Habeas Corpus, installment 2
Posted on November 12, 2007
Filed Under writings, Habeas corpus |
I just love that a few of you are reading this. So here goes…installment 2.
For those of you who need to brush up. Click here to read installment one.
Memories of my father, his temper, his long absences, the defeated hang-dog way he drifts around the house filling ashtrays and playing Steppen Wolf albums so the windows rattle, make it hard to conjure anything close to pure sorrow. I hurtle past Brattleboro and Bellows Falls and struggle to suppress panic as it dawns on me that I will be asked to say something apt and poignant at the service.
By Exit 62, I recover my senses. Service, what service? Mom and I will bury him in Franklin, the place he played his last USTA match in ’61. It will be she and I and the open grave site. No trumped up eulogies delivered by a minister that has never laid eyes on my father. Yes, Franklin. Franklin is perfect. Franklin is a town thirty miles from the one in which my parents have lived physically together and mentally apart for more than two decades. Franklin represents a time before ashtrays and Steppen Wolf, a memory my mother will be willing to honor.
Still, I am restless and divided, unable to settle on which loss to mourn. There’s the effort to anticipate my father’s shrunken frame, his last days ahead of him, but just. But then there’s Chad’s recent departure. Nothing to show for our year together but the embarrassment that is now my car. Violent, sprawling expletives spray painted across the hood. ‘BITCH’ and ‘WHORE’ companion sentiments to the old bumper stickers, peeling and faded: Keep Your Laws Off My Body, Clinton/Gore ’92, Good Planets Are Hard To Find.
It’s been seventy-two hours since Chad packed his collection of framed vintage concert posters into the back of his VW bus - Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed - a neatly stacked assembly, the audience to his long drive back to Santa Monica. .
Three days and already my mind has begun to revise things, to forget the noisy way he chews, with his mouth wide open, great gobs of food collecting along his gum lines – a smile traced with bits of frozen burrito or Fruity Pebbles. I can suddenly and inexplicably forgive him his inability to wring out the sponge, leaving it soaked in the bottom of the sink, cold and stinking. I have the inner patience to overlook his habit of leaving glasses and bowls and heaping ashtrays on counter tops and bedside tables. Now that he’s gone, I can’t remember why these things ever mattered to me at all.
After Chad’s leaving, there had been several hours in which I did nothing but contemplate the blank space above the couch where those posters had hung. I had just decided to find an Impressionist print to fill the space. I’d resolved to purchase something like Madame Monet and Her Son. Monet is so un-Chad. I expected it to soothe me. I had made this kind of emotional progress when Mom called from Wichita.
“It’s your father,” she said. “I’m bringing him back to Northfield. You need to come. There won’t be much time to say goodbye.”
Turns out that the nice folks at the Wichita Ecno Lodge, a ruddy cheeked woman named Ruth or a squat and solid man named Buddy, had taken great pains to be polite and delicate when informing my mother that her long estranged husband was dying a messy, inconvenient death in the confines of Room 115.
I’ve always expected my father to be exempt from common endings - tumors, colostomy bags, a morphine drip. I had been certain that someday he’d suffer a rock star’s demise - found face down in a pool of his own vomit or bent, broken and scorched in a fiery wreck. But now there was the slow, sucking waste of metastasized cancer.
I shouted, “Wichita? Why Wichita? What the Good God Damn is in Witchita?” But it had been a hypothetical rant. I knew there was no good reason for my father’s having chosen to die in a motel overlooking the Little Arkansas River. It was just convenient to his latest wanderings and seemed as good a place as any. Too sick for choices, once Mom arrived in Kansas, he had quickly caved to the idea of a supervised death of standard proportions, when it became clear to him that dying alone in a cheap motel was an impossibility.
Comments
6 Responses to “Habeas Corpus, installment 2”
Leave a Reply
cce,
yours is my style of fiction. I love the Faulkner passage that takes a chapter to get our hero out to the mailbox or the prologue to Underworld that DeLillo turned into its own book, the unfolding of one swing of the bat into a book. Sure it’s an exchange between mother and daughter, but it means little without the context. Moments are an eternity because, somehow, all that comes to bear on the moment. I’m engaged, curious, and enjoying the ride.
Thanks, Ron. I’m just swooning to be included in the same thought process as Faulkner and DeLillo.
“a time before ashtrays and Steppen Wolf, a memory my mother will be willing to honor.”
i really liked this line.
i’m intrigued!
waiting for the 3rd.
this stuff is rocking, C.
I just love that you’re sharing!
Title and author, please?