The Golden Boy, page 29
Justice
And therefore justice is often thought to be the greatest of virtues, and neither evening nor morning star is so wonderful.
—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
IN THE END, IT was the crudely built bunkhouse on the second floor of the house that got them through, and although it would be rebuilt many times over the years, it would always bear the mark of a fourteen-year-old boy.
Stafford had been careful not to assign identities to Bobby’s grandchildren, but as that first summer progressed, it became clear to him that if Bobby was the conscience of the family, Andy the glue, and Lucy the wild card, Donny was the builder. Building gave Donny something to do when he got up in the morning and it gave him something to say to Stafford during the course of the day.
“We need a box for the tools.”
“We need a lock for the toolbox.”
“We’re running out of four-by-fours.”
“We need a better pry bar.”
“We could use a level.”
Sure, Stafford would say, and he would get the keys to the truck and drive Donny into town. There would be no directives from Stafford, subtle or otherwise, that Donny prepare a more comprehensive list of supplies before they set out. If Donny said he needed a four-by-four, Stafford would drive him into town and Donny would pick one out. And if Donny said he needed another four-by-four a few hours later, they would go back and get it. Stafford was determined to let Donny take the lead, and with multiple daily trips to the building supply store in Lahaina, Donny gradually became known to the men who worked there, who began to smile at him and address him by name.
“I want you to keep track of expenses, Donny,” Stafford said, handing him the neatly folded receipts.
“Okay,” Donny said, stuffing them into his pocket.
But for all of Stafford’s efforts to connect with Donny, it was obvious from the start that Donny was more comfortable around Agnes. Agnes seemed to know what to do with Donny’s grief, and it began to give Stafford an emotion teetering on joy to see his wife sitting next to Donny in the late afternoon, the two of them swinging their feet in the swimming pool while Bobby, Andy, and Lucy had their lessons. Agnes had organized daily lessons for all of them, finding, of course, the most beautiful teenage girl on Maui to teach them. And although Donny kept his distance, claiming he already knew how to swim and didn’t need lessons, he would arrive at the pool at lesson time, covered in sawdust like a weary contractor on his way home from the jobsite. Take your boots off, Donny, Agnes would say. It’s time to cool off. How did it go today? Are you working on Andy’s Lego table yet? I’ll need some help with the barbecue later. Look how well your sister is doing.
Lucy and Andy would settle into their new life with comparative ease, or so it seemed, so long as Bobby was there to reassure them. But sometimes Bobby would push them away, unable to give more than he had, and those were hard times. Donny would shut down and Lucy’s tantrums would erupt and carry on long into the night. Agnes would take the first shift, and when she ran out of patience, Stafford would meet her in the hallway and take over.
“You get some sleep,” he would say. “I can manage.”
Andy would reveal himself in different ways. When things were going badly, he was cheerful and optimistic, generous even in his affection and concern for others. But on good days, when the day had gone well and Donny was laughing about something with Bobby, and Lucy was in the pool with Agnes, and Stafford was lighting the barbecue for dinner, Andy would start to cry.
“What’s the matter, darling?” Agnes would say, but Andy would only shake his head.
“My dad likes cheese on his hamburger,” he would say. And he would look up, bewildered, Stafford thought, by the unfairness that in this moment of happiness his parents would not be coming through the gate to join them.
It was Bobby, though, who worried Stafford the most. Bobby never broke down like Lucy or Andy, never withdrew for days at a time like Donny, never questioned Stafford’s right to determine where he would live or how he would fill his days. He would pound nails into four-by-fours all day long for Donny. He would patiently change the TV channels for Andy. He would load and unload the dishwasher for Agnes. He would read stories to Lucy until he knew them by heart. And when Stafford asked if he was doing okay, Bobby would smile and say yes.
“He’s holding the rest of them together,” Agnes said, which was precisely what Stafford feared. That Bobby Shepherd would wear himself out for the people he loved. That Bobby of the red hair and the pale-green eyes and the skin that burned too easily under a tropical sun would suffer for the weaknesses of others. Oh, Bobby, Stafford wanted to say, tell me what to do for this boy.
But as the weeks passed into months and Donny’s bunkhouse filled up with beds and mattresses, comic books and old chairs, a fragile semblance of routine began to emerge. In May, Stafford hired tutors to help the older boys catch up with their schoolwork. He installed a chalkboard that stretched across the back of the bunkhouse where he could help Andy make sense of the alphabet. In June, he toured the island schools with Agnes. He persuaded the Maui Softball Association to give Donny a late-summer tryout. He sent for the Shepherds’ cat, which arrived dewormed and hostile to everyone but Stafford. And on Tuesday, July 1, 2003, he bought a red minivan.
Agnes had taken to joining him on the stone wall for early-morning tea. Away from the house, they could talk freely, and although the views were spectacular at sunrise, they sat with their backs to the view, watching instead the house and the pool. The practicalities were significant. Should they stay in Hawaii? Should they move back to Kingston? Should they start over somewhere else? Would Callie ever forgive them? Were they going to screw things up again? There were no answers, though. No answers to the mystery of grief when one world has ended and a new one not yet begun.
In July, the warm weather brought calmer waters to the northern beaches and the haze from the Kona winds was displaced by the cleaner air of the trade winds. The days were hot now, and the beaches crowded with local families who staked their territory early in the day before the tourists arrived in search of their own patch of sand.
Agnes had promised they would go to Kapalua Bay when the older boys could swim six lengths of the pool. They would set up camp early, she said, and have lunch on the beach. They would spend the whole day there, and if they had a good time, they would go more often. Donny and Bobby would swim and try out their new snorkeling gear. Andy would practice his starfish in the shallow tidal pools with Agnes, and Lucy would play in the sand with Stafford, who had failed to master the front crawl, she said, to anyone’s satisfaction.
“Why does Bobby burn?” Andy asked, watching Agnes coat his brother’s back with sunscreen.
“It’s the price he pays for having such beautiful hair,” Agnes said. “Hold still, Bobby, I’m not done yet.”
“Red hair sucks,” Bobby said.
“Your great-grandfather had red hair,” Stafford said coming into the kitchen. “He brought it with him from Scotland.”
“He should have left it there,” Bobby said.
“His name was Andrew Shepherd—that’s your name, Andy—and he married a woman named Susan—Douglas, I think. She was from Alberta. It was right after the Great War. That’s what they called World War One. Are we really taking all this stuff to the beach, Agnes?”
“Yes, but let Donny load the van, please. He has it figured out.”
“Did she have red hair?” Andy asked.
“Who?”
“The lady.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Andy. It was already gray when I met her. They were a little older than most parents. Your grandfather was what they call a surprise.”
“Why?”
“Well, let me see. Agnes?”
“Over to you on that one,” Agnes said, smiling at Bobby. “You brought it up.”
“Because she could sing, Andy,” Stafford said. “She had a beautiful voice. She met your great-grandfather at church, and he heard her singing. She was in the choir. So that was a surprise. They lived on a farm across a field from us. That’s how I met your grandfather, Bobby. We used to play in that field.”
“Did he have red hair?” Andy asked.
“He did. And the girls were crazy about him. None of us could get a second look when your grandfather was around.”
“What girls?”
“The girls we went to school with. Girls like your grandmother. She had red hair too.”
“I thought her hair was gray.”
“No, that was your great-grandmother on your dad’s side. Your dad’s father’s mother. Your grandmother’s name was Carrie Ann. She wasn’t a Shepherd.”
“Why not?”
“Well, because she was your dad’s mother—your paternal grandmother.”
“I don’t know,” Andy said. “I don’t know her. Why does everybody have red hair?”
“Stafford, please,” Agnes said. “Enough with the family tree. You’re confusing the boy. I know just how you feel, Andy. He does it to me all the time. Okay, Bobby, you’re all set for the beach. Where’s Donny? Time to load up.”
“I want to hear about the family tree,” Bobby said.
And so it began.
Agnes was not given to moments of poetry but sitting in the shallow waters of Kapalua Bay that day, Lucy squirming on her lap, she felt for the first time that she might not be living on an island after all.
The older boys had unloaded the minivan, set up an umbrella, rolled out the towels, and unpacked the cooler. Bobby and Stafford were deep in conversation under the umbrella, Stafford dressed in those ridiculous shorts Andy picked out for him at the mall.
Andy was the first of the children to celebrate a birthday without his parents and it was hard to know how to mark such an occasion. But when the day came, he woke up in tears because he couldn’t remember where he left the hat his dad gave him on his last birthday. The hat was surely somewhere in their once-pristine house, but where? So Stafford drove him into town to buy—not a hat but a camera. A simple Polaroid camera that he thought might help Andy remember things and alleviate his anxiety. Which seemed to work, although who could have anticipated how many times a day they would hear the click of another picture or Andy’s excitement in capturing Bobby putting on his shoes or Lucy dropping an apple on the floor.
“Got it,” he would say, and what could they possibly do but agree?
“Yes, you did,” Stafford would say. “That’s the apple, all right. Right there on the floor.”
Andy was sitting now, camera at the ready, between Stafford and Bobby under the umbrella, watching Donny pace back and forth, waiting for Bobby so they could snorkel out to the reef to see the turtles. The bay was filled with swimmers, bathers, and snorkelers but the rules of the water were simple. Know your limits, look before you leap, and never ever swim alone. The truth of that had been drilled into Agnes by Arlene at that crumbling swimming pool in Madison. But this was not a day in Madison, and there were no more long walks across that park.
She was on a beach with four children.
A beautiful, crowded, noisy public beach on one of the hottest, busiest days of the year, surrounded by people of every possible description—young, old, half dressed or close to naked. And there in the middle of this hub of humanity was Stafford, deep in conversation with Bobby Shepherd under a cheap umbrella. A man who rarely appeared in public in anything less casual than linen pants and a tailored shirt, now wearing an oversize pair of Hawaiian shorts festooned with pink alligators that Andy picked out for him at the mall to thank him, he said, for the camera.
Bobby must have said something funny, because Stafford suddenly let out a great whoop of laughter. Not the measured, tight-lipped, mildly amused laugh he had perfected over the years, but a throw-your-head-back old-man belly laugh. Unsettling, perhaps, in a man not yet sixty but Andy was ready with his camera.
“Got it,” he said.
Donny was stripping off his shirt now, grabbing his snorkeling gear, and running into the water, flexing, yes flexing! when he realized a group of girls were watching him. Bobby, a few steps behind, turned once to smile before wading into the sea.
CHAPTER 29
Mercy
He restoreth my soul.
—Psalms 23:3
April 2, 2016
From the desk of Stafford Hopkins
Plantation Estates, Maui
Dear Donny,
Yup, it’s a letter. Hope you can read the scrawl. I’m sitting at his desk writing on his stationery with his pen. It feels a little weird on all levels but the storm’s knocked out power to most of the island and I wanted to write this down tonight while it’s still fresh in my mind.
First things first. If this is a tropical storm, I don’t want to meet a hurricane. We’re taking a hell of a pounding and it’s pitch black out there but Lucy is lighting candles and Andy is whipping up a gourmet meal of dill pickle dip and potato chips. He’s doing great, by the way. He loves working on the grounds crew and is extremely conscientious about his grass-cutting duties. Don’t ask unless you’re ready for a long conversation about mowing patterns. When he got the job, Stafford bought him a golf cart, which he “drives” down the hill to work every day and washes every night. He has a very cool uniform with Andrew Shepherd, Plantation Grounds Crew, on it. He’s up early and whistling, Agnes says, like a canary. Not so little though. I think he’s grown another inch and is going to beat his brothers in the height lottery.
And Lucy? She’s amazing, really great. She’s by far the only real Hawaiian in the family and I’m not sure they would have stayed without her. She was so little when we got here and says she doesn’t remember anything else. She’s wrapping up 11th grade and is a nationally ranked open-water swimmer thanks to Agnes who forced us (some of us anyway) to take all those lessons. I think she’ll get snapped up by the University of Hawaii but she’s being a bit cagey about her plans right now. I don’t think she wants to leave Maui but Agnes will make sure she doesn’t stay on her account. It would be nice for me if she came to Berkeley and judging from the way my thesis is (not) going, I’ll be there for a while. Don’t think Queen’s is in the cards though. You’ll have to carry the torch on that one yourself.
So now to it. Don’t beat yourself up. You’re good at it but don’t. Yes, Stafford is gone. But nobody saw it coming and you couldn’t have made it from Kingston to Maui in time anyway. I was only here because my spring break trip fell through. A stroke of luck, if that’s what it was.
Agnes and I were with him last night and most of the day and he didn’t seem anxious or afraid. More resigned, I’d say, almost like he was expecting it. The official cause of death was acute respiratory distress syndrome which means, to be blunt, his lungs filled with fluid and he drowned. He and Andy had gone to the beach to watch Lucy train and when they got back, he said he had a sore throat. That turned into bronchitis and about a week later, it was pneumonia. It seems strange that people can still die of something like that in the twenty-first century but Agnes couldn’t get him to go to the hospital until it was too late. She finally called Cynthia who gave him hell and talked him into it. Callie’s okay, I think, but she’s taking it hard. There was a lot of stuff between her and Stafford. She could have made it here in time but didn’t. Not sure why she waited but she did. I’m glad she’s got Cynthia in her life.
Lucy and Andy were with him in the morning and Andy kissed him and hugged him and tried to tell him a joke he’d memorized to make him laugh but Andy being Andy forgot the punch line and started to cry. Which meant Stafford tried to take off his oxygen mask and smile at him. The nurse gave Stafford shit for that, and Agnes shoveled it right back. At which point Andy remembered the line and retold the joke. A classic Hopkins-Shepherd moment. At the end, though, he wasn’t conscious, and Agnes asked the doctor to pull out all the tubes and take off the oxygen mask so she could see his face.
There was another fight about that, this time with the doctor and half the ICU staff. God, she was tough, Donny. Tough and a bit crazy maybe but Stafford was her guy, and he was going out her way. When he was all cleaned up, she took his hands out from under the sheet and held them for a long time. I asked if she wanted me to leave and she said something strange. She said Stafford wants you here, Bobby Shepherd. Not Bobby or BS as she used to call me when I tried to put one past her. Bobby Shepherd, she called me, and I think I saw his hand move when she said it.
So, I stayed. Stayed and kept the vigil for us Shepherds—you and me, Lucy and Andy, Mum, Dad, our grandfather Bobby, the grandmother we never knew, and the great-grandparents Stafford always talked about. He kept the stories alive for us, and without him, we wouldn’t know much.
After a while, Agnes asked me to bring Lucy and Andy in and then she did something I’d have to say was heroic. She stepped back and let Lucy and Andy each take one of his hands and hold on until he was gone. I watched her—the tears were falling but she was smiling and nodding like it was all fine. Anyhow, I hope I’ve done justice to this. I’ve tried to tell you what I saw and how it was, but I’ll be in Kingston at the end of the month, and we can talk more then.
You’ll hear more about this from Agnes in a few days but apparently Stafford wanted his ashes buried in the old Napanee graveyard next to Bobby Shepherd. This may cause a little local angst because the rest of his family are buried at a Catholic cemetery. But this is what he wanted and good luck to anyone trying to talk Agnes out of it. So we’ll see you in a few weeks, for the memorial, and now that you’ve got Mum and Dad’s old house opened up again, you can put us all up.
I call the lower bunk.
Bobby
Epilogue
“AND WHEN THE STORM had passed and the pirates all killed and captured, and their own boat wrecked upon the shores of a distant island, Bobby and Stafford would stretch out on the ground and lay their faces against the earth, turning over only to watch a sky that changed with each blink of their eyes.”
