Doesn’t ring a bell, my charge said.
His father stopped combing the grass and stood. When he had risen to his full height, he seemed perhaps five or six feet taller than before, his head being slightly bent down by the ceiling, and was wearing finer clothes, and his hair was slicked back and he looked somehow cleaner, as if he had just gotten ready for church.
His country affect fell away, and he glared at his son with the focused intensity of a wronged, wrathful deity.
It frightened even me.
I won’t have it, he said. Won’t have a liar in my house. You tell it. Tell what you did. Or else.
But my charge was no longer the child who, hearing his father in the living room, would veer away in something like fear and take instead the dining room route into the kitchen. Something arose in him, instilled by the many tense situations from which he’d emerged victorious, the many lawsuits, hallway confrontations, public fights, occasions on which powerful individuals had cowered before him seeking his favor.
Or else?
Some joker was threatening him, K. J. Boone, withor else?
Or else what? he said coldly.
And turned his mind deliberately, even cruelly, to that sad Wyoming shack, that failing farm, his parents’ poverty in their middle years, the way he’d swooped in, knocked that little dump down, put them up a new house, hired help, got them a driver, had flowers delivered out there every damn week for the rest of their lives, sent them to the Holy Land by way of Paris. (Only the best hotels. Cars, tour guides, the whole enchilada.)
His father, drawn into the orb of my charge’s thoughts by a desire to be near his son after these many years of separation, found himself also recalling these things.
And was shamed by them, and subdued.
Shrinking down to his previous size, suddenly self-conscious, wearing again the dusty work clothes in which he’d arrived, holding a cheap straw hat he had not been wearing before, behind the brim of which he was endeavoring to hide his four-fingered hand, he backed out of the room, begging our pardon.
Aarhus, he mumbled timidly as he left.
I felt a jolt of joy run through my charge in response to this perceived victory.
This petty, mean-spirited victory.
—
It was quite something.
Quite something to have watched a man savage his own father like that.
He was positively on fire now with fresh self-regard.
You know that speech? he said.
No, I said.
Ever read it? he said.
No, I said.
Ever hear about it? he said.
It—it may have been before my time, I said. That is, it may have been after I—
Aarhus, Denmark, he said. Nineteen ninety-seven.
I’d already come here, I said. So.
Come where? he said.
Nowhere, I said.
