was like a garden, like black earth, like leaves after a hard rain. She turned and set the pot down lightly on the counter. Her suppleness, the strength in her hands, and her hair belied her age. Lafleur carried the vegetables to the dining room, then the meat. He moved into the living room and stopped near his father, who still wore his old khaki trousers and plaid shirt, but whose body, like his nod, was a vestige of what it had been. The clothes were baggy. The ankles going into the worn slippers looked like sticks. He'd had a stroke and it had shocked his face into stillness and turned his skin white as porcelain. His silver hair was sparse and wispy. Lafleur feared for his ghostly father, for the stymied life in him.
Jewel rolled the wheelchair into the living room. The two of them maneuvered Gus into it. Jewel held Gus by hugging him full about the body and Lafleur steadied the operation by holding Gus's elbows. Once again, Lafleur was appalled by how light his father was, how limp and doll-like. As he wheeled his father to the table, he gazed down at the kidney-colored blotches that showed through the fine hair. Jewel came along with the catheter bag.
“Did somebody called Clinton U find you?” she asked.
Lafleur looked at her. “You?”
Jewel laughed softly and gestured with the bag, making the liquid slosh against the plastic walls. “I did the same thing. U as in T, U, V. Chinese, I guess.”
“Who is U?” he said. His mind knotted on the nonsense of the question.
As Jewel bent to attach the bag to the side of the wheelchair, her hair slid over her shoulder and touched the floor. She checked the connection between the tube and the bag, then straightened up, brushed back her hair, and said, “I don't know.” Lafleur nudged the wheelchair close to the table. Gus sat there still as a stone. Jewel sat down. Lafleur sat across from her. Between them rested the steaming bowls of broccoli, carrots, mashed potatoes, a fresh loaf of bread, a salad of blanched spinach and egg, and the beef dish—a feast.
The stewed meat smelled of garlic, sage, and bay. The herbs, Jewel would say, were there to combat the drugs Gus had to use, and his lack of activity. The garlic cleansed his system, the bay aided digestion, the sage mollified the midnight sweats. She'd told Lafleur that sometimes she would wake up at night and hear Gus moaning and feel his side of the bed drenched with perspiration. It was as if he came alive in his dreams where nobody could see him, she'd said.
Jewel was of the old school, a farmgirl from Nevada who had survived thirty years in the Multnomah County Auditor's Office. Arcane things appeared from her stores—blackberry root, nettle, and wormwood, or birch leaves to purify Gus's blood. With these armaments she waged war against her husband's infirmity. The linen cloth she'd spread across the table, the white Austrian china with its delicately painted rosebuds, and the glittering chandelier above their heads were also among the weapons. The table setting appeared and the chandelier was lit whenever guests came so she could show Gus that some things in life were still fine. Lafleur always handled the china cautiously. Along with the chandelier, it was an heirloom. Jewel had children of her own, a son in Minneapolis and a daughter in San Diego, and Lafleur sensed a perhaps angry orbit there and felt a vague guilt for what had befallen Jewel as a member of his family.
He said grace.
Then Jewel said, “I thought he was a salesman at first, but his suit was too expensive. He came in a Cadillac and had a ring with a stone big enough to choke on. He had glasses thick as bottle bottoms. He asked how your father was. He said he'd been trying to reach you on a business matter. I was sure you knew each other.”
“Never heard of the guy,” Lafleur said, then smiling, he added, “U.”
She looked relieved. “I told him you had no phone, that he should catch you at work.” She placed dollops of food on Gus's plate and looked across at Lafleur again. Her face shuddered. It was a stirring as of leaves by the wings of a small bird. “Eat,” she said.
He served himself. Jewel held a spoonful of potato in front of Gus. Gus opened his mouth and she put the potato in. Gus's eyes grew wider as he chewed. Jewel served herself. Lafleur slipped his fork under a chunk of broccoli. He stopped for a moment and inhaled deeply, inwardly marking his appreciation for the one homecooked meal he got during the week. It was a second, flashing prayer, one of gratitude for Jewel's generosity. He ate the broccoli, then said, “What's wrong?”
When Jewel sighed, Lafleur's eyes darted to his father. “No, Hank,” she said, meaning it was not Gus, that he was fine, or the same at least. She looked straight at Lafleur with her luminous gray eyes. “It's Ned Blaylock,” she said. “He's putting the squeeze on us.”
Lafleur set down his fork. Jewel went on. She told him that his father's company, the old partnership of forty years between Gus and Blaylock, had been taking losses and that Blaylock was applying his father's interest to offset the shortfall. He was expanding from excavation to general contracting, she said, though he and Gus had been planning that before Gus's stroke, or had been fighting over it. Lafleur knew about that, that each old man had tried to outdo the other by hatching one new scheme after another, but he'd had too many of his own troubles at the time to pay close attention.
Jewel touched the edge of her plate with her fingertips and said that now Blaylock wouldn't stop, or slow down, or listen. He'd fortified the gap left by Gus. He wouldn't give her figures. He wouldn't answer her questions. He hardly acknowledged her existence.
When Jewel paused, Lafleur said, “But he has to.”
“Supposedly.”
“You've got power of attorney.”
“I'm a woman. To a man like that, do you know what that means?” Jewel said. Lafleur squinted at her, not speaking. He guessed he knew. “To a man like that,” Jewel said, “power of attorney means you'd damn well better go out and hire the best one you can find.”
Lafleur remembered his father's periodic anger with Blaylock, and the bitter conversations at the dinner table, the anxiety Blaylock sometimes caused in his mother. He remembered Blaylock's drinking habits and being afraid of Blaylock himself when he was little, and just now as he stared at the spears of light Jewel's chandelier cast against the ceiling, a haunting from his boyhood flashed through his mind: the giant of a man seen usually back in a dim corner of the shop, or bent into a piece of machinery with a flashlight in his mouth and the neck of a pint bottle sticking out of the back pocket of his grimy coveralls.
Blaylock was a mechanic, which was how he and Gus had come together. The two young men, a diesel mechanic, a good one, and a heavy equipment operator, another good one, had joined forces after the war to make a company. Blaylock ran the equipment yard that through the years came to surround his big house down on the river, twenty miles south of Portland. He'd rarely spoken to Lafleur, the boy, who sometimes went up to the yard with his father from their house, which was less than a mile down the road from Blaylock's place. Lafleur remembered the few times Blaylock had, the man coming near and grasping his arm, bending down from above as he told the boy to stay away from something, or to get over there—to watch out!
Once Lafleur had been in a dozer cab, pretending to operate the controls. He heard Blaylock shout. When he looked across the yard, he saw the man darkening the doorway of a shop. The boy—Hank—started to climb out of the cab, but Blaylock shouted again, “Get off that!” As he slipped to the ground, Hank looked back and saw the big man striding toward him. He ran across the yard, heading for the front where he had left his father, but Blaylock cut him off at the side of the house and backed him into a corner. He grabbed Hank's shoulder and forced him down to the mud. Blaylock had a monkey wrench in one hand. Hank saw the wrench rising.
He saw the wrench glint above the man's shoulder. The man stared venomously at him and bent down, tightening the grip on his shoulder. Hank writhed in pain and shrank from the man's nearness, from the stink of sweat and of sweet, overpowering breath, and from the wrench poised against the sky, but suddenly Blaylock released him and straightened up, rocking slowly. He looked at his wrench. Hank didn't move. He hardly breathed. “It's you,” Blaylock said, meaning Hank, his partner's son, but looking at his wrench. “You,” Blaylock said, drawing the wrench close to his face and addressing it, or addressing