For the first time since Jake had rescued him, Lloyd took a good, clear-minded look at his father, realizing how much he had aged. His hair was peppered with gray, and the lines of hard prison life showed around his eyes; but he was still a good-looking man with an air of strength and power about him. He noticed the man limped a little as he walked around to the other side of the bed. He had a vague memory of the shoot-out in California, had a feeling the hip wound was from that and not from taking a fall from a horse, as his father had once told him when he was younger. There were so many things he wanted to know the truth about.
“I thought I heard voices in here. You look a lot better today,” Jake was saying.
“I feel better.”
Miranda rose, deciding to leave the room and let them talk. “You two need some time alone. I’m going to make both of you a nice, big breakfast,” she told them. She leaned down and kissed Lloyd once more, then left, closing the door behind her.
Jake sat down in a chair beside the bed. “You still hate me for not letting you have the whiskey?”
Lloyd closed his eyes for a moment. “No. I’m sorry for the things I said, Pa. I’m sorry for a lot of things. I never hated you. I just wanted to hate you. The whiskey made it all easier.”
“You’ve got to stay away from it, Lloyd. I lived with that hell for the first fifteen years of my life, with a man who went crazy when he drank. That’s just the way it is for some men, and you’re one of them. The difference is, my pa was mean clear through, and all the time. Whiskey just made him even meaner. I’ve got scars on my back you’ve never seen because I never let you. I didn’t want to have to explain about a father who beat me with the buckle end of a belt from when I wasn’t more than two; who murdered my mother and my little brother. You think it’s terrible that I shot him, but he was a brutal, brutal man. He was raping a young girl I cared about very much, and I didn’t know how else to stop him. After that, I didn’t know how to stop myself from falling into a life of crime. It just seemed like that was all I was fit for, and I had nobody to guide me.”
He stopped to light a cigarette he had brought into the room with him, leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “It’s not like that for you. You had me to guide you, and I can tell you from firsthand experience that the path you’re taking will only lead to a life of pure hell, full of regrets that eat at you on the inside like a cancer. If you hate things about my past so much, then why create one just like it for yourself?”
“I don’t know.” Lloyd stared at the ceiling. “I just wanted to hurt you like you had hurt me. Why didn’t you tell me a long time ago, Pa?”
Jake took a deep drag on the cigarette, blowing out the smoke with a deep sigh. “I was afraid. From the day you were born I knew that through you I could somehow recapture my own youth and relive it in a whole different light. I could be the father I never had. I was ashamed of the man. I never wanted you to know the kind of man your grandfather was, and I sure as hell never wanted to see the same shame in your eyes for me that I had for him. I saw it the day you visited me in jail back in St. Louis.”
Lloyd turned to look at him, for the first time noticing the crippled look to his right hand when the man put the cigarette to his lips again. “What happened to your hand, Pa?”
Jake took the cigarette in his other hand, flexed the crippled one as best he could. “I, uh, I made a vow when you were born, Lloyd, that because of my own pa, I would never, never lay a hand on you. That day you visited me, after I hit you, I felt a rage at myself. I guess I started hitting the wall, so they tell me. I didn’t stop until I broke pretty near every bone in my hand, wasn’t even aware of what I was doing until I wore myself out and couldn’t keep it up.”
“My God, Pa…I didn’t know.”
Jake smiled sadly and shrugged. “I can still shoot a rifle with it, but I have to rely on my left hand now to draw and shoot a revolver.” He took another drag on the cigarette, staring at the floor then. “You want to talk about pain? I know pain, Lloyd, from this hand to bullet wounds to brutal beatings to losing someone you love. There isn’t one loss or form of pain you can suffer that I can’t understand.” He raised his eyes then to meet Lloyd’s gaze. “But I’ll tell you one thing. I’d take on every bit of your pain too, if I could do it. I’d take away the physical pain, the whiskey jitters, the pain in your heart over Beth, I’d gladly suffer all of it if there was any possible way I could take it all off you.” He blinked back tears. “But I can’t, and that’s the hell of it.”