BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 57

APRIL 2012

DAVID AND WULF

Yet again I can see the situation, don't want to imagine the details. Dad, provoked by Mom, put his anger on slow boil for a while and then deflected his anger onto Wulf, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A whipping ensued. Wulf's resentment from the beating let loose on the crying baby, me, also in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was just an accident, fury coming out and landing where it shouldn't. Whatever the act, once discovered it warranted another beating for Wulf. Mom, who couldn't use me as a surrogate victim right then, given my diminutive stature, let her retaliation simmer. And simmer. And simmer—until it extended throughout a lifetime.

That's one version that runs through my mind.

During my drinking years I sometimes spent time with Wulf's high school friends—he was in Alaska, purportedly being a guide. Conversation occasionally drifted to him, one I remember detailing how he, a robust, muscular young man, six foot four and probably two hundred and twenty pounds and feared, if not respected, was sobbing, lamenting that he had no father. The word "bastard", already vanished as a slur in my time, had stuck in his psyche. Hearing that, I understood the provenance of a book in his bedroom, "Famous Bastards", which at the time registered only as a swear word to me and which I deemed a pretty curious title.

That was a side of Wulf I never knew. Ten years older than me, he was more of an imposing father figure drifting in and out of my life, hunter and fisherman when I was small, a soldier when I was somewhat older, a student later, and then a rogue of renown as a pool shark throughout the eastern part of the state. He was a womenizer, too, I was told. He settled down, returning to the country life he came from and becoming a ditch rider going on twenty years now. He has to be contemplating retirement.

He doesn't stop by the museum but I see him at the store—our paths have crossed a number of times, we acknowledge each other, don't always speak, the gulf of a decade between our ages not easily bridged. "Any news?" he asks. "Just waiting for probate to end," I say. He nods. I wonder what his version of the incident is, consider the configurations of emotion he might experience from having done what he did—if he did it. From having been beaten, if he was, and bearing secrets, if he does. The possibilities create a perceptual lag for me, I have to filter what I say and what I hear.

A psychologist might say getting it all out into the open might earn some closure but I'm of the opposite mind. There is no fixing the past. Revisiting it just adds to the confusion, when what you want to do is subtract. A broken spot is a broken spot, and you may splice it but the splice, however well done, doesn't make it pretty.

I'm not sure Wulf even knows about the museum, he hasn't mentioned it. I can't say that its appearance elicits a great deal of community interest. Any difference normally makes the gossip rounds swiftly, but a museum may just seem mundane to the rural population. Doyle suggests getting an Instagram account to drum up some buzz, a Facebook page, maybe starting a blog, and I confirm his ideas, careful to add nothing to them, and then let them die an easy death. Like most of us, he has a lot of thoughts but doesn't follow up on them. Call them mutations, the mind casting them out to meet the ever-changing cultural landscape with only a few coming to fruition. Most of them, thankfully, abort.

***

"I have Mom's memoir out in the truck," I tell Wulf. "Finally made copies." He sets a cold case of Pabst on the counter, which is manned by a shirttail relation, Rita—a second cousin, maybe, though my genealogy is weak: my grandmother's niece?

"Family reunion!" she remarks jovially. "Don't often see so many Burgesses together at once."

Wulf growls a laugh out. "Can't put too many of us in one spot at one time," he says. "It's like putting gophers in a barrel." To me, he says, "I'll wait for you."

He pays, leaves. I take my quart of milk, cheese slices and loaf of Wonder bread—'when in Rome'—up and pay for it, updating Rita, upon being asked, on the museum's progress.

At the truck, I hand over the memoir to Wulf. It has a sticky note on it so I know which copy is his. I say, hesitantly, "I don't know if you want this information or not but here it is. You can do what you want with it." I open the memoir in his hands to reveal the loose page inside. Three names, all the same save their middle initials, with addresses and phone numbers. "Mom had me look him up," I tell him. "She said it's your father. I got three hits on the internet, that's as far as I got."

He has already cracked a beer. The news doesn't seem to phase him. He takes the memoir, the sheet. "Paul McCallister," he reads aloud. He ponders for a second, adds laconically, "Does that mean I'm Irish?"

My pace of conversation is slow, his slower. I decide to blurt out the rest, get it over with. "She said he was an American doctor. For the Reconstruction, the clean-up, the occupiers at Weimar after the war. Whatever you call it. That's all I know. Maybe it was Wiesbaden."

He nods, adds silence to the sequence.

"You might be able to get something from the military. I tried, didn't get far through the chain of command. I didn't try too hard, though."

Quiet again. Finally, he says, "Anything good in it? The memoir?"

"Just the usual complaints. I kind of hoped for more."

"She didn't give out information freely." He emits something like a laugh but is more like a scoff. It's a sound that cuts into a place, one he's obviously aware of but one the listener isn't. It feels like its aim might be anywhere. He uses the device often. it might be his primary tool. Call it a weapon, even. One that throws his partner off balance.

I don't bite. I learned, in the game of catch, to just drop the ball and end the game. I do wait, though, in case he has other questions. He doesn't. "Back to the museum, then," I say.

"Work, work, work." There's the laugh, the scoff, again.

© Ralph Thurston 2025