A short story about post traumatic stress disorder, masculinity, patriarchy, and a woman's love of her children. Beware: The writing is a bit overdone
Andre
Pens are mines. They need to be searched and when dug into correctly, you emerge with jewels. Many fail to realize black ink from the pen is coal. A good writer manages to put enough pressure, enough scrutiny on expressions of the human condition to render ordinary words multi faceted, with cut, color, and clarity. This is my attempt at a diamond. I want it to be natural. Stories should be authentic. So I shall take authentic events, and authentic imagination and compact them. I’ll allow you to appraise them.
The week before I was born, my parents left Alabama. My mother will never let me forget how much her ankles hurt; how terrible she felt. Most complain of the arduous hours spent in labor, but my mother’s lament was always her ankles. When I was younger, taking too long doing chores or being uncooperative, she’d raise up her dress, and show her ankles, copper brown.
That week in April in between the showers, her and my father walked and hitchhiked from Arlon to New Jersey. They weren’t ready for the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple.
Mama would always say “ There’s no place to stretch your legs in a city like that. Children should be able to stretch their legs”.
And stretch I did. Our home was nothing extraordinary, but I can not remember a summer that I didn’t run around our backyard, and climb our tree. Sometimes, I wished that we’d stayed in Alabama, so that we could trick the warm air to stay with us, so winter wouldn’t be as wicked as in New Jersey. I've always liked the spring, how the sun stays a little longer before kissing the sky good night . When I was younger I used to think that maybe the view of budding roses and newborn chicks were enough to keep the sun smiling a bit longer, keeping the world a bit warmer.
It was a spring day when they came knocking on our door. “Is your father home? Could you get him for us?” and I called my father. His bones creaked like the joints of an old rocking chair . As soon as he saw the door ajar and full of broken promises--full of things not visible to the naked eye until the millionth time you’ve played the memory in your mind -- he went rigid. It seemed all the air had been knocked out him. He closed the door on the two men.
“You’ve got the wrong house”.
My father returned to the couch, feet up and sipped at his beer. The knock came again, steady and patient.
I looked at him, “Go get the damn door boy”
“Daddy it’s them men again ”.
My mama, hands covered in flour, walked out of the kitchen. Her eyes grew to full moons, and then the tides rushed in. The dams burst. The mirrors in her eyes shattered. I watched my mother, graceful as a swan, fall, I saw her neck bend and break, I saw it snap, I saw her chest heave, her hummingbird heartbeat. And she cattawalled. She moaned, rocking back and forth.The men at the door, in their blue uniforms, white hats, saluted, turned on their heels and walked away.
One day, when I was cleaning the house, as was one of the prerequisites to going outside as I got older, I came across a piece of paper, in my father’s slow and deliberate handwriting:
We’d rise before the Sun
My son
I didnt know that his first steps were marches
He was full of medical bullets before he got full of metal ones
I told that boy to never leave, he had too much warring inside him to fight someone else’s
I told my son he was never no dog, he had no tags, cuz how you paying for a life?
If I had a nickel for every I’m sorry for your loss, how many would it take for me to buy my soul back from the devil?
He ain't hurt a fly
Mosquitoes used to whisper the secrets of the universe in his ear
they used to tell him things God laced in Gabriel’s trumpet blare
He could hear the trees whisper in the morning breeze
he would ask the sky why it wept at dawn
My son
of all the flowers he conversed with,
why was he nipped in the bud so quickly
My father was so economic with his words. In the last 4 years I hadn’t held a conversation with the man outside of the weather, what Mama was cooking for dinner, or taking the trash out. Tears came to my eyes. We never talked about my brother. It seems ever since the day my mother’s swan neck snapped, and my father began to walk with a hunch, beer in hand, the pictures of him slowly eased themselves from the walls and into a box in the closet.
Sometimes, I’d sneak into the closet and sneak peeks into my brother’s eyes. Sepia photographs that made everything the same color as his skin. His eyes always seemed to be asking me a question, and every time we’d meet, the question would be new, it’d be fresh.
I took the poem my father had written and sat it back where it was. The parchment couldn’t have been heavier than an ounce, but I felt its weight, all that my father had poured onto the page with his 6th grade education. I never told my mother, I figured she’d read the poem in his eyes a thousand times.
I walked out of the house and took my bike off the porch, careful not to drag it down the wooden steps, knowing it would wake my father, and that was cardinal rule number 2 in my house: Don’t wake him. The bed could’ve been a dodecagon and he still would wake up on the wrong side.
“Hey David!”, I heard. It was Marie, my friend since kindergarten. I’d stolen her pencil and she beat the snot out of me at recess, we’d been inseparable since, even though most boys thought girls were icky. We’d climbed trees together and had tea parties (something my mother and father could never find out about, they’d skin me alive).
She wore a red collared shirt and a navy jumpsuit that stopped at her knees. She’d gotten taller. Her hair was in long brown french braids. I smiled at her, all legs and teeth. Her almond brown skin sometimes reminded me of Mama’s ankles. Her face, looked just like her mother’s. It was just the two of them. Her father disappeared one day; left for work and never came back.
As we grew, and my father’s withdrawal got worse. I wondered what it would be like if my father left, if he’d just left, maybe I wouldn’t have a story to tell. I wouldn’t be the person I am today.
In school one day, my teacher Ms. Jones told us to write something about the Vietnam war. It was 1967 and I knew as much as everyone else did. The war was bad. There were groups of college students protesting and people getting married to avoid being drafted.
So one day my mother asked me what I was doing in school, as she usually did--for a woman with a tenth grade education, working as a seamstress in a department store, she valued education more than anything else; I can remember the fear of being whipped for bringing anything home under an A-- I told her. This was five years after the mirrors shattered, and the dams broke.
She whispered “Andre”. That whisper sauntered under the door of the closet at the end of the hall and rustled the dust of the box. I swear I heard a sigh of relief escape from the door of the closet. She’d acknowledged him! Suddenly the walls were awash with photographs of happy parents, holding a brown, bouncing baby boy, holding their first son.
And when I turned back around to face my mother, there were two tears. Sad and explanatory, all the photos removed themselves from the walls and sulked back to the closet to hide deeper.
I wanted immediately to fill the empty walls, with now, with pictures of a happy family, but I didn’t know where to find one. This was before the time of picture frames being sold with sample photography. Anyway, I think it’d be weird to look up and see white faces.
One day, when I came home from school, our bags were packed. Mother told me we were going on a vacation, to visit her mother in Georgia.
I thought great! An even hotter summer for running around, maybe she'd have a forest or honeysuckle thicket in the backyard!
Papa could go fishing (something that couldn't happen in jersey , the waters were polluted.. I was yapping on and on about this and that and my mother let me. She calmly packed the last bag and as it closed, she said "your father is not coming with us".
Her face looked different but I could not tell exactly what it was that had changed, she did not let me get a full view of her face.. She slipped on her shades and we walked out the house and passed our beat up old car.
"We're catching the bus to the train station David " .
Suddenly I was not all excited to go to Georgia. Mother was too somber for this to be a vacation, but then again, when wasn't she somber? I hoped to God her mother hadn't passed away.
I entertained myself with sleep and a novel my mother had packed for me on the train. I was still very restless though. Mother hummed and sewed. She'd cut out many patterns of clothing before boarding the bumpy train and now was very concentratedly piecing them together.
I preferred when she sewed at home, she’d use the sewing machine. If I slid close enough to the ground I could see those copper ankles. She used to hum to herself. Changing rhythm with the stitching pattern. It was the same tune every time, but my mother was my own Lady Day (Billie Holiday) , gardenia in her hair, perfume in her throat. She never sang at church, but the prayers she sent up while on that sewing machine were accompanied by Gabriel’s trumpet. And God was tapping his fingers.
When we arrived to Georgia, red dirt and grass, a man was waiting for us. His name was James. He had a smile like my mother’s, a smile like strings of pearls.
“David!”, he said.
I looked into this man’s eager eyes. Ah, the age-old obligation to remember every person that’s ever held you as an infant.
He answered my blank eyes with the expected reply, “I’m your cousin James, you don’t remember me, but when you were three you and your bro-”, he shot a glance at Mother who was fussing with the conductor of the train as to our luggage, “spent a summer with me and Gramma”.
Cousin? He looked old enough to be my uncle. Cousin? That meant Mother had siblings. I’d never heard of any siblings, I’d never even heard of her Mother until 2 days ago.
I’d prided myself on being able to gauge my mother’s emotions through the cadence of her laugh, but in that moment, I realized, she had an entire life—possibly multiple lives— I’d never heard of, much less been a part of. How could I have been so ignorant to someone I knew so well?Living with my puzzle of a father, I’d sworn I’d had all the pieces of my mother and my relationship with her, not only together, but glued, stagnant, like basic arithmetic. The only person who I understood. I didn’t understand girls, especially not like Sue Ellen, who had left bicycles and moved on to skirts and sending notes in class. My mother was not supposed to change, she was not supposed to be anything than what I’d expected her to be. Simple, constant, ever-omniscient to all my mischief.
My grandmother—who turned out to be a caramel woman with wrinkly freckles, stern and sweet — sent me downtown one day that almost proved to be my last. In the South, white men didn’t even want you to walk on their pavement.
Cousin James tried to explain to me that in Georgia, there was a silent Jim Crow. It was more subtle than signs on bathrooms.. There was a boundary, it was invisible but it was so tangible you could almost touch it. It didn't come as a Trojan horse as it did in the North. It was deliberate, unadulterated, and was refined in the Southern Sun and blood of the Rednecks that resided under it .
I never went back to that side of town, but I did continue to explore. There was no honeysuckle thicket in my Grandmother’s backyard but there were cicadas. I thought of my father’s poem and wondered why I couldn’t hear the insects talk like my brother had. I wondered what they were saying.
When I wasn’t out riding my bicycle, I was in the hammock reading. Cousin James saw the book in my luggage and immediately showed me where the library was. I swear, every two days I was in there combing through the walls looking for something new to read.
The librarian, in her slow Southern twang, always had a smile for me. She would laugh as she fanned herself.
“Back again? What’ll it be this time?
A piece of curly hair would always manage to escape from her bun and fall ever so slightly on her face.
“I think I’ll tackle a science fiction today.” .
I wondered how she managed to stay so calm in that hot library. The ink of the books seemed to sweat. Maybe thats why her khaki skin seemed to glow. I wondered what her ankles looked like.
My grandmother, whom I had said less than 200 words to, stopped me one day when I had my nose in a book.
Listen to me chile,
I understand
when I open my mouth
you hear my teeth creaking like the floorboards in a one-room school house
But no university will ever be able to teach you the universal truths that lie in my smile
Live a little, be Happy, now go and get me a cool glass of tea
Books are great but sometimes you have to take your head out of clouds and look at your feet to make sure you’re walking where you need to go.
Before this, we’d only spoken briefly, through a system of gestures and stares. We were quiet souls. We were boats on other people’s horizons.
We were in Georgia for about a month and a half before my father came.
Cousin James, who was about 10 years older than my 12 year old self, he understood, saw me walk towards the back door, to go lay in the hammock, and said “Cuz, how about you and I go down to the lake to skip rocks.”
“Maybe later James, I just got this new book..”
“Come on cousin, we’re going to the pond”.
But it was too late, I’d already seen my mother and my father under the shade of the red oak.
He had his arm on her and she kept pulling away. She was not enjoying the conversation.
I turned on my heel, as my father had done the day the men in the blue uniforms came, and walked back into the house.
I met grandmother’s eyes had mirrors with cracks in them too. But hers did not shatter. My mother and her mother seemed to look like Sue Ellen and her mother at that moment.
“Let’s go Cousin”.
We came back later that day, my father was gone and the Sun had begun to set. Pink, orange, purple and blue, like the Sun’s goodnight kiss to the sky . All the colors of the flowers my father had said my brother talked to.
My mother sat on her childhood bed, with a purple mark on her arm
“Hey baby”.
“Mama?”.
“Yes sugar?” , her Southern twang had grown stronger since we’d been in Georgia.
I didn’t want to ask about my father. I didn’t care.
I stood at the edge of the bed and looked down at her ankles crossed on the floor. I kept my eyes glued to them. Years I’d spent with those copper ankles, but as she sat, they started to buckle.
And as a zombie would give a eulogy, she said "Your father says he’ll be back"
"Why?"
"He misses his family".
"You don't hit your family", I said and I met my mother's eyes. It looked like my father had stolen the day precisely before the sun set and put it on her face. Pink eyes, purple and blue surrounding them.
My mother had been crying; somehow she'd managed to repair the dams and find almost every shard from the day the broke in mirror in her eyes, but today it looked like someone had taken a hammer to them.
"I hate him" .
"David! Your father,broken man as he is, is still your father. God doesn't want you to hate him".
I thought of sue Ellen and whether or not her mom let her hate her father. I didn't care what God wanted. God wanted my brother dead, my father crazy and my mother running away while trying to hold all the pieces of herself together.
I was nowhere near a man yet, but I understood that I could not be one like my father. I wondered what type of my man my brother would be. I wanted to ask my mother if she had read the poem in my father's eyes again that day, but it seemed she was too busy revising her own.. She'd been working on a new one since we got on the train to Georgia , but this was an entirely new verse, and I wasn’t sure I had the courage to read it.
I was going to write this story about something I had absolutely no idea about, it would’ve won Newbery medals. The critics would’ve said I somehow, in my youth discovered some secret in the star that allowed me to piece together universal truths about identity, about hope, about growing pains —I won't give up that plot, because eventually I’ll write that story.
Through my muddled attempt at a plot for a glimpse of my truth. We’d like to think we’re all so unselfish, so down-to-Earth that anyone can relate to our stories, that every stride we take is a step for mankind, that anyone can appreciate our triumphs. But in this memoir, or vignette, or simple recant of moments in my life —they honestly make no sense at all— I hope if you have stashed nothing for yourself from my ramblings, I hope you’ll wear my lump of coal around your neck, and if not, I hope it wasn't torture for you to read.
Yours Truly,
David
We should all the have the courage to read the poems in everyone’s eyes.
Pens are mines. They need to be searched and when dug into correctly, you emerge with jewels. Many fail to realize black ink from the pen is coal. A good writer manages to put enough pressure, enough scrutiny on expressions of the human condition to render ordinary words multi faceted, with cut, color, and clarity. This is my attempt at a diamond. I want it to be natural. Stories should be authentic. So I shall take authentic events, and authentic imagination and compact them. I’ll allow you to appraise them.
The week before I was born, my parents left Alabama. My mother will never let me forget how much her ankles hurt; how terrible she felt. Most complain of the arduous hours spent in labor, but my mother’s lament was always her ankles. When I was younger, taking too long doing chores or being uncooperative, she’d raise up her dress, and show her ankles, copper brown.
That week in April in between the showers, her and my father walked and hitchhiked from Arlon to New Jersey. They weren’t ready for the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple.
Mama would always say “ There’s no place to stretch your legs in a city like that. Children should be able to stretch their legs”.
And stretch I did. Our home was nothing extraordinary, but I can not remember a summer that I didn’t run around our backyard, and climb our tree. Sometimes, I wished that we’d stayed in Alabama, so that we could trick the warm air to stay with us, so winter wouldn’t be as wicked as in New Jersey. I've always liked the spring, how the sun stays a little longer before kissing the sky good night . When I was younger I used to think that maybe the view of budding roses and newborn chicks were enough to keep the sun smiling a bit longer, keeping the world a bit warmer.
It was a spring day when they came knocking on our door. “Is your father home? Could you get him for us?” and I called my father. His bones creaked like the joints of an old rocking chair . As soon as he saw the door ajar and full of broken promises--full of things not visible to the naked eye until the millionth time you’ve played the memory in your mind -- he went rigid. It seemed all the air had been knocked out him. He closed the door on the two men.
“You’ve got the wrong house”.
My father returned to the couch, feet up and sipped at his beer. The knock came again, steady and patient.
I looked at him, “Go get the damn door boy”
“Daddy it’s them men again ”.
My mama, hands covered in flour, walked out of the kitchen. Her eyes grew to full moons, and then the tides rushed in. The dams burst. The mirrors in her eyes shattered. I watched my mother, graceful as a swan, fall, I saw her neck bend and break, I saw it snap, I saw her chest heave, her hummingbird heartbeat. And she cattawalled. She moaned, rocking back and forth.The men at the door, in their blue uniforms, white hats, saluted, turned on their heels and walked away.
One day, when I was cleaning the house, as was one of the prerequisites to going outside as I got older, I came across a piece of paper, in my father’s slow and deliberate handwriting:
We’d rise before the Sun
My son
I didnt know that his first steps were marches
He was full of medical bullets before he got full of metal ones
I told that boy to never leave, he had too much warring inside him to fight someone else’s
I told my son he was never no dog, he had no tags, cuz how you paying for a life?
If I had a nickel for every I’m sorry for your loss, how many would it take for me to buy my soul back from the devil?
He ain't hurt a fly
Mosquitoes used to whisper the secrets of the universe in his ear
they used to tell him things God laced in Gabriel’s trumpet blare
He could hear the trees whisper in the morning breeze
he would ask the sky why it wept at dawn
My son
of all the flowers he conversed with,
why was he nipped in the bud so quickly
My father was so economic with his words. In the last 4 years I hadn’t held a conversation with the man outside of the weather, what Mama was cooking for dinner, or taking the trash out. Tears came to my eyes. We never talked about my brother. It seems ever since the day my mother’s swan neck snapped, and my father began to walk with a hunch, beer in hand, the pictures of him slowly eased themselves from the walls and into a box in the closet.
Sometimes, I’d sneak into the closet and sneak peeks into my brother’s eyes. Sepia photographs that made everything the same color as his skin. His eyes always seemed to be asking me a question, and every time we’d meet, the question would be new, it’d be fresh.
I took the poem my father had written and sat it back where it was. The parchment couldn’t have been heavier than an ounce, but I felt its weight, all that my father had poured onto the page with his 6th grade education. I never told my mother, I figured she’d read the poem in his eyes a thousand times.
I walked out of the house and took my bike off the porch, careful not to drag it down the wooden steps, knowing it would wake my father, and that was cardinal rule number 2 in my house: Don’t wake him. The bed could’ve been a dodecagon and he still would wake up on the wrong side.
“Hey David!”, I heard. It was Marie, my friend since kindergarten. I’d stolen her pencil and she beat the snot out of me at recess, we’d been inseparable since, even though most boys thought girls were icky. We’d climbed trees together and had tea parties (something my mother and father could never find out about, they’d skin me alive).
She wore a red collared shirt and a navy jumpsuit that stopped at her knees. She’d gotten taller. Her hair was in long brown french braids. I smiled at her, all legs and teeth. Her almond brown skin sometimes reminded me of Mama’s ankles. Her face, looked just like her mother’s. It was just the two of them. Her father disappeared one day; left for work and never came back.
As we grew, and my father’s withdrawal got worse. I wondered what it would be like if my father left, if he’d just left, maybe I wouldn’t have a story to tell. I wouldn’t be the person I am today.
In school one day, my teacher Ms. Jones told us to write something about the Vietnam war. It was 1967 and I knew as much as everyone else did. The war was bad. There were groups of college students protesting and people getting married to avoid being drafted.
So one day my mother asked me what I was doing in school, as she usually did--for a woman with a tenth grade education, working as a seamstress in a department store, she valued education more than anything else; I can remember the fear of being whipped for bringing anything home under an A-- I told her. This was five years after the mirrors shattered, and the dams broke.
She whispered “Andre”. That whisper sauntered under the door of the closet at the end of the hall and rustled the dust of the box. I swear I heard a sigh of relief escape from the door of the closet. She’d acknowledged him! Suddenly the walls were awash with photographs of happy parents, holding a brown, bouncing baby boy, holding their first son.
And when I turned back around to face my mother, there were two tears. Sad and explanatory, all the photos removed themselves from the walls and sulked back to the closet to hide deeper.
I wanted immediately to fill the empty walls, with now, with pictures of a happy family, but I didn’t know where to find one. This was before the time of picture frames being sold with sample photography. Anyway, I think it’d be weird to look up and see white faces.
One day, when I came home from school, our bags were packed. Mother told me we were going on a vacation, to visit her mother in Georgia.
I thought great! An even hotter summer for running around, maybe she'd have a forest or honeysuckle thicket in the backyard!
Papa could go fishing (something that couldn't happen in jersey , the waters were polluted.. I was yapping on and on about this and that and my mother let me. She calmly packed the last bag and as it closed, she said "your father is not coming with us".
Her face looked different but I could not tell exactly what it was that had changed, she did not let me get a full view of her face.. She slipped on her shades and we walked out the house and passed our beat up old car.
"We're catching the bus to the train station David " .
Suddenly I was not all excited to go to Georgia. Mother was too somber for this to be a vacation, but then again, when wasn't she somber? I hoped to God her mother hadn't passed away.
I entertained myself with sleep and a novel my mother had packed for me on the train. I was still very restless though. Mother hummed and sewed. She'd cut out many patterns of clothing before boarding the bumpy train and now was very concentratedly piecing them together.
I preferred when she sewed at home, she’d use the sewing machine. If I slid close enough to the ground I could see those copper ankles. She used to hum to herself. Changing rhythm with the stitching pattern. It was the same tune every time, but my mother was my own Lady Day (Billie Holiday) , gardenia in her hair, perfume in her throat. She never sang at church, but the prayers she sent up while on that sewing machine were accompanied by Gabriel’s trumpet. And God was tapping his fingers.
When we arrived to Georgia, red dirt and grass, a man was waiting for us. His name was James. He had a smile like my mother’s, a smile like strings of pearls.
“David!”, he said.
I looked into this man’s eager eyes. Ah, the age-old obligation to remember every person that’s ever held you as an infant.
He answered my blank eyes with the expected reply, “I’m your cousin James, you don’t remember me, but when you were three you and your bro-”, he shot a glance at Mother who was fussing with the conductor of the train as to our luggage, “spent a summer with me and Gramma”.
Cousin? He looked old enough to be my uncle. Cousin? That meant Mother had siblings. I’d never heard of any siblings, I’d never even heard of her Mother until 2 days ago.
I’d prided myself on being able to gauge my mother’s emotions through the cadence of her laugh, but in that moment, I realized, she had an entire life—possibly multiple lives— I’d never heard of, much less been a part of. How could I have been so ignorant to someone I knew so well?Living with my puzzle of a father, I’d sworn I’d had all the pieces of my mother and my relationship with her, not only together, but glued, stagnant, like basic arithmetic. The only person who I understood. I didn’t understand girls, especially not like Sue Ellen, who had left bicycles and moved on to skirts and sending notes in class. My mother was not supposed to change, she was not supposed to be anything than what I’d expected her to be. Simple, constant, ever-omniscient to all my mischief.
My grandmother—who turned out to be a caramel woman with wrinkly freckles, stern and sweet — sent me downtown one day that almost proved to be my last. In the South, white men didn’t even want you to walk on their pavement.
Cousin James tried to explain to me that in Georgia, there was a silent Jim Crow. It was more subtle than signs on bathrooms.. There was a boundary, it was invisible but it was so tangible you could almost touch it. It didn't come as a Trojan horse as it did in the North. It was deliberate, unadulterated, and was refined in the Southern Sun and blood of the Rednecks that resided under it .
I never went back to that side of town, but I did continue to explore. There was no honeysuckle thicket in my Grandmother’s backyard but there were cicadas. I thought of my father’s poem and wondered why I couldn’t hear the insects talk like my brother had. I wondered what they were saying.
When I wasn’t out riding my bicycle, I was in the hammock reading. Cousin James saw the book in my luggage and immediately showed me where the library was. I swear, every two days I was in there combing through the walls looking for something new to read.
The librarian, in her slow Southern twang, always had a smile for me. She would laugh as she fanned herself.
“Back again? What’ll it be this time?
A piece of curly hair would always manage to escape from her bun and fall ever so slightly on her face.
“I think I’ll tackle a science fiction today.” .
I wondered how she managed to stay so calm in that hot library. The ink of the books seemed to sweat. Maybe thats why her khaki skin seemed to glow. I wondered what her ankles looked like.
My grandmother, whom I had said less than 200 words to, stopped me one day when I had my nose in a book.
Listen to me chile,
I understand
when I open my mouth
you hear my teeth creaking like the floorboards in a one-room school house
But no university will ever be able to teach you the universal truths that lie in my smile
Live a little, be Happy, now go and get me a cool glass of tea
Books are great but sometimes you have to take your head out of clouds and look at your feet to make sure you’re walking where you need to go.
Before this, we’d only spoken briefly, through a system of gestures and stares. We were quiet souls. We were boats on other people’s horizons.
We were in Georgia for about a month and a half before my father came.
Cousin James, who was about 10 years older than my 12 year old self, he understood, saw me walk towards the back door, to go lay in the hammock, and said “Cuz, how about you and I go down to the lake to skip rocks.”
“Maybe later James, I just got this new book..”
“Come on cousin, we’re going to the pond”.
But it was too late, I’d already seen my mother and my father under the shade of the red oak.
He had his arm on her and she kept pulling away. She was not enjoying the conversation.
I turned on my heel, as my father had done the day the men in the blue uniforms came, and walked back into the house.
I met grandmother’s eyes had mirrors with cracks in them too. But hers did not shatter. My mother and her mother seemed to look like Sue Ellen and her mother at that moment.
“Let’s go Cousin”.
We came back later that day, my father was gone and the Sun had begun to set. Pink, orange, purple and blue, like the Sun’s goodnight kiss to the sky . All the colors of the flowers my father had said my brother talked to.
My mother sat on her childhood bed, with a purple mark on her arm
“Hey baby”.
“Mama?”.
“Yes sugar?” , her Southern twang had grown stronger since we’d been in Georgia.
I didn’t want to ask about my father. I didn’t care.
I stood at the edge of the bed and looked down at her ankles crossed on the floor. I kept my eyes glued to them. Years I’d spent with those copper ankles, but as she sat, they started to buckle.
And as a zombie would give a eulogy, she said "Your father says he’ll be back"
"Why?"
"He misses his family".
"You don't hit your family", I said and I met my mother's eyes. It looked like my father had stolen the day precisely before the sun set and put it on her face. Pink eyes, purple and blue surrounding them.
My mother had been crying; somehow she'd managed to repair the dams and find almost every shard from the day the broke in mirror in her eyes, but today it looked like someone had taken a hammer to them.
"I hate him" .
"David! Your father,broken man as he is, is still your father. God doesn't want you to hate him".
I thought of sue Ellen and whether or not her mom let her hate her father. I didn't care what God wanted. God wanted my brother dead, my father crazy and my mother running away while trying to hold all the pieces of herself together.
I was nowhere near a man yet, but I understood that I could not be one like my father. I wondered what type of my man my brother would be. I wanted to ask my mother if she had read the poem in my father's eyes again that day, but it seemed she was too busy revising her own.. She'd been working on a new one since we got on the train to Georgia , but this was an entirely new verse, and I wasn’t sure I had the courage to read it.
I was going to write this story about something I had absolutely no idea about, it would’ve won Newbery medals. The critics would’ve said I somehow, in my youth discovered some secret in the star that allowed me to piece together universal truths about identity, about hope, about growing pains —I won't give up that plot, because eventually I’ll write that story.
Through my muddled attempt at a plot for a glimpse of my truth. We’d like to think we’re all so unselfish, so down-to-Earth that anyone can relate to our stories, that every stride we take is a step for mankind, that anyone can appreciate our triumphs. But in this memoir, or vignette, or simple recant of moments in my life —they honestly make no sense at all— I hope if you have stashed nothing for yourself from my ramblings, I hope you’ll wear my lump of coal around your neck, and if not, I hope it wasn't torture for you to read.
Yours Truly,
David
We should all the have the courage to read the poems in everyone’s eyes.