Small Town

Francis X. Buckram had come home from World War II and traded a khaki uniform for a blue one and never got out of it. He was a beat cop for the rest of his life, on his feet most of the time, and those feet had never been right since the Battle of the Bulge. He’d come home at the end of his shift and sit on a stool in the bathroom with his feet in a tub of water. “Hit those books,” he told his son. “Pay attention to what the nuns teach you. You don’t want to wind up like this.”

Then, two months before he could have watched his son graduate from Colgate, Frank came home from work and told his wife he didn’t feel so hot. “I’ll call the doctor,” she said.

“It’s nothing,” he said, and sat down in his chair. His eyes widened, as if he saw something that surprised him, and then he slumped in his chair and died. It was, they told his wife, a massive myocardial infarction, which was another way of saying a heart attack. At least he didn’t suffer, they told her, and she said, Oh, a lot you know, for didn’t that man suffer his whole life?

Fran flew home for the wake and the funeral mass, then hurried back to finish school. He’d delayed choosing among the law schools that had accepted him, and now he wrote them all and said he’d be unable to come. He didn’t want to be a lawyer. He wanted to be a cop, under it all he’d always wanted to be a cop. When his father’s friends — cops, all of them — came up to him at the wake, many of them said, You’re making something of yourself, you’re going to be a lawyer, your dad was so proud of you, that’s all he talked about.

When he caught a break, parlaying a good arrest into a promotion to detective, his mother was there to see him get his gold shield. She kissed him and said, Oh, Fran, if he could see you now. Later, he wondered how to take her words. If Frank Buckram could see him now, then what? Would he shake his hand or shake his head? Slap him on the back or across the face?

When he came back from Portland and was installed as police commissioner in a public ceremony at One Police Plaza, with him in a uniform with a ton of brass on it and Rudy presenting him with the commissioner’s badge, his mother was there in her wheelchair. She’d turned into a little old lady, she had less than a year and a half left, and her voice was so faint he’d had to bend down to catch what she was saying.

“So proud,” she said. “Your poor father, how proud he’d be. His heart’d be bursting, he’d be so proud.”

And now? He was flying first class, he was staying in good hotels, he was getting paid good money to say the same thing over and over. Men with too much money were willing to give some of it to him so he could try to get a job nobody in his right mind would want.

How proud would the old man be now?

Buckram was indeed an Irish name, he told Wilburn. It was also an English word, meaning a stiff cotton fabric used in bookbinding, and he’d checked the etymology once and learned the word had antecedents in Middle English and Old French, and derived ultimately from Bokhara, in Central Asia.

The Irish had no connection to that part of the world, unless they were indeed one of the Ten Lost Tribes. The name was an Anglicization of a Gaelic name that started out Buccrough — and ended in any of several unpronounceable ways. It wasn’t a common name in Ireland, but he’d checked the directories during a visit to Ireland, and there were Buckrams in County Monaghan, where his father’s people had come from. He’d thought of looking them up, but Monaghan was in the Midlands, well out of his way, and what would he say to them, anyway?

Wilburn said, “There was talk that you might get your old job back. That the new fellow might appoint you.”

“We discussed it,” he said, amazed to be talking so openly with a stranger. He’d had a Bloody Mary shortly after takeoff, but when did one drink ever loosen his tongue? He’d always been able to knock them back with the heavy hitters without fear that the slightest indiscretion would pass his lips. No, he evidently felt like talking, and he didn’t think the drink had anything to do with it.

“You didn’t want it or he didn’t want to offer it?”

“I wanted it, and he’d have liked to give it to me,” he said, “and we both realized it wasn’t a good idea. Rudy’d hired me and fired me, and Rudy’s endorsement put him in Gracie Mansion, even if he doesn’t actually live there—”

“Likes his own place better, does he?”

“—and he couldn’t start off his own term putting me back in as commissioner without biting the hand that fed him, and publicly at that. He’s in an awkward position anyway, coming in on the heels of a hero, and one who’d still have the job if the voters had anything to say about it.”