56
After my father left, I went down to the river.
I’m under a gray and dull sky. Sometimes you can see the clouds moving, heading out, with places to be, but today, they are stagnant. I am sitting, despondent, on the stump of a dead tree. The morning rings about with the finality of a church bell at midnight. Somewhere along the way, the old man developed lung cancer. The pink tissue beneath his ribs had been slowly eroding for years, blackened, dead, and now it was almost completely useless. You could sense it in the way he breathed, feel it in the way he coughed, but it was the words he uttered that were terminal.
“I’ve felt sick for years,” he said.
“I put it off and put it off.”
He still never told me a damn thing about where he’d been all this time or what he’d done. He spoke very little about any of that, and I hadn’t asked. There’d be time for it.
“I saw a doctor a month back and he gave me the news. My body is full of it. I’m finished.” Thousands and thousands of packs down the pipe, ignited and inhaled. They had done their damage.
Cancer of the lungs and it has caught my father, just as it did his father before him. He worked hard for it since a kid and had earned it, but it wasn’t just that. The truth is my father had been slowly dying for ages. The drink and the smoke and the guilt and all else. And the guilt is the worst of them all. There is nothing more green and vile and desperate to devour a spirit. Guilt can rob the soul from a man’s chest. The gray clouds above begin to make the strangest shapes.
There was little else to say after he explained his diagnosis. My mind was blank. I was an infant, lost. I was under a spell of numbness.
“I’ve been staying at the Motel 8, just waiting things out. Haven’t even driven through town yet. Can’t bring myself to it.”
“Not much has changed.” Which, of course, isn’t true.
“Haven’t slept much in years but the last few months have been the worst. There’s no escape anymore. My mind. I drove to the house three times without stopping, son. Took me three times to knock on the door. You have every right to hate me. I know that.”
And still, I wasn’t able to say a thing. All I could do was listen. The whole damn time I muttered only a small handful of words. I had never heard him speak so much. It was something to behold. I wanted to preserve it.
After all these years, it’ll be cancer that does it.
“It’s hell. But it’s not the end of the world.”
Isn’t it, though? What’s left of his hair is turning gray. What to say? I feel remorseful for his life. I have so many questions. In time.
“A few months I’d say. The energy’s going. It’s a feeling. It’s a feeling.”
A letting go. A passing. And so again I must grapple with death. All across my Johnston life, it is lurking. The worst friend I have, but a friend nonetheless. Death, at least, is loyal. It makes eyes with me around every corner. I can find it anywhere if I look close enough. It is in the eyes and the bodies of everyone and everything. Why did it seem to come to roost in Johnston most of all? Death. Why reaper, do you choose to shack up here? Don’t you have the whole wide expanse of America to travel and torment? To think that some grow up without its constant reminder, its presence. They are feinting the feist, but that isn’t me. That isn’t us. The people of Johnston have been looking down the barrel all their lives. Are we better off? How many of us had lost our parents, friends, sons and daughters? Was it like this everywhere and for everyone or have we been chosen? I don’t know. And what do any of us have to offer in the face of death? The fish in the river are quiet, nowhere to be seen.
A wake for my father. I can’t comprehend. I can’t statue myself aside a casket again, especially not his. I won’t bear the long line of empathetic, inescapable eyes. Though who would even show? There is no healing to be found at a funeral. But if not there, where?
What a dark day it is, and what dark depressing thoughts consume me. I have half the mind to start from scratch, but it’s true that at times the sadness feels better, and the losses stitch us all together somehow. Like one impenetrable strand of DNA. All one. No name, no face, no future. We are more continuous and flowing this way. And I remember when Leon told me how all the ancients were so much better with transition. That dying was celebrated and a beautiful part of life they all cherished. Well, if there was any place out there today, anywhere that was close to this everlasting understanding, it’d be the simple town of Johnston. It’d be us. I throw a stick in the river and watch it float away in the current.
Sometimes I find my wonderings barren. I become tired of myself. Looking up to the changing sky, I admit I still know nothing. I have a buddy who has the smiliest little brother. He once said to me.
“it’s because he’s stupid, Cash, and I mean that as a compliment.” I thought about that often. Maybe he was right. Maybe the kid caught wind of the secret after all, the one that eludes the rest of us so easily. To believe like a child , as Ma would say. She was usually right, that’s the thing. In all my memories.
Shock. What kind of delusions had I carried before today? Had I honestly thought I wouldn’t see my father again? Or that I would, and that we’d build something together, anew? In the distance an eagle explodes off the bank of the water. It swoops down and picks a fish from the river.
I think deep down I have always known that he’d show up on the doorstep. But to be so weak and dying and sorry? Where has all my rage gone? My hate? Looking at his slumping body I could not find it anymore. It died in the desert like my dreams. It was washed away by my loving blood and adoration for the almighty father. And that was something, wasn’t it? To be forever a kid at his father’s side, looking up. We rally and rally trying to become better men, to be proud and able and strong, to have our fathers reach down from their tower and ruffle our hair in the wind. I’m uncontrollable in mercy. My mother had forgiving hands, and I am infused with her wonder for God whether I like it or not.
Why had He brought my father back from the dead? Why had He dropped him at my feet like a mouse? I could have made peace with one thousand demises, each more gruesome and fit for punishment. But even now, there is something else working. I don’t want my father to die. I don’t want him to leave. There was a grace in his weeping admission. He knows now. He understands. But it’s too late.
I hate a farce. It could have been a fine morning in my youth in which he had seen God’s white light, but it wasn’t. Rather, it was months before the grave in which he finally came stumbling home. What depravity. What confession. And still, I am sorry. So infinitely sorry for my father and for myself. For my mother, dead and gone, and all the souls of Johnston who just didn’t catch their break in time.
Everything changes. Things aren’t built to last. When I stroll the streets next summer, all will be different. I will again see the people walking with badges of survival on their chests, proud and happy. Sweet Johnston, maybe you are nirvana in the end. With your tough souls and courage and perspective. You are the heart of the country and more.
Well, what will it be? God, when will you take him from me again?
I’m lost deep into the river. It moves quickly. It’s hurrying off to another pair of eyes also trying to make sense of the world. And it’s true that we will never put it all together. Not a single one of us. There is no intellectual or artist out there. Not Marcus Aurelius or Aristotle. No King. No Nietzsche or Dostoevsky. No Plato. No Rembrandt. No Kahlo. No Ginsberg. No Kerouac. No Austen. Nobody. No Mozart. No Pollack. No O’Keefe. No Socrates. No Shakespeare. No. No one. The truth is, we all make a mess of it, every one of us. We aren’t sure of much.
Are we owed some divine response? Some answer? Maybe. It’s possible. I do not believe we are meant to be forgotten. Abandoned. Abused. We deserve words, love. We are to be delivered, no matter how long we spend our time lost, wandering our deserts, thirsty and longing.
We have each other, there is that. I believe we are to take care of one another, to see our fellow man’s reflection in ourselves. This is about all I know. And to abuse an opportunity for love, to forsake your fellow man, that is a sin most severe. And I understand this is why I have harbored such harm in my heart, for so many long desperate years, for my father. But now, there is only one voice I hear, and it’s my mother’s. It is her song of forgiveness that plays in my ears. It rings out like a chorus of angels. It is all okay. It is all okay. I surrender to the truth.
I will miss my father even so.