VI : Maladies
1985
Toledo, Ohio
ou didn’t ever come up to Toledo with us when your brother Joseph was in the hospital did you? Damned highway’s always under construction. Thirty-five years we’ve been using I-75 and there’s forever a place they’re still working on. Every time we drove up I couldn’t help but think of driving up here in ’65 when Rusty was in the hospital, talk about history repeating itself. He doesn’t remember coming up here that time, he sure wasn’t driving. I forget who brought us up must have been his sister, he was certainly in no condition to drive, I don’t think he sobered up until a few days later. Veteran’s Hospital is up by the waterfront. This place where Joseph went is right in the center of the old part of the city.
It’s a little gloomy and run down but St. Vincent’s was a good hospital in its day, wasn’t surrounded by all these liquor stores and abandoned buildings. What are those kids doing there with that bicycle, looks like four of them are going to try to ride it at the same time damn fool kids, someone’ll get hurt.
Nothing looks good on this kind of winter day, red bricks and the concrete parking garage, bare trees and garbage cans, nothing looks good. They say if he completes the six week treatment he can go back to work, disability only pays for that much anyway. Course his father is still making excuses for him, he feels so guilty about it to begin with.
Well Hooper Tire pays for him to be in the residential treatment facility they have there, Union pays for it. He’s a good union member volunteered to be the officer for his group at the factory, the men who work the machines that stamp out the treads. I don’t know what you call them. I doubt they call them tread man, or tread mill, well it certainly is a treadmill. They say if he completes the five weeks of treatment he can go back to work.
His father was still trying to help him find an excuse for why he ended up there.
“Oh he just had a few too many drinks and shouldn’t have been driving. Forget the other list of DWI’s and the blackout and the cocaine possession. “Just had a few too many beers one night,” Rusty says but he’s been doing that since he was 16. It’s a miracle he hasn’t killed himself or someone else by now with his driving. Get calls at 2 in the morning, “Oh Joseph’s in jail, picked up after ramming his car into a tree out on Rte. 224.” We’re almost there.
“Aren’t you gonna park here in the garage?” I ask him.
“What?”
“Why don’t you park in the garage it’s only two dollars?”
“We’re not gonna stay long.”
“Well they say it’s a family meeting it’s gonna take a few hours.”
“Oh hell alright.”
We waited a long time it seems, oh they finally came out. All the families waiting. Sitting in this plastic orange chair so long my legs start to fall asleep. Feet are damp from stepping in the slush getting out of the car. At least he doesn’t have any children yet. Oh the male nurse is gonna talk to them, talk to everyone.
“Oh Joseph your parents are here, anything you want to say to your parents?”
“Just that I love you and I’m sorry to put you through all this worry Mom, and I’m sorry to disappoint you so much, I know I never lived up to what you wanted Dad.”
“Now I’ve been where you are son and it’s damn hard, though no one can help you. Truth is you gotta go on and decide for yourself. You gotta do it yourself.”
“Is there anyone else would like to speak. No. Well let’s say goodbye to our families.”
“Hey son, keep at it, I know you can beat it,” Rusty says.
“I’ll pray for you,” I kiss him but he seems sleepy, and doesn’t look me in the eye. I don’t know if they give them some kind of drug to calm them down or what.
No one ever talks about it, but all the men in the factory drink, what else can they do. Bone tired when they’re finished. My niece’s husband works there has a drug problem too, think of spending your day at the end of a huge machine pulling a lever, week after week. Use a hundredth of your brain but you have to pay attention to the gauge, open the door, lift another load of material into the machine, close it, pull the lever. I think the machines make them drink. Factories want something from a man he can’t give and that’s to be a machine himself. Mary’s husband works as an engineer for Hooper. Jo says they keep redesigning the machines but they never ask any of the guys that run the machines what would work better. That kind of thing demeans a man’s work; to not be asked about what you know, and year after year, like you’re not even there. Day after day, you and a piece of machinery. Say it gets up to 110 degrees on the stamping floor in summer, but its better in the winter when it’s still fairly warm. He’s only twenty-three there’s no reason he couldn’t still go to college and get a different job if he wanted to.
It’s sad about the men who work in factories. Never have the satisfaction of mastering a craft or working through a profession, so how do they have the sense of growing. They don’t, they’re the same at twenty-five as they are at fifty those factory men. Well having children, that makes a change for some, but for who they are, what outlet do they have?
“Goodbye Son,” your father said, and we left the building walking silently to the garage next door. Tears my heart out to see the two of them. None of his sons ever lived up to being the quarterback, or the army officer, but the drunk he was, they all lived up to that. He’s Willie Loman if there ever was one. Willie Loman to the bitter end. They all are these poor men; expect too much so of course they’re disappointed.
“Remember what floor we left the car on?” I ask him.
“Who’s carrying on?”
“No, what floor we left the car on,” I repeat it.
“What?”
“Where’s the car?”
“The car’s right in the next row.”
“Should we stop at the Big Boy on the way home and get a sandwich.”
“You want to get who a toy?”
“Should we get a sandwich. Food. Eat?”
“Well God damn it I don’t know. You want to stop. Where?”
He can’t hear anything by now, oh it’s tiresome having to repeat everything three times and so loudly well it makes me not want to say anything at all. There’s no way to have a conversation now. Would like to have someone to talk to. But we’re left with just the necessities of life, meals, transportation. You want to go now, or not, ’ bout all I can say. Any kind of conversation, did you see such and such in the paper, or that was a pretty garden, I don’t bother trying to say and that gets lonesome after a while; when talking is such a chore.
Sitting in the room earlier listening to him talk about how he stopped drinking made me wonder if I wasn’t better off when he was drinking. It’s a terrible thing to say I know but once he quit I had to listen to all his criticism about how I keep the house, and how what I cook never suits him. I don’t iron his shirt cuffs right or how I wasn’t disciplining the children, nothing suited him anyway so why try to please him. About the day he became sober, his eyes fastened on his youngest son and I let him take him.
He told me, “You never mind, I’ll raise this one.”
And I said, “Fine, I’m sure you can do better!”
Was insulting to me that I couldn’t raise my children right, but I took him at his word and I never interfered between them. Maybe I should have. Well Joseph then got all the attention he never noticed how the other children felt neglected. He would buy Joseph a new mini-bike for Christmas and the girls would get a sweater it wasn’t equal at all. But they never complained really. There was nothing he wouldn’t do for him and we all just accepted that was the way things were.
Child became his raison d’être. Got him on a kids wrestling team and took him all around the state wrestling. Once there was a tournament in Cleveland and we went with them, do you remember that we took you and your sister. That was a big trip for us, stayed in a nice hotel downtown and did some shopping and sightseeing. You had just turned thirteen and he was ten or so.
Talk about wrestling with demons. All those matches, wasn’t your brother it was your father wrestling, trying to twist his way back into the contest of life through that child, and he never gave up. He never stopped thinking that he could get up off the mat and pull a surprise reversal, and his son was how.
Poor boy, was so driven by someone else’s dream that he never got a chance to learn who he was. Had a father who drove him, then he had a factory that drove him, and the man inside has yet to take over. I feel like I let him go too easily, but he never held it against me.
2000
Cranford Street. Blanchardville
I could tell by the way he was acting that he didn’t feel good. Always took a walk after dinner but then stopped taking his walk, started falling asleep in his chair. Hadn’t been feeling good all summer. Said he felt pain in his chest and so they checked out his heart didn’t find anything wrong. Well, early August it got really bad and they finally took a chest x-ray, well, why they hadn’t done that in the first place I don’t know, it’s a podunk hospital.
Now we come to find out it’s lung cancer. After he quit smoking all those years ago. Said he might as well have gone on smoking for all the good it did him. It was spread pretty far by the time they found it, no way to operate. They could have tried radiation or chemotherapy but the doctor didn’t think the chances were very good, and your father wanted to be the tough guy.
“Oh hell, it’s gonna happen one way or the other, might as well be this way.” I was surprised by the way he accepted it. And then pretty soon after hearing about the diagnosis he began playing the part of the dying man. Started using a walker, wearing his pajamas all day, he had never done that before in his life, had you go out to Penney’s and get him an extra pair of pajamas when you came. He just started staying inside, wouldn’t even go for a ride in the car on a beautiful autumn day. Moved himself from upstairs to downstairs for sleeping and eating but that was about it.
·
Linda and Cathy told me we’re going to home hospice, that’s what he wanted and when you sign up it means you’re going to die at home. You’re not going to the hospital at the end. That’s what he wanted. I thought he should go to the hospital when it got bad so he could be taken care of, but I went along.
Anne had come from Texas, and Tim from Oregon and you came back in October to take a turn, and say goodbye. At least you were still in the country then.
Well it was the afternoon and time for you to head for the airport to catch your flight and you knew it was the last time you were going to see your father. He was sitting there at the round table in the dining room on Cranford Street, beautiful autumn day and you couldn’t put it off anymore.
“Well Dad I have to go.”
“I know you do honey.”
You sat looking at each other and holding hands.
“I love you. You were a good dad.”
“Well I hope so.”
“I love you, you take care now.”
Tears in every eye, but you have to stand up and go.
I always was grateful to you for saying that to that dying man. You hadn’t planned on it, but when you sat there and you wanted to give him something to go with, you said you were a good dad. Even though we both knew it wasn’t true. And he knew it too. Said I hope so, meaning he wished he had been. Or did your saying it to him, at that very last minute, make it true? Made it true between you is what I saw. There wasn’t any easy thing like that I could say.
·
Know it doesn’t sound charitable but I don’t want to watch him die, would have been better if he went to the hospital. Girls all think I’m being mean spirited, that I don’t want the inconvenience but it’s more than that, do they think I don’t have any feelings at all. To watch him degenerate right before my eyes. Used to walk so fast no one could keep up with him, now he totters around all stooped over who stood up so straight his whole life, drinking out of a straw like a child. A body I knew like the back of my own hand, black cinders under the skin on his knee where he fell on the track in high school, freckled forearms in a sport shirt, the body I had children with. Watching him go makes me feel so pressed, my life going with his woven together as it is can’t quite put my finger on it. What I loved. But love did not spare.
Like I said the home health care nurse came every few days. But we still had trouble getting him in and out of the shower, none of us girls could lift him. We had the shower chair and all but he still needed help.
Well brother Joseph seemed to be avoiding us altogether, I think he couldn’t stand to see his father suffering like he was, he was in a lot of pain. But one day, I think you might even have been there, I said I’m gonna call Jo and get him over here. Well he didn’t have any problem coming once I asked him, and he had something specific to do, drove his truck over before work.
It was October, a beautiful day, the whole season he was dying was just lovely. Wouldn’t you know.
“There you are, your dad’s upstairs waiting for you, there’s towels there on the hall table.”
I left them to it, but I could see through the door slightly, Earl sitting there on the shower stool slightly hunched over and his fair freckled skin still smooth over his arms and chest. The water ran down his back.
“How’s that feel?”
“Feels good.”
“You wanna wash your hair.”
“If I can, hurts like hell when I raise my arms like that.”
“I can do it for you.”
“Alright.”
Took the shampoo and lathered it in his hands then onto his father’s thinning old head, and rubbed it gently, lather rinsed down over his face so he closed his eyes. His son’s hands mixed in the water against this skin, “I’ll wash your back too,” Joseph said. And he took a washcloth out of the little basket there on the edge of the tub and soaped it up then rubbed his father’s back.
“That’s good. I’m ready to get out now.”
“OK.” He turned the water off.
“Let me get a towel down on the floor.”
“OK ready.”
Joseph took his wrists in his hands and pulled him naked from the chair where he sat into a standing position and leaned his shoulder against him as he lifted his leg over the edge of the tub. Then he stood for a moment dripping water and leaning against his son.
“Let me catch my breath,” he said.
“Sure” Joseph said “no problem, here’s a towel.” He put the towel around him, and pulled the toilet seat cover down so he could sit.
“That’s better. Say, could you help me shave.”
“Sure.”
Earl lathered up his brush with soap as he always did.
“I can do this if you hold the mirror for me.”
He held the mirror but it kept steaming up. Joseph would wipe it with a towel every few minutes and when he was done, he took the towel and wiped away the bits of white lather.
“Want me to get your robe now?”
“Nah, I want to get dressed. Might as well go ahead and get dressed.”
He put on his khakis and his grey cashmere sweater and Joseph helped him get down the stairs, and he sat in his chair.
Jo went off to work but seemed happier, I thought, for being near what it was he was trying so hard to avoid.
·
His children all going about caring for him and I’m spookin’ around here thinking how we have been struggling hope against hope all along. For what?
Maybe some irrational hope that what wasn’t said or given will be made right. Then that hope dying right in front of me, but is resolved by dying too. Have to watch the horror of his dying along with everything else I’ve had to watch him do. Hear his breath rattling in his throat, or watch them give him ever more drops of morphine, one then three then four doses. The home health care nurse well she finally came and gave him a dose I think that was what did it, they don’t say oh at a certain point we’ll give you so much morphine you’ll die from it but in essence that’s what happens. And Becky sitting there beside him saying Oh Daddy it’s all right like we ever called him Daddy to start with. Could he hear her? I had to go upstairs at a certain point. To the very end more than should be asked.
·
One summer you were home soon after Dad died maybe five, six years ago, I don’t know why it comes to mind now, because Dick Dougherty died I guess, they had his funeral recently. You wouldn’t know him but he was the bandleader for the concerts out at the band shell at Riverside Park. Remember you took me occasionally when you came in the summer, your father never wanted to go, well he couldn’t hear it for one thing; but I always thought it was pleasant out there on a summer evening. I always thought the music chased the mosquitoes away, I know it sounds crazy but it’s true. We were walking along arm in arm passing the time.
“Playing ‘Green Eyes,’ used to be my favorite. Old band shell looks pretty in the sunset, pink to the west tonight, pink sky at night sailor’s delight, and they just painted the band shell pink too. Was quite an uproar in town about the color of course. A lot of people thought they should stick to white. Nice and cool here though under the tall trees, shady, and a breeze off the river. Quite a crowd here tonight. ‘Tuxedo Alley,’ gets my feet moving, I can sing a little no one will mind, well there aren’t any seats left we should have brought our chairs well we can sit here on the benches. Gonna Taaaake a Sentimental Journey. I don’t know why I’m whispering like, the sun is behind the trees, going down. Poor old folks in wheelchairs pushed up to the front so they can hear, and look, not a one of ’em is awake, all bent forward like wilted flowers.
“I’m telling you there are an inordinate number of old widows in this town, look at them lined up one after the other in their chairs with their matching blue hairdos, and all dressed up, well we are obviously underdressed. Course I don’t know a soul here, except Dick well he used to work at the paper. I’m glad you came. Your father hated in his last years to go out in public he was so self-conscious about his tremor as if everyone was looking at the fact that his hands shook, but no one notices anything really. Yes that retarded man you’re looking at goes to our church, I know his mouth is open and he’s drooling, now I don’t know his name, he’s so overweight that doesn’t help him.
“He’s mentally disturbed, but he goes to church so maybe he’s a holy man. Well once I was in church you know that half pew right inside the front door, well he comes back from communion and just starts to sit right on top of me, like he didn’t notice I was there, I moved over as soon I could.
“I think that’s the last song. ‘Stardust.’ Oh it’s nice to walk here by the riverfront. Might as well wait till the traffic clears out. Did you see the new platform they put over the water, you can sit up there, oh I can barely climb the stairs to it. Look there on the water, seven ducklings are following their mother, oh see how flustered they get when they can’t find her. They say so many people have been feeding the ducks they stay when they should go south and then freeze to death when winter comes. People ought to let nature take its course.
“Now what was that just surfaced out there, muskrat maybe, or a big carp, remember that time somebody dumped a giant carp, must have been three feet long onto our front porch one day, and nobody saw who did it, well one of the older girls had broken up with some boyfriend and she thought he did it maybe out of spite, but we never did know who did that. Well who would do such a thing I don’t know, it was hot and that fish smelled to high heaven. You never know who you’re getting mixed up with.”
·
Worried me that you were mixed up with that William when he had a wife, and I know you said it was just a Green Card marriage so he can stay here from England but I didn’t trust it. He was so much older than you. Oh sure he made it to Cambridge from a coal miner’s village in Yorkshire and you liked him because he seemed a rebel to all that, sort of the rough explorer type, tall and weathered. I don’t know, what you did see in him? You could talk about poetry, he could show you London, take you to his old rooms, or quote Wordsworth, but I could do that. I wandered lonely as a cloud. I gazed—and gazed—but little thought, What wealth the show to me had brought. Took you years to figure out what I already knew first time you brought him to Ohio.
You were on your way to one of those travel assignments out West, you and he were doing those for several years writing for the Triple A, and stopped to visit.
I had him sleep on the couch in the living room. But I heard him come up the stairs several nights to wake you, heard you two go down into the basement so you couldn’t be heard, and then go sneak back to bed. Like I didn’t know. Lust is one of the seven deadly sins you know. Looked on you as some kind of amusement I thought. Wanted you to be faithful to him but he never had any faithfulness to you and you let him, he was never going to take you seriously, or you didn’t take yourself seriously, I don’t know, he used your body is all I saw. But you can’t see that when you’re young.
·
You gave so much away that you could have kept for yourself. I don’t know why, and you gave it away so easily. Like it wasn’t worth so much, but plenty of other men would have thought it was, if you had just taken the time to look. You gave away always more than you had to, and went further away than you had to. You always thought I didn’t see how things were, that you were in some world so different than mine but that wasn’t really the case. Anyway I’m glad you chose Paul in the end, he’s a good man, and Irish too.
Anyway that evening in the park we saw a great blue heron on the other side of the river. “Look at that. Can barely see it against those grey rocks. Look how still it stands. Wait let’s see it moves. I want to see it fly. No it’s just standing there, standing on one leg like that for how long? Let’s wait for it to fly. Could be hours. I guess. The dam looks awful low today. You know your dad’s childhood friend drowned there, was a terrible tragedy. ’Bout nine years old, boys from over on Lima Avenue, used to come out here to swim and fish. Well one day the group of ’em, came out to swim and then rode home only to discover that Les had not come with them, and they found him the next day under the dam there. I think your dad always felt a little guilty about that.”
You kids practically lived all summer at the park here, swimming, didn’t you. Walked out here almost everyday, from Pine Street down Clinton and then along Center Street to the pool. Center Street wasn’t so run down in those days. There were just long streets of solid Midwestern houses with front porches and swings, and lawns getting mowed and kids with their bicycles and bigwheels out front and little wading pools in the yards, and teenage boys washing Mustangs. Now I swear you go out and don’t see a soul. All inside in the air conditioning.
The park was different then too, you used to have the roller coaster and the bumper cars, cotton candy, and the taffy man. You would come out of the pool for a break, put on your rubber thongs and get a 15¢ bag of popcorn, to last you the whole afternoon, popcorn stand stood in the center of the concession stand, was decorated with stars and stripes and filled with white and gold warm popping. That old stone shelter was filled with picnic tables and kids in bathing suits eating hotdogs and fries running to the playground to swing on the rings, those ring on a chain on a pole, you loved to hold onto the ring and spin high into the air, around and around like you were flying.
Pool’s still the same. You kids would go swimming all day in the vast blue of the pool, diving off the boards, then diving again. All day diving, and working your way up the platform to the four feet, six then ten. Took courage to dive off the ten foot board. Then too you had to be able to swim a certain distance if you wanted to play in the deep end.
2005
Cranford Street. Blanchardville
Boo Radley, that’s what I called him in later years. Remember the man who never comes out in To Kill A Mockingbird. Well that was your brother Tim.
This was when he came to live with me after Dad died. Just after the funeral he went back out to Portland to settle his affairs then drove his truck back here. He didn’t leave much behind there, had been renting a room in a house, had handyman jobs. But he functioned you know. Or it seemed as if he did, oh I was glad to have him come home and help.
Your sister Jane said well she would pay for him to finish up college at State here, he only had a year or so left. So that’s what we did, and it all seemed like a good idea. He went to State up the road and that was working out well, the first summer he even had a summer job, and was working construction until they just didn’t call him back one day. Well we didn’t worry ’cause we thought once he got his college diploma he could do something else.
We all went up there to the graduation. But he never worked after that. Months went by. Linda and Kathy would come over.
“Hey Tim you send out any resumes?”
“I’m going to.”
“Did you call the employment service at school?”
“I called them last week.”
“Supposed to call them every day.”
“My professor said he might have an assistant position.”
“Tim that was four months ago.”
“He’s probably going to call.”
But of course no one called. He never pursued it, see. He thought he ought to be given a job right off running the whole department.
Well, it did come to weigh on me that he couldn’t be budged. For one thing he was obsessed with George Bush. Hated him with a vengeance, well we all did but he spent everyday on the computer, just following every move Bush made.
He’d say “Oh I know what’s going on, I see what they’re up to. Most people don’t know, but I’ve read and I’ve put it all together the whole voter fraud thing here in Ohio; I’ve tracked it down but nobody does anything.”
“Well I know you do son.”
“Well it really bugs me that he gets away with it, you know what he did yesterday?”
“No, son.”
“Well he took those machines and…” then launched into another a rant. Well sometimes I thought if I listened to him, if I paid attention to him he would get it out, but that never seemed to be help.
“Well I know Betty Maloney who has always run the Democratic Party here in town, the 100 democrats there are anyway. Well if you hate George Bush so much go do something, go call up Betty and campaign.”
“I’m going to, somebody has to do something.”
He would talk about it. Then the day would come.
“Wasn’t this the day Betty was having a meeting, at the headquarters.”
“I know but not until six o’clock.”
“Well it’s five now so why don’t you go get cleaned up?”
“I will.”
Then forty minutes later. “I thought you were going out to the Headquarters?”
“Oh those meetings are stupid, I don’t want to drive all the way out there. Doesn’t do any good anyway.”
Got so he just ranted about George Bush to Linda or Dave when they would stop over with the kids.
“I’ve just printed out the reports see, about Iraq, I’ve put all the sources together here you should read this. I got it all right here in this binder.”
Would sit there in the dining room, cursing at George Bush on the computer screen. Or playing that damn fighter jet video game, for hours on end, shooting down fighter jets on the computer screen, put-a-put put put put.
Got so Joseph and Linda wouldn’t even stop by ’cause they just fought with him. Said he shouldn’t be living off me for free.
I begged him to stop. We all begged him.
·
One night a long time ago, Tim must have been about ten, I was listening to Walter Cronkite on the eleven o’clock news, I hear footsteps. Think, who’s that coming down the stairs, it’s Luke Roy.
“What is it, why aren’t you asleep, it’s almost midnight.”
“Tim won’t stop talking. And it’s so hot up there. He makes us turn the fan off so he can talk. It’s fun for a minute but he never stops. He talks every night when we are trying to go to sleep, telling movies over and over again, last week it was The Blob, and this week it’s The Fantastic Voyage, every single detail, we don’t even want to listen to him, but he won’t shut up.”
“Tell him you want to go to sleep.”
“We do Mom, he won’t stop. Come here, listen.” Luke was pulling on me, “Come and listen to him.”
I went to the foot of the stairs and heard Tim talking on. He was telling about the Fantastic Voyage, that film I guess where they travel through the human body.
“But by then see their boat gets too close to the heart, and with each beat there is a huge tidal wave that goes pulsing across the blood ocean and they almost tip over and they worry, see, is the next beat going to suck them in, because it’s like a vacuum there in the cardiac cavity, there’s a pulse outward but that pushes everything to one side see and that’s when the boat will slide down the wave and get sucked in, like into a whirlpool and if it does, into the aorta, when that closes, comes down like a giant steel garage door well they’ll be crushed by the valve, and then there’s no going back, see. So they have to time it just right to ram the boat in there between the beats, and the one guy says it’s too dangerous he wants to go back through the veins, see, but…”
I walked up those creaking wooden stairs to the front bedroom where you younger children slept under the slanted roof, two boys in one bed, two or three little girls in the other, was a big room. I said, “Timothy that’s enough now, you go to sleep.”
He said “Not yet were just into the lungs, and it’s not half over.”
I said “It’s over for you, now I’m gonna have your dad up here with a belt if you don’t mind me.”
“He’s not even home.”
“He’ll be home, so let your brothers and sisters get some sleep for heaven’s sake. And I’m turning the fan on, you’ll all suffocate up here without some ventilation.”
“Good Night.”
·
So there were some obsessive traits early on but every child is different. I didn’t think at the time. Course your father never encouraged him. Well then he started to play Irish music here and there, like the flute and the penny whistle. Well, the penny whistle was not a very impressive instrument for your father. Whenever Tim would visit he’d be practicing in the basement, and your father would say, “Damn it he’s on that goddamn whistle again. Gonna have every dog in the county over here.” He was joking but it hurt Tim’s feelings I know.
Well it worried me those last years of my life that the man couldn’t seem to make a life for himself. I thought for the first few years that a mother’s patience and understanding might cure him of whatever it was. Thought maybe he wants someone to take his ideas seriously, so I listened to him, and listened to him, but it just seems to make him spin deeper into his own obsessions and his conspiracy theories.
It was all building up inside him, all that he didn’t do, or try, and that was starting to weigh him down. I’ve seen it happen to others, a burden builds up in the soul when there’s too much we haven’t done or attempted that we should have, and then the burden defeats us. You can use your brothers and sisters to learn from. Don’t go down that road. I’ve often wondered what you were waiting for, too. Pacing around instead of sitting down and taking a crack at it.
But I tried everything I could think of for Boo Radley. His sister knows people in the County who could get him an office job but he won’t even apply. He was the final worry I was to have in later years. Another man to worry and pester me. But what was I gonna do. Can’t turn him out onto the street.
December 2004
Cranford Street. Blanchardville
Can’t get him to do the simplest thing. Asked him two hours ago to take me over to the store, he said give me fifteen minutes. Well I’ve given him fifteen minutes four times over. Now I’m all dressed have to put on so many layers in this cold, boots, coat, hat scarf, gloves, with the wind-chill they say ten degrees, now he doesn’t come. I’m sitting here on the back porch for fifteen minutes now said he was coming, not like he’s doing anything just sitting at that damn computer. I’ll call him again.
“Now what’s the holdup Tim, come on.”
“I said I’m coming I just need to finish this…just wait a minute.”
Oh, no point in trying to reason with him. Let me get a whiff of fresh air there oh, it is cold, at least it stopped snowing, doesn’t look too windy. Just wanted to get a piece of meat and a few things for dinner, he’s the one who’ll eat it after all.
Hell, why should I sit here and wait on him. Been sitting and waiting on some fool man to do something my whole life. Probably could carry what I need, it’s only that block down the alley and across the parking lot. Only reason I don’t walk is the snow on the ground and the cold makes me short of breath. I can wrap my scarf over my face probably be fine. Gonna be dark in a few minutes, wanted to be back as Julie said she might drop by.
Oh, I’m gonna go ahead. Put my purse over my shoulder, so I can hold onto the railing. Step down carefully first step. Doesn’t look like he shoveled here like he said he would. One more step, oh it’s ice under there.
·
Next thing I know I’m slipping, put my hands on the garage to steady me no, but it was too far away, I was pitching forward like something pulled out from under me and my glasses go flying off, put my arms down in front of me to break my fall, and my palms scrape open on ice and gravel, then my chin hits.
Oh the ice is hard. I’m laying on my glasses. I think I’m laying on my glasses. Blessed Mary Mother of God pray for me. Try to push myself up but it hurts.
Must have pulled my shoulder. Oh I can sit up. Can’t hardly catch my breath, heart’s racing. Don’t want to die here alone in the driveway. Collect myself for a minute here. “Tim, Tim, can you”... Oh there’s a little bit of blood must be coming from my chin, scraped my chin like a child, “Tim can you help me.” Oh he’s not hearing me, hell.
Now I’m crying. Tears will freeze on my cheek, crying isn’t going to help. Shock of it, the ice cold the broken glass scattered around pain so fierce in my old bursitis shoulder joint, and my jaw, looking at the grey concrete blocks at the foundation of the house; the handle of the unused snow shovel sticking out there to mock me. Oh I’ve fallen, the earth and the air conspiring against me, breaking through my body, this coat to no avail. Cold pouring in now, fright of it the worst part, feels like I was mauled by a giant grey wolf flying out of the winter from nowhere, all claws and teeth against my soft old flesh. Call him and he doesn’t come and I’m crying like a baby when I’ve had better reason a hundred times and never shed a tear.
Whose car is that pulling through the alley into the dentist’s office next door, oh it’s one of the girls that works there I better stop crying, it’s too pathetic, I’ve seen her car before, oh she’s stopping, thank goodness, window going down.
“You need some help?”
“I slipped down here.”
“Oh dear, should I call the ambulance?”
“Maybe you could just help me up, first.” I’m embarrassed but I’m crying right in front of her.
“You poor thing,” she said. She was getting out of her car.
“I don’t think anything’s broken.”
And she came, her name was Janice. I got to my knees and Janice helped me stand up. Was a relief to be standing I could tell then nothing was broken, blood from my chin all over my camel hair coat, I was shaken but I could walk alright.
“My son’s home there if you could get him.”
Well just then Timothy walks out the door, looks horrified.
“Your mother fell down the stairs,” Janice said.
“Why did you go, I was coming right out. Why didn’t you wait for me?”
He actually stood there and said that, why didn’t you wait for me. Oh I wanted to take up the snow shovel and hit him over the head. But my shoulder hurt too much. It never was right after that.
1974
Blanchardville
It’s hard to believe what some men can do. Or people can, I guess I should say but it does seem men are self-centered in a way most women I know aren’t. Thinking of Tim, though, I did start to wonder about mental illness, he was alright as a child. I guess mental illness has its outbreaks just like flu.
Certainly your brother-in-law Bill was mentally ill; but we didn’t see it until after the damage was done. We should have been more careful about letting you stay over there, but life is much easier in retrospect.
I thought your sister Linda really needed the help with the two little boys is why I went along with it. Leo was just in Kindergarten I think, Vince a toddler. She was working the graveyard shift at RCA, and Bill was working the six to two, so they had a cross time problem, one had to leave before the other got back as I recall. It was just going to be for a few weeks and then they’d move her onto the same shift. She asked me could one of the younger girls sleep over at her place and I wanted to help her. You were in what eighth grade I think. Carrie was already in high school, she always had so much work to do and got up early to do an extra class or something.
Anyway they were willing to pay you $25 a week, and that was a lot for you in those days. But it wasn’t so much the money as we wanted to help her out.
Well, in retrospect Bill had been acting a little strangely toward you, like that night he asked you to ride to Columbus with him to order a car part. I don’t know what we were thinking, he said he needed someone to ride with him to keep him awake. We sent you down there with him a rainy dark night, you waiting for him in the dark car, as he went into the highway rest stop and stayed a long time. You sitting in the car in the dark alone. And didn’t some man yell at him as he was coming out of there? Say pervert or something? Am I just imagining that? Well he was your sister’s husband, we had no reason to suspect him. He was quiet and artistic, liked to paint pictures. I never liked him as I said.
He said something to you that night didn’t he? But you didn’t ever tell me about it. You didn’t think to tell us, it just seemed strange to you. When he came out of the rest stop sat down in the car seat next to you and he said, “Can I kiss you?” And you said “No.” And that was that. You didn’t think so much of it, maybe older men were strange like that.
What did you know, or if it was some temporary insanity you aren’t a person to tattle. He drove back and dropped you at home. When the other event transpired a month or so after that, then it seemed important and obvious but it didn’t at the time.
I can see now what you didn’t tell me then, see it affected you in a way I didn’t know.
You were sleeping on a bed in their little sewing room upstairs. Heard a light knocking in your dream did you? Like I did that one day.
No, I think he just shook your shoulder, woke you in the middle of the night it must have been near 4 or 5 a.m. He said, I can’t sleep. I’m going to swallow these sleeping pills and kill myself.
He said this to you waking you up, he said the sleeping pills are in the pocket of this bathrobe, and he gave you the bathrobe, as if you should put it on, he said can we go downstairs so we don’t wake the boys.
What I can see now that I couldn’t see before are his hands. His hands wrestling you to the floor. Why? What did he want? He didn’t want to kill you. It wasn’t clear to him what he wanted.
·
He was raving. He said, I like you, I’m depressed, I’ve always liked you. Can I kiss you. He wrestled you to the floor, you tried to get away didn’t you. You tried to get away but he didn’t want you to scream. He didn’t want you to wake the babies, so he put his hand over your mouth. Didn’t want you to scream, but the problem was, there wasn’t just one problem, but one thing it seems like such a small thing, such a little detail, like Peter Rabbit trying to climb under the garden fence but getting his coat caught on a wire, a little wire sticking out that catches in the fabric and you’re finished no matter how fast and strong, or smart you were, because you couldn’t breathe.
He put his hand over your mouth to stop you from screaming, but you had a terrible sinus infection you couldn’t breathe through your nose at all, so when he put his hand there you couldn’t breathe, and you struggled to pull his hand away trying to tell him you couldn’t breathe but that made him think you were trying to scream you weren’t trying to scream but he wouldn’t give you a chance to tell him. I can’t breathe you tried to say I can’t you pulled with all your might, you gained a breath or two but you couldn’t get his hands away and when you struggled then fell to the floor and he pinned you to the floor and held his hands over your mouth and you started to faint couldn’t get a breathe in and at that moment you saw, saw your own spirit rise in the room, imagined, as you fell away, that it had started to leave your body.
Saw men in blue uniforms, there was an ambulance outside, there was a question, people were asking questions, there was your sister, your brothers, your father, I came in to find how you had died and the light was dim there it wasn’t morning there, they came from the driveway came up the few back stairs that led into the kitchen through the kitchen a dark square of shadow, there on the floor in front of the love seat you were, and a reporter from the newspaper of eternity came and said it’s clear now there was something missing. What belonged to you.
It’s better that I tell this story, you should never have to tell this story to yourself or to anyone again, you can let me tell this story my dear daughter, I can tell this story for you though your fingers could type the words they will not be your words nor the man behind them any longer, no.
·
You had gone beyond and seen ahead, beyond the event of your own dying to the news of it spreading from there and spreading to me. And in widening circle you felt the time that had been taken from you, the missing days, oh a good many days as you were so young. All the depths of the days stolen from you poured into the room with the dense weight of absence, an element like plutonium, or some laws of physics I don’t know, what they call a black hole, where your days were pouring out of that room, out of the future where they were to have been, the force of it pulling the walls inward and the door off its hinges into the center of the floor where you lay still under the gale force of it, in the deep magnetic graphite of that dream before his hand felt your stillness. And lifted.
Through the ten thousand days that had been taken you returned. You returned to the floor, and gasping whispered to him. So that he would not mistake it for a screaming, whispered. Please when your hand covers I can’t breathe, I won’t scream. He seemed to hear or was it that he simply had grown tired and went upstairs to sleep. Leaving you to sit huddled on the couch until your sister arrived.
She put on the coffee pot when she came in, and you told her what had happened, she seemed too tired to cry about it. Was there penetration she said, because of course the possibility was she might need to take you to the hospital, but you said no not like that.
It wasn’t rape, in a purely anatomical sense because he wasn’t able to. But of course there was a penetration of another kind, as light penetrates a pulled drapery, or a penetration of knowledge glimpsed before its time, something out of order. Well he is sick, your sister Linda said, he needs a doctor.
In years to come I watched you writhe to breathe under that invisible hand like a fish out of water, watched you fight off everything that came near. Now I see the effect that had. Violence can penetrate a child easily. Upset the whole order.
Then again the fact that there wasn’t intercourse, made it so we didn’t have to take you to the hospital. That was maybe good, or bad, I don’t know, I think you didn’t have your period yet. You were fourteen but that wasn’t unusual in those days anyway.
Linda brought you home, she phoned I think, I can’t quite remember it was a school day. Your dad had already left to drop the kids at high school. Linda said there was some trouble. She came in and we talked a minute, you were there you didn’t look bad, you looked tired. Your dad came back, he didn’t say anything. He needs to see a doctor we said, but did not offer one to you.
I asked if you were going to go to school, and at first you said no, but then the thought of staying home all day thinking about what had happened was too much. You said you wanted to take a shower. I talked to your father, we tried to decide what to do.
“She seems alright. Now what happened?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “He grabbed her. Threatened suicide.”
“He what, now?”
You know he couldn’t hear, it was so hard to say anything, especially if it was hard to explain, or contained any kind of subtlety. You didn’t look terrible.
Of course we didn’t see your body, in the shower. We didn’t see the fresh bruises as you did, standing in the water that could not wash them away. You saw them for the first time. Bruises just now darkening on your young body. Bruises where you had fought him and he had held you, around your ribs, on your upper arms and shoulders, and even your legs though you could not fathom how they had been bruised, and you cried in the shower for your young body, that had been so marked and damaged.
You went to school late, you were still at Center Junior High. There was a drama class performance you didn’t want to miss. And you wondered if anyone could see any difference in you but you did not tell anyone or say anything. You pretended nothing had happened. You watched yourself on the stage.
·
Walking down the school hallway, lockers opening and slamming closed, the painted yellow brick walls just after lunch. You had gone down to the counselor’s office and you thought maybe you would talk to him because everyone liked him he was a young man, and friendly with the students even the hoodlum boys liked him, but there was a line waiting to see him. Kids you knew, you didn’t want to be asked questions. It was possible to make an appointment but you had to go to the office you had to have a reason and you didn’t want to do that. But if the counselor had been there to talk to just right then, you would have told him and that probably would have helped. But there was only that moment, you might have talked and then it was gone.
I don’t know what consequence that would have had for us. You wanted to tell somebody, and then what? have them take him away, have him punished, but you never said that. Or maybe you didn’t know that.
·
Nothing was done. You went on. Pretending that nothing had happened.
But now I see. You had given up on us then. You saw you were on your own. That year, that summer you started smoking marijuana, drinking. By ninth grade it was regular. It wasn’t just the smoking marijuana, I know that’s not such a huge deal. Reading about Carlos Castaneda, new age crazy people, shamans, birds, people flying, and Kurt Vonnegut, it was the 1970’s, it wasn’t a simple time. Everything was in flux. Moving. And you were going away, away from your body. Things went on as before but not for you. You saw that you would not be protected, there was no protection for you, the world would come and you would have to fight it off by yourself in the middle of the night and no one would speak of it. You’d felt your own life being taken from you, but you’d fought and gotten it back. Must have been terribly frightening for you. Oh there was sadness you felt for your own life too, what you had lost that you couldn’t name, and that was an awful lot for a 14-year-old girl to feel. Why did it happen to you, you wondered. Why was such difficulty saved up for you and not others. Course every adolescent gets a little grandiose like that, they’re all the center of their own universe. But it certainly made it worse in your case. That’s when you made leaving your specialty. Mississippi was just the first place you ran away to.
The way you would talk to people was terrible to hear. You’d put down everything, say, “So what’s the big deal in that?” Almost anything someone said to you, you’d answer with some version of, I don’t care, I don’t care. Or it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Oh sure there are plenty of kids get that hard shell to protect themselves, and yours might have been harder than others. The shell protects you but it also causes goodness to slide away before you have a chance to savor it.
·
Bill and Linda stayed on as before. You saw him at family dinners, events. You said hello, suffered his limp kisses at the door on holidays. He was always a reminder for you but we soon forgot. Did he know what he had done even? He was sick. Well, that showed even more later. At the time she had those two little boys Leo and Vince and they depended on his salary, they were trying to buy a house. What would have happened to them if he had been arrested, or to you, to have to say all that, to all of us? Would have been a terrible scandal. A terrible heartache on our family and her. So instead we gave that heartache to you to keep, we gave that to you to carry. I’m not saying it was right but it’s what we did because we couldn’t see to do otherwise.
·
It wasn’t that month or the next, but you soon saw it. You saw what you had been given to carry. In how things are organized in this country, maybe every country, though I wouldn’t know, someone has to bear the burden for the sins of the other. Someone has to absorb what is wrong so the others can go on. Usually those who do it are those who are able to. You and I share that quality. You were invincible. You could carry that burden, and lift it so high no one even saw it. That burden you carried, but it wasn’t one you chose. And I was wrong to let you carry that. I didn’t know what else to do at the time. But that doesn’t make it right. No one else should decide what we carry. And no one else should think that they know the story that defines us, that’s just another kind of injustice. As if we couldn’t speak for ourselves.
That lightness he took from you. Or did he? It’s so easy to jump to conclusions. To make one event the catalyst for every other. I think it’s hard to fix the blame on a permanent point. Him, or me or your father or God, take your pick; I certainly couldn’t in my own life. Find a clear point of blame I mean.
If there is divine retribution it certainly did find him. Now his grandchildren don’t even know him. I don’t know if he even knows that Leo has five children, or if they even know his name. Well, he left Linda some years later, told her he wasn’t fulfilled. Just to make it more palatable, right. About a year later he moved out to Texas and married a born again Jesus woman, named Tammy. Well, that fell apart and then he was living on the street pretty much, his brothers tried to help him but he wouldn’t get help. Later his son Vince offered that he could live with him if he got psychiatric help but he wouldn’t do that either. I guess he has a cabin in the mountains somewhere in Oklahoma, all littered with broken cars and mewling cats. So we don’t have to worry about him anymore.
Of course I still think of all that you could have had for yourself besides running forward like the hounds of hell were on your heels. What you might have found if you weren’t writhing and struggling to get out from under those hands, running away from those for years to come.
But maybe, I’m not trying to make any excuse here, but don’t we all end up in the same boat wrestling some demon or other? It’s the Bible but I can’t quite recall, we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against the rulers of darkness something like that. Or maybe, because I love you, because you are my daughter, we never left the boat to begin with, rowing in this same boat all along, fighting the same demon all along. Maybe there is only one demon waiting in the deep, and it waits for our bodies; our bodies are the vessel of our going as we float on this wine dark sea.