Journeyman Read online

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  He stands with his back to the fireplace as he admires an oak banquet table his father crafted from planks milled from a tree that fell on the property during a winter rain storm when Nolan was fifteen. The table is almost completely hidden by antiques and collectibles, items that fill the small living room: ornate chairs and metal children’s toys; book cases housing bronze bookends and pewter flasks; galvanized tubs filled with old tools; brass weathervanes leaning against a leather-covered trunk filled with vases of cameo glass wrapped in newspaper; stacks of old popular magazines; World War I gas masks; World War II fighter-pilot gear; an upright piano; collections of Zippo lighters, medicine bottles, ceramic mugs, arrowheads, china dish sets, campaign buttons, brass compasses, polished silverware; a cluttered assortment of beads and pins and old coins; all this and more.

  Nolan’s mother weaves her way into the living room from the kitchen carrying a mug of hot black coffee and a buttered piece of toasted banana nut bread.

  —Here you go, she says, handing Nolan the mug and toast.

  —Thank you.

  —My pleasure.

  Nolan takes a bite of the homemade bread and washes it down with a sip of the coffee.

  —Better than ever, he says.

  —It’s gluten free.

  —I don’t know what that means.

  —It means all those years of stomachaches and inflammation your father used to complain about wasn’t my cooking.

  —He didn’t mean—

  —I’m joking, Nolan. It means there’s not much wheat in my diet anymore. Doctor’s orders.

  —Everything all right?

  —Everything’s fine. She said, change my diet or take a pill.

  —She really offer you a pill?

  —No, she was joking. But she said there is one.

  —Of course there is.

  —She said you can buy just about anything from Canada these days.

  —I believe it.

  —Your Aunt Grace said Uncle John orders boxfuls of those little blue pills for a fraction of the price.

  Nolan tries to hide his smile behind the coffee mug.

  —Boxfuls?

  His mother smiles.

  —They’ve always been very active.

  Nolan nods. Lowering the mug, he says:

  —This lady doctor the one who took over for Dr Shepherd?

  —Yes.

  —Sounds like she’s a good fit for you.

  —Dr Shepherd was a good man, but it makes a world of difference for a woman to be able to go to a woman doctor for woman things.

  —I never thought of that.

  —Why would you?

  Nolan lowers his eyes to the coffee.

  —This is delicious, he says.

  —I’m glad I had some on hand for you.

  She returns to the kitchen and stirs chicken stock simmering on the gas range. Leafy green remnants litter an antique butcher’s block at the center of the kitchen. A collection of postcards that Nolan has sent to his mother from his travels over the years are held fast by magnets to the side of the refrigerator. He walks among the antiques, scrupulously placed about the room.

  —Lot of new pieces here, Mom.

  —God bless the Internet.

  —That right?

  —Just the other day I sold a seasoning rack for ninety dollars.

  Nolan whistles a short note while his mother walks over to the sink and begins filling a tall drinking glass from the faucet.

  —Guess where to, she says.

  —China.

  —How’d you know?

  —Lucky guess.

  When the glass is full, she carries it over to where a writing desk stands beside a white bed sheet that has been pinned halfway up the wall. The sheet hangs down over a stool, the backdrop to the photos she takes of items she posts for sale on the web to supplement her income.

  —Come here, she says to Nolan. I want you to see something.

  Alongside the desk a large clear-plastic bag sits slumped full of packaging material.

  —This is so neat, she says.

  Nolan’s mother picks out a single piece of the packaging material and holds it up for his inspection. Then, she drops it in the glass of water and the piece dissolves immediately.

  —Rice, she says, grinning with satisfaction.

  —Whatever happened to good old-fashioned Styrofoam?

  —Frank thinks that one day, millions of years from now, some species will mine Styrofoam the way we do diamonds.

  —Who’s Frank? Nolan tilts his head, smiling, but his mother sets the glass on the table and turns back toward the kitchen.

  —A friend.

  —Do I get to meet him?

  —Not yet.

  Raising the mug to his mouth, Nolan says:

  —Yet is good.

  —We’ll see.

  His mother returns to the chopping block and picks up the knife.

  —What does Frank do for a living? Nolan goads playfully.

  —Very funny.

  —He at least drinking age?

  —Not funny.

  —Where’d you two meet?

  —He’s the new principal.

  —What happened to Ms Baker?

  —A group of Evangelicals scared up a witch hunt.

  —So, now you’re dating your boss? Nolan’s grin growing.

  —As the school librarian, he’s only marginally my boss.

  —That’s one way to look at it.

  —Are you finished?

  —Is he a nice man?

  His mother stops chopping and sets the knife on the block with her hand still on the handle, her knuckles down on the smoothed wood. Without turning her head to him, she responds:

  —In the way I want a man to be, yes, he is.

  —Good.

  Nolan watches the remnants of the packaging material settle to the bottom of the glass.

  —How’re the kids? he asks, moving on.

  —It seems like the girls wear less and less each day and fewer and fewer of the boys know how to read.

  —You think there’s a correlation there?

  —Is the Pope Catholic?

  —This where you side with the Evangelicals?

  —Sometimes I think things have gotten to the point where I don’t know where I side. Like it’s all just confusion and complexity.

  —I know what you mean.

  —There’s always been division. Bitter division. But there used to be more compromise. Now, compromise is considered weak.

  His mother resumes chopping. She says:

  —A while back, the Governor said something along the lines of, crush your enemies and drive them before you.

  —I read about that.

  —But Frank told me he was quoting some movie he was in.

  —I read that, too.

  —I mean, what kind of reality are we living in?

  —California.

  —I guess.

  Nolan carries his mug of coffee over to the fireplace mantle, made from the same wood as the banquet table, another of his father’s pieces. Framed photographs on the mantle show a young Nolan standing alongside his Airstream. Next to this, a photo of Nolan’s brother, Chance, sitting beside their father on a river bank, the both of them fishing, their father with a cigarette at the corner of his smile. Nolan’s smile.

  —Tell me what you’ve been building, his mother says from the kitchen.

  —Same old, same old.

  —Monster tract homes?

  —Customer’s always right.

  —The amount of energy it must take to keep one of those things going.

  —Amount of energy it takes to build one.

  —You’d think that by 2007 we’d have some things figured out. I just don’t get it.

  —Not much to get.

  —I guess not, she says. Did you like living in Las Vegas?

  —I didn’t dislik
e it.

  —What happened to Arizona? You liked Arizona.

  —I got tired of working nights, building under those flood lamps. That’s no way to do carpentry.

  —I read somewhere that fifteen of the world’s twenty largest hotels are in Vegas.

  —I watched them demolish the Stardust.

  —Did you?

  —They had water sprinklers out to try and keep down the dust, but people just ended up running like mad from the clouds. I hear you can watch it on the Internet.

  —Did you go see the Hoover Dam?

  —They searched my truck before I drove over it.

  —Why?

  —I could’ve been a terrorist.

  —My generation experienced life much differently than yours.

  —Usually the case.

  —This seems different, though.

  —Is what it is.

  —I’ve never liked that saying. It’s too easy.

  —Nature takes the path of least resistance.

  —You think all this is natural?

  —You sound like Dad.

  —Where do you think he stole his good ideas from?

  —Oh, he always gave you credit.

  —Later, he did.

  —Just his way of teasing.

  —Odd way of teasing.

  Alongside the photograph of Nolan’s brother and father, a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star, both framed. Nolan reaches up and checks the frames for dust with the ends of his fingers and finds none.

  —Is there a special lady in your life? his mother asks from the kitchen.

  —I was seeing a woman down in Vegas, but we were headed in different directions.

  —You mean you left town.

  Nolan doesn’t respond.

  —Do you know where you’re headed next?

  —It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the ocean.

  —Any place in particular?

  —I haven’t decided yet.

  Then, he says:

  —When’d you bring out Dad’s medals?

  —I don’t know, some time ago.

  Next to the medals, a picture of Nolan’s parents on their wedding day. Standing on the steps of City Hall, his mother in a white dress and his father in suit and tie. The sun in their eyes.

  His father was a scion of east-coast industrialists. The wayward son. His mother’s baby and his father’s foil. The headstrong child who rebelled by lashing himself first to counterculture ideals and then further by volunteering for service in Vietnam. There, he came to acknowledge the privileges he had, but had conveniently ignored during what his father called his prolonged adolescence. He served one tour, during which his mother passed away. The paper of the letter his sister wrote softened by the humidity of the jungle. He came home humbled, to find his father senile and bitter and his brothers positioning themselves around the family fortune. He left it all behind and hitchhiked to California, where he slept on the beaches and yo-yoed up and down the coastline before swinging inland to follow the paths of Muir, Harte, and Twain.

  Nolan studies his parents’ faces, their smiles and their eyes. Complex souls full of contradictions.

  His mother was pregnant with Chance, but not noticeably, when the wedding-day photo was taken. She was a native northern California daughter who left Placerville for UC Berkeley at seventeen and returned, quietly proud, four years later to work as an elementary-school librarian, a sharp, kind wit whom grown students would return to visit through the years to thank her for helping them to become lifelong readers.

  She was first in her family to go to college, and one of only a few women in the town to do so. On her return after graduation, while walking beneath the weathered dummy hanging from the Hangman’s Tree on Main Street, she realized how conflicted she felt toward her hometown, not only about the place’s history, but toward the townspeople, who came to view her with suspicion. They were envious and distrustful of her education, she felt, scornful of a woman with an education. Her older brothers had gone into the trades and her younger sister had gotten pregnant in high school. Her mother and father both had tears in their eyes when the three of them gathered to hang her degree on the living-room wall, handsomely framed and prominently placed. The animosity that piece of paper generated from her own siblings and her community she transformed within herself into a point of quiet pride.

  Nolan looks at his father. He wonders if the suit is the same one they buried him in. It couldn’t be, could it? He’d only seen him wear a suit to weddings and to funerals and it was always the same one. Normally, he wore denim and leather. The Texas tuxedo, Nolan would hear it called. At work, he wore canvas coveralls. His name embroidered on a patch ironed over his heart.

  His parents met in the summer of 1972 at Placerville Hardware, the oldest continually operating hardware store west of the Mississippi. Their father was buying a gold pan, and a tarp to shade the campsite he’d staked out on the American River. He wasn’t doing much then other than reading philosophy and playing a five-string guitar. Their mother was in the store to buy an extension cord.

  —I smelled him before I saw him, she liked to joke.

  He asked her name and she looked him up and down and asked him how old he was. He smiled and told her and next she asked him if he had a job.

  —And then he got all smart and asked why, and I told him I had no interest in dating a man I would have to support. So, he walked right up to the counter at the hardware store and asked if they were hiring. A week later he was renting a room across from the Gold Bug and we were picnicking down on the river.

  Her pregnancy wasn’t a secret. Her siblings were only too happy to see her finally do something her parents didn’t approve of. She told Nolan on one of his visits home after his father’s death that she knew she’d broken their hearts, despite their standing by her and never saying she had.

  —Good people, she often called them.

  Nolan reads the details of the photograph. He sees in it all he knows and doesn’t know of his family’s history.

  —I always wanted to see the Hoover Dam, his mother says to him from the kitchen. Your father used to say it’s something worth seeing.

  —It is, Nolan says, reaching up to turn the picture’s frame slightly.

  —You think you’ll head back to Vegas after seeing the ocean?

  —I doubt it.

  The next morning, Nolan unhitches the Airstream and drives his Ranger to the supermarket, where he purchases a single daffodil bulb in full bloom. At Placerville Union he removes his hat and squats beside his father’s grave and, using the claw of his hammer, digs a small hole and plants the daffodil just above the granite marker. The bulbs from his previous visits are also in bloom. He digs quietly beneath the late April sky, ragged with clouds, and when he finishes, he takes his hat in his hands but he remains squatting beside the marker.

  Uphill, seven soldiers in dress uniforms loiter beneath a collapsible aluminum and plastic tent. Men younger than Nolan, who lounge in the empty rows of white folding chairs arranged for a ceremony still some time off. Their polished helmets set on the seats of the chairs, their rifles leaning against the seat backs. To the side of the chairs, hidden behind flower wreaths and a poster board decorated with photographs, or photocopies of them, artificial turf partially conceals a mound of dirt. Parked beyond this, a backhoe, blatant yellow in an otherwise green and gray setting.

  Nolan pulls a dandelion from the side of his father’s marker and specks of dirt scatter over it and into the lines of the dead man’s name:

  CHANCE NOLAN JACKSON

  1947–1996

  Loving Husband and Father

  Veteran of the War in Vietnam

  Nolan was twenty years old and rolling trusses in the cool of night under stadium lights in the desert of New Mexico when his father passed on. The foreman handed him a folded slip of paper from the office that said he needed to call home. He left New Mexico before daw
n the next day.

  The wind stirs a dogwood downhill. Nolan watches the wind rattle the pink petals, watches it bend the daffodils on their slender stalks. He brushes dirt from his father’s granite marker. He traces the laser-carved letters of his name. His own name. A decision Nolan despised his father for during his adolescence and loved him for more intensely after his death. Chance, too. But Chance so much so that when he turned eighteen and left for Berkeley, he changed his name to Cosmo Swift.

  —Whatever the fuck that means, Nolan remembers his father saying with a hint of pride for his son’s determination to break free of the father.

  In the end, though, it was Chance who returned home and Nolan who broke free. Chance changed his name but Nolan drove distance between them. In the handful of times he stopped home before his father’s death, he sensed that his father’s pride had shifted. Chance’s break was symbolic. It was words. But Nolan constructed something new of himself. If ever he felt a desire to return, this small happiness he saw in his father kept him further away.

  Nolan stands and puts on his hat. One of the soldiers walks out from beneath the tent and tosses his helmet in the air. As Nolan walks to his truck, he watches the young soldier toss and catch the polished chrome helmet. Despite the clouds and dull light, the helmet gleams.

  That night, he carries two bottles of beer into the living room. His mother is sitting on the couch before the fire in the fireplace and he hands one of the bottles to her.

  —Thanks for cleaning up, she says, accepting the beer.

  —Least I could do.

  Settling in beside her on the couch, he says:

  —You had other plans for tonight, didn’t you?

  —I’m glad you’re here.

  —I should have called first.

  —I’d still change plans to sit here with you.

  —Yeah.

  —It’s been too long.

  Nolan nods.

  —Almost a year, he says.

  —Shame on you.

  —I know.

  She pats Nolan on the knee. The ranch home stands quiet around them as firelight plays over the different surfaces of the antiques in the room.

  —I went and saw Dad today.

  —I figured you might. How is he?

  —Still there.

  —Far as we can tell.

  Nolan shakes his head, smiling. His mother raises the bottle to her own smile.