Father and Son by Larry Brown

of the window and the sheet of glass itself that rested within it. He reached out for the door handle and pushed it down. The dog came up waving his tail as he got out. Clancy was a patient man buthe was getting close to sixty, and the first emotion he felt was a quick nagging one of aggravation that they weren’t ready. He put out one hand to keep the dog from jumping on him as he stepped over the tree roots and the chicken shit and the pine needles that formed the yard.
    â€œI thought y’all gone be ready,” he said, and then he took a good look at his sister’s face. She was wringing a grimy piece of tissue between her hands and swaying a little, back and forth, and she wouldn’t look at him. She’d been crying and she was crying still. The screen door pushed open a crack and a small face peered out.
    â€œShut that door, Queenola,” she said, and the small face withdrew. Inside a shriek of laughter that didn’t sound quite right, rising boys’ voices, rapid running steps. Clancy stopped on the first step, leaned over, and grabbed a post and eased himself up on the porch.
    â€œWhat’s wrong now,” he said.
    She slowly turned her face to him. “He ain’t come home.”
    Clancy lowered himself into a chair and sat gingerly, leaning forward. He took his hat off and with a handkerchief he pulled from its safekeeping inside mopped at his face. He sat there holding the hat and the handkerchief.
    â€œHuh,” he said. “Where then reckon is he?”
    â€œI know where he’s at. He still down yonder.”
    She tipped her head toward the wall of pines that rimmed the north side of the house. The noise of the children inside dropped to silence and he looked through the screen door to see them grouped in a dim huddle, listening.
    â€œWell,” he said. “What you want me to do?”
    â€œGo down there and see. I’ll send Derek down to the road.”
    He sat there and looked out across the yard. He put his handkerchief back inside his hat and put his hat back on.
    â€œWell,” he said. “I don’t reckon we goin to church.”
    He raised himself from the chair, leaned forward for the post, eased down the steps. For a moment he stood in the yard and looked at her. He remembered the night she was born by the light of a coal-oil lamp in a blood-soaked bed where his mother screamed curses down on the house and damned his daddy for ever putting it in her. Then he went to the truck and got in. The chickens scattered again, feathers fluttering and settling in the little dusty clouds they stirred.
    Clancy had never been to Barlow’s but he knew where it was. His drinking days were long over, his people had their own places anyway, up in the forests and back roads of Stone County, little roadhouses where the Kimbroughs and the Burnsides played their guitars on the weekends and rocked the old buildings until dawn.
    He turned in at the sign, having made a short but bumpy journey around the base of the ridge that Rufus and his family lived on, traveling the main highway briefly and rocking along with cars passing at what were reckless speeds to him. These young people driving so fast scared him. The road to the joint was littered with beer cartons and trash, the sides high with weeds. There was a curve in the road and he slowly rounded it and saw the place sitting there in a grove of pines, a highly polished black car pulled around to one side. He slowed and shifted down. He felt bad already, had begun to know something inside himself like grief. It just felt like trouble. His old truck ground to a halt and he sat there looking everything over before he killed the engine. Now that he was here he didn’t know what to do. In the yard it was quiet but on the highway behind the joint the cars were flying by, trucks with their heavy loads whining. He got the door open and stepped down from the truck, holding on to the door frame and slipping