Last Summer Boys(36)

Standing back, he folds his arms.

“Why don’t he just go away and stay away?” I bawl. “Why’s he keep coming up here and botherin’ us like he does?”

I’m embarrassed now. The tears run like water from a faucet. Pete watches while I double over and blow my nose into the dry grass between my knees. “And how come Will’s gone all weird? I know he’s sad somebody shot Bobby Kennedy, but that ain’t any fault of ours. Why’s he got to go off all alone and leave us?”

I am running out of tears at this point, but still sobbing so that I can hardly sit still.

Pete waits. When I’m done talking, he walks to the other end of the pile and picks up the sledgehammer and a few of Dad’s thick metal wedges. He walks slowly back to where I sit and drops them into the dry grass in front of me.

“Get up,” he says.

He places the wedge, thin end first, against the center of the log I’ve been sitting on. He taps it lightly a few times with the sledge until its edge has bit into the wood.

He hands me the hammer. “Here.”

The sledge is awful heavy for me by myself, but Pete helps me steady it. I strain with all my might and I manage to lift it, slowly.

There’s a sharp cry of metal on metal. The sledge strikes the wedge at an angle, slides away. It ain’t as good a hit as it could have been, but the wedge has sunk deeper into the wood. A tiny crack has formed around it.

Pete helps me lift the hammer again.

I drive that wedge slowly the whole rest of the way into the log.

At last there’s a sound like someone’s ripped a piece of cloth, and the log comes apart into two halves.

Wordlessly, Pete kicks one out of the way, takes the wedge, and sets it into the center of the other half.

“Again,” he says.

I’m so focused on it I barely notice the sound of Kemper’s engine, or the dust from his car as he slides back down our drive for Hopkins Road.

I bring the hammer down again. I jump when I see orange sparks shoot from the metal and catch my breath as they fall. The grass is awful dry, but the sparks die in the dust.

I wipe the sweat from my forehead and lift the hammer again.

My back is to the barn, so I don’t see Dad come up. I know he’s there just the same.

I give the wedge a last slam. It’s dead on, but the wedge doesn’t go deep enough to split the log. I take a long breath and turn to face my father.

He stands bareheaded in the sun, forehead shining with sweat. He’s still got Mr. Kemper’s envelope in one hand. He folds it and stuffs it into his pocket.

I wait for him to speak, wait for that incredible fury he held back from Kemper in the drive. Dad controlled his anger then, but I didn’t. I let loose with my words and those stones, and I embarrassed him worse than he could have himself.

I can’t look him in the eye, so I stand there and wait.

For a long time Dad doesn’t speak. Then he steps forward and puts out his hand for the sledge.

I step aside as my father takes up his place at the log. In one fluid motion he swings the sledge, his powerful shoulders rolling under his overalls. The sledgehammer wheels in a giant arc over his head and comes smashing down, like a thunderbolt.

White wood shines in the sun. The wedge drives clean through the log and sinks six inches into the dirt.

Pete crouches and rolls another log into place.

Dad swings again. He splits it in two again, then hands the sledge to Pete.

Pete swings a few, then hands the sledge to me.

And that’s how we spend the afternoon, splitting wood, Pete and Dad and me.





The next morning we watch Bobby Kennedy’s funeral on the television. Before it begins, the network broadcasts the word SHAME in large blocky letters, and then we see the stone steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. Hundreds of people, black and white, young and old, wait in line to pass inside and say goodbye. After the Mass, the flag-covered casket is carried down the steps by gray-faced men, followed by a stream of weeping family and friends. President Johnson is there. So is Nixon.

Dad shuts off the TV.

Martin Luther King Jr. killed in April. Now Bobby Kennedy. I can’t help wondering who will be next.





They say bad luck comes in threes. If you had asked me, I’d have said things couldn’t get worse, what with Bobby Kennedy’s killing in California and that worm Kemper and his county council trying to steal our land to sink Apple Creek under a reservoir. But the day after Kennedy’s funeral, things do get worse.

Frankie and me are at the creek, skimming some of those smooth pink and blue river stones, when we hear Ma calling for Frankie from the front porch, shouting that his mother’s on the telephone.

You’ve never seen a boy move so fast.

I trot after him, catching sight of my mother’s face as I push through the screen door. A hard look is on it, her eyes flinty sharp and her lips closed tight with no color to them. I know right then: something’s happened.

By the time I get in, Frankie is standing at the phone in our kitchen with the receiver pressed tight against his ear. Aunt Effie’s voice comes squeaky to me, and I don’t catch everything she says, but I can tell something ain’t right.

“But how is he?” Frankie asks, still catching his breath.

Aunt Effie’s voice comes through the receiver in a thin squeal. Hard to hear her now, but a tremor seems to pass through Frankie, as if his whole body is water and a heavy stone’s been dropped into it, sinking deep and making waves as it goes. With a sudden chill, I remember Uncle Leone’s been looking for the murderers of them boys at that corner store, and I wonder if maybe he’s found them. Or if they found him.