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  Steam began to waft from the pot. Vaughan cut off the gas and poured two cups, handing the one without sugar to Michael.

  Vaughan didn’t ask, so Michael didn’t offer his own history. He tasted the coffee instead. It was strong and acidic, but far from the worst he’d ever had. Finally he said, “My father came back here to die, you know.”

  “Yes. Cancer.” Vaughan pronounced the word the way Michael’s mother did: first syllable like “cane,” no “r” in the second.

  “That’s right. End stage lung cancer. I don’t think he has more than a few days left. I came up here with him thinking he would talk to me, that maybe we could…” His own rising emotions cut him off.

  Vaughan nodded with something like sympathy. “I never knew who my daddy was. My momma died when I was nine and Mr. Bynum took me in to raise. She may have only been a seventeenth cousin or some such, but that was good enough for him. I was family. That was the kind of man he was.”

  “Look, I’m sorry I never knew what kind of man he was. That’s part of the reason I’m here.”

  Vaughan took a long drink and set the cup on a coaster on a TV tray. “So what do you want to know?”

  “Did you know my mother before she was married?”

  “Only to speak to. She was already gone off to college when I came here.”

  “Do you know what started the trouble between Grandpa and my father?”

  “I don’t think Mr. Bynum ever knew. Try as he might to be philosophical about it, you could see that it really hurt him. He loved your mama, and he couldn’t understand why your father had to move so far away, and why he got shut out.”

  “What’s the story on the house?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is nobody living there? What’s with all the weird additions?”

  “Nobody’s lived there since Mr. Bynum died. He was a very old-fashioned kind of man, the kind of man that changed the world to fit him instead of the other way around. Liked to do things himself, with his own two hands. He needed a new roof, he’d round up some of the neighbors and put one on. He got to feeling cramped, he’d take out a wall and add on some floor space. Maybe not the best carpenter in the world, but he got the job done.”

  “Who owns the place now?”

  “Well, it got carved up pretty good when Mr. Bynum died. At one point he owned fifteen hundred acres. He was a very big man in these parts. But he had to sell off a parcel here and a parcel there, and then a lot got sold for taxes after he passed. Your mother and her two sisters got parcels. This here piece you’re sitting on, including the house and on out to the highway, is mine now. Mr. Bynum left it to me.”

  “The house didn’t go to any of the sisters?”

  “They had no interest in working the land. They’d all gone off—your mother to Texas, Esther to California, Naomi to Minnesota. They all sold off their parcels, the way he knew they would. I was the only one stayed around to take care of him all those last years. None of the sisters even came for the funeral. ‘I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me,’ the Lord said to Isaiah. ‘They are gone away backward.’ ”

  “I thought Aunt Esther was in Virginia.” Naomi, he knew, had been dead for several years.

  “She moved to Richmond a few years ago. So I hear.”

  “You haven’t seen her.”

  Vaughan shook his head, a movement so small it was almost a tic.

  “So if the house is yours now…”

  “Why don’t I live in it? It’s a reasonable question. The answer is it’s too big for me. I’d rattle around in there like a BB in a boxcar.”

  “Can I see the inside?”

  It was like he’d asked to borrow Vaughan’s last fifty dollars. After a pained silence, Vaughan said, “Mr. Bynum never did like having people inside his house.”

  “I heard people used to come around all the time, looking for advice.”

  “Mr. Bynum liked to chat with folks on the front porch, sometimes in the parlor in the winter, but he was a very private man for all of that.”

  “I’m not folks. I’m family. I’d like to see the inside.”

  They played Mexican standoff for a few seconds more. Michael felt he had the edge: My father is dying while we’re sitting here.

  Apparently he got it across. Vaughan finally stood up, took one last drink of coffee, and said, “All right. Come on.”

  He took a set of keys off a hook by the front door and then held the door open for Michael. As they walked toward the main house, Henry the German Shepherd trotted up and fell into place next to Vaughan.

  Michael attempted to make nice. “What do you grow here?”

  “This used to be cotton country. Back before the War, of course.” He smiled as if he were joking and Michael realized with a chill that it was the Civil War he was talking about. “After the War it was tobacco. Up until the 1950s we would ship the cotton and tobacco both over to Durham to get milled or processed. All that’s gone now. Tobacco companies moved up to New York, and then the government scared people off cigarettes. Mills are all gone too. People want that Egyptian cotton or Indian cotton or NAFTA cotton. These days I mostly grow produce, sell what I can’t eat over to the Farmer’s Market in Raleigh. My needs are pretty simple.”

  “There’s worse ways to be.”

  “You can write that on my tombstone. I seen some of the world when I was in the service, and I lived in Durham for a while, but the older I get the less I want to do with any of it.”

  They climbed six steps to the porch. There was a wooden swing and painted wicker furniture, all of it clean and in good repair. Michael held the screen door while Vaughan unlocked a deadbolt as well as the lock on the knob. Vaughan went in first, then snapped his fingers again for Henry to follow. Michael brought up the rear.

  The house was dark, even after Vaughan flipped a wall switch and two table lamps came on in the parlor. Heavy drapes covered all the windows; it felt like they were holding back time as much as daylight. A yellow pine floor, dark with age, showed around the edges of carpets whose floral patterns had worn away under decades of feet. The furniture was faux Victorian, with intricately curved lines, wooden legs, and threadbare tufted upholstery. Doilies covered the end tables, and the candy dish on the marble-topped coffee table held wrapped Starlite mints of questionable age.

  Feigning casualness, Michael approached a wall of framed photographs. Score, he thought. There must have been 30 or 40 of them, in all shapes and sizes.

  The biggest frame held a matte with four oval cutouts, each holding a black and white photo. Three showed women in their late teens; the fourth, on the far right, was a poor match for the others. Its subject was a girl of no more than six or seven, with dark circles under haunted eyes. To her left was Ruth, Michael’s mother, pretty and self-conscious; he vaguely recognized the other two high school girls as his aunts.

  He turned to Vaughan. “There were four sisters?”

  Vaughan stayed where he was, leaning against the wall by the door. “You’re talking about the little one? Orpha died not long after that picture. She was seven. She had TB. They kept treating it and it kept coming back. This was 1953. Your mama never told you?”

  That put the sisters’ photos in order, oldest to youngest. “No. She only called her sisters when my father wasn’t around. It wasn’t something we ever talked about. I mean, that was all I knew when I was a kid. My father’s parents died before I started school. I guess I was an adolescent before I figured out that other families included aunts and uncles and grandparents.”

  He found the three surviving sisters in another photo, gathered around their father. Ruth nestled in one shoulder and the other two leaned in, but Wilmer wasn’t actually holding them. Ruth must have been in her early teens, and Naomi, the oldest, well into her 20s. Wilmer was not much taller than his daughters, his hair cut close to the scalp and receding from a face with sharp features, narrow eyes, and a smart-ass grin.

  One of Mic
hael’s few recollections of Wilmer Bynum was his open leering at women on the few occasions that the family was out in public. Michael immediately saw more photos that confirmed the memory: Wilmer with his arm around one woman or another, all taken at outdoor gatherings at the farm. The women’s smiles were embarrassed, as if only the presence of the camera kept them from objecting.

  Here was Wilmer again at his own wedding, barely out of his teens, by the look of him. Michael had to struggle to come up with the name of Wilmer’s wife: Regina. She was stiff and somber in the photo, wearing a high-necked, long-sleeved wedding dress that looked more to the next life than to any pleasure in this one.

  The wall held a dozen more family shots: Wilmer on a tractor, looking as if he didn’t quite belong there; Regina on the porch in a new Sunday bonnet, old beyond her years; the girls playing with a puppy on the lawn.

  Then came the celebrity shots. The first featured Wilmer with US Representative Randy Fogg, drinking iced tea on the porch and laughing. The picture must have been 30 years old; Fogg was still reasonably thin and his hair still black, and Wilmer looked no more than middle-aged. The photo was signed, “To the real man of the people—Always at your service—Randy Fogg.” Michael would have recognized him without the signature. Fogg was a gift to editorial cartoonists, with popping eyes and big jowls that earned him the nickname Congressman Frog, after the character in the Pogo comic strip. His racist politics, friendship with the gun and tobacco lobbies, and fist pounding harangues against “Commonism” had made him a legend as far away as Texas.

  In the next picture Wilmer stood shaking hands with Richard Nixon, again with the farmhouse in the background. This one was signed also, with just Nixon’s name. Michael figured the date for late seventies or early eighties, well after Nixon’s resignation, but it was clear that neither Vaughan nor Mrs. Wingate had been kidding about Wilmer Bynum’s importance.

  One large photo showed a barbeque at the house, complete with checkered tablecloths, big pots of food, and an enormous, partly dismembered pig, its flesh cooked white, stretched out next to a blackened pit in the ground. The words “pig picking” came into Michael’s head. The voice was his father’s, and it held a sneer. Randy Fogg was in this photo too, along with other important-looking men in suits, none of whom Michael recognized. Signs in the background urged Fogg’s reelection.

  All fascinating, Michael thought, but none of it was what he’d come for. He wanted to see Ruth pregnant, or Ruth with a newborn Michael in her arms, preferably standing in front of a hospital with its name clearly visible.

  Double French doors led to what appeared to be a den. Michael glanced at Vaughan. “Okay if I go in?”

  “Suit yourself,” Vaughan said, meaning “no.” He was clearly uneasy and anxious to get Michael out.

  Michael went in anyway. There was a big-screen television, a leather couch, and a matching recliner. More photos lined these walls, all of them showing Wilmer with Duke football and basketball players.

  Vaughan had followed as far as the French doors. “So he did leave the farm,” Michael said to him.

  “Mr. Bynum loved the Blue Devils. He had season tickets until it got to be too much of a hardship for him to make the trip. I drove him the last few years, but even that was too much in the end. He got the dish so he could watch all the games here.”

  All the players Wilmer posed with, Michael noted, were white. He doubted it was coincidence.

  “What’s this?” Michael pointed to a display cabinet next to the TV. Inside hung what seemed a random assortment of objects: headline-sized lead type from a printing press; a rubber roller; a ball peen hammer; a brace and bit; and what Michael thought might be a shoemaker’s awl, a wood-handled punch with an eye in the middle of the blade.

  “Like I said, Mr. Bynum liked working with his hands. He used to collect old tools. There’s a bunch of old rusted whipsaw blades and tillers and post hole diggers and the like out in the shed.”

  “And the piano?” Michael asked. “I can’t feature him as a musician.” A black baby grand sat at the far end of the room, topped with the largest doily Michael had ever seen. A single framed photo of Regina as a young woman sat on top.

  “Mrs. Bynum played. The piano used to be in the parlor. She would play hymns and old Stephen Foster songs and the like. Christmas carols every Christmas. Mr. Bynum moved it in here as a kind of memorial to her.”

  Michael trailed one finger over the keyboard cover. It was waxed and buffed to a high polish and completely dust-free. Startled, he went to the TV and touched the screen. No dust there either. He tried the top of the glass cabinet. Clean.

  He looked at Vaughan. “You keep it like this all the time?”

  Vaughan seemed even more uncomfortable. “It’s a way for me to show my respect.”

  This, Michael thought, is getting creepy. He took a cursory look through the rest of the ground floor. The huge, dark dining room had a doily and candles in the center of the massive oak table. The kitchen was spotless and the empty refrigerator was plugged in and running cold. Vaughan, leaning against the door of a broom closet, said, “Is there something particular you’re looking for?”

  Michael blushed and closed the refrigerator. For future reference he noted the back door, with its six narrow windowpanes and a deadbolt that opened from the inside without a key.

  In the formal study Michael was surprised to find a late model Dell desktop connected to an Ethernet cable. “Wilmer was on the Internet?”

  “Through the dish. It was hard for him to see people in the later years. He used email to keep in touch with his friends.”

  The computer still seemed functional. Michael pictured Vaughan coming over late at night for cable sports and Internet porn, and found the thought more lonely and depressing than anything else. He sat in Wilmer’s solid oak desk chair, ignoring Vaughan’s look of alarm, and said, “When did you go to Vietnam?”

  “My 18th birthday was July 23rd of 1969. This was before the lottery, so with my not being in college or anything, the chances of my getting drafted were pretty good. I tried to make the best of it, went to downtown Raleigh and signed up, hoping I’d get some choice about what they did with me. I didn’t. They shipped me out for Fort Ord in California at the end of August, and 13 weeks later I was on a C-141 headed for DaNang.” The dog decided they would be there for a while and lay down at Vaughan’s feet with a heavy sigh.

  It was the opening Michael had been aiming for. “So you just missed my being born.”

  Vaughan looked at him like he’d started talking in Russian. “August of ’69, I’m talking about. You weren’t born until July of 1970.”

  Michael felt like the room had tilted sideways and he was rolling away from Vaughan on the wheels of the chair. “My birthday,” he said carefully, “is September 19th, 1969.”

  “That’s not possible. Aunt Ruth came to see me off when I left, and she wasn’t even pregnant. She was two months gone when they moved to Dallas, and she didn’t tell anybody about it till she got there. You were born there the next summer.”

  That, Michael thought, would certainly explain the missing hospital records. “Why would they lie? Why say I was born here?”

  “Some kind of tax dodge, maybe? Why don’t you ask your parents?”

  “Because I don’t know that they would tell me the truth. You’re sure about all this?”

  “In July of 1970 I was deep in country, blowing up gook tunnels in the central highlands. Every night I would try to imagine I was in North Carolina, and I would memorize every detail of every letter I got from home. It was in July that Mr. Bynum wrote to tell me that Aunt Ruth had had her a baby boy, named Michael.”

  “I need to go,” Michael said. The desire was suddenly overwhelming.

  “Sure, I understand,” Vaughan said, already moving toward the door. Once outside he locked the deadbolt and hesitated. “I really do know what it’s like to have all those questions and not be able to get answers.” Though his arms were fol
ded across his chest, Michael sensed he was reaching out to the best of his ability.

  “Thanks,” Michael said. “I appreciate it.”

  They walked in silence to the car, where Michael knelt again, ran his hand by Henry for permission, and then scratched the dog’s thick chest fur. Henry licked his chops and squirmed with pleasure.

  “You like dogs?” Vaughan asked approvingly.

  Michael stood up. He considered himself more of a cat person, but in truth he could watch any animal for hours. “Sure. What’s not to like?”

  “They’re God’s creatures,” Vaughan said, with a smile completely free of irony or condescension. “Give me a dog over a man any day.”

  *

  Michael drove as far as I-40, then pulled off into the weeds beside the access road.

  Until he was 12 and began spending as much time as he could at his friend Jimmy’s house, Michael had assumed his parents were the same as anyone else’s: his father’s long working hours and unpredictable moods, his mother’s exaggerated, artificial cheerfulness. The times his father would stare at him with a kind of mournful longing were as bad as his fits of frustration and tightly contained anger. Michael hid from both extremes, as he hid from his mother’s intermittent and clumsy attempts to hug him or pet him, as if he were a lapdog or stuffed animal. He spent many hours in the walk-in closet in his bedroom with a reading lamp and his sketchbook and comics. It wasn’t enough that his parents never came into his room without permission. He needed to be where there were no windows.

  He couldn’t remember his father ever throwing a ball with him, but on weekends when he was very young the two of them might visit a construction site. Michael would sit in a silent grader or crane, pretending to work the controls while his father explained the job to him: the tilt wall forms, the crushed gravel for the roadbeds, the grids of reinforcing rods.

  It seemed to be more about his father wanting an audience, a witness to what he did, than any expectation that Michael would find a calling there. When Michael showed no interest in drafting, his father let it go; when Michael wanted to draw superheroes and dinosaurs, his father showed him the one thing he could offer, which was the mechanics of perspective—one point, two point, and finally three. Even then Michael felt his father’s lack of emotional investment, as if Michael were a pet whose real owner was expected back any minute.