“Don’t forget to patch that hole in the basement wall before you leave tomorrow.” The echo of his father was deafening.
“Alright.” Thomas’s voice croaked with the strain of frozen December air and too many cigarettes that morning.
The sun had just exhaled the last of its dawn and now cast the crisp jail bar shadows of the naked forest across the two of them as they inspected the snowed land for salvageable gems of firewood. His father led the way several yards ahead. Thomas had forgotten how much he missed winter. He managed to survive southern summers, even enjoy them. Still it was in his blood to love the colorless landscape. Thomas already began debating whether or not he would in fact patch the wall. He could just as easily tell his father he’d never mentioned it to him. After all, it wasn’t Thomas’s house, nor did he wish to make it such. He knew the scheme to be indecent, that Mom would be ashamed of him if she could hear his thoughts. For a moment he hated her. He hated her for wanting to relocate so far from the city, for smoking, for marrying his father, for having her foresight so Thomas may inherit it as her child.
“Tom?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you stronger than me?”
Thomas looked up at his father – into his eyes this time – and through the distance he scrutinized the lazy skin of his eyelids slumped over their lashes, wanting to sleep like the rest of his father’s body. “Yeah, Dad.”
“Come see if you can break this branch off. It looks dry enough for kindling.”
Thomas made his way up the white veiled crest. He felt as sheets of the snow, partially melted and refrozen into crusty layers, gave way to the pressure of being walked on. He continued to juggle his commitment to the wall. It was all pointless – collecting firewood, getting a Christmas tree later, patching the hole in the wall – all as pointless as asking his father to pick up milk from the store yesterday.
Life had become circular in the presence of his father. They might carry on about what day and time Thomas would drive him to perform his regular checkup or when to schedule the fMRI later that month only to have the same conversation again at lunch, at the end of the day, and continue these iterations up to the day of the appointment. These events were becoming much more frequent. Thomas thought of the hole in the wall – a vortex – his father and him spiraling toward the center of critical mass and inevitable collapse. He thought of his father leading the way to collect the firewood this morning.
“This one right here.” His father pointed to a specific branch amongst the array spiraling out of the fallen tree. Thomas dropped his pile across a jumble of young collapsed maples that failed to survive the season. With a quick twist-and-pull the tree relinquished its arm to him. He went on to snap it into halves over his knee, his father watching. “So I was thinking of inviting your sister over for the holidays.”
The snapping branch spoke for Thomas. Why couldn’t it have been Celia? He thought. Why couldn’t their mom have called her, being the older one, to handle their father? Why couldn’t she be deemed responsible enough? These were, of course, futile questions. Joe’s Gentlemen Club wasn’t paying enough to cover her rent, let alone her cocaine. She may have had a chance were she one of the dancers, but she didn’t make the cut. No one spoke of it openly, but Celia was somehow robbed of genetic advantage. Under the seduction of low key light and booze side projects made ends meet. Thomas recalled his visit to her inner city flat.
“It’s very… hipster.” He took his steps lightly, lest the floorboards creak at his remarks.
“Fuck you. You live out of your car.” She tossed her candy red wool coat on her bed. In four steps she turned to face him, leaned against the kitchen counter, and slouched into her cigarette.
“That’ll all change soon. I got some magazines looking at my resume. If they read my blog they’ll figure it out.”
“Mom ask about seeing your place yet?”
“Oh yeah.”
“And?”
“It’s a work in progress.” Thomas casually inspected the bed as he sat but did all he could not to imagine its history.
She gave a puckered grin through another drag of her Newport. “You’re a fucking pussy.”
“Well…” he thought of all the criticisms floating around the dilapidated room like dead fish ready to be harpooned, “you have your approach I have mine.”
“I guess.”
“Speaking of secrets, did you finally tell Mom you dropped out?”
“Yeah she’s pissed.”
“What about Dad?”
“That’s her call.”
Thomas snapped the branch over his knee again.
“Tom?”
“Hm?”
“What do you think?”
“Of what?”
“Inviting Celia… for Christmas.”
He snapped another. “She doesn’t have the money.”
“Well I can cover that.”
And another. “I think she’s busy studying. They’ve got finals going on right now.”
“Through the holiday?”
“I just don’t think she’ll be able to come, Dad.”
“I just don’t think she’ll be able to come, Dad.”
“Well I should at least call. You should too.”
Thomas picked up the rest of his bundle. “Where do you want to go later? You didn’t answer me before we left.”
“Where to go later?”
“For the tree. To get the Christmas tree.” The broken nubs of the branches stabbed into Thomas’s arms.
“Oh.” His father turned and continued across the hill.
Thomas stared at him, through him, through the next twenty years. It played out uncontrollably. Today it was the Christmas tree, then it would be bathing a decrepit father that can’t remember his son’s name; fighting with him at the supermarket because he has no concept of his whereabouts and suspects Thomas to be an attacker; wandering the woods around the house for hours, calling police, forcing himself to hope that his father isn’t fatally injured by a car or a fall to the concrete… forcing himself not to hope that it’s finally over; staring into the sunken confused eyes of a withered body, submerged in the bathtub as they look past him – a struggle to find a soul – and ask, “Thomas?”
That will be the moment, Thomas decided. That will be the day that it’s too much to take. The explanation will be easy; any number of his father’s medications could cause it. It will be quick and too likely to be disbelieved by anyone. Thomas won’t be looking. He’ll be downstairs or out for a short errand… too likely to disbelieve… perhaps even inevitable. It’s what Thomas would want if it were himself. When it is himself. Thomas was nauseous now.
“Do you remember the name of the place you kids always loved going to? They usually had good ones.”
“It was… it started with a ‘T’ didn’t it?”
“I don’t know, I’m asking you.”
“It was…” Thomas struggled. “Fuck. Oh fuck I know this.”
“You know, I’m sure it’s closed down by now.”
“I’m telling you I know this.”
The nausea mutated into panic. Thomas compulsively began replaying Sudoku and various memory games in his mind. He was a fiend of them and regularly placed his keys and wallet in uncommon places, reciting and constantly testing his memory. Confronted with the event horizon of the vortex Thomas swam madly against the current combating what no one else seemed to realize. Again he cursed his mom for passing her foresight down to him.
His father once recounted a brief history of his family to Thomas when he was a young boy. Thomas’s grandparents were killed in a car accident when his father was little so there wasn’t much to know. What his father could recall was Thomas’s great grandfather and how he was known to wander the streets confused in his late years. Back then such things were blamed on past injuries like his fall from the ladder thirty years earlier. Even as a young boy Thomas knew it to be a misdiagnosis by the neighborhood whether his own father was willing to admit it or not as he struggled to remember the task at hand each day. If Thomas somehow managed to escape the same fate he found no solace in it.
There would be periods of time, weeks or even months, when Thomas and Celia would be saved from visiting their grandmother on Mom’s side. Thomas noted this and duly deemed it strange, the only thing stranger being the actual visits themselves.
She lived in a small condo their mom helped pay for out of her own salary. Decorated with dream catchers and hundreds of little dolls made of horse hair, leather, and colored beads, Thomas assumed somewhere in his bloodline he carried a Native American tribe. He and Celia would sit casually yet always disciplined – an act they grew accustom to – watching whatever channel their grandma had last left on the TV, cautious to not watch anything modern lest it be condemned as evil. When he was six Thomas had once drawn a picture of his favorite dinosaur, a stegosaurus, for his grandma. They too were evil and thus wiped out in accordance to God’s will, as well as holocaust Jews and the passengers of the Titanic.
Sometimes Mom would get up to prepare soup or coffee in the kitchen, leaving Celia and him alone with their grandma. She would stare out the window silent until Mom returned to usher her back to reality. When she confronted their grandfather about her condition he ignored her, far too concerned with the return of the alien mother-ship to dispense Jesus’s new edicts… this is why he had to exile himself to his mobile home in Mexico in the first place.
As Thomas became a teen he was no longer forced to visit their grandma, left only with his fragmented childhood memories. He decided that she was staring out at the evil surrounding the condo, reciting silent prayers to protect herself from demons, ill-intentioned men, the landlord, the modern world… evil things. He came to this conclusion sitting on a bench at the school yard staring blankly at the swaying trees and classmates scurrying about him as they made their way to buses and cars borrowed from their parents to go home. This was the vice Thomas wrestled with.
As Thomas’s mom lay in the hospital bed, beyond the salvation of chemo or any other therapies, cradling her last handful of breaths, he saw a glint of grace in her eyes. A gratefulness that she would not go out like her mother or uncle; that she was still fully aware of reality. In Thomas’s family they did not speak of frailty; not of his grandfathers’, not of his father’s, not of his grandma’s or great uncle. All things despairing were left to be understood in unspoken time. So, accordingly, as she dispensed the final breath counting down to her death, she looked into Thomas placing her fingers to his forehead and grazed them across his brow, over his temple and to his cheek. She gave her final blessing of safe travels. She and Thomas knew his fate. Celia had been robbed of all genetic advantages except the one Thomas would give up everything to have. In Thomas’s family they did not speak of frailty, only of how similar he was to his grandma and the things he too did like his father. So Thomas played Sudoku and crosswords, counted cards in euchre and solitaire, and recited the location of his keys and wallet each evening; a mantra to tether his mind to each day.
Perhaps, he thought, he should have never pursued his journalism career with earnest, never gotten an apartment. It might be better if he lived homeless and not dependent on upkeep like his father. When things turned for the worst he would just die of his fragility and be swept away by the streets he chose to call home; an animal in the wild. Natural.
“Remember when we tried to cut down that tree in the backyard, the old birch in the backyard?” His father’s voice was crisp.
“And Celia was freaking out,” Thomas chimed in.
“She would not leave that trunk.”
“I can’t believe we left it for another… what… Five years?”
“Seven.”
“Really?”
“Mm hm.” He was certain.
Thomas laughed. “She should have been an environmental activist.”
“She was afraid of it hitting the house.”
“You’re joking.”
“Oh she didn’t care how sure your Mom or I were. Out of the question.”
“I thought she loved the tree… for climbing or something.”
“Nope. She didn’t want it to hit the house.”
“The branches damaged the roof in a storm a few years later.”
“Sure did.”
“Sure did.”
“Oh god…” Thomas had caught up to his father by now, pile still in hand. “She refused to let you guys cut it down because she didn’t want it to damage the house?”
“Yep.”
“Oh my god! I didn’t even realize that. I never knew that was the reason.”
“I’m sure your Mom or I mentioned it at some point. Sometimes things click differently when you hear it again.”
Thomas looked at his Dad. “Yeah… Wow, yeah that’s ironic.”
“We did a lot of silly things for you kids. You didn’t know any better. That’s just what growing older is all about.” The words stretched out and covered the time between the two of them out there in the woods.
“Right.”
“After all that sort of shit happens you just laugh it off by my age.” He turned and smiled at Thomas.
Thomas chuckled. “Right. So where did you want to get the Christmas tree?”
“I like those.” He gestured to a crowd of towering pines haloed by glowing backlit clouds of the mid-morning.
“Yeah just give me a day or two to shape one down to the size of the house.”
“There’s a place about five minutes toward town that had some good looking ones. I saw them while driving back from the store the other day.”
“Alright. Let’s turn back and get some lunch then go.” They had collected all the wood they needed.
“Sure. Oh hey, Thomas, before I forget…”
“What’s up?”
“There’s a hole in the basement wall. Something fell over or something, I just noticed it the other day. Anyways, could you patch it up before you leave tomorrow?”
“Yeah, Dad… I will.”
Much more frequent.
