Memory never fades, not in a small town like this. Your sins only become more amplified, cautionary tales passed down from generation to generation.
We lived on the outskirts of town, on a couple of acres my father had purchased before the town was the size it was now. Size it is now was really an exaggeration. There were maybe a couple thousand people in West Bend. But when I was younger, it was even smaller. Even more closed off and closed minded.
There were some more stores and more rich people with second homes here, and more tourists coming down here during ski season, but the town hadn't changed all that much. At least not out where my family's house was. Out there, out on the edges of town, it was still folks eking out whatever kind of existence they could. Out there, it was people like my father, who owned a tiny patch of dirt and worked the land for whatever they could get from it. It was the way he had done with the coal mine on our property.
People think of coal mines as these big places run by mining companies. But the truth is, there's people who, at least when I was a kid, got away with mining on their own property. It was kind of like bootlegging, almost – except legal. My father had the permit he needed when we were kids, and it wasn't some complicated operation. It was pretty straightforward – him putting blasting caps on the side of the mountain on our property, blasting away a little bit at a time. He sold coal the way that people sell firewood, this business that provided us just barely enough to scratch out an existence.
And then he drank away most of what he earned, came home angry, ready to lay into whoever crossed him.
Then the shit happened with Silas - the trouble with the explosives, when he set them off unauthorized and my father lost that mining permit - and there was no more mining. My father became a janitor in our high school.
Then we were the kids of the drunk high school janitor.
To say I was happy to leave West Bend was a fucking understatement.
I was running from West Bend full throttle as soon as I could get gone.
It’s funny the way life works. Things always come round full circle when you least expect them to. I swore to everything I believed in that I’d never come back here again. The one time I returned, to make sure my brother Silas wasn't fucking dead, only confirmed that I needed to stay the hell away from this place.
Ahead of me, the house stood in stark contrast to the houses I’d passed on the way out of town. My parents hadn’t kept up with the repairs, I could tell that much, although I guessed the repairs on the piece of shit would have been more than the house was worth. It hadn’t been a nice place when I was growing up, and it was even less of a nice place now.
A dog wandered up to the car. I wasn’t sure if it was a stray or not.
The door to the house opened and a figure stood in the frame, shadowed by the overhang of the doorway in the mid-afternoon light. She shielded her eyes from the sun, but I could see her squinting at me. She stepped outside, wearing a satin bathrobe and heeled slippers, rollers in her hair, waving at the dog. “Get away from the car and leave him be, you mangy mutt.”
I opened the door and stepped out, and the dog slinked away into the yard. “Hi, Mom,” I said.
***
“Is that him?” I asked.
My mother lit a cigarette, blew smoke through the kitchen before she answered. She played with the book of matches on the kitchen table, then pulled her satin robe tighter around her before she answered. “That’s him,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do with him so I left him there.”
“Flushing him would work,” I said. I didn’t like the idea of him sitting there in an urn on the mantle, like he was watching over us or something. As if he was some kind of beloved father figure.
“Elias, you don’t mean that,” she said. She crossed her feet, dangled the kitten slipper with the furry pom-pom on top off the end of her toe. My mother was stuck somewhere in the fifties, in many ways, the least of which involved her wardrobe. “It’s unchristian to speak of the dead like that.”
I wasn’t able to stifle the laugh, the sound bitter. “Well, it was unchristian for him to be a worthless drunk and child-beater.”
“Your father had his own demons, Elias,” she said. “Someday you’ll understand that.”
“I doubt it.” That much was true. I’d never understand why my father was who he was, cold and callous when he wasn’t drunk, worse than that when he was.