No Resting Place Read Free Page B

the wife he had left—the second one, the red one—having crossed his red Rubicon to found a red empire, and founding instead a redneck republic.
    Again that scent assailed my father, so heady this time he could hardly believe that he only imagined it, unlikely as the alternative was. Never in all his many springs had he known one that forward. And yet as he crept nearer the old roadbed, drawn there by the chatter of a squirrel, it seemed to him that the scent hung still heavier on the air.
    A bushy tail twitched high in the crotch of a tree. My father raised his rifle, took aim, drew a deep breath—then lowered his rifle and walked directly to the roadway, and found the roses in full, furious bloom.
    It was unheard-of for them to bloom so early. Their doing so in this centennial year could only seem to my father a message sent to him, who alone could interpret it. It was as though the roses had been expressly forced so as to be out on this San Jacinto Day, reminders of a sordid betrayal connected with, yet forgotten amid, all the festivities, and an admonition to him to keep their meaning alive in me. Almost stifled by that scent, my father stood listening to the silence which for him was peopled by a host of spirits attending upon his decision to do his duty. But what was that? To whom did he owe it?
    To disregard the roses’ prompting would be for my father to renege upon a lifelong pledge. It would be to forsake an entire people. It would be to disinherit me from my birthright. Yet which was preferable for getting through life, knowledge of the truth or peace of mind? My father could not decide that question for himself; who was he to decide it for somebody else? He knew that once peace of mind was lost there was no recovering it. I might begrudge his taking mine from me, and all for the sake of events that had happened a hundred years before my time.
    And then maybe it might not disturb me, not even touch me. This was a possibility that struck my father now for the first time. Suppose he told me the story, to him so unforgettable, so unforgivable, and I was insensitive to it, indifferent to it? Suppose I said glibly, “Yes, it’s all very sad, but it was all a long, long time ago”? It was an old story even when he was told it; to me it might seem ancient history, far too remote from me for the people in it to be real.
    Enough that he had had to know the story from my age on. Its poignancy undiminished by time, it would affect me the same as it had him. He could recall as though it were only yesterday his terror as he listened to it, his outrage, his indignation, above all, his feeling of helplessness. It had disaffected him from his country and his community, had given him a lasting disrespect for its laws, its leaders, and the dismay he had felt as a child on learning what lies history told, thereby calling into question every accepted truth, had colored his entire life, had kept him even into his old age a rebellious boy. Ought he not to spare his son that? As a southerner, I already had a separate history from that of most of my fellow countrymen—a history sad enough; did I need yet another one to alienate me even from my fellow aliens?
    Thus did my father reach his decision to renounce his ghosts. To the injustice and neglect they had endured, he hardened himself to add this one: to bury them in lasting silence rather than spoil my simple joy, divide my loyalties and set me apart for life from those around me. Not even the prick that the roses inflicted upon him when he plucked one of them for a keepsake, not even the sight of his blood it drew, not even the reminder of that steady throb in his finger could undo his resolve.
    Then came my announcement that in our town’s first San Jacinto Day pageant I was to play the part of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, and this was too much for my father.
    It was first of all the story of a story. Of how, on another day, long ago, another boy, one