But there were no words in any language to explain how amazed I was. So I turned and pressed my lips to hers; it was the only thing that seemed appropriate.

However, what was meant to be a kiss to tell her that I thought her pictures were fabulous, turned into something more. I didn't touch her except with my lips, but for a moment I thought I heard bells ringing. Or maybe it was stars tinkling like little silver bells. When I pulled away, I looked at her in shock. It was one more shock in a day that could have put an earthquake to shame. And she seemed to be feeling the same way because she just sat there staring at me with her eyes wide.

"I don't know about anybody else, but I'm hungry," n.o.ble said, and broke the spell that was on Jackie and me.

Turning, I looked at the four of them standing there, and had to blink a couple of times to clear my vision. n.o.ble had an I-told-you-so expression on his face and Nate looked embarra.s.sed. Tessa was frowning, while Toodles was looking at me, well, kind of fondly, like a father might look at his son. I turned away and studied the facade of Jackie's studio.

A minute later, everyone was back to normal, except that I thought I'd had enough of lying in the hammock and watching, so I got up and, after we'd eaten all of n.o.ble's cheese-things, I helped him put that old frame over the broken seat back together. I got out Pat's father's toolbox and we used the tools. n.o.ble didn't comment when he first saw the tools, but when he got one dirty, he apologized. I said it was okay, and a minute later, he mumbled, "Sorry about your wife."

I didn't say anything, but his words meant a lot to me. They were of sympathy, yes, but the words also showed that he'd been interested enough to learn about the contents of my books.

In the late afternoon, Nate went home, and when Allie came to pick up Tessa, I thought Toodles was going to cry. Allie kept looking at Toodles, trying not to, but he was indeed an odd-looking little man. Since Toodles and Tessa were holding hands and looking at Allie as though she were an evil social worker about to take Tessa away from her beloved grandfather, Jackie asked if Tessa could have a sleep-over.

Allie said, "You mean I could have an evening to myself? Take a long, hot bath? Watch a movie on TV that has s.e.x in it? Drink wine? Naw, I don't deserve such happiness." She practically ran through the garden gate before anyone changed his mind.

Eventually, n.o.ble and Jackie went into the kitchen to fix dinner, while Toodles, Tessa, and I stayed outside. Tessa ran around chasing fireflies while I sat on a chair next to my dad.

What a strange thought: my dad. All my life he'd been nothing but a head in group photo shots. I don't think there was one picture of him alone.

And none of my uncles spoke about him. It was hard to believe in a family like mine, but I think they felt guilty. At least one good thing had come of my dad's incarceration: My uncles never again intentionally committed a crime. Sober and planned, that is.

Toodles and I didn't say much. Actually, we didn't say anything. Me, the wordsmith, had not one word in my head that I could think of to say. So tell me, Dad, what was it like to spend forty-three years in prison? Do you hate your brothers? Or maybe I should have asked if he had any of my favorite June bugs on his vest.

When Jackie called us in to dinner, Tessa ran into the kitchen. It was late and we were all hungry. I let my father go ahead of me into the house, but in the doorway, he paused. He didn't look at me, but stared at the sight of n.o.ble and Jackie loading the table with food.

"You'll have me?" he asked in that thick accent that I hadn't heard in years.

For a moment it was as though the earth stood still. Even the fireflies seemed to pause as they waited for my answer.

What could I say? As Jackie had pointed out, the man had been put in jail because he was trying to get money to support his wife and son. Me.

I guess it was my turn to support him.

As Jackie said, I tended to get weepy, so I needed to say something that wouldn't put me there now. "Only if you show me how to make a cat's cradle."

It was at that moment that I found out where my weepiness came from. I was trying to be cool, but my dad made no effort toward restraint. Burying his face in my chest, he began to bawl. As he held on to my shirt for dear life, he cried loud enough to knock the plaster off the walls.

"What did you do to him?" Jackie yelled as she clutched Toodles's arms and tried to pull him away from big, bad me.

Part of me wanted to grab my father and hug him and cry with him, but another part was put off by his display. Toodles kept bawling, his face pressed hard against my chest. He started saying that he loved me and was glad I was his son, and that he was so proud of me and he knew men who'd read my books, and he loved me and wanted to be with me all his life, and - n.o.ble was clearly enjoying my discomfort, while Jackie was still trying to pull Toodles off. It was my guess that Jackie couldn't understand what my father was saying. I think you needed to grow up with an accent like his to be able to understand it, especially when a man was howling and his mouth was full of shirt.

The part of me that was affected by my father's copious tears seemed to be the part attached to my muscles because I couldn't get Toodles off. Jackie was pulling, but making no headway as he was a strong little guy. I had my arms on his shoulders, but every time he said he loved me, my arms turned to wet spaghetti and I couldn't push. "I love you" was not something I'd ever heard before from a blood kin. Heaven knows that my mother never said the words to anyone.

n.o.ble finally took pity on me, pulled my father off, and got him seated at the table, where he hung his head and kept sobbing. Tessa moved her chair beside him, held his hand in hers, and got the hiccups as she tried not to cry with him. She kept looking at me in puzzlement. Had I done something good or bad to make her friend cry like that?

I was so weak I could hardly sit up.

We were a strange group. Toodles and Tessa sat on one side, him sobbing as though his heart was broken, her holding his hand and hiccupping. Jackie was at one end of the table looking like she was going to cry too but not knowing why. I was across from Toodles, feeling like a deflated ball, and n.o.ble was at the other end of the table laughing at the lot of us.

n.o.ble picked up a bowl of mashed potatoes and slapped a mountain of them onto Toodles's plate, then put an equal amount of meat loaf and green beans beside the spuds. I saw where I got my good appet.i.te.

But Toodles didn't even look at the food.

"Did you know that Ford here can tell stories?" n.o.ble said loudly, his words directed at Toodles. "He never was good around the house, hardly knows one end of a crowbar from the other, but he can tell stories like n.o.body else. My mom used to say that meals were never the same after Ford left home."

"Yeah?" I said.

"Yeah," n.o.ble answered. "My dad said that all the lying of the Newcombes had gone into you so that you could tell the biggest, best lies of anybody on earth."

"Yeah?" I said again. This was high praise indeed. I turned to look at Jackie to see if she was taking note of this, but she was looking as though she couldn't tell if this was good or bad.

Toodles gave a big sniff, so Jackie got up to get him a tissue. After he'd blown his nose so loud that Tessa started to giggle, he winked at her, picked up his spoon, and said, "Tell me a story."

I obliged.

It was after dinner that I told n.o.ble I wanted to talk to him. I wanted the truth about what was going on. I'd known him too long and too well not to suspect he was up to something. We took a six-pack and went up to my office where we could talk man to man.

"Okay, so why are you here and what do you want?" I asked. "And think about who you're talking to before you make up any lies."

"I'll leave the lies to you," he said, his voice humble so he wouldn't offend me.

I wasn't fooled. n.o.ble was a grown man and able-bodied. Even if he had been in prison a few times, he could find work, so why was he here? Why to me? n.o.ble was well named. He had a great deal of pride, so I knew it would take some doing to find out what was in his mind.

It took me a while to get him to talk, but when he started, I thought he might never shut up.

He got off the couch and stood over me, glaring.

"I'm here because you ruined my life so I figure you owe me."

"And how did I do that?" I asked calmly, keeping my own anger under control. What ingrat.i.tude! I'd never added up the amount of money I'd spent in giving free education to all the nieces and nephews, n.o.ble's kids, legitimate and otherwise, included, but it was a lot.

He was still glaring at me. "I used to be happy. I loved bein' a kid near all my uncles, and I was crazy about my father. And you know something?

When I look back at you and me, I thought we had a good time. Yeah, I know we all gave you a hard time, but you were such a sn.o.b you deserved it. You always looked down on us."

Pausing, he waited for me to say something, but what could I say? To deny that I'd looked down on them? To feel that I was superior was the only defense I had.

"When you left for college, I was glad to see the last of you-but you know what? I missed you. You always made us laugh. The rest of us, we could do things with trucks and a pocketknife, but you could do things with words."

Pausing for a moment, he took a drink of his beer and smiled in memory.

"I was pretty mad when you left for college. You remember how I ran over your suitcase with the tractor? You were goin' off to see the world, while I had a pregnant girlfriend and her dad was threatenin' to shoot me if I didn't marry her. Did you know that by the time I was twenty-one I'd been married and divorced two times and I had three kids to support? And all this happened while you were off at college meetin' town girls."

n.o.ble drank some more beer, then sat down on the other end of the couch. His anger was gone now. We were just two men heading toward middle age, reminiscing. "Then you got a book published and all the aunts read it and said it was all about us. Only they said you'd made us look like we ate roadkill for dinner. Uncle Clyde's wife said, 'I don't know who he's talkin' about but it ain't us.' So after that, we all pretty much decided that you didn't remember any of us and you'd made up people to write about."

n.o.ble gave a little smile. "I can't tell you how many times I was asked if I was kin to that 'writer feller' and you know what I said?"

He didn't wait for me to answer, but I don't think he wanted one. I think he'd waited a long time to tell me what he was saying now. In fact, maybe he'd driven all this way just to tell me what he thought of me.

"No. I told 'em no. Ever' time somebody asked if I was kin to Ford Newcombe, I told 'em no."

I tried to be philosophical about what he was saying, but I felt some hurt.

Everyone wanted his relatives to be proud of him, didn't he?

"You humiliated us to the world, but you know what was the worst thing you did to us? You changed the kids. My daughter, Vanessa, the one that was born right after you left for college, is just like you. She even looked like you, too, until she had her nose fixed. She read your book when she was just a kid, and after that she didn't want nothin' to do with us Newcombes."

n.o.ble opened another beer. "You can't imagine all the ribbin' I got over that kid. People said she was yours, not mine." He looked at me over the top of his beer. "You remember her mother? That little Sue Ann Hawkins? You didn't... ?"

Of course I remembered Sue Ann Hawkins. Every young man and a few old ones within twenty miles of her house had been to bed with her. Of course no one dared tell n.o.ble that. Not then and not now. Back then, we kept our mouths shut and wished them luck on their wedding day. Later, half the county breathed a sigh of relief when the little girl was born with the Newcombe nose. Whether the nose had come from n.o.ble, me or one of our other relatives had never been discussed even in private for fear of n.o.ble's legendary right hook.

n.o.ble put up his hand. "No, don't answer that one. That girl swore she'd only been to bed with me in her whole life, and if I hadn't believed her, I wouldn't have married her, her daddy's shotgun or not. But if she was so d.a.m.ned pure, then why did she later take up with every-"

He stopped himself. "Naw, I won't go into that. Let's just say that her mother was so bad that Vanessa ended up livin' with me from the time she was four. But after she read your book, she was livin' with you in her mind.

It was always, 'My uncle Ford this' and 'my uncle Ford that' until I wished I'd never saved you that time you fell into the creek and hit your head. You remember that? You remember how I carried you a mile and a half to get you home? I wasn't an ounce bigger than you, but I carried you. Then Uncle Simon drove his old pickup across the fields and through the fences to get you to the hospital as fast as he could. When you didn't wake up for two whole days, we thought you were a goner. You remember that?"

I did remember it. But, oddly, I hadn't remembered it when I was writing my books.

"You know what?" n.o.ble said, looking at me. "My daughter didn't believe me when I told her about savin' you. She said that if it'd really happened, you would have put it in your book, 'cause you put everything in there. And since it wasn't in there, it didn't happen. How come you didn't put that story in there?"

I had to look away because I had no answer to that question.

"Well, anyway, you sent all four of my kids to college. h.e.l.l, you even sent my third wife money so she could go back to school and become a grade school teacher. She divorced me after her first year teachin'. Said I wasn't educated enough for her. And now my college-educated kids don't want anything to do with me. They want to see you, who they've laid eyes on maybe twice in their lives, but they don't want to see their own dad. But you don't have anything to do with any of us, do you? Except to write about us."

While he took a deep drink from his beer, I waited in silence for him to continue. I must admit that I was fascinated at this look at how I'd "ruined"

his life. I was also busy speculating if smart little Vanessa could be my daughter.

"So, anyway, when we got word that they was gonna let Toodles out, I thought it was time for you to pay up for what you'd done to us, and to me, especially. 'King'? Did you have to name me ' King' in your books? Ain't 'n.o.ble' bad enough?"

"What do you want from me?" I asked. "You didn't come here to cry in your beer, so what do you want?"

n.o.ble took a while to answer. "I got into trouble at home. I don't mean the jail time. It wasn't the first time I'd seen the inside of a jail, as you well know. But this time I got into trouble with the family."

I wasn't about to tell him that Vanessa had already told me her version of the "family trouble."

"After I got out of jail this last time, I had nothin'. My three ex-wives had cleaned me out, and n.o.body wants to give an ex-con a job, so all I could do was go back home. Uncle Zeb offered me a place at his house, said I could stay in the back room that he turns the heat off in-you know what an old skinflint he is. So I'm out there, freezin' cold, and here comes Uncle Zeb's new wife. You should see her. She's about twenty-five and a dead ringer for Joey Heatherton. Remember her? Lord only knows why she agreed to marry an old coot like Uncle Zeb. So I wake up and she's in bed with me.

I'm a man and I hadn't had a woman in a long time, so there was no way I wasn't gonna give her what she wanted. The next mornin' she didn't say nothin' and I didn't say nothin', so I thought maybe things would be all right. But three months later, she's over at Uncle Cal's house and she's cryin'

her eyes out, and she's sayin' that she's a faithful wife, but I sneaked into her bed one afternoon while she was takin' a nap, and now she's gonna have my baby."

I wanted to say that such a story wasn't new in our family, but n.o.ble barreled on ahead.

"Back when I was a kid, people would have been more understandin' if somethin' like this had happened. But you destroyed our family. When we was kids, the uncles would have laughed somethin' like that off. And the girl wouldn't have told in the first place. She was married to an old man who couldn't give her what she wanted, and I did, so what was she upset about?"

He took a deep breath to calm his anger. "But that day she was cryin' to the uncles, one of the kids you sent to college was there, and he said that what I did 'is no longer done in our family.' That's exactly what he said, 'cause that's how they talk now. All h.e.l.l broke loose and it was my own daughter, the oldest one, the one you ruined the first and the most, that told me I had to get out. She said she was ashamed of me and I had to leave.

You know what they have now? 'Family councils.' Sounds like somethin' off The G.o.dfather movie, don't it?"

n.o.ble shook his head in disbelief. "You sent all the kids to college and what'd we get? They've 'upgraded' as they call it, so that now we're like the Mafia. Some 'up-gradin' huh?"

I had to work to keep from laughing, but I figured if I did laugh, n.o.ble might take a swing at me. Not that I didn't think I couldn't take him, but, well, sitting behind a computer day after day...

"And you know what else you done to us? You ruined our land. There ain't no more trailers. One of the kids-they're all so clean now I can't tell one from another-become an architect and he designed a bunch of little houses on Newcombe Land. Cute little places with garages to hide the cars in. The kid even designed matching doghouses and he bought each house somethin' called a 'p.o.o.per scooper.' You know what that is? He said we had to use it to clean up all the dog 'do-do.' That's what he called it. A grown man! So all the trailers were hauled away, and the old swimmin' hole was filled up just because it had a few leeches livin' in it, and they built those little houses. All of them are alike except just an itty bit different. They look like they fell out of a box of cereal. And rules! Those houses come with rules. No tires left outside. Not even if you fill 'em full of flowers. No cars that don't work. No weeds anywhere. We didn't have as many rules in jail."

n.o.ble narrowed his eyes at me. "And you know what's really bad? The whole place won awards. One of the nephews named the place and entered it in a contest and it won. You know what they named it? 'Newcombe Manor Estates' Can you beat that?"

Speaking of awards, I should have been given one for containing my laughter. To hide my mirth, I held the beer can in front of my mouth until my lip began to freeze.

"So, anyway, they had a 'family council' and decided that I'd done 'somethin' unforgivable' so I had to leave. Not one of the uncles stood up for me. They've got rich, college-educated kids to support 'em and make 'investments' for 'em, so they don't have to do nothin' but watch TV all day long and clean up the dog do-do before one of the kids arrives with those prissy little grandkids. Those kids told me I was a 'throwback to a darker age.' Can you believe anybody says things like that? When we were kids, what would one of the uncles have done if we'd said somethin' like that? We would have had our behinds blistered until we wouldn't be able to sit down even today.

"So, anyway, after they said I had to leave because I was 'soilin' the family name,' I said, 'What about Toodles?' One of the kids-maybe one of mine, I can't tell-said that Toodles was a criminal so he'd have to make it on his own. There's no sense of family in those kids. None at all. So I said that if I was leavin' I was gonna pick up Toodles and take him with me. See, I thought I'd get to their pride at that and they'd at least say they'd pay to send Toodles to some real nice old-age home. But n.o.body said nothin', so I took one of Uncle Cal's old cars and headed out. And all the way to the Fed where they had him, I kept wonderin' what I was gonna do with him when I got him. I didn't have no place to live and no way to support myself, much less a way to take care of an old man with a bruised brain. But just before I got there, I thought, 'Ford ruined our family so he owes us. 'When I got to the prison I asked Cousin Fanner-You remember him? He works in the warden's office now. Lifer.-if he knew where you was livin' and he said that if you owned anything in the world, he'd be able to find you. So by the time Toodles was ready to leave, I had your address and we set out. And here we are."

And, I thought, here to stay. I've said a lot of bad about my relatives- and all of it deserved-but I knew, in spite of what n.o.ble had told me about current circ.u.mstances, that they had a sense of family. They tended to travel around a bit-my relatives discussed the pros and cons (no pun intended) of prisons like businessmen compared airports-but they always returned "home." In fact, "home" was an important word to Newcombes.

As I sat there in silence with my cousin and went over his story in my mind, I knew what he was actually saying. He needed a home base. We might wake up tomorrow morning and find him gone, but he would leave some possession behind, a shirt, a pocketknife, something that would mean that my house was now his home.

His long story had been to tell me that right now he had no home base, no place to tie the far end of his leash.

All too well, I knew how that felt. After Pat died, I'd had no home base for years.

My problem in saying yes was that I was making a big commitment.

We'd owned what we called "Newcombe Land" for a century. It was 146.8 acres of land that was owned jointly by all the adult Newcombes. When a boy or girl reached twenty-one, his/her name was put on the deed. The catch was that the land couldn't be divided or sold without the written consent of every person on the deed. Since there were now over a hundred names on the deed, that didn't seem likely to happen.

If I said n.o.ble and my father could stay, I was making a sort of Newcombe vow. I'd have to stay here in this house in Cole Creek. If I moved, it would have to be done with the consent of n.o.ble and my father.

Yeah, I knew it was ridiculous. I owned the house and I could sell it any time I wanted, but the rules that were taught to me when I was a kid were as strong in my mind as taboos against incest (something that wasn't done in my family) and turning blood kin over to the law.

I took a deep breath. "There're two unused bedrooms and a bath on the second floor. You and...'What did I call him? "Uh, Dad, can take those."

When n.o.ble nodded, then looked away, I knew he didn't want me to see his smile of relief. When he looked back at me, he said, "This place is fallin'

down, but I ain't got no tools to fix it."

After a moment's hesitation, I said, "Use the ones I have. The tools in the oak box."

n.o.ble looked shocked. "I can't use them-not on my own anyway.

Vanessa told me about those tools. She said they were famous. Said they were..." He thought. "She said they were a 'symbol of a great love.' They were a..." He frowned in concentration. "She said those tools were a meta...

Meta something."

"Metaphor," I said, also frowning. As Jackie said, gag me with a spoon. If my sending Vanessa to college had made her talk like that, I wished I'd not sent the money.

The truth was, I didn't like to think of Newcombe Land being turned into some award-winning subdivision. I'd never thought of it consciously, but if I'd had kids-legal ones, that is-I'd have wanted them to swing out on a rope tied to a tree branch and jump into the Newcombe Pond. And what the h.e.l.l did a few leeches matter? When I was in the second grade my teacher said, "We have a Newcombe in our cla.s.s so let's have him tell us all about leeches." At the time I'd been bursting with pride, having no idea the teacher was being snide. But the laugh was on her because I went to the chalkboard and drew not only the exterior but the interior (don't ask) of a leech. When I sat down, the whole cla.s.s and the teacher were looking at me oddly. I didn't know it until years later, but that afternoon in the teachers'