A Faithful Son Read online

  A Faithful

  Son

  A Faithful Son

  Michael Scott Garvin

  Facebook: Michael Scott Garvin Author - A Faithful Son

  Website: MichaelScottGarvinBooks.com

  Copyright © 2016 Michael Scott Garvin

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1519414730

  ISBN 13: 9781519414731

  Dedicated to C. A.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  I know less than I did, but of this I’m certain: a journey best begins at the start. So my story will begin there—before Dad left, before I spotted Doug’s crooked grin across the nightclub. My tale begins before I understood this old world is held together with twisted baling wire and rusted penny nails.

  If I were to retrace my steps, I’d find my way back to those warm summers in Durango, where I first heard the echoes of the Silverton Narrow Gauge whistling through the San Juans, down the familiar dusty road, just off County Road 250, winding its way to the small white house on the left with the screened-in porch, peeling gray-blue shutters, and a barking yellow dog. Back to Mom’s warm waffles and itchy Sunday mornings, sitting on a pew in my starched button-down best, gazing up at a carved crucified savior suspended over the congregation like some great dying hope.

  Standing behind his pulpit, Preacher Barnett stretched his arms above his head, fists clenched, warning of a day of reckoning close at hand. The ladies of the First Assembly of God choir reminded the congregation to take our souls down to the River Jordan and wash our sins clean.

  After the sermon and the pastor’s call to the altar, my two sisters and I would escape from God and our afternoon chores, running deep into the woods, down Parker’s Path, through the meadow, and farther on to Rainbow Lake. Breathless, we’d shed our Sunday skin, clasp our hands together, and leap off Mancos Rock, splashing into the water below.

  Together the three of us canvassed the mountainsides and overgrown gullies. We spent those brilliant, shining summer days exploring the backwoods of the San Juans. As we lay side by side along the shore of the lake in the warm August sun, dragonflies hovered low out across the water.

  With Cousin Dell’s old canoe balanced atop our shoulders, we’d stumble down the path to the mighty Mancos River and maneuver through the river’s rocks and muddy, rushing rapids.

  I was the swashbuckling pirate and my older sister, Laura, my able foe. The youngest, Kate, with her sea-grass green eyes and tousled honey-blond hair was the damsel in distress.

  As the sun slipped behind the pines and darkness found us, tales of buried treasures turned to stories of ghosts and lost children. We’d drift to sleep in our bedrolls, circled around a crackling fire. So close were my sisters and I that I’m certain we three shared the same dreams.

  When dawn’s first light splintered through the trees, we’d awaken to find the forest wrapped in its own white quilt of morning mist, wet aspen leaves blanketing us, and our campfire burned to smoldering embers. Morning unfolded as we lay waiting for Mom’s voice to beckon us back home.

  My life bears no resemblance to those summers of my childhood. Durango’s bustling Main Street is now cluttered with T-shirt shops and storefronts hawking turquoise jewelry. The First Assembly of God was bulldozed to make way for Carl’s Jr. Katie is gone, and Laura married an accountant who took her far away.

  My sisters’ laughter is only a faint memory now, lilting through the pines when a September breeze cools the last days of August. There are no pirates, no dragonflies, and our mother is the only ghost haunting these woods.

  I’m an old man now, and no matter the years traveled, I carry an aching feeling that something has been lost and that the missing pieces maybe found somewhere there—the only home I’ve ever known. Good or bad, right or wrong, I am left with the memories of these people and the small white house on County Road 250.

  Perhaps if Parker’s Path greets me once more, I will find them waiting—Laura and Katie, laughing, with their bare feet dangling off Mancos Rock. Together, hand in hand, we can jump into the clear waters below. And if the lifting of the morning mist through the aspens clears an unmarked path, and if the Colorado clay breaks easily beneath my hands, maybe I can unearth some answers and, like a buried treasure, find what is lost. In that moment, kneeling on the banks of Rainbow Lake, I will wash it all clean and, finally, leave it there. I will then rest in the shade of the pines and wait for the echoes of my mother’s distant voice to hasten me home.

  And so, no matter where I am, I remain exactly where I lost him.

  —Joseph Olshan, Nightswimmer

  CHAPTER 1

  Durango, Colorado, 1959.

  On a dusty back road on a sunny afternoon, I was planted between Mom and Dad, straddling the gearshift of an old rusted-out Ford. Sitting on a metal toolbox lodged between the front seats, I watched the passing blacktop through a crack in the cab floor. Johnny Cash’s rhythmic guitar kept time with slipping gears. From my lower perch, all I saw was dashboard beneath the wide, blue sky stretching from mirror to mirror.

  Earlier that morning Dad had woken up a poor man, and later that night when he climbed into bed, he was still poor as Durango dirt. The small mason jar hidden above the Frigidaire contained his amassed fortune, but sitting between my folks, I measured wealth by something far greater than any currency.

  Driving deep into the San Juan Mountains, the pickup’s jerky shifting gears accelerated us through the countryside, coughing gray exhaust as we started our climb up the mountain pass. Dad shifted and released the whining clutch, powering ahead.

  Momma shook her head. “Lloyd, slow down—the babies are in the truck.”

  Pops took a long last drag and flipped his cigarette out the open window. “Yes, babe.” Flashing a grin, he reached across me to squeeze Momma’s leg.

  “Lloyd, stop it right this minute!” she said, smiling and swatting his arm. “Keep your hands on the wheel. You’re gonna take us right off the road.”

  “Babe, now don’t you go workin’ yourself into a tizzy.” Dad grinned at her like he was conjuring up mischief.

  Laura poked her head through the truck’s back window. Long, wild strands of her chestnut hair whipped in the summer wind. “Look, Dad!” She pointed to a collection of clouds in front of us, just above the mountain ridge. “A duck! See it over there? Can you see its beak?” She laughed.

  “Yup, I see it right there.” Dad traced the shape in the sky with his finger.

  Our summers were long threads of warm, golden days. The hours sitting behind school desks were forgotten, replaced with lazy summer afternoons floating on tubes down the irrigation ditches. Afternoons were spent drifting along the culverts and under the roadways, all the way to Vallecito Reservoir.

  On those bright, blazing days, hotter than afternoon asphalt, we caught tadpoles in the last puddles of summer. We swung from a knotted rope off Baker’s Bridge an
d jumped, aiming for the center of a floating rubber inner tube below. With my pellet gun, we shot tin cans, one by one, off the picket fence or took aim at the black crows perched on the wire.

  Laura and I explored the backwoods, with young Kate scrambling to keep pace. Flashlights in hand, we scouted the dark, abandoned mine shafts that peppered the hillsides.

  “If I catch you kids anywhere near those mines, I swear I’ll take a piece of each one of your hides,” Momma warned. “You’d best be listenin’ to me!”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Ever since the Delany kid had fallen to his death, Momma had forbidden us to venture anywhere near the dark shafts.

  Later I made little Kate swear, with her hand pressed to her heart, not to tell a living soul as we ventured off in the pitch-black tunnels.

  “If you open your flap to ma, you ain’t goin’ with us no more. You hear?”

  She shook her head. “My lips are sealed tight.” Turning an imaginary key, Katie locked her pink lips.

  The three of us ran wild, tearing up and down the rows of cornstalks at the Bledsoe farm. Slithering like snakes, low on our bellies, we hid rotting eggs in the crawl space beneath fat old Nettie’s front porch.

  “You children, listen up!” Nettie hollered from behind her screen door. “Your daddy’s going to swat the skin from your backsides with a switch when I tell him!”

  The three of us escaped into the nearby woods. Breathless, we hid low in the scrub brush as big ol’ Nettie emerged from the screen door, madder than a hornet’s nest and waving her frying skillet.

  “You young’uns get back here right now. These eggs are stinking like all get-out!” Shuffling her enormous frame to the edge of her porch, she huffed and puffed and yelled, “I’m calling your daddy, and your momma is gonna hear all about this.”

  Hiding in the deep summer grass, Laura covered Katie’s mouth with the palm of her hand, smothering her laughter.

  By the time we made it back home, Nettie had already phoned the house. Pops stood waiting on the porch, a green sapling switch in his hand.

  “Lloyd, remember, they’re just kids,” Mom called out from the kitchen window, trying to save us from a well-deserved whipping.

  “Alice, these children are up to no good. I will not abide such behavior.”

  With crocodile tears streaming down her flushed cheeks, Laura sniffled, “Pops, since it was Zach’s idea. You don’t suppose you could give him a few of my swats?”

  “No, Laura. You’ve earned them.”

  Following after Laura, I took my turn, bent over the piano bench, and braced for a strapping while a weeping Kate was made to look on.

  With a stern eye, Dad assigned all three of us chores, including mowing the Bledsoes’ patch of grass for the rest of the summer.

  On this day there was no talk of afternoon chores. We were heading high into the San Juans for the afternoon. Mom bounced little Kate on her knee while Laura rode in the truck bed with the yellow dog.

  The pickup followed the narrow back road as it snaked through La Plata Canyon up to the timberline, where the muddy Mancos River begins. Dad pushed the old truck as fast as it could muster, traveling along the blacktop until it turned to gravel, and then a trail of dust followed us higher into a collection of aspen trees.

  “Go, Daddy. Go!” Laura laughed through the open back glass.

  “Young lady, sit your tail back down,” Momma warned. “You’ll bounce right out of this truck.”

  Laura rested her back against the bed, pulling her knees into her chest. As we passed through a grove of oaks, nets of sunlight and shadow were cast over her head. The yellow dog leaned precariously over the side of the pickup, barking and snapping at the wind.

  “Pull on over, Lloyd. There’s a pretty spot right there with plenty of shade.” Mom pointed to a cluster of trees near the reservoir.

  Dad took the pickup off-road, driving us across a field of knee-high grass.

  Together we unpacked the cooler and picnic supplies. While Mom and Kate prepared our lunch, Dad took Laura and me into the hills to explore the remains of a burned-out farmhouse.

  The old abandoned homestead teetered on crumbling footings, pushed forward by a slowly encroaching hillside. Dad, Laura, and I trod carefully through the skeleton frame of boards and shingles, searching the vine-choked ramshackle for any remains of lives lived before.

  An old teapot, a few rusted tin cans, and an empty leather satchel were the last remaining treasures in the charred ruin.

  I crept up the dilapidated, shifting staircase to explore the small vacant rooms. The walls, papered with a repeating pattern of tiny roses, had yellowed and peeled where they met the plastered ceilings. With one good kick of my sneaker, I busted out the last remaining glass pane from an upstairs window. The shards fell to the ground below.

  “Zach!” Dad hollered up the slanted stairs. “What the hell are you up to?”

  “Nothin’, Pops. It’s just an old window.”

  “Get down here right now! This old house has stood a hundred years without the likes of you coming through like some bulldozer. Haul your tail down here now!”

  “Yes, sir.” With my hands stuffed deep in my pockets, I trudged down the steps.

  “Son, you gotta use the good sense God gave you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Standing in the remains of the kitchen, Dad called me to his side, placing his hand on the back of my neck. He reminded Laura and me that when folks die, some part of them still lingers behind. He told us we should honor the old house as if someone still slept in the small rooms upstairs and gathered each morning around the table for breakfast.

  “Zach, treat this place with common courtesy and respect. Just like you would if you were visiting Toby’s house for the night.” He lightly squeezed the back of my neck with his fingertips. “Do you understand me, boy?”

  “I understand, Dad.”

  In actuality, Toby’s place was a pigsty—the squalor stunk like dirty socks and soured milk—but I knew Pops was making a bigger point.

  As Dad spoke, Laura shook her head in my direction like a snotty, disapproving schoolteacher. She was only sixteen months older, but she used every bit of daylight to boss me around.

  Dad disappeared onto the lopsided porch while Laura gathered a handful of wildflowers for Momma, and I took one final look around the abandoned, splintered farmhouse. Shadows filled the tiny rooms except for the slightest sliver of sunlight peeking through a decaying rafter. The last remaining shreds of linen hanging from the windows danced in the warm whisper of an August wind. Dad’s story had me thinking hard, and just the notion of ghosts haunting the bare rooms was enough to send me hightailing it from the old abandoned shack.

  The three of us hiked back down to the reservoir and hunted for smooth rocks to skip on the water. Dad taught Laura how to grip it just right and showed her how to throw it across the surface. With a quick flip of his wrist, Pop sent a gray stone sailing over the still water. It skimmed the surface for eight yards before skipping five times and then disappearing into the blue. I could already skip rocks like an ace on account of I’d been doing it since I was almost seven and a half. Laura’s sad attempt took one bounce in the shallow water and then sunk like an anchor.

  “Miss Know-It-All, you throw just like a dumb girl,” I yelled.

  “That’s enough, Zach,” Dad called to me.

  Stripping down to our underwear, Laura and I raced across the reservoir and swam over to our waiting mom, who championed us on at the water’s edge. Katie cheered from the banks, and the yellow dog jumped into the cold water to swim the last few strokes with us.

  On a blanket spread on the ground, Mom sliced open the last of the buttermilk biscuits from our morning breakfast and filled them with pulled barbecued pork. Sipping sweet tea from white Styrofoam cups, we lunched on Mom’s barbecue sandwic
hes, potato salad, and a bowl of green beans from her garden. Using our bare hands, we gobbled up slices of Momma’s fresh strawberry pie, gorging ourselves until our stomachs ached.

  “Swing me, Daddy, swing me!” Katie pleaded.

  Holding tight to her small wrist and ankle, Dad spun her around. The yellow dog chased Katie’s revolving course, yelping and snapping at her gingham dress.

  “Lloyd, you’re gonna make that child sick,” Momma called. “She just ate. She’s got her belly full.”

  “Look, Momma, I’m a carnival wheel!” Kate giggled. “Go faster, Daddy, faster!”

  He spun her around until his arms grew heavy and then gradually brought her to a soft landing in the meadow.

  Wobbly, little Kate tried standing upright but stumbled, falling back to the ground. She lay dizzy in the tall grass, laughing and watching the spinning world.

  Since Kate was the youngest, we all kept a watchful eye on her. Laura and I shared an unspoken pact to stay vigilant with our little sis. Even the dog seemed to trail close behind her.

  I was seven when Mom arrived home with little Kate. I recall Pop lifting her from the crib and placing her into my arms. She was pink and powdered and squealing like a newborn piglet. The moment I laid eyes on her, I thought she was all mine—made just for me. I suspect Laura and the dog felt the same.

  While my older sis and I fussed and fought around the clock, we tended to little Kate as if she was something fragile, like one of Mom’s porcelain figurines on the foyer credenza. Not an hour passed that I wasn’t pulling Laura’s ponytail or she wasn’t snooping where she ought not, but I never gave a second thought if little Kate messed with my stuff or tagged close behind.

  “Again, again! Spin me again!” Katie tugged on Pop’s belt.

  “Missy, you’re just gettin’ too big.” Dad pulled her into his chest and kissed the top of her head. “Run along now, and go help your momma.”