Thistles

His boys were choosing ways of life now that took them on paths away from John Franklin.  He could not blame them for this.  They had been good boys and had helped him on the farm while they were growing up and had never caused him any worry.  If they wanted different lives they had to give themselves the chance.

When he had been at Camp Dix he had met a fellow from Florida who had been a fisherman before the war.  That was World War I.  This man had made a lot of trips down to Cuba and said the country was good for growing tobacco.  He wanted John to go down there with him after the war, and he was going to get a friend of his to back them on a tobacco plantation, and all John had to supply was the know-how for raising tobacco.  He could have done that all right.  But he was writing to Liz then, and she was waiting for him to come back and Cuba somehow didn’t seem the more important of the two.

John thought about Cuba sometimes, and he knew that the deal would probably have fallen through.  But still, he thought about it, mostly when he was morose about droughts or mortgages.  Sometimes he could see the ephemeral palms and cane as clearly as his parched and rocky hillsides.  He conjured it up more often now since Eddie had left.  It was what he had for his escape from his fathers’ ways – the old, tired ways, the bone-weary, strength-sapping, sweat-soaked ways – just as Louisville was Eddie’s.  Helen had pulled Eddie in the same way that Liz had held John.  Only in that way were they women of different minds.  Women sometimes got in a man’s way; sometimes they gave him a push.  Perhaps Eddie would have gone anyway.  Maybe it was in him to go.  More and more John believed that he himself was meant to leave, and he would have if it were to do over.  Perhaps he would have returned later.  But the painful part was that he would never know.  He had not taken his chance.  Eddie had taken his and so would Gil.  Maybe Joanne would hold Gil here for a while yet, but he would go.  It wasn’t right for John to attempt to deny him his chance.  He was resigned to the loss.  None of his sons would follow him here.  It was this certainty that mocked all his efforts.