Free Only Love Can Break Your Heart by Ed Tarkington Page B

“meet up” for breakfast at his favorite coffee shop, where I would consume a plate of sausage and hash browns while he sipped his coffee and lectured me on the art of manhood or told stories about growing up on the farm in Hampton Roads: bird and squirrel hunting with his brothers, fishing in the rivers and marshes, playing baseball in sandy fields, gathering with his family around the fireplace in the days of Saturday evening radio shows. We rarely mentioned Paul. Once, we did discuss the night I mistook Brad Culver for a ghost. I described Paul’s account of the life and death of Frank Cherry and asked the Old Man how much of that dubious history lesson was true.
    “I’m not sure Cherry was quite the scoundrel your brother made him out to be,” the Old Man said. “But otherwise, yes, that’s the way it happened.”
    “Why did you want that house?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Probably because the bastards didn’t want to sell it to me.”
    “Why wouldn’t they want you to have it?” I asked.
    “Some people have everything handed to them and let it all go to shit,” the Old Man said. “These people can’t stand to see a man who’s come from the bottom get ahead of them. They’ll take every chance they get to make him feel that he isn’t good enough. I’ve had to deal with people like that all of my life.”
    He sipped his coffee and glanced out the window with an air of satisfaction.
    “Did it make you mad that they sold the place to the Culvers?” I asked.
    “Sure,” he said. “But not at Brad Culver.”
    I thought of the look on the Old Man’s face that night when he pointed his gun at Culver’s head.
    “I don’t like him,” I said.
    “I’ll tell you a secret,” the Old Man said. “I’m about to do a big deal with Culver.”
    “You are?” I said.
    “A real biggie,” he said.
    “A contract for one of his businesses?”
    “Not a contract for a business. An investment. Venture capital,” he said. “The big leagues.”
    I wasn’t sure what he meant. I don’t think he knew exactly himself.
    “Is it some new kind of insurance?” I asked.
    “No,” he said. “I’m selling the insurance business.”
    “Oh,” I said.
    What on earth would lead a man to sell off a profitable business he’d spent more than thirty years building up from nothing to start over from scratch at seventy-three? I suppose he was just too confident, too certain that this “venture capital” scheme was his last chance to make that big, once-in-a-lifetime payday—the one that would make him five times as rich as even the richest of those who had ever looked down their noses at him.
    “This is going to be the one, boy,” he said.
    He leaned forward, his eyes filled with an unnerving exhilaration. You could see through those eyes as if down a narrow tunnel to the past where stood a poor kid from the sticks listening to Huey Long’s “Every Man a King” speeches on the radio, gazing out beyond the peanut fields, dreaming. They were the eyes of the eternal optimist. They were also the eyes of a gambler who had just put his whole stake on a sure thing.

6
    I OFTEN WONDERED WHAT Paul would have made of the transformation Twin Oaks underwent in the hands of Brad and Jane Culver. Even those big old trees seemed invigorated by the polished surfaces and the bursting fertility of the lawn and gardens beneath the canopy of their limbs. In the dell to the right of the house, hidden from view by a grove of poplar trees, stood a newly raised, air-conditioned stable for the Culvers’ horses. A high white picket fence enclosed the breadth of the property. Intentionally or not, this gleaming white border made clear the comparatively diminutive dimensions of the Old Man’s parcel of land.
    Around the time I started the eighth grade, Patricia, the Culvers’ daughter, returned home from England, where I imagined her life had consisted solely of cocktail parties, fox hunting, and polo matches. By