“Every parting gives a foretaste of death, every reunion a hint of the resurrection.” ~Arthur Schopenhauer
Lucien Talbot thought this trip home was to be about his mother, but thought wrong as his business with her was amicably settled years before; and in a way any grateful mother and child should hope to leave it.
The full story began before this, and joined in Memphis, Tennessee from the neighboring counties of Arkansas, where both sides of the family originated. The mother’s family struggled economically on the fringes of Old South agriculture, while the father’s side, more prosperous, floundered following a farming venture. The fraternal grandfather eventually dissolved his farm and bought a country store. There his wife survived him by some years and supervised her grandchildren’s visits.
It was, from the perspective of the grandchildren who played along the irrigation canal of a soybean field, heaven, and they knew their summers to be eternal. Yet among the unraveling hems of hand-sewed quilts and chalk-white cuttlebones in the parakeets’ cage, a preindustrial world started centuries before was finding its unglamorous end. Holdovers persisted—icy beds, wood smoke indoors, and an outhouse fifteen yards from the front porch. Still, before these children approached the age of their beloved, snuff-pinching grandmother, digital technology had transformed their formative youth into wall decorations at Cracker Barrel.
Lucien was the oldest child by minutes. Liam was his paternal twin, while Lana, the sister, was born five years later. All had friends at stages, but there were limits to these intimacies. Regardless, the Talbots were social performers of the first magnitude when occasion demanded it, except where Ernie, in later life, made a petulant fuss of travel or tolerating visitors (unless his wife bribed him with cash payments). Indeed, all but the mother was easily fatigued by society.
Ernie, when younger and energetic, was one for projects and gadgetry. Working first as a mechanic at his father’s filling station in Arkansas, and then attending refrigeration school in Memphis, he was mechanically minded and an early adopter of technology. His DIY spirit made his household repairs legendary, with questionable carpentry skills and many more strategies involving fake wood veneer contact paper and duct tape than any family may reasonably endure.
Diabetes and the physical stress of manual labor reduced Ernie in body and spirit over time. Through self-imposed exile, he was an invalid in all but fact for the last two decades of his life; and the end of his life mirrored its beginning, where his wife (where first it had been his mother) waited on his every need.
The patriarch was given to cyclical laconic vegetative states, retreating to his bed for spells to watch television incessantly. His children called him “the border in pajamas,” and resisted the way he referred to them as “brother” and “sister” when they encountered him at the dinner table, as if they all belonged to his pajama-wearing cult.
While still able-bodied, and in fits of domestic vexation, Blythe threw up her hands, packed her bags, and went off to stay with her sisters or mother, who were at least animated and meddlesome in the way of typical families.
She had bowled on a women’s PTA league when younger, and her weekly tales involving fellow bowlers and their foibles entertained the children. (These inexhaustible harangues resembled complaints she expressed about her Arkansas relations.) Investing little interest in the affairs of others themselves, the brothers puzzled over their mother’s need to afflict herself to these trials; yet she thrived on them.
Beyond this, the matriarch cultivated few interests that did not entail a social dimension, such as cooking for large family get-togethers, which spoke to her industry. She pursued housekeeping with maniacal single-mindedness (if not glee), and was rarely seen out of her apron or without a scent of Pinesol about her.
She was always an attractive woman. The walk-in closet in the master bedroom was solely hers and provided a showcase for her shoes, dresses, and pants suits. Even with age and osteoporosis, her fashion sense was impeccable and flattering; and she never gave up high heels as church apparel.
There was talk of Lucien moving home when Blythe’s ability to live independently came into question after the father died. It would not be (as he refused to entertain the notion) the return of a Prodigal Son. Nor would wheedling or ingratiation be called on to repair decades of an absentee family member. Yet in returning to the house that Christmas, Lucien could not immerse himself in any new state of affairs—past, current, or potential. He assumed the housekeeping while home, as this was the one trait he inherited from his mother. Moreover, he doted on her physical needs where he regrettably had little emotional comfort to offer.
That bright morning he dressed while she slept, which was the reverse of their initial roles in life. Brushing his teeth in the bathroom sink, a patched-over hole in the wall marked where an intercom terminal was once attached. Busy wallpaper did not distract from the outline left by a bracket, which was not sanded smooth prior to the paper’s installation. In retrospect, his father’s handyman abilities matched his communication skills, which was apropos of the intercom system’s removal from the house decades earlier.
In fact, the son had been dreaming about Ernie in the hour before waking, and about one of his impossible tasks. These stressful undertakings routinely occurred on holidays and threatened to derail family gatherings. Particularly, in this invented scenario, the eldest son was appointed to carry scoopfuls of gravy across the dining room with a pair of salad tongs without spilling it on his mother’s white, special-occasion tablecloth (this in spite of a special-occasion gravy boat sitting on the counter). When alive, his father’s exasperating chores were of a more mundane character, whether inserting extra leafs into the holiday table upside down or going to church to borrow folding chairs for guests and finding the Sunday school building locked.
Ernie’s gravestone was three miles away from his sister’s house, past the Wolf River Watershed and the gold chaff light of a winter’s cloudless sunrise. The son had not visited the site since the funeral, although he did not have the excuse of his housebound mother. A radio tower sat halfway between I-40 and the headstone, and a transformer station sat across the street from the cemetery. The delinquent child believed his electrician father could (should he choose) use these means to communicate with him from any distance, and in much the way when his citizen band radio transmitter invaded the walls of his children’s bedrooms, and lastly their stereo speakers and headphones.
When Lucien eventually emerged from the bathroom, his mother was sidewinding her way down the sempiternally dark hallway behind her walker. “It’s turkey time,” she proclaimed, “and your momma’s dragging her butt this morning.”
Normally Blythe would have been up with the robins, already slaving in the kitchen and filling the house with scents of oregano and sage. Her current feebleness was unbearable to contemplate for long, but she had pared down her routines to what was essential: A saltshaker, a bottle of nondairy creamer, and a crystal goblet filled with Equal packets were set aside on a low shelf in the kitchen, while a little pan for frying her daily egg sat on top of unused cookware in a baseboard cabinet.
Bits of her breakfast were dropped somewhere between the stove and the table and, like the voice of another person having taken possession of her failing body, she declared, “Leave it for the dog.”
Lucien studied his mother’s strong smooth face across the kitchen table: Its stoic visage was inherited from her father, and the son always assumed it would be precisely in its place.
The matriarch was never part of her children’s play, yet they had flourished in their secret worlds because she disappeared into a background of ironing clothes and preparing meals. Lana had a family that would outlive her, yet what would become of the brothers? Lucien spent his life playacting, but he never play-acted with his mother. Hers was an exalted position, where the security she imparted allowed her frightened sons to immerse themselves in fairytale worlds.
Table chatter would be the last trait to abandon her, and though she rambled tirelessly, she was beginning to become incoherent here and there in a worrying way. Breakfast was the one meal for which Blythe husbanded her resources, and most days it left her exhausted and tottering back to bed with dishes in the sink. Today she would rally for family, so left the dishes for her son and disappeared to dress.
When quiet filled the house for too long a spell, Lucien checked on her breathing, or saw to where she had gotten. In her prime, forty minutes were needed to finish her hair and apply her makeup. Now those preparations stretched over an hour.
The hum of an oxygen generator was by then a constant refrain in the house, and its wheezing tune was both solemn and steadfast. Yards of a life-sustaining plastic tube snaked over treacherous carpet, so Lucien was mindful where he stepped in a dwelling that saw little light throughout the day.
He used the interval of his mother’s toilette to consider the house’s state as an extension of hers: The lowest drawer in her bedroom chest contained a handful of ankle socks, through which she cycled; they lay among sharply creased pillowcases that had not covered the bed in some while. (Disarray tended to these items with a light touch.) Pill containers were kept in a lidless shoebox on the kitchen table, while other features of a once vital house faded into an eigengrau background.
Yet whenever Lucien remembered home, he thought not of this house but an earlier one; and rarely of indoors but outdoors where he and his brother played together. Death had skirted a mostly idyllic childhood. It poked its head in only occasionally from a sun-drenched hedge, past where the boys ran in a yard of changeless forms. Each blade of grass on that lawn was bright and untroubled. The biology of cell structure that composed them, and the chlorophyll that sustained them, were mythologies of recent invention grafted into the crisp, aromatic pages of school life science books. Here, with its patient gaze, Death kept its distance, and let a world burgeon and flourish.
Empathy would be added last as an understanding to the Talbot household, and while both parents were still alive to see it. Lucien could mark the day of its arrival: when he came home to find his father giving his mother intravenous drip infusions of a powerful antibiotic due to a life-threatening lung infection. For the first time she was frail and needy, and when Ernie enlisted Lucien to help with the administration of the medicine, it was not without a measure of bickering common to their cooperation; this reduced Blythe to tears more than once. Lucien realized he needed to be strong for his mother and, though it was unnatural to him, he caressed her back at the dinner table while the protracted operation was performed. He held his peace with his father, and tracked air bubbles in the IV tube with horror that one might find its way into her vein.
Though she recovered from that episode, a transformation was underway. Roles of parent and child were reversing, and a late-born sense of responsibility in the son meant he never looked at his beloved mother the same way again. When his father died, and he saw his mother in the hospital at his side, he knew it would take all his energies to preserve her, only now there was no awkwardness in his love.
The clacking walker was heard a minute before Blythe reappeared in the hall doorway. She was always mindful of the clock and ready with time to spare. Prodding her son along to the door, she said, “Warm the car up for your mother, and grab the dog’s bag of Beggin’ Strips.”
En route to his sister’s house, three radio towers jutted over a blanched field of late city landscaping to the east; this was the only direction Memphis could grow between the Mississippi River and the state bearing the river’s name. Lucien could not say which of these towers was closest or tallest, but knew one had a commanding view of his father’s grave.
The son thought of Ernie and his horrendous eyesight, and his painstaking threading of the IV needle into his sickly wife’s arm three times daily in those harrowing weeks of the antibiotic infusions. The son knew there was more good in this man than he came to see and understand by choosing to live so far from home.
The patriarch had gone before them, had shaken off what was flawed in his character and un-communicated in his thoughts. What he now possessed was enviable perspective, and so would preside over the family gathering this year at a distance, as steward of all that was yet to come.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.