Moonchasers and Other Stories

Seasons of the Heart

In the mornings now, the fog didn’t burn off till much before eight, and the dew stayed silver past nine, and the deeper shadows stayed all morning long in the fine red barn I’d helped build last year. The summer was fleeing.

But that wasn’t how I knew autumn was coming.

No, for that all I had to do was look at the freckled face of my granddaughter, Lisa, who would be entering eighth grade this year at the consolidated school ten miles west.

For as much as she read, and when she wasn’t doing chores she was always reading something, even when she sat in front of the TV, she hated school. I don’t think she’d had her first serious crush yet, and the girlfriends available to her struck her as a little frivolous. They were town girls and they didn’t have Lisa’s responsibilities.

This particular morning went pretty much as usual.

We had a couple cups of coffee, Lisa and I, and then we hiked down to the barn. It was still dark. You could hear the horses in the hills waking with the dawn, and closer by the chickens. Turn-over day was coming, a frantic day in the life of a farmer. You take the birds to market and then have twenty-four hours to clean out the chicken house before the new shipment of baby chicks arrives. First time I ever did it, I was worn out for three days. That’s when my daughter, Emmy, read me the Booker T. Washington quote I’d come to savor: “No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as writing a poem.” Those particular words work just as well as Bengay on sore muscles. For me, anyway.

The barn smelled summer sweet of fresh milk. Lisa liked to lead the animals into the stalls; she had her own reassuring way of talking to them in a language understood only by cows and folk under fourteen years of age. She also liked to hook them up.

The actual milking, I usually did. Lisa always helped me pour the fresh milk into dumping stations. We tried to get a lot of milk per day. We had big payments to make on this barn. The Douglas fir we’d used for the wood hadn’t come cheap. Nor had the electricity, the milking machines or the insulation. You’ve got to take damned good care of dairy cattle.

I worked straight through till Lisa finished cleaning up the east end of the barn. This was one of those days when she wanted to do some of the milking herself. I was happy to let her do it.

Everything went fine till I stepped outside the barn to have a few puffs on my pipe.

Funny thing was, I’d given up both cigarettes and pipe years before. But after Dr. Wharton, back in Chicago when I was still with the flying service, told me about the cancer, I found an old briar pipe of mine and took it up again. I brought it to the farm with me when I came to live with Emmy. I never smoked it in an enclosed area. I didn’t want Lisa to pick up any secondhand smoke.

The chestnut mare was on the far hill. She was a beauty and seemed to know it, always prancing about to music no one else seemed to hear, or bucking against the sundown sky when she looked all mythic and ethereal in the darkening day.

And that’s just what I was doing, getting my pipe fired up and looking at the roan, when the rifle shot ripped away a large chunk of wood from the door frame no more than three inches to my right.

I wasn’t sure what it was. In movies, the would-be target always pitches himself left or right but I just stood there for several long seconds before the echo of the bullet whining past me made me realize what happened.

Only then did I move, running into the barn to warn Lisa but she already knew that something had happened.

Lisa is a tall, slender girl with the dignified appeal of her mother. You wouldn’t call either of them beauties but in their fine blond hair and their melancholy brown eyes and their quick and sometimes sad grins, you see the stuff of true heartbreakers, a tradition they inherited from my wife, who broke my heart by leaving me for an advertising man when Emmy was nine years old.

“God, that was a gunshot wasn’t it?”

“I’m afraid it was.”

“You think it was accidental, Grandad?”

“I don’t know. Not yet, anyway. But for now, let’s stay in the barn.”

“I wonder if Mom heard it.”

I smiled. “Not the way she sleeps.”

She put her arms around me and gave me a hug. “I was really scared. For you, I mean. I was afraid somebody might have — Well, you know.”

I hugged her back. “I’m fine, honey. But I’ll tell you what. I want you to go stand in that corner over there while I go up in the loft and see if I can spot anybody.”

“It’s so weird. Nobody knows you out here.”

“Nobody that I know of, anyway.”

She broke our hug and looked up at me with those magnificent and often mischievous eyes. “Grandad?”

She always used a certain tone when she was about to ask me something she wasn’t sure about.

“Here it is. You’ve got that tone.”

Her bony shoulders shrugged beneath her T-shirt, which depicted a rock-and-roll band I’d never heard of. They were called the Flesh Eaters and she played their tapes a lot.

“I was just wondering if you’d be mad if I wrote it up.”

“Wrote what up?”

“You know. Somebody shooting at you.”

“Oh.”

“Mrs. Price’ll make us do one of those dorky how-I-spent-mysummer-vacation deals. It’d be cool if I could write about how a killer was stalking my Grandad.”

“Yeah,” I said, “that sure sounds cool all right.”

She grinned the grin and I saw both her mother and her grandmother in it. “I mean, I might ‘enhance’ it a little bit. But not a lot.”

“Fine by me, pumpkin,” I said, leading her over to the corner of the barn where several bales of hay would absorb a gun shot. “I’ll be right back.”

I figured that the shooter was most likely gone, long gone probably, but I wanted to make sure before I let Lisa stroll back into the barnyard.

I went up the ladder to the hayloft, sneezing all the way. My sinuses act up whenever I get even close to the loft. I used to think it was the hay but then I read a Farm Bulletin item saying it could be the rat droppings. For someone who grew up in the Hyde Park area of Chicago, rat droppings are not something you often consider as a sinus irritant. Farm life was different. I loved it.

I eased the loft door open a few inches. Then stopped.

I waited a full two minutes. No rifle fire.

I pushed the door open several more inches and looked outside. Miles of dark green corn and soybeans and alfalfa. On the hill just about where the mare was, I saw a tree where the gunman might have fired from. Gnarly old oak with branches stout enough for a hanging.

“Grandad?” Lisa called up from below.

“Yeah, hon?”

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, hon. How about you?”

“God, I shouldn’t have asked you if I could write about this for my class.”

“Oh, why not?”

“Because this could be real serious. I mean, maybe it wasn’t accidental.”

“Now you sound like your grandmother.”

“Huh?”

“She’d always do something and then get guilty and start apologizing.” I didn’t add that despite her apologies, her grandmother generally went right back to doing whatever she’d apologized for in the first place.

“I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings, Grandad.”

Lisa never used to treat me like this. So dutifully. Nor did her mother. To them, I was just the biggest kid in the family and was so treated. But the cancer changed all that. Now they’d do something spontaneous and then right away they’d start worrying. There’s a grim decorum that goes along with the disease. You become this big sad frail guy who, they seem to think, just can’t deal with any of life’s daily wear and tear.

That’s one of the nice things about my support group. We get to laugh a lot about the delicate way our loved ones treat us sometimes. It’s not mean laughter. Hell, we understand that they wouldn’t treat us this way if they didn’t love us, and love us a lot. But sometimes their dutifulness can be kind of funny in an endearing way.

“You ‘enhance’ it any way you want to, pumpkin,” I said, and started to look around at fields sprawling out in front of me.

I also started sneezing pretty bad again, too.

I spent ten more minutes in the loft, finally deciding it was safe for us to venture out as soon as we finished with the milking for the day.

On the way out of the barn, I said, “Don’t tell your mom. You know, about the gunshot.”

“How come?”

“You must be crazy, kid. You know how she worries about me.” Lisa smiled. “How about making a bargain?”

“Oh-oh. Here it comes.”

“I won’t tell Mom and you let me drive the tractor.”

Lots of farm kids die in tractor accidents every year. I didn’t want Lisa to be one of them. “I’ll think about it, how’s that?”

“Then I guess I’ll just have to think about it, too.” But she laughed.

I pulled her closer, my arm around her shoulder. “You think I’m wrong? About not telling your mom?”

She thought for a while. “Nah, I guess not. I mean, Mom really does worry about you a lot already.”

We were halfway to the house, a ranch-style home of blond brick with an evergreen windbreak and a white dish antenna east of the trees.

Just as we reached the walk leading to the house, I heard a heavy car come rumbling up the driveway, raising dust and setting both collies to barking. The car was a new baby blue Pontiac with official police insignia decaled on the side.

I stopped, turned around, grinned at Lisa. “Remember now, you’ve got Friday.”

“Yeah, I wish I had Saturday, the way you do.”

We’d been betting the last two weeks when Chief of Police Nick Bingham was going to ask Emmy to marry him. They’d been going out for three years, and two weeks ago Nick had said, “I’ve never said this to you before, Emmy, but you know when I turned forty last year? Well, ever since, I’ve had this loneliness right in here. A burning.” And of course my wiseass daughter had said, “Maybe it’s gas.” She told this to Lisa and me at breakfast the next morning, relishing the punchline.

Because Nick had never said anything like this at all in his three years of courting her, Emmy figured he was just about to pop the question.

So Lisa and I started this little pool. Last week I bet he’d ask her on Friday night and she’d bet he’d ask her on Saturday. But he hadn’t asked her either night. Now the weekend was approaching again.

Nick got out of the car in sections. In high school he’d played basketball on a team that had gone three times to state finals and had finished second twice. Nick had played center. He was just over six-five. He went three years to college but dropped out to finish harvest when his father died of a heart attack. He never got the degree. But he did become a good lawman.

“Morning,” he said.

“Pink glazed?” Lisa said when she saw the white sack dangling from his left hand.

“Two of ’em are, kiddo.”

“Can I have one?”

“No,” he said, pulling her to him and giving her a kind of affectionate Dutch rub. “You can have both of ’em.”

He wasn’t what you’d call handsome but there was a quiet manliness to the broken nose and the intelligent blue eyes that local ladies, including my own daughter, seemed to find attractive, especially when he was in his khaki uniform. They didn’t seem to mind that he was balding fast.

Emmy greeted us at the door in a blue sweatshirt and jeans and the kind of white Keds she’d worn ever since she was a tot. No high-priced running shoes for her. With her earnest little face and tortoiseshell glasses, she always reminded me of those quiet, pretty girls I never got to know in my high school class. Her blond hair was cinched in a ponytail that bobbed as she walked.

“Coffee’s on,” she said, taking the hug Nick offered as he came through the door.

We did this three, four times a week, Nick finishing up his morning meeting with his eight officers then stopping by Donut Dan’s and coming out here for breakfast.

Strictly speaking, I was supposed to be eating food a little more nutritional than donuts but this morning I decided to indulge.

The conversation ran its usual course. Lisa and Nick joked with each other, Emmy reminded me about all the vitamins and pills I was supposed to take every morning, and I told them about how hard a time I was having finding a few good extra hands for harvest.

Lisa sounded subdued this morning, which caused Emmy to say, “You feeling all right, hon? You seem sort of quiet.”

Lisa faked a grin. “Just all that hard work Grandad made me do. Wore me out.”

Lisa was still thinking about the rifle shot. So was I. Several times my eyes strayed to Nick’s holster and gun.

Just as we were all starting on our second cup of coffee, Lisa included, a car horn sounded at the far end of our driveway. The mail was here.

Wanting a little time to myself, I said I’d get the mail. Sometimes Lisa walked down to the mailbox with me but this morning she was still working on the second pink glazed donut. The rifle shot had apparently affected her appetite.

After the surgery and the recuperation, I decided to spend whatever time I had left — months maybe or years, the doctors just weren’t very sure — living out my Chicago-boy fantasy of being a farmer. Hell hadn’t my daughter become a farmer? I inhaled relatively pure fresh air and less than two miles away was a fast-running river where, with the right spoon and plug and sippner, you could catch trout all day long.

I tried to think of that now, as I walked down the rutted road to the mailbox. I was lucky. Few people ever have their fantasies come true. I lived with those I loved, I got to see things grow, and I had for my restive pleasure the sights of beautiful land. And there was a good chance that I was going to kick the cancer I’d been fighting the past two years.

So why did somebody want to go and spoil it for me by shooting at me?

As I neared the mailbox, I admitted to myself that the shot hadn’t been accidental. Nor had it been meant to kill me. The shooter was good enough to put a bullet close to my head without doing me any damage. For whatever reason, he’d simply wanted to scare me.

The mailbox held all the usual goodies, circulars from True-Value, Younkers Department Store, Hy-Vee supermarkets, Drug-town and the Ford dealer where I’d bought my prize blue pickup.

The number ten white envelope, the one addressed to me, was the last thing I took from the mailbox.

I knew immediately that the envelope had something to do with the rifle shot this morning. Some kind of telepathic insight allowed me to understand this fact.

There was neither note nor letter inside, simply a photograph, a photo far more expressive than words could ever have been.

I looked away from it at first then slowly came back to it, the edge of it pincered between my thumb and forefinger.

I looked at it for a very long time. I felt hot, sweaty, though it was still early morning. I felt scared and ashamed and sick as I stared at it. So many years ago it had been; something done by a man with my name; but not the same man who bore that name today.

I tucked the picture into the envelope and went back to the house.

When I was back at the table, a cup of coffee in my hand, I noticed that Emmy was staring at me. “You all right, Dad?”

“I’m fine. Maybe just getting a touch of the flu or something.”

While that would normally be a good excuse for looking gray and shaken, to the daughter of a cancer patient those are terrifying words. As if the patient himself doesn’t worry about every little ache and pain. But to tell someone who loves you that you suddenly feel sick...

I reached across the table and said to Nick, “You mind if I hold hands with your girl?”

Nick smiled. “Not as long as you don’t make a habit of it.”

I took her hand for perhaps the millionth time in my life, holding in the memory of all the things this hand had been, child, girl, wife, mother.

“I’m fine, honey. Really.”

All she wanted me to see was the love in those blue eyes. But I also saw the fear. I wanted to sit her on my lap as I once had, and rock her on my knees, and tell her that everything was going to be just fine.

“OK?” I said.

“OK,” she half whispered.

Nick went back to telling Lisa why her school should have an especially good basketball team this year.

On the wall to the right of the kitchen table, Emmy had hung several framed advertisements from turn-of-the-century magazines, sweet little girls in bonnets and braids, and freckled boys with dogs even cuter than they were, all the faces and poses leading you to believe that theirs was a far more innocent era than ours. But the older I got, the more I realized that the human predicament had always been the same. It had just dressed up in different clothes.

There was one photograph up there. A grimy man in military fatigues standing with a cigarette dangling from his lips and an M-16 leaning against him. Trying to look tough when all he was was scared. The man was me.

“Well,” Nick said about ten minutes later.

Emmy and Lisa giggled.

No matter how many times they kidded Nick about saying “Well” each time he was about to announce his imminent departure, he kept right on saying it.

Emmy walked him out to the car.

I filled the sink with hot soapy water. Lisa piled the breakfast dishes in.

“Grandad?”

“Yes, hon?”

“You sure you don’t want to tell Mom about the gunshot?”

“No, hon, I don’t. I know it’s tempting but she’s got enough to worry about.” Emmy had had a long and miserable first marriage to a man who had treated adultery like the national pastime. Now, on the small amount of money she got from the farm and from me paying room and board, Emmy had to raise a daughter. She didn’t need any more anxiety.

“I’m going into town,” I said, as I started to wash the dishes and hand them one by one to Lisa, who was drying.

“How come?”

“Oh, a little business.”

“What kind of business?”

“I just want to check out the downtown area.”

“For what?”

I laughed. “I’ll fill out a written report when I get back.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“Oh, no, hon. This is something I have to do alone.”

“Detectives usually have partners.”

“I think that’s just on TV.”

“Huh-uh. In Weekly Reader last year there was this article on Chicago police and it said that they usually worked in teams. Team means two. You and me, Grandad.”

I guessed I really wasn’t going to do much more than nose around. Probably wouldn’t hurt for her to ride along.

By the time Emmy got back to the kitchen, looking every bit as happy as I wanted her to be, Lisa and I had finished the dishes and were ready for town.

“When will you be back?”

“Oh, hour or two.”

Emmy was suspicious. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“Nothing, sweetheart,” I said, leaning over and kissing her on the cheek. “Honest.”

We went out and got in the truck, passing the old cedar chest Lisa had converted into a giant toolbox and placed in the back of the pickup. She had fastened it with strong twine so it wouldn’t shift around. It looked kind of funny sitting there like that but Lisa had worked hard at it so I wasn’t about to take it out.

Twenty years ago there was hope that the interstate being discussed would run just east of our little town. Unfortunately, it ran north, and twenty miles away. Today the downtown is four two-block streets consisting of dusty redbrick buildings all built before 1930. The post office and the two supermarkets and the five taverns are the busiest places.

I started at the post office, asking for Ev Meader, the man who runs it.

“Gettin’ ready for school, Lisa?” Ev said when we came into his office.

She made a face. Ev laughed. “So what can I do for ya today?”

“Wondering if you heard of anybody new moving in around here?” I said. “You know, filling out a new address card.”

He scratched his bald head. “Not in the past couple weeks. Least I don’t think so. But let me check.” He left the office.

I looked down at Lisa. “You going to ask me?”

“Ask you what, Grandad?”

“Ask me how come I’m asking Ev about new people moving into town.”

She grinned. “Figured I’d wait till we got back in the truck.”

“No new address cards,” Ev said when he came back. “I’ll keep an eye out for you if you want.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

In the truck, Lisa said, “Is it all right if I ask you now?”

“I’m wondering if that shot this morning didn’t coincide with somebody moving here. Somebody who came here just so they could deal with me.”

“You mean, like somebody’s after you or something like that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But who’d be after you?”

“I don’t know.”

The man at the first hotel had a pot belly and merry red suspenders. “Asian, you say?”

“Right.”

“Nope. No Asians that I signed in, anyway.”

“How about at night?”

“I can check the book.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“Two weeks back be all right?”

“That’d been fine.”

But two weeks back revealed no Asians. “Sorry,” he said, hooking his thumbs in his suspenders.

“How come Asians?” Lisa said after we were back in the truck.

“Just because of something that happened to me once.”

We rode in silence for a time.

“Grandad?”

“Yeah.”

“You going to tell me? About what happened to you once?”

“Not right now, hon.”

“How come?”

“Too hard for me to talk about.” And it was. Every time I thought about it for longer than a minute, I could feel my eyes tear up.

The woman at the second motel wore a black T-shirt with a yellow hawk on it. Beneath it said, “I’ll do anything for the Hawkeyes.” Anything was underlined. The Hawkeyes were the U of Iowa.

“Couple black guys, some kind of salesmen I guess, but no Asians,” she said.

“How about at night?”

She laughed. “Bob works at night. He doesn’t much like people who aren’t white. We had an Asian guy, I’d hear about it, believe me.”

The man at the third motel, a hearty man with a farmer’s tan and a cheap pair of false teeth said, “No Asian.”

“Maybe he came at night?”

“The boy, he works the night shift. Those robberies we had a few months back — that convenience store where that girl got shot? — ever since, he keeps a sharp eye out. Usually tells me all about the guests. He didn’t mention any Asian.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure.”

“I’ll be happy to ask around,” he said.

“Cochran, right?”

“Henry Cochran. Right.”

“Thanks for your help, Henry.”

“You bet.”

“You going to tell me yet?” Lisa said when we were in the pickup and headed back to the farm.

“Not yet.”

“Am I bugging you, Grandad?”

I smiled at her. “Maybe a little.”

“Then I won’t ask you anymore.”

She leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek, after which she settled back on her side of the seat.

“You know what I forgot to do today?” she said after awhile.

“What?”

“Tell you I loved you.”

“Well, I guess you’d better hurry up and do it then.”

“I love you, Grandad.”

The funny thing was, I’d never been able to cry much till the cancer, which was a few years ago when I turned fifty-two. Not even when my two best soldier friends got killed in Nam did I cry. Not even when my wife left me did I cry. But these days all sorts of things made me cry. And not just about sad things, either. Seeing a horse run free could make me cry; and certain old songs; and my granddaughter’s face when she was telling me she loved me.

“I love you, too, Lisa,” I said, and gave her hand a squeeze.

That afternoon Lisa and I spent three hours raking corn in a wagon next to the silo, stopping only when the milk truck came. As usual Ken, the driver, took a sample out of the cooling vat where the milk had been stored. He wanted to get a reading on the butterfat content of the milk. When the truck was just rolling brown dust on the distant road, Lisa and I went back to raking the corn. At five we knocked off. Lisa rode her bike down the road to the creek where she was trying to catch a milk snake for her science class this fall.

I was in scrubbing up for dinner when Emmy called me to the phone. “There’s a woman on the line for you. Dad. She’s got some kind of accent.”

“I’ll take it in the TV room,” I said.

“This is Mr. Wilson?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Wilson, my name is Nguyn Mai. I am from Vietnam here visiting.”

“I see.”

“I would like to meet you tonight. I am staying in Iowa City but I would meet you at The Fireplace restaurant. You know where is?”

“Yes, The Fireplace is downtown here.”

“Yes. Would seven o’clock be reasonable for you?”

“I have to say eight. There’s a meeting I need to go to first.”

“I would appreciate it, Mr. Wilson.”

She sounded intelligent and probably middle-aged. I got no sense of her mood.

“Eight o’clock,” I said.

After dinner, I took a shower and climbed into a newly washed pair of chinos and a white button-down shirt and a blue windbreaker.

In town, I parked in the Elks lot. Across the cinder alley was the meeting room we used for our support group.

The hour went quickly. There was a new woman there tonight, shy and fresh with fear after her recent operation for breast cancer. At one point, telling us how she was sometimes scared to sleep, she started crying. She was sitting next to me so I put my arm around her and held her till she felt all right again. That was another thing I’d never been too good at till the cancer, showing tenderness.

There were seven of us tonight. We described our respective weeks since the last meeting, exchanged a few low-fat recipes and listened to one of the men discuss some of the problems he was having with his chemotherapy treatments. We finished off with a prayer and then everybody else headed for the coffee pot and the low-fat kolaches one of the women had baked especially for this meeting.

At eight I walked through the door of The Fireplace and got my first look at Nguyn Mai. She was small and fiftyish and pretty in the way of her people. She wore an American dress, dark and simple, a white sweater draped over her shoulders. Her eyes were friendly and sad.

After I ordered my coffee, she said, “I’m sorry I must trouble you, Mr. Wilson.”

“Robert is what most people call me.”

“Robert, then.” She paused, looked down, looked up again. “My brother Ngyun Dang plans to kill you.”

I told her about the rifle shot this morning, and the envelope later.

“He was never the same,” she said, “after it happened. I am his oldest sister. There was one sister younger, Hong. This is the one who died. She was six years old. Dang, who was twelve at the time, took care of the funeral all by himself, would not even let my parents see her until after he had put her in her casket. Dang always believed in the old religious ways. He buried Hong in our backyard, according to ancient custom. The old ways teach that the head of a virgin girl is very valuable and can be used as a very powerful talisman to bring luck to the family members. Dang was certainly lucky. When he was fourteen, he left our home and went to Saigon. Within ten years, he was a millionaire. He deals in imports. He spent his fortune tracking you down. It was not easy.”

“Were you there that day?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see what happened?”

She nodded.

“I didn’t kill her intentionally. If you saw what happened, you know that’s the truth.”

“The truth is in the mind’s eye, Robert. In my eye, I know you were frightened by a Cong soldier at the other end of our backyard. You turned and fired and accidentally shot Hong. But this is not what my brother saw.”

“He saw me kill her in cold blood?”

“Yes.”

“But why would I shoot a little girl?”

“It was done, you know, by both sides. Maybe not by you but by others.”

“And so now he’s here.”

“To kill you.”

During my second cup of coffee, she said, “I am afraid for him. I do not wish to see you killed but even more I do not wish to see my brother killed. I know that is selfish but those are my feelings.”

“I’d have the same feelings.” I paused and said; “Do you know where he is?”

“No.”

“I looked for him today, after the envelope came.”

“And you didn’t find him?”

I shook my head. “For what it’s worth, Mai, I never forgot what happened that day.”

“No?”

“When I got back to the states, I started having nightmares about it. And very bad migraine headaches. I even went to a psychologist for a year or so. Everybody said I shouldn’t feel guilty, that those accidents happen in war. Got so bad, it started to take its toll on my marriage. I wasn’t much of a husband — or a father, for that matter — and eventually my wife left me. I’d look round at the other guys I’d served with. They’d done ugly things, too, but if it bothered them, they didn’t let on. I was even going to go back to Nam and look up your family and tell them I was sorry but my daughter wouldn’t let me. At that point, she was ready to put me in a mental hospital. She said that if I seriously tried to go, she’d put me away for sure. I knew she meant it.”

“Did you talk to the police today, about his taking a shot at you?”

“You’ve got to understand something here, Mai. I don’t want your brother arrested. I want to find him and talk to him and help him if I can. There hasn’t been a day in my life since when I haven’t wanted to pick up the phone and talk to your family and tell them how sorry I am.”

“If only we could find Dang.”

“I’ll start looking again tomorrow.”

“I feel hopeful for the first time in many years.”

I stayed up past midnight because I knew I wouldn’t sleep well. There was a Charles Bronson movie on TV, in the course of which he killed four or five people. Before that day in Nam, when I’d been so scared that I’d mistaken a little girl for a VC, I had been all enamored of violence. But no longer. After the war, I gave away all my guns and nearly all my pretensions to machismo. I knew too well where machismo sometimes led.

Ten hours later, coming in from morning chores, I heard the phone ringing. Emmy said it was for me.

It was the motel man with the merry red suspenders. “I heard something you might be interested in.”

“Oh?”

“You know where the old Sheldon farm is?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well there’s a lime quarry due west of the power station. You know where that would be?”

“I can find it.”

“There’s a house trailer somewhere back in there. Hippie couple lived there for years but they moved to New Mexico last year. Guy in town who owns a tavern — Shelby, maybe you know him — he bought their trailer from them and rents it out sort of like an apartment. Or thought he would, anyway. Hasn’t had much luck. Till last week. That’s when this Asian guy rented it from him.”

The day was ridiculously beautiful, the sweet smoky breath of autumn on the air, the horses in the hills shining the color of saddle leather.

The lime quarry had been closed for years. Some of the equipment had been left behind. Everything was rusted now. The whining wind gave the place the sound of desolation.

I pointed the pickup into the hills where oak and hickory and basswood bloomed, and elm and ash and ironwood leaves caught the bright bouncing beams of the sun.

The trailer was in a grassy valley, buffalo grass knee-deep and waving in the wind, a silver S of creek winding behind the rusted old Airstream.

I pulled off the road in the dusty hills and walked the rest of the way down.

There was a lightning-dead elm thirty yards from the trailer. When I reached it, I got behind it so I could get a better look at the Airstream.

No noise came from the open windows, no smoke from the tin chimney.

I went up to the trailer. Every few feet I expected to hear a bullet cracking from a rifle.

The window screens were badly torn, the three steps tilted rightward, and the two propane tanks to the right of the door leaned forward as if they might fall at any moment.

I reached the steps, tried the door. Locked. Dang was gone. Picking the lock encased in the doorknob was no great trouble.

The interior was a mess. Apparently Dang existed on Godfather’s pizza. I counted nine different cartons, all grease-stained, on the kitchen counter. The thrumming little refrigerator smelled vaguely unclean. It contained three sixteen-ounce bottles of Pepsi.

In the back, next to the bed on the wobbly nightstand, I found the framed photos of the little girl. She had been quite pretty, solemn and mischievous at the same time.

The photo Dang had sent me was very different. The girl lay on a table, her bloody clothes wrapped round her. Her chest was a dark and massive hole.

I thought I heard a car coming.

Soon enough I was behind the elm again. But the road was empty. All I’d heard was my own nerves.

During chores two hours later, Lisa said, “You find him?”

“Find who?”

“Find who? Come on, Grandad.”

“Yeah, I found him. Or found his trailer, anyway.”

“How come you didn’t take me with you? I’m supposed to be your partner.”

I leaned on my pitchfork. “Hon, from here on out I’ll have to handle this alone.”

“Oh, darn it, Grandad. I want to help.”

There was a sweet afternoon breeze through the barn door, carrying the scents of clover and sunshine.

“All that’s going to happen is I’m going to talk to him.”

“Gosh, Grandad, he tried to kill you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“But he shot at you.”

“He tried to scare me.”

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

After washing up for the day, I went into the TV room and called Mai and told her that I’d found where her brother was staying.

“You should not go out there,” she said. “In my land we say that there are seasons of the heart. The season of my brother’s heart is very hot and angry now.”

“I just want to talk to him and tell him that I’m sorry. Maybe that will calm him down.”

“I will talk to him. You can direct me to this trailer?”

“If you meet me at the restaurant again, I’ll lead you out there.”

“Then you will go back home?”

“If that’s what you want.”

She was there right at eight. The full moon, an autumn moon that painted all the pines silver, guided us to the power station and the quarry and finally to the hill above the trailer.

I got out of the car and walked back to hers. “You follow that road straight down.”

“Did you see the windows? The lights?”

He was home. Or somebody was.

“I appreciate this, Robert. Perhaps I can reason with my brother.”

“I hope so.”

She paused, looked around. “It is so beautiful and peaceful here. You are fortunate to live here.”

There were owls and jays in the forest trees, and the fast creek silver in the moonlight, and the distant song of a windmill in the breeze. She was right. I was lucky to live here.

She drove on.

I watched her till she reached the trailer, got out, went to the door and knocked.

Even from here, I could see that the man-silhouette held a handgun when he opened the door for her. Mai and I had both assumed we could reason with her brother. Maybe not.

“You up for a game of hearts?” Lisa said awhile later.

“Sure,” I said.

“Good. Because I’m going to beat you tonight.”

“You sure of that?”

“Uh-huh.”

As usual I won. I thought of letting her win but then realized that she wouldn’t want that. She was too smart and too honorable for that kind of charity.

When she was in her cotton nightie, her mouth cold and spicy from brushing her teeth, she came down and gave me my goodnight kiss.

When Lisa was creaking her way up the stairs, Emmy looked into the TV room and said, “Wondered if I could ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Are you, uh, all right?”

“Aw, honey. My last tests were fine and I feel great. You’ve really got to stop worrying.”

“I don’t mean physically. I mean, you seem preoccupied.”

“Everything’s fine.”

“God, Dad, I love you so much. And I can’t help worrying about you.”

The full-grown woman in the doorway became my quick little daughter again, rushing to me and sitting on my lap and burying her tear-hot face in my neck so I couldn’t see her cry.

We sat that way for a long time and then I started bouncing her on my knee.

She laughed. “I weigh a little more than I used to.”

“Not much.”

“My bottom’s starting to spread a little.”

“Nick seems to like it fine.”

With her arms still around me, she kissed me on the cheek and then gave me another hug. A few minutes later, she left to finish up in the kitchen.

The call came ten minutes after I fell into a fitful sleep. I’d been expecting Mai. I got Nick.

“Robert, I wondered if you could come down to the station.”

“Now? After midnight?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“What’s up?”

“A Vietnamese woman came into the emergency room over at the hospital tonight. Her arm had been broken. The doc got suspicious and gave me a call. I went over and talked to her. She wouldn’t tell me anything at all. Then all of a sudden, she asked if she could see a man named Robert Wilson. You know her, Robert?”

“Yes.”

“Who is she?”

“Her name is Nguyn Mai. She’s visiting people in the area.”

“Which people?”

I hesitated. “Nick, I can’t tell you anything more than Mai has.”

For the first time in our relationship, Nick sounded cold. “I need you to come down here, Robert. Right away.”

Our small town is fortunate enough to have a full-time hospital that doubles as an emergency room.

Mai sat at the end of the long hallway, her arm in a white sling. I sat next to her in a yellow form-curved plastic chair.

“What happened?”

“I was foolish,” she said. “We argued and I tried to take one of his guns from him. We struggled and I fell into the wall and I heard my arm snap.”

“I don’t think Nick believes you.”

“He says he knows you.”

“He goes out with my daughter.”

“Is he a prejudiced man, this Nick?”

“I don’t think so. He’s just a cop who senses that he’s not getting the whole story. Plus you made him very curious when you asked him to call me.”

“I knew no one else.”

“I understand, Mai. I’m just trying to explain Nick’s attitude.”

Nick showed up a few minutes later.

“How’s the arm? Ready for tennis yet?”

Mai obviously appreciated the way Nick was trying to lighten things up. “Not yet,” she said, and smiled like a small shy girl.

“Mind if I borrow your friend a few minutes, Mai?”

She smiled again and shook her head. But there was apprehension in her dark eyes. Would I tell Nick that her brother had taken a shot at me?

In the staff coffee room, I put a lot of sugar and Creamora into my paper cup of coffee. I badly needed to kill the taste.

“You know her in Nam, Robert?”

“No.”

“She just showed up?”

“Pretty much.”

“Any special reason?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Robert, I don’t appreciate lies. Especially from my future father-in-law.”

“She phoned me last night and we talked. Turns out we knew some of the same people in Nam. That’s about all there is to it.”

“Right.”

“Nick, I can handle this. It doesn’t have to involve the law.”

“She got her arm broken.”

“It was an accident.”

“That’s what she says.”

“She’s telling the truth, Nick.”

“The same way you’re telling the truth, Robert?”

In the hall, Nick said, “She seems like a nice woman.”

“She is a nice woman.”

When we reached Mai, Nick said, “Robert here tells me you’re a nice woman. I’m sorry if my questions upset you.”

Mai gave a little half bow of appreciation and good-bye.

In the truck, I turned the heat on. It was 2:00 A.M. of a late August night and it was shivering late October cold.

“Where’s your car?”

“The other side of the building,” Mai said.

“You’d better not drive back to Iowa City tonight.”

“There is a motel?”

After I got her checked in, I pulled the pickup right to her door, Number 17.

Inside, I got the lights on and turned the thermostat up to 80 so it would warm up fast. The room was small and dark. You could hear the ghosts of it crying down the years, a chorus of smiling salesmen and weary vacationers and frantic adulterers.

“I wish I had had better luck with my brother tonight,” Mai said. “For everybody’s sake.”

“Maybe he’ll think about it tonight and be more reasonable in the morning.”

In the glove compartment I found the old .38 Emmy bought when she moved to the farm. Bucolic as rural Iowa was, it was not without its moments of violence, particularly when drug deals were involved. She kept it in the kitchen cabinet, on the top shelf. I had taken it with me when I left tonight.

In the valley, the trailer was a silhouette outlined in moonsilver. I approached in a crouch, the .38 in my right hand. A white-tailed fawn pranced away to my left; and a raccoon or possum rattled reeds in a long waving patch of bluestem grass.

When I reached the elm, I stopped and listened. No sound whatsoever from the Airstream. The propane tanks stood like sentries.

The doorknob was no more difficult to unlock tonight than it had been earlier.

Tonight the trailer smelled of sleep and wine and rust and cigarette smoke. I stood perfectly still listening to the refrigerator vibrate. From the rear of the trailer came the sounds of Dang snoring.

When I stood directly above him, I raised the .38 and pushed it to within two inches of his forehead.

I spoke his name in the stillness.

His eyes opened but at first they seemed to see nothing. He seemed to be in a half-waking state.

But then he grunted and something like a sob exploded in his throat and I said, “If I wanted to, I could kill you right now but I don’t want to. I want you to listen to me.”

In the chill prairie night, the coffee Dang put on smelled very good. We sat at a small table, each drinking from a different 7-Eleven mug.

He was probably ten years younger than me, slender, with graying hair and a long, intelligent face. He wore good American clothes and good American glasses. Whenever he looked at me directly, his eyes narrowed with anger. He was likely flashing back to the frail bloody dead girl in the photo he’d sent me.

“My sister told you why I came here?”

“Yes.”

“You came to talk me out of it, that is why you’re here?”

“Something like that. The first thing is, I want to tell you how sorry I am that it happened.”

“Words.”

“Pardon?”

“Words. In my land there is a saying, ‘words only delay the inevitable.’ If you do not kill me, Mr. Wilson, I will kill you. No matter how many words you speak.”

“It was an accident.”

“I am a believer in Hoa Hao, Mr. Wilson. We do not believe in accidents. All behavior is willful.”

“I willfully murdered a six-year-old girl?”

“In war, there are many atrocities.”

Anger came and went in his eyes. When it was gone, he looked old and sad. Rage seemed to give him a kind of fevered youth.

“You were there, Dang. You saw it happen. I wasn’t firing at her. I was firing at a VC. She got in the way.”

He stared at me a long time. “Words, Mr. Wilson, words.”

I wanted to tell him about my years following the killing, how it shaped and in many respects destroyed my life. I even thought of telling him about my cancer and how the disease had taught me so many important lessons. But I would only sound as if I were begging his pity.

I stood up. “Why don’t you leave tomorrow? Your sister is worried about you.”

“I’ll leave after I’ve killed you.”

“What I did, Dang, I know you can’t forgive me for. Maybe I’d be the same way you are. But if you kill me, the police will arrest you. And that will kill Mai. You’ll have killed her just as I killed your other sister.”

For a time, he kept his head down and said nothing. When he raised his eyes to me, I saw that they were wet with tears. “Before I sleep each night, I play in my head her voice, like a tape. Even at six she had a beautiful voice. I play it over and over again.”

He surprised me by putting his head down on the table and weeping.

In bed that night, I thought of how long we’d carried our respective burdens, Dang his hatred of me, and my remorse over Hong’s death. I fell asleep thinking of what Dang had said about Hong’s voice. I wished I could have heard her sing.

When I got down to the barn in the morning, Lisa was already bottle-feeding the three new calves. I set about the milking operations.

Half an hour later, the calves, the rabbits and the barn cats taken care of, Lisa joined me.

“Mom was worried about you.”

“Figured she would be,” I said. “You didn’t tell her anything, did you?”

“No, but Nick did.”

“Nick?”

“Uh-huh. He told her about the Vietnamese woman.”

“Oh.”

“So Mom asked me if I knew anything about it.”

“What’d you say?”

“Said I didn’t know anything at all. But I felt kinda weird, Grandad, lying to Mom, I mean.”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

At lunch, baloney sandwiches and creamed corn and an apple, Emmy said, “Dad, could I talk to you?”

“Sure.”

“Lisa, why don’t you go on ahead with your chores. Grandad’ll be down real soon.”

Lisa looked at me. I nodded.

When the screen door slapped shut, Emmy said, “Nick thinks you’re in some kind of trouble, Dad.”

“You know how much I like Nick, honey. I also happen to respect him.” I held her hand. “But I’m not in any kind of trouble.”

“Who’s the Vietnamese woman?”

“Nguyn Mai.”

“That doesn’t tell me much.”

“I don’t mean for it to tell you much.”

“You getting mad?”

“No. Sad, if anything. Sad that I can’t have a life of my own without answering a lot of questions.”

“Dad, if Nick wasn’t concerned, I wouldn’t be concerned. But Nick has good instincts about things like this.”

“He does indeed.”

“So why not tell us the truth?”

I got up from the table, picked up my dishes and carried them over to the sink. “Let me think about it a little while, all right?”

She watched me for a long time, looking both wan and a little bit peeved, and finally said, “Think about it a little while, then.”

She got up and left the room.

There were two carts that needed filling with silage. Lisa and I opened the trapdoor in the silo and started digging the silage out. Then we took the first of the carts over and started feeding the cows.

When that was done, I told Lisa to take the rest of the afternoon off. She kept talking about all the school supplies she needed. She’d never find time for them if she was always working.

During the last rain, we’d noticed a few drops plopping down from the area of the living room. The roof was a good ten years old. I put the ladder against the back of the house and went up and looked around. There were some real bad spots.

I called the lumber store and got some prices on roofing materials. I told them what I wanted. They’d have them ready tomorrow afternoon.

There was still some work so after a cup of coffee, I headed for the barn. I hadn’t quite reached it before the phone rang.

“For you, Dad,” Emmy called.

I picked up.

“Robert?”

“I thought maybe you’d be gone by now, Mai. I went out and visited your brother last night. I don’t know if he told you about it. I also don’t know if it did any good. But at least I got to tell him I was sorry.”

“I need to meet you at the hill above his trailer. Right away, please. Something terrible has happened.”

“What’re you talking about, Mai?”

“Please. The hill. As soon as possible.”

“Can you drive?”

“Yes. I drove a little this morning.”

“What’s happened, Mai?”

“Your granddaughter. Dang has taken her.”

As I was grabbing my jacket, and remembering that I’d left the .38 in the glove compartment, Emmy came into the room.

“I need to go out for a little while.”

She touched my arm. “Dad, I don’t know what just happened but why don’t you get Nick to help you?”

I’d thought about that, too. “Maybe I will.”

I drove straight and hard to the hill. All the way there I thought of Dang. One granddaughter for one little sister. Even up. I should have thought of that and protected Lisa.

Mai stood by the dusty rental car.

“How do you know she’s down there?”

“An hour ago, I snuck down there and peeked in the window.

She is sitting in a chair in the kitchen.”

“But she’s still alive? You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see if she’s bleeding or anything?”

“I don’t think he has hurt her. Not yet, anyway.”

“I’m going in to get her.”

She nodded to the .38 stuffed into my belt. “I am afraid for all of us, now. For Dang and for your granddaughter and for you. And for me.”

She fell against me, crying. I was tender as I could be but all I could think of was Lisa.

“I tried to talk him into giving her up. He says that he is only doing the honorable thing.” More tears. “Talking won’t help, Robert.”

I went east, in a wide arc, coming down behind the trailer in a stand of windbreak firs. The back side of the Airstream had only one window. I didn’t see anybody watching me.

I belly-crawled from the trees to the front of the trailer. By now, I could hear him shouting in Vietnamese at Lisa. All his anger and all his pain was in those words. The exact meaning made no difference. It was the sounds he made that mattered.

I went to the door and knocked. His words stopped immediately. For a time there was just the soughing silence of the prairie.

“Dang, you let Lisa go and I’ll come in and take her place.”

“Don’t come in, Grandad. He wants to kill you.”

“Dang, did you hear me? You let Lisa go and I’ll come in. I have a gun now but I’ll drop it if you agree.”

His first bullet ripped through the glass and screening of the front door.

I pitched left, rolling on the ground to escape the second and third shots.

Lisa yelled at Dang to stop firing, her words echoing inside the trailer.

Prairie silence again; a hawk gliding down the sunbeams.

I scanned the trailer, looking for some way to get closer without getting shot. There wasn’t enough room to hide next to the three stairs; nor behind the two silver propane tanks; nor even around the corner. The bedroom window was too high to peek in comfortably.

“He’s picking up his rifle, Grandad!” Lisa called.

Two more shots, these more explosive and taking larger chunks of the front door, burst into the afternoon air. I rolled away from them as best I could.

“Grandad, watch out!”

And then a cry came, one so shrill and aggrieved I wasn’t sure what it was at first, and then the front door was thrown open and there was Dang, rifle fire coming in bursts as he came out on the front steps, shooting directly at me.

This time I rolled to the right. He was still sobbing out words in Vietnamese and these had the power to mesmerize me. They spoke exactly of how deep his grief ran.

Another burst of rifle fire, Dang standing on the steps of the trailer and having an easy time finding me with his rifle.

There was a long and curious delay before my brain realized that my chest had been wounded. It was as if all time stopped for a long moment, the universe holding its breath; and then came blood and raging blinding pain. Then I felt a bone in my arm crack as a bullet smashed into it.

Lisa screamed again. “Grandad!”

As I lay there, another bullet taking my left leg, I realized I had only moments to do what I needed to. Dang was coming down from the steps, moving in to kill me. I raised the .38 and fired.

The explosion was instant and could probably be heard for miles. I’d been forced to shoot at him at an angle. The bullet had missed and torn into one of the propane tanks. The entire trailer had vanished inside tumbling gritty black smoke and fire at least three different shades of red and yellow. The air reeked of propane and the burning trailer.

I called out for Lisa but I knew I could never get to my feet to help her. I was losing consciousness too fast.

And then Dang was standing over me, rifle pointed directly down at my head.

I knew I didn’t have long. “Save her, Dang. She’s innocent just the way your sister was. Save her, please. I’m begging you.”

The darkness was swift and cold and black, and the sounds of Lisa screaming and fire roaring faded, faded.

The room was small and white and held but one bed and it was mine.

Lisa and Emmy and Nick stood on the left side of the bed while Mai stood on the right.

“I guess I’ll have to do some of your chores for a while, Grandad.”

“I guess you will, hon.”

“That means driving the tractor.”

I looked at Emmy, who said, “We’ll hire a couple of hands, sweetheart. No tractor for you until Grandad gets back.”

Nick looked at his watch. “How about if I take these two beautiful ladies downstairs for some lunch? This is one of the few hospitals that actually serves good food.”

But it wasn’t just lunch he was suggesting. He wanted to give Mai a chance to speak with me alone.

Lisa and Emmy kissed me then went downstairs with Nick.

I was already developing stiffness from being in bed so long. After being operated on, I’d slept through the night and into this morning.

Mai leaned over and took my hand. “I’m glad you’re all right, Mr. Wilson.”

“I’m sorry, Mai. How things turned out.”

“In the end, he was honorable man.”

“He certainly was, Mai. He certainly was.”

After I’d passed out, Dang had rushed back into the trailer and rescued Lisa, who had been remarkably unscathed.

Then Dang had run back inside, knowing he would die in the smoke and the flames.

“Tomorrow would have been our little sister’s birthday,” Mai said, “I do not think he wanted to face that.”

She cried for a long time cradled in my good left arm, my right being in a sling like hers.

“He was not a bad man.”

“No, he wasn’t, Mai. He was a good man.”

“I am sorry for your grief.”

“And I’m sorry for yours.”

She smiled tearily. “Seasons of the heart, Mr. Wilson. Perhaps the season will change now.”

“Perhaps they will,” I said, and watched her as she leaned over to kiss me on the forehead.

As she was leaving, I pointed to my arm sling and then to hers. “Twins,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Perhaps we are, Robert.”