Chapter Ten - Asher
CHAPTER TEN
Asher
WILLOWS ARE PERHAPS the saddest of all the trees.
I don’t know where or when or if I heard that somewhere, read it, or maybe I just thought it.
But it’s true.
I stand by the willow I used to climb when I was a kid, avoiding the house and the people inside it, watching its weepy leaves sway in a gentle breeze.
It’s bigger now, the trunk, and the branch I’d lie on wouldn’t hold me up now.
The little waterfall I’d watch back then is gone.
The creek is just a winding, flat snake.
It seems wider than I remember, and the water sparkles in the sunlight. It’s just a bit of magic. Just a peek.
I lean against the trunk and mourn the ghost of me that still lingers here. The ghost of a time before everything changed, and I could no longer stay.
I hear grass swishing behind me. I startle and turn to Glen, approaching cautiously.
“What are you doing all the way out here?” He places a hand above his eyes to shield from the sun.
I shrug. “Just wanted to see.”
Glen looks around as if there’s something to really see.
“You probably don’t remember,” I say. “But I used to come out here. When we were kids.”
“Oh.” He blinks at me. “No, I don’t remember that.”
I can’t get over how different he is. My scrawny kid brother is as broad and tall as a barn door. Hard labor and ungodly hours have chiseled and molded him into someone I’m sure my father was proud of. Even if Glen was not the son he preferred. Or ever thought would be the only one left.
I feel a wave of shame.
“Well, when you’re done,” Glen says. “Mom’s making some lunch.”
It just seems like something she shouldn’t do anymore.
She’s hardly too old, but now she’s a widow.
Making lunch for her sons seems like a cruel thing to make her do after losing her husband.
I feel another wave of shame. I shouldn’t be out here, lolly-gagging , as my father would say, and did say just two days before I left home.
I don’t remember what I was supposed to be doing, but I wasn’t doing it.
I already knew I was leaving, and I just didn’t care.
I follow Glen back to the house. He wears denim with a shirt tucked in. On the last day I saw him, the evening before I left, he wore overalls over a wool shirt that came from the Sears Roebuck catalog. It’s funny how I remember those details. They stick out in my mind like spikes.
At the funeral, he wore a dark, pressed suit and shined shoes.
He was stoic, didn’t shed a tear, but took care to ask everyone if they were all right.
The shock of seeing me had cooled on our mother, stiffening her features to almost stone, as my father was lowered into the ground.
She reached for Glen’s hand, but as for me, on her left side, it was like she couldn’t be bothered to remind herself I was there.
She reached for my brother, and it shouldn’t make my heart hurt.
It shouldn’t make me feel as if I have something to prove and something to fulfill.
If I left again, right after the funeral, it would be like I was never here.
Their lives had adjusted to my absence, and I saw it plain as day.
Only no one thought to preserve my spaces, keep my bed like it was, or keep my clothes in a mothballed closet.
I arrived in a foreign land, one I could have sworn I’d lived in before, but all traces of me had vanished, as if I’d only imagined it in my childhood spot, lying on my favorite branch only to come down and discover none of it had been real.
My father went into the ground after sixty-four years of life, of breaking his back, providing, and that’s all he got. And all we could do was sit in the house with neighbors and other family members I didn’t recognize and eat food. Everyone brought food. We weren’t fucking starving to death.
Glen had his fiancée with him. I stared at his shiny shoes when he introduced her.
She was a Jessup. Lorianne Jessup. I stared at the shine of his shoes, the gleam, and thought of something else I’d just left behind.
Something else I walked away from without a goodbye.
Paul has noticed by now. He’s probably hurt, confused, and a vicious part of me believes he’s actually relieved.
But after just a couple nights alone, in a cot my mother set up in the sitting room, my heart began to ache.
I keep telling myself that I can still go back and resume my life.
He’ll still be there. Maybe. And if he isn’t, my heart will ache for a time, I’ll dream of him, and I’ll miss him, but it’s just as well, isn’t it? It was better to do it this way.
I step inside the house behind Glen, consider the irony of it, and sit at the table with him and my mother.
She’s made us sandwiches and iced tea. I begin to tell her that she shouldn’t do these things, that Glen and I can take care of her now, but she turns from me.
She starts talking to my brother about Lorianne and their engagement.
It’s pleasant and hopeful. Futures and families yet to be made.
And I’m the son that left.
I eat my lunch while they talk, and stare over at my father’s empty chair, wood painted black and walls white, a photograph taken and then forgotten.
Sometimes I’ll just wander around the house for no reason, if I don’t want to be outside.
It’s really hard to avoid; everywhere I look in the house, I have memories of my dad.
In fact, it still seems as if he’s here.
I keep thinking I’ll turn a corner and he’ll be there, a copy of the Farmer’s Almanac in his hands.
Or he’ll be out in the north pasture, fixing a piece of fencing, a stable door.
He never seemed to be still unless he was sleeping, and even then, my mother always complained of his tossing and turning.
There was always something to do. Something to fix, plant, a chore to begin.
He wasn’t a hard man, really. He was certainly never an idle man and couldn’t stand it if he caught me daydreaming.
It’s why I escaped to my willow tree. I fought to hang onto that part of me, the daydreaming part of me, the part that believed in things I knew weren’t real, but I wanted to be just the same.
I clung to that part of me so desperately, but at some point, it vanished.
At some point, my father managed to take it from me after all.
I try to think of when it could have been.
Before I left home?
After?
Maybe it was the day they put Jimmy in the ground.
In the scheme of things, death became a reality to me early.
That must have been when it happened. It must have been the moment my mother kneeled down beside Glen, both of them tearful, and she told him our brother was an angel now.
Her words slipped right past me, like water down a drain. I didn’t believe her at all.
No one has the audacity to say out loud that my father is an angel now.
I wander upstairs to the bedroom Glen and I shared. There’s only one bed in it now, pushed up against the wall, neatly made. I stare at the cherry wood frame and try to remember if it was his. Or mine…
See, I just left early one morning without leaving a note or telling anyone.
Just like that. Gone.
I thought about it beforehand. I thought about what would be the best way.
I thought about leaving behind a letter addressed to my folks and Glen and maybe a private one to Jimmy.
I could leave it at his grave. I started to write it one afternoon, but my pencil kept smudging and after only two sentences I couldn’t think of another single word.
They’d want to know why, but I was sure if I offered them an answer, they’d try to search for me.
And that wasn’t the point. They weren’t supposed to.
No one was ever supposed to search for me.
So I didn’t leave a letter. I didn’t leave them a crumb.
I lay awake the whole night before, listening to Glen’s snores.
I lay awake, clutching the covers, and wished there was another way besides the bus station and endless roads.
I wished for it, another answer, all the way up until it was time to leave.
Both my father and Glen would be up at dawn, so I only had a small window of escape.
I had that duffel full of clothing, Christmas money, and a composition book, in case I changed my mind about writing to anyone. I walked out the front door, letting the storm door fall quietly into place. I walked all the way to the road.
I didn’t look back.
Didn’t turn my head even once.
I have never regretted something so much.
I step into my old room and try to find some piece of me still here. My clothes in the closet. My shoes by the door. Anything. But there’s nothing but Glen.
I’ve come home all tainted and poisoned.
Living a life that if my mother or brother knew, they’d demand I leave.
Each time I step into the house, it’s like I have to hunch over and hide, my body making an involuntary cover around me.
The very walls know; they can see. My father died and what was I doing?
I was fucking this guy I caught spying on me, doing him practically in his aunt’s backyard, leading him along and leading him astray.
I could have been writing my father, telling him how sorry I am that I never said goodbye to him, that the last time we ever spoke it was over the dinner table and all I said to him was “please pass the rolls.”
I sit on the front porch after supper and think about it, all of it, my pack of cigarettes beginning to dwindle, a cloud of tobacco dissolving in my lungs.
I hear the storm door slap closed behind me and Glen’s there. I glance at him and feel a shiver of uncanniness. He’s very Jimmy-like around the eyes and in his stance. From a distance, I bet I could make an unsettling mistake.