Twenty-Five
I’VE NEVER BEEN a very religious person. I know it about myself. EJ knows it. We just don’t talk about it.
Oh, I went to church like a good boy, first with my parents and later with EJ after they were gone, until I stopped going in high school and she stopped fighting me over it.
And I’ve never lived my life under the assumption, or the belief, that my parents are Looking Down on Us.
Every time I’d watch one of my college teammates point up to the sky after scoring a touchdown or making some kind of big play, I’d find myself thinking this same exact thing:
Really?
I never said anything about it to my teammates, or shared these sentiments with my God-fearing grandma, but I’ve always wondered what the oddsmakers would say about anybody Looking Down on Us.
From Up There.
I mean, what odds could you get on that?
That doesn’t mean I think that my father isn’t out there somewhere.
Or that I’m ruling out the possible existence of a spiritual world.
The truth is, I believe and I don’t believe, mostly because I still do want to cling to the notion that my father remains a presence in my life, the way I fiercely clung to that same notion after he died, when I found myself talking a lot more to him than the God who’d just sold me the hell out.
So after dinner tonight with EJ, steak on the grill and mashed potatoes and more of the endless supply of green beans from her vegetable garden, I drive over to Good Shepherd Cemetery on the north side of town, where the headstones for my parents and my grandfather are located in our family plot.
One time when EJ and I went over there together, on what would have been my mother’s birthday, she said, “Someday I’ll be right there next to them.”
And I said, “I don’t like playing this game.”
I bring some flowers that I’d picked from EJ’s other garden and lay them at the base of my mother’s headstone, the mother who might as well have died the day her husband did.
Then I go over and stand in front of my father’s headstone, by far the tallest and widest of the three, looking bigger than everything the way he was.
I’m not looking up at the big Carolina sky, just trying to get myself to believe—contrary to my beliefs about the afterlife one more time—that he really is here with me in the cemetery stillness, underneath all those stars.
I’ve been thinking about him a lot today, and how badly I’d let him down at the high school—just because he’d always taught me to never punch down, which is exactly what I’d done with those three punks—and whether I thought I had the right to do what I did or not.
I’d gotten into a lot of fights after my father was gone, in junior high especially, before I grew into being me, acting out in anger, and my loss. But then I’d finally grown out of all that, in all ways.
After a while I told myself that fighting wasn’t who I was.
But I stand here and tell my father that I don’t know who I am right now, and don’t know what I should do for Leamon Ridenour and about Briar Crockett.
Because I don’t know.
I stand here for a long time, and despite the day I’ve had, almost against all odds, I feel the first peace I’ve felt since coming home.
Then I feel a smile come out of me and over me, because then I am the one speaking to him out loud, as if he really is here or even Up There and can hear me.
“Say hello to Gideon,” I say.
Then I do the only thing any sensible person would do after a spiritual moment like this.
I head for the bar.