George handed Jonathan a drink and lowered his massive thighs into an overstuffed chair. ‘’Course a frock coat don’t look so funny on a reverend gentleman as it does on an old senator. So—’ he said, lifting his glass and smiling.
Jonathan lifted his glass, too: smiled, too, into George’s smile and took a sip of the drink. What was it? Apple juice? Whiskey?
George slapped one fat leg. ‘My daughter says to me, this guy looks kind of peaked, so she brings you inside and she likes you. A preacher, she says. Then she shows me how you use your hands. I near to dropped dead. “Only one guy uses his hands like that,” I say to myself, “and that’s Jonathan Carrick.”’
Jonathan tilted his head to squint at George.
‘I says to her,’ George went on, ‘“Victoria,” I says, “this preacher of yours: was he wearing a frock coat like me?” And she says, “Daddy, you’re a genius.”’
George’s laugh split in the middle, and Jonathan – noting the split and the vulnerability it implied – nodded, knew he had gained a point of country and felt calm determination edge its way through the tension of his battle-lines.
‘You got to know how much this means to me, Jonathan – your coming here to see me. Answer to my prayers, kind of. Jesus, when I think of that lousy hovel—’
‘Which hovel?’ Jonathan said. ‘Yours or the one I – what’s the right word? – occupied?’
‘What difference does it make? They both stank.’
‘It makes a difference to me.’
George laughed. ‘Yeah, you’re right. Of course you’re right.’ He shifted in his chair, an awkward shift that made him wince. ‘Shit, I spent so many years trimming I don’t hardly notice when I’m doing it anymore. How’d you get to be a preacher? Funny thing for a guy like you to do. Of all the things I’d have thought – Hey, you married? Got any children?’
A fan creaked around in the ceiling but failed to stir the sodden air.
‘I have tried to do no harm,’ Jonathan said and was so surprised at his own words and at the anger so evident in them that he barely heard George’s response.
‘Yeah,’ George said. ‘What a waste.’
One weekend during Jonathan’s first year in Denver, College had taken him into the mountains. They spent the night up on a ridge about a hundred yards above one of those mountain springs that rush and gush through the rocks below. The next morning, about halfway down the mountain, working their way toward the stream, they saw a whistling marmot. I’ve never seen one of these creatures myself, but Jonathan says in his diaries that they live in rocks; they make nests there, and they call to each other from rock to rock, a moaning, sad note. Jonathan was carrying College’s little single shot .22 rifle; he aimed at the marmot, just for fun, carried away by the beauty of the place and the freedom of the mountains, never thinking of firing at it. College said, ‘You can’t hit that thing.’ Jonathan said, ‘The hell I can’t,’ and shot the marmot through the head.