“Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.” ~William Shakespear, Cymbeline
Between connections and delays, the traveler did not reach Memphis until late, and the compression of air travel, as compared to legendary bus rides, was of a concentrated but tolerable duration. Nothing again in his life would be so arduous or crucial.
Lana informed her brother he would be sleeping at the old family house over his visit. “The house is topsy-turvy with packing boxes, but you will have peace and quiet,” she explained. “The power is still on, and the bed sheets have been changed. I turned on the ice machine in the fridge. The keys are on the table,” was left as a gesture, along with a bag of takeout food picked up in transit. “Clark will be by tomorrow to pick you up for breakfast, so get a good night’s sleep.”
With his sister’s departure, the silence in his parents’ empty house became a continuation of the pressurized state experienced in the airliner’s passenger compartment. He switched on one of several lights and entered, incrementally, a residue of memory. Every trip home evoked sentimental attachments, but the vacancy of these rooms became (more than replaced) Liam’s sense of compression. Lana, who lived in proximity of developments, felt this gradual abandonment keenly, and watched each parent fracture like a load-bearing beam. From there, family dissolution was a rapid business.
This was the first holiday home since his mother’s death, and the first year no Christmas decorations added light to the overly shaded house.
Scratching erupted at the backdoor. The elderly family Shih Tzu was left outside, and had been forgotten over the course of a busy day. Liam peeked through cinched curtains, but the motion detector light failed to activate on the patio stoop. Liam feared the pet might stray into black wilderness for what little of the hedge and chain-linked fence was seen.
The son toured the dark yard, which his mother had cared for like her one unruly child. Her nemesis (bamboo planted by an unthinking neighbor) stormed the fence line. The invasive species made regular incursions onto the property.
Lana was keeping up the yard work in anticipation of selling the house, but while searching for Deirdre, Liam collided with a stalk of bamboo. Sheared in a gust, it had fallen over the fence to lie diagonally to the ground. He thought to cut down the invader, but as unfortunate circumstances demanded, someone had stolen his mother’s pruning shears from under the carport. Twisting the stalk off at its point of breakage did not separate the pieces. The outer skin was too tough to tear with his hands.
This encounter beneath the dark hedge reminded him of the fake Christmas tree purchased in California, which he brushed in the darkened, snowbound rental car.
Liam turned away from the disagreeable feature, and reminisced over years of December visits where his mother, from her glass patio storm door, watched her son rake leaves and sweet gum burrs. In failing light, the last of the leaf bags would be dragged onto the front curb, and for as many years as she was able, a hot meal waited to warm his bones.
The orphan returned indoors without the dog. The phone rang; it was Lana informing her brother of personal items in the house that might interest him.
“Deirdre has been left outside all day,“ related the concerned brother.
“Deirdre?” puzzled the sister sadly. “We put Deirdre to sleep two day after Christmas. She had lymphoma. I am sure I told you that in the car ride from the airport.”
Liam was drawn back into his mood. Had he lived near home for all those indistinguishable years, he surely would have visited his mother several nights a week to watch television with her, and share a bag of microwave popcorn.
Had he lived near home for all those indistinguishable years, he surely would have visited his mother several nights a week to watch television with her, and share a bag of microwave popcorn.
Deirdre’s water bowl was topped off at the kitchen sink without thinking: It was customary to check it at the backdoor whenever entering or leaving the premises. This placed the erstwhile caretaker eye-level to cupboards. These were bare but for peeling shelf paper and a generational dusting of seasonings sifted into cracks. One fork remained in the cutlery tray and, utilizing the asset, the takeout meal was consumed. The diner debated whether to line the wastebasket with a plastic bag for purposes of discarding his burger wrapper; this set him weeping. How many times had the son lined this wastebasket after an aromatic supper, and removed its bundle of trash to twilight and the carport bin? He chose instead to leave the plastic bag and its contents in the floor beside a stack of newspapers.
Lights were turned off and the son crawled onto his parents’ bed, which became his mother’s bed and the place of her last conscious breath. He tried to picture what she saw when she pointed with a trembling finger at the doorway, and then to imagine that first full minute when her body was removed from the house and it ceased being a home.
It was like the night she died, and he, hundreds of miles away, needed both to feel something as well as sleep in preparation for what came next. Schnapps and diphenhydramine dulled everything but the boy wanting his mother, and in his tumbling down into a shallow place, a sound (perhaps a gurgle in his throat) pulled him briefly out of his struggle. The sound was easily conflated with his feeble mother’s cracking voice who, shaking off the ordeal of death, formed a clear cry to signal him, as from the other end of a cavern where no time was left to make promises.
The bereaved son slipped in and out of conscious thought; the pet leapt upon the bed to lie beside him. He stroked its grey fur sympathetically, and surmised a plot in dark veneers and drapery closing around him like the last chapter in a sad book:
He was awake only minutes into putting his head on the pillow—a noise found his ears. It was clearly his mother in the kitchen, somewhere near the breakfast table speaking in her proclamation tone of voice. This was the voice she used when chattering at the dog, or to one of her sisters on the telephone, or, in the years since Ernie died, to herself. It was a cadence well known to the child. He did not stir while he endeavored to decipher it.
After a minute or two the speechifying died away and the son rose to investigate. He stood in the kitchen doorway evaluating the silence, and opened the freezer compartment in the refrigerator. The whining sound was likely made by the ice maker churning out a block of unused cubes.
Liam returned to the empty bed where no deceased pet had joined him; the ice machine theory was revisited: Its lyrebird impression of his mother was uncanny; and moreover by originating from a part of the house where Blythe routinely soliloquized.
Twilight sleep came, and the ghostly Shih Tzu again grazed his thigh. With ears cocked, the dog stared toward the cracked bathroom door, as if listening to a wet toothbrush tapping the ceramic basin.
Liam was uncommitted to the incorporeal question, yet would not categorically abjure from entertaining it: Science assured the reasoner that no coincidence could have meaning. No explanation could exist that did not have a natural explanation. The optical eye, the digestive tract—these were developments of necessity, but not by necessary choice; and so too the same must be claimed for a dying mind flooded with endorphins, where it pictures dead loved ones come to greet the dying out of refulgence and love.
Heaven (it might also be asserted) was just another late invention of material Nature, and served, where material Nature is incapable of possessing an intrinsic moral dimension, as an unintended “gift” bestowed on those in the last seconds of life. Graciousness was mere appearance issuing from a disintegrating limbic system—on this determination a scientific reasoner must insist. No higher attribute could be attributed to a blind evolutionary process that valued nothing higher than the furtherance of gene procreation; and so the grievers and the too eager-to-believers must be gently persuaded to the impersonality of biology…
Coincidences nevertheless impress the mind, and come too often at poignant, ironic moments; and even to the end of the world…
A late morning sun poured through open blinds. Pipes exposed in the wall behind the refrigerator overshot recent prosperous decades and blended urban landscapes with those of rural Arkansas.
Across from the conspicuous plumbing, the kitchen table bore fragile keepsakes wrapped in pages from The Commercial Appeal: Blythe would not have read the obituaries that morning. Nor would she rehash any of fractious city politics recounted from the previous day.
Green depression glass was among the last items to be packed, which Blythe collected and, through which, she revisited her long ago childhood in a spyglass.
A large blue tarpaulin lay in the middle of the floor; Lana dropped the wrapped stemware in the center of it. The loose ends of the folded newspaper resembled the airfoils of maple seed pods, making the fragile object twirl to a soft landing.
Cold air crept up the brother’s pants leg. He knelt over the plastic blue liner and realized that it was retrieved from the morning frost outdoors. His sister gathered its drawstrings and dragged the catchall through the carport door. Once it was spread over the cement drive, its ends were loosened. A sharp November breeze reached into the tarpaulin and, where before there were carefully wrapped pieces of glass, vivid green leaves of May escaped into the bracing sunlight. They scattered quickly into the autumnal sienna tones of the lawn.
Liam fetched a leaf. The thready cocoon of a moth was stitched to the underside of it. He released the miniature ghost and saw it pass from the yard and over his white banana seat bicycle lying edgewise across the cracked sidewalk.
“It’s time to get dressed,” the sister told him.
His church clothes, covered with a paper liner, were removed from the closet. The stiff fabric felt like cardboard tubes into which the boy’s body was poured. When his preparations were complete, he was ushered into a photographer’s studio with his siblings. He knew the family portrait was to be a reenactment of an earlier occasion, although this time his mother was seated on a queenly throne behind several small chairs.
Her hair was unnaturally dark, tinted to match her graduation picture from high school. Its resembled a depression era wig, such as worn by her own mother late in life during protracted hospital stays.
Blythe’s gaze was fixed on a darkly cloaked object at the front of the room, which Liam had not noticed on entering. It was an imposing, old world apparatus, measuring the dimensions of an iron lung distantly recalled from school field trips, or a casket brought into family homes. The son concluded, from his attire and the seating arrangement, that the unusual object was an elaborate camera.
He studied his mother’s unblinking expression to ascertain a meaning to it, but her eyelashes were false and long, and her makeup, silvery and thick, as to conceal an involved transformation that proceeded the children into the studio. She resembled her beautiful sister, Judy Pauline, before her untimely death while still a teen.
Liam did not remember a picture being taken, but the other family members were soon spirited through another doorway where distraction waited.
The mysterious photographer held Blythe up in the doorway.
The son tarried worriedly in a hallway, along a wall crowded with fragrant potted flowers. Everyone was breaking up into smaller parties in a perpendicular room; many of these individuals were strangers to him. He was halfway between them and his lagging mother, and with a fear of separation.
Blythe remained beside the dark gentleman, with whom she seemingly shared an acquaintance. He made her look through a smaller handheld camera, as if to conduct a test on her eyes. This was unusual since she was the subject of the previous photograph. The photographer (or optometrist) next pointed her toward another doorway open to a sunny lawn framed by towering trees. The boy wanted his mother to catch up with scattering family members, but she was rapidly absorbed in snapping pictures with the new camera, and with happy indifference to whatever responsibility brought her here.
Liam thought of calling out to her, but the man with her kept pointing out different views. Finally, with his finger extended toward the blue sky, Blythe swung around with a bright smile, even as the camera’s body blocked her upper face. The lens reflected the cloudless heaven she saw, which did not include her son. His heart sank to imagine himself, for a second, out of her mind; yet he could not deny her happiness: happiness he had not seen in her visage for many years.
The photographer slowly locked eyes on the abandoned child, first with pity, and then with a winking mischievous grin Liam fondly remembered. His grandfather, with high smooth cheekbones and jet-black hair, cut a strong line against the bedroom doorway; and as if to say to his grandson, in commencing one of his infamous pranks, watch this:
He gestured lovingly to his dying daughter, so tired and broken on the high bed that came to claim too much of her attention. She lifted a finger, past where her own daughter cried and pleaded over her wasting body, and groaned before she could cry with joy; and was gone.
Liam turned to see where his family had dispersed through the connecting room, and knew this was the path he must also follow. He found his white, banana seat bicycle still on the sidewalk, and peddled it up the chilly leaf-strewn lane, into a diminished but still beautiful landscape that would hold him, through inexplicable obligation given by a Subtle God, for a time longer.
The End
Copyright © 2008-2024 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.