I’VE STOOD ON top of more churches than I’ve gone into. The last time I was in a church, I was forty-four, and it was my father’s funeral. Him and Mom had been living in Pennsylvania, and I came in to stay with them while she was sick.
She died in June. He died in August. Another summer of death. I knew he wouldn’t last long, the way he sat at her bedside, eyes squinted, arms folded, legs crossed. For all the sunscreen Grand had asked me to put on, no one ever once asked Mom, not even when she left the house and went to all those places in the sun. Her chocolate chips had melted. I wasn’t there to pull her away from the oven.
I remember how Dad would lay his hand on her head as white and as slight as powder on the pillow. She’d tilt her ending eyes toward him and the window. Her breathing raspy and rutted, like a fingernail scratching across a cotton sheet.
All she wanted to do was to go outside, even in the rain. Especially in the rain.
“Let me go.” She’d reach for her feet like that was the first step.
We’d pull her bones back to the bed. It was no longer her keeping her inside. It was us, and that turning of the tables clotted our hearts with an inescapable sorrow until we almost wished she were still afraid of the rain.
“You need your rest,” we’d say, and feel her pulse, sounding like closing.
One time as she slept, I held my nose to her cold skin. I thought she would smell like the morphine they pumped into her. I don’t know if morphine has a smell, but I thought it would be something metallic, something acidic, most definitely something cold. I was relieved when she still smelled like Breathed River. Did she really? I think I just needed her to.
Our conversation consisted of her saying my name, me saying hers. Fielding. Mom. Fielding! Mom! Fielding? Mom?
A dying mother is hard to talk to, especially when she starts screaming about a fire. We told her it was put out.
“When?” she asked.
“A long time ago,” we said almost in unison.
I took a wet washcloth and stroked her face. She seemed to like it. She smiled. Said Grand’s name.
“He’s not here, Mom.” I laid the washcloth over her eyes so I wouldn’t have to see them.
“Why ain’t my boy here?”
“He’s with Sal.”
With my palm lying on top of the washcloth, I could feel her eyes pushing like tiny hands trying to push up out of rubble.
“Oh.” She drew her breath. A faintly sketched line. “My boys.”
I went away from her then and thought of Granny, of that suffering we are asked as men to end. As I was packing my suitcase to go to Mexico to buy pentobarbital, the phone rang. It was Dad. He didn’t say a word. All he did was cry. I told him it was a bad connection and to call back. I had to hang up first. I tore up my plane ticket and went around the house, turning on all the faucets. The kitchen, the bathroom, upstairs and down. Sinks and tubs and showers. I wanted to hear the water go down the drains so I wouldn’t have to hear myself doing the same.
After Mom’s funeral, when me and Dad were driving back to the house, he told me to take a turn. Following his directions, I ended up driving to an amusement park off the highway.
“We’re going to ride the roller coasters.” He grunted into his handkerchief.
“You hate roller coasters. And what about what the doctor said about your heart? No quick starts, remember. No big frights.”
He rode every roller coaster in the park that day, as somber as his black suit. His heartbeat escalated, his pulse quickened, but what he wanted to happen did not happen. I’ve never seen a more disappointed man in my life. Every day he returned to the park, but after a month of roller coasters, he did not have the heart attack the doctor assured him he would have under such stress.
He’d gotten so used to the coasters that there he’d be, his chin propped up on the back of his hand, looking out past the loops and turns like he was just taking a Sunday drive while everyone else screamed around him and gripped the bar for dear life.
When the heart attack did finally come, it did so when he was sitting calmly in the La-Z-Boy. Instead of an obituary, I put an invitation in the newspaper. I sat there in a pew of the church, and for every person who walked through the door who wasn’t Sal I took a drink from the flask in my pocket. By the time the preacher asked me to stand and say a few words, the flask was empty. I ended up wobbling on the pulpit while going into the graphic details of what happens when a bullet hits the chest cavity.
The preacher whispered in my ear something like, “I think you should take your seat now.”
“Fuck you, man,” I might have said. And then somebody punched him. I suppose it was me.
I was never meant to be a violent man. I was meant to be my father’s son. My mother’s. But in the end, I became the son of that summer. That summer is my father. It is my mother. It is my violence’s blame.