle is a wonderful woman, and if it took me a long time to accept just how wonderful, I did learn at last. I could not have imagined a better mother for my children, or a wife who cared more for me. Michelle knew me so well, had loved me for so long, that perhaps she did indeed understand the sad, sorry, shameful impulses that could make a man imagine leaving his tractor, his home, and his family, those same impulses that make up most of the story I am to tell you.

All of these things went through my mind on that sunny September day in 1994 as I listened to Don Henley sing of forbidden love, loud and raucous on the tractor's cassette player, as a fly pattered forlornly against the inside glass of the enclosed cab, as the warming sun dropped slowly toward the far rim of the Canadian River Valley a few miles west: things from my past, present, and future. I had been around long enough to understand that, taken all together, these were the truths about life: Things had happened; things were happening; things were going to happen.

The last of these truths remained mysterious to me, as it must. But all the same, with so much thoughtful time on my hands, I couldn't help but sit and wonder.

Did my future include another twenty years on a tractor in red dirt, turning ever inward on myself? Or would there come a day when I drove straight and true toward the far horizon?

Birthdays

That horizon seemed far indeed, because to get anywhere of consequence in western Oklahoma you have to travel quite a spell. We lived twenty miles from Watonga, where we worked, went to church, attended school sporting events, and visited friends and family, but like most small towns, people seemed only too happy to escape it. Lauren already was informing me on a regular basis that to do any real shopping she needed to be taken to Weatherford or El Reno, each an hour off, and naturally she'd prefer to go to the Quail Springs or Penn Square malls in Oklahoma City, a distant City of Oz rising from the grasslands where we went once or twice a month to stock up on food at Sam's or to see a movie.

So my world was limited to what it had always been—a town that was already drying up by the time I came along and long unrelieved hours on the farm where I grew up. The farm consisted of two plots of land: 280 acres where we lived on the house my grandfather built in the 1940s—always called, not surprisingly, the Home Place—and 320 acres around the section line road where sat the remains of the house my great-grandfather built in the 1920s, which we called the Old Place. The fields I cultivated were, variously, red sandy soil or dark brown soil thick with clay. The pastures in both places were rolling hills covered by grasses and hillside clumps of cedar and scrub oak, and there were oaks and towering leafy cottonwoods in the creek beds and ravines where they could sip water. Five creeks crossed our land on their short progress to the Canadian River, and my parents had dammed up two of them to create ponds, although only one was still worthy of the name, and on Saturdays I used to take the kids down to fish in it.

Like my father, I raised wheat as a cash crop, alfalfa to make hay, and kept cattle, with some chickens to tempt coyotes and provide eggs or an occasional Sunday dinner. Over the years the kids had raised a few sheep and pigs to groom and show, but like most of my neighbors, we were pretty much a cattle and wheat operation, eating our own beef, growing vegetables in a summer garden, keeping a fruit orchard.

Both Michelle and I were raised in a culture that made do—that raised its own food, cooked it, cleaned up after it. So it almost always required a special occasion to get us to a restaurant. Two weeks after my long afternoon of tractor-bound soul-searching, Michelle and I skipped Sunday evening services at the Watonga First Baptist Church and drove out to have a steak dinner at the Roman Nose State Park lodge in honor of her birthday. We could have had grilled sirloins out of the freezer, which I told Michelle halfheartedly as we drove to the restaurant. “But it's different if we don't have to cook it,” Michelle said. “It's my birthday. I want somebody to serve me for a change.”

“I brought you a glass of tea the other day,” I said. “I wait on you hand and foot. I am a slave to your every desire.”

Her eyes crinkled when she smiled, and even though her face showed our twenty years together, it was a lovely face, and I told her that, too. “Happy birthday,” I said, and I leaned over and kissed her. “May God give you many, many more.”

She was wearing what for her amounted to dress-up clothes: a big crinkly skirt, a colored T-shirt with a Navajo-themed vest over it, and brown pointy-toed cowboy boots. In warm weather, Michelle attended church in a sundress; she generally taught school in faded jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. She refused to get with the program, and I loved her for that. I told her that when she started getting her long hair cut and frosted by the beauty operator, I would start playing dominos with the old farmers downtown.

The hostess, who was one of Michelle's former students, showed us to a good table with a window overlooking the golf course and the tiny lake—more like the size of our pond really. After taking our orders (T-bones done medium-well and charred), the waitress—another of Michelle's former students—brought salads and bread, and Michelle tore into them with the joy of someone who hadn't had to participate at all in their preparation.

“You didn't talk to me about your day yesterday. How did the sale go?” she asked as she spread some butter on a slice of bread. I had been at the weekly cattle auction in Geary the day before and picked up some calves at a little less than two hundred fifty a head. In the spring, after they'd gained about three hundred pounds on the wheat that was now starting to sprout, I'd sell those that made it through the winter for two hundred dollars profit each, God and Mother Nature willing. All I had to do over the next six months was feed them, keep them well, keep them warm, and get them to market.

“Bought seventy nine head,” I said. “Some pretty good calves. If all goes well, we'll be in business for at least another year.”

“What did you have for lunch?”

“Burger, fries, Coke, and a piece of pie. Mmm. Apple.” The auction barn had a little café where the cook did the miraculous, whipping up roadhouse delicacies within smelling distance of tons of manure. You wouldn't think it'd be a stimulus for a healthy appetite, but all the same, I made a good meal between auction lots.

“Well, I don't remember it spoiling your dinner.” And she crinkled her eyes at me again, as if to say that she knew nothing on God's green earth would ever do that. Fact is, if I didn't get out and run with the kids during basketball practice I'd look like Pavarotti, and as it is, I have a gut that never quite goes away. I've grown to accept it, like I've learned to accept the white hairs sprouting on my chest and at my temples, my own set of wrinkles around the eyes. I accept them, even though I get a twinge deep in my gut when I look in the mirror and see a middle-aged man looking out at me.

“Uh, right,” I said. “Let's talk about something else.” I took a deep breath, let it out, went on to another subject. “I went out and shot baskets with B. W. this afternoon before I came in to get cleaned up. He took me two games out of three. Good games, though.”

“Oh. Oh.” Michelle laughed and then caught herself, covering her mouth with her napkin. “That reminds me.” Michelle drew herself up proudly. “National Honor Society met Friday before school. B. W. was elected president.”

“This I have been told,” I said, chewing my food thirty times the way my mother taught me. “What's the latest on the Lauren makeup crisis?”

“Oh, it gets better. She wants to know if she can double-date.”

“Maybe with us. Was that her intent?”

She gave me a look of derision, and deservedly; what junior high kid wants to be seen with parents or even wants to acknowledge their existence? “I think not. Let's present a common front. What do you think?”

Cherry, our waitress, came back to ask us if things were okay, which they were. “I think the usual things,” I said when she walked off. Where Lauren was concerned, I was against makeup, against double-dating, against the onset of puberty itself. Like the progressive parent she was, Michelle tried to keep me up-to-date on Lauren's physical changes, but to be honest, I didn't want to hear about that, didn't even really want to learn secondhand by pulling training bras out of the dryer or carrying in grocery sacks containing feminine hygiene products. Ideally, I would have preferred for Lauren to remain prepubescent until the moment before her wedding.

I didn't have my head in the sand. I mean, I watched the news, I talked to my buddies over coffee every morning at McBee's, and I heard firsthand from Michelle that girls Lauren's age were having sex, that these days twelve-year-olds were having babies. And as somebody whose entire life was changed by becoming a parent, I was scared to death that Lauren would accidentally screw up her life and not the least bit sure I knew how to keep her from doing it. Although at the time it would never have occurred to me, I think I longed for Rocket Ron Reagan, for the bad old days of the cold war; I missed the looming specter of nuclear destruction and the knowledge that the AWACS base at Tinker Field—not far away, outside Oklahoma City—was a primary target for all those Soviet ICBMs.

Back then I could submerge my purely personal fears; how could you obsess about kids and crops when the world as we knew it might disappear any moment into mushroom clouds? But now that the Berlin Wall had come down, I was forced to think about too many other things.

“I think we probably need to give her The Talk,” Michelle said after the waitress cleared off our salad plates and set down our steaks. We had wondered when to say what to Lauren about sex, although she probably knew more about sex as a seventh grader than we had in high school.

“Forget that,” I said, cutting up my baked potato so the butter and sour cream could fraternize more freely. “I say let's confine her to her room for the next eight years. And what do you mean ‘we'? I didn't notice you anywhere around when I was giving B. W. and Michael The Talk.”

“Well, let's think about it.” This, or something similar, was Michelle's way of deferring action I had spoken out against. She actually would think about it; I'd forget about it, and the next time she brought it up, I'd have to try to deflect her reasoned arguments with bluff and bluster.

“Oh, that reminds me,” I said. That, or something similar, was my way of changing the subject. “I had a talk with Bobby Ray over coffee this morning.” My old friend and teammate Bobby Ray was now another of the group of farmers and farmer types who met daily at six or seven for caffeinated rural fellowship. Despite his round of business failures over the years, he had amassed enough personal capital to get elected to the school board, so my talks with him were sometimes farmer to farmer, sometimes lord to vassal. “He said the money was iffy for new uniforms this year.”

Michelle was chewing vigorously, but she managed to curse around the steak before turning bright red and looking left and right to see if anyone had overheard. “They don't pay you a cent for coaching. And those uniforms have holes in them. How can he say such a thing?”

“We did get in some new basketballs this week.” I sighed. “Leather balls at forty bucks a pop. But, Shell, it's not like we're talking about football here. They'd find the money for football uniforms.”

“Football.” She raised her eyes heavenward and shook her head. “Football is a stupid game. It's a game for human tractors. It doesn't require grace or stamina—”

“It's the only sport people in this state care about anymore,” I said, and it occurred to me that, free coach or no, as far as some folks were concerned, Watonga High School basketball could disappear, could sink into the swamp, leaving only a few disconsolate bubbles behind to mark its passing.

“Oh well,” I said. “That's life.”

“Hey,” she said, laying down her knife, “we should hold a benefit concert. Basketball Aid. I'll invite Jackson Browne and the Boss.”

“Right. I'll give Paul Simon and Peter Gabriel a call.” I checked my pockets. “I think I've got their numbers right here.”

“Sting.”

“Oh, right. And Bonnie Raitt. And John Mellencamp.” We were both laughing again, and the evening went on its appointed way. It was a good birthday.

So I forgot about the impending fiscal crisis in boy's basketball to concentrate on nursing eight sick calves back to health. It wasn't until practice actually began a few weeks later that I remembered Bobby Ray's warnings, and then it was only because before our first practice I took a look in the closet where our game jerseys were hanging and got a good look at them; they had so many holes in them they were starting to look like our mesh practice jerseys. But that was a problem for later; I had my mind on the here and now.

As always, on the first day of practice I had a mixture of old hands and new talent. Most of the young kids hung back around the edges as the lettermen shot. Tyrel Sparks was the exception—only a sophomore this year but totally fearless. I'd been watching him play schoolyard ball for three years. Jimmy Bad Heart Bull and one or two other boys would be joining us after football ended, but for the most part, these twelve would be my team. I stood back for a moment, caught up in the possibilities of a new season, and watched them shoot, listened to the sound of basketballs thudding dully against the hardwood floor and echoing off the upper reaches of the old gymnasium, breathed in the dim odors of decades of perspiration and floor wax.

When they'd had a few minutes to shoot around and get warm, I blew the whistle and gathered them all together for the first time, an event I had anticipated for weeks, an event I had lost sleep over for days.

I had never really thought of myself as a coach. I was once a smart player, and I loved the game. But I never planned on being a coach; fate dropped me into the position. I read the few books on coaching basketball available at the Southwestern State University library in Weatherford, books written by coaches of NAIA champs in the 1950s, books that extolled the virtues of the two-handed set shot, books illustrated exclusively by line drawings of white players with crew cuts. They added nothing to my knowledge. Everything I knew about coaching came from my own high school years under Von Parker and from repeated viewings of Gene Hackman in
Hoosiers.

I had coaching philosophies: I favored good aggressive man-to-man defense, transitioning from defense to offense by moving the ball upcourt quickly, and, on offense, a mixture of crisp ball movement and individual initiative. But even with some idea of what I wanted, it was all I could do to speak when I stood in front of a team at the first practice, whistle around my neck, clipboard in my hand. On this afternoon, I lifted my head, looked briefly at each of them—including B. W., who was grave and only blinked at me—and forced the words out in a low, neutral tone.

“My name is John Tilden. Some of you I already know. The rest of you I'll get to know if you stick around. You can call me ‘Coach' or ‘Mr. Tilden.' I don't care much which.”

I paused for a moment. The boys stood in various degrees of nervous discomfort, standing arms crossed or not meeting my eye, waiting for me to go on. Their anxiety gave me extra confidence. Pitiful, wasn't I?