Posted on by Lydia Ink

She Rattles, She Doesn’t Knock

After my wife left me I felt a terrible loss because she took the dog and the cat with her.  She left angry.

Don’t blame me.  We both agreed we didn’t want children.  A friend of mine told me that would change.  He told me so, sitting slumped over on a barstool with a begging look at the bartender who kept telling us the place was closed.  He wasn’t drunk, well not stupid, pie-eyed drunk, he didn’t want to go home to the wife and kiddos–all four kiddos.  No, five total, if you counted the wife.  He has a sweet wife, really, just a little, well a little… she’s simple; I mean all those kids.  She’s a great mother, though, but they had agreed that they would not bring any children into this awful, dying world.  Like I said they had four, I’m sure his wife is up for more and maybe he is too, one more would shorten his life, two more may end the suffering.

I held my ground on the whole pregnancy thing.  Now my wife is someone else to someone named Jeffery, with a little girl that “means the world,” to her.  I know my wife, she’s sorry she allowed her biological clock get the best of her.  I know she misses the long weekends listening to Lake Michigan pound the coastline and reading by the fire.  Yeah, I kept the cabin because there was no way she could afford it, not with a kid, the cat and the dog and a husband named Jeffery.   Sure, we sold the two-story house but I’m fine with a small apartment downtown.  Little has changed for me–except for the damned doorknobs.

She showed up when I was moving in, my wife that is.  She showed up about three months pregnant to make sure I was “okay.”  I told her in no uncertain terms not to show her face at my apartment again and that this was not some “adult,” type of divorce where we would be friends and remain concerned about each other.

Actually, I said no such thing; I told her I was fine and got back to rearranging my apartment.  She had no business being there.  The friend who didn’t want to leave his bar stool spoke loud and fast at her for about fifteen minutes.  I didn’t see her leave.

That night while I was on the toilet reading Jaws, the doorknob rattled.  I shouted at Ralf, my big dumb golden lab to knock it off and go to bed.  Then I remembered that Ralf, the big dumb lab went with mommy.  I sat there, book in hand and stared at the doorknob.  Why had I shut the door to go to the toilet?  I was the only one living in the apartment.  I didn’t have to worry about offending anyone.

The door knob softly rattled.

“Who’s there?”

The door knob shook and turned as if someone would wrench it out of the door and then suddenly went silent.  I felt cold to the bone.  I sat there until I felt my feet go numb.  When I stood up my knees were wobbly.  I made lots of noise, flushed the toilet twice and open the door suddenly with a wide sweep.  The apartment was quiet and gray-dark.  I heard the noise of after hours downtown, a comforting sound and noticed the dim glow of streetlights.  I walked about turning on all the apartment lights and the TV.  I slept on the couch and was to work early.

Yeah, that’s nice.  I can walk to work and I do.  I’ve lost five pounds already and some envious people are looking at me and saying I need to take it easy.

So, when my wife had this guy’s daughter she plastered her ugly little face all over Facebook.  Friends who didn’t know what to do with either one of us put their little thumbs up under the kid’s picture so I closed my account and read The Count of Monte Cristo.  I even bought the audio book and have it playing while I cook.  It’s a little galley kitchen in the apartment.  I miss the big old kitchen in the two-story house we sold but I don’t cook like I used to; I can still cut a great salad.

One night I woke up to a door slamming and thought one of my neighbors was having a loud fight.  My bedroom was dark, I was groggy and just becoming aware that the room was too dark.  Where was the night light I kept in the hallway?  I didn’t become fully awake until I heard the rattle of a doorknob.  My bedroom door was closed.  Why was my bedroom door closed?  I had lived in the apartment almost 10 months and I made it a point not to shut any of the doors leading into rooms (the closet door knobs never protested up to that point).

I do not understand what made me brave; I got out of bed while the door knob jiggled in the door.  I grabbed the thing and felt an electric shock go through me.  The only thing I remember is my teeth chattering while trying not to urinate and feeling… I don’t know… terrified.  Absolutely terrified.

“Janet, I think something haunts my apartment.”

Silence.

“Janet, are you still there?”

“Yes.  What makes you think something haunts it?”

“The doorknobs rattle in the door and last night I tried to open the door while the doorknob was moving and something… something happened.”

“I know a good priest.”

“I’m not joking.”

“Neither am I.”

“You never went to church a day in your life.”

“I know I started after I left you.  Jeffery goes.”

“Yeah, well, never mind.  I wouldn’t want you to miscarry.”

“I’ve already had the baby.”

“Yeah, right never mind.”

I hung up before she could say another word, disgusted with myself that I had called her but I couldn’t shake that feeling of apprehension.  I spent the weekend up at the cabin.  I left instructions with the apartment’s handyman to change every damned doorknob in the place.  When I came back every new doorknob on every door, including the closets shone bright and ready for use.  I deliberately closed the bathroom door Monday night and continued reading The Count of Monte Cristo.  When I had finished, hands washed and reaching for the doorknob the damned thing rattled.  I stood in the bathroom for an hour.  When I opened the door–nothing.

At Wednesday’s board meeting I lost track of the conversation, thinking about what my apartment would look like with no doors.  I could use beads or heavy damask material for doors.  My boss pulled me aside later and asked if I was okay.  The job had been great, sales were up and my department was top of the line, so I was a little impatient that he pulled me aside.

“Listen, you’ve lost weight and you are here early and you leave late.  I know things have been tough but I want you to take a few days off.”  The boss walked away before I could protest.  I wanted to shout after him to come on over and use my toilet but I didn’t.

I can survive my wife leaving and becoming instantaneously pregnant with a younger guy named Jeffery instead of Jeff (who goes to church) but it’s the doorknobs that will unhinge me.  Is there a pun in that?

The week off at the cabin was a good idea, but I decided not to tell my boss.  The old place is on the Wisconsin coastline, due north of Chicago and a place of refuge.  I thought I’d miss my wife but oddly enough I missed the dog.  Ralf and I would walk the coast while my wife and the cat would read by the fire.  For the first few days I looked at any door knob before I turn it or pull it but by Wednesday morning I forgot all about doorknobs and thought about grilling steaks, putting together quiches with sweet potato crusts and mixing egg custards.  Salads didn’t cross my mind, and I finished The Count of Monte Cristo.

I returned mid-afternoon on Saturday thanking my boss mentally for the good advice.  The apartment seemed small and cramped so I opened a few windows and thought about maybe buying plants to help freshen the air.  I stood in the middle of the living room and said, “I like it here, it’s close to work and I don’t have to park on the street.  This will work.”

For the first time, the doorknob on the closet rattled.  It rattled violently.  I stood and looked at it for a moment.  It rattled again and then settled down into a tapping and then stopped.  I strode with determination toward the closet door and swung it open wide.

I stayed in a hotel that night and had movers take my stuff to a cool loft apartment in an old Victorian.  It’s a little further to work if I drive but I don’t mind the walk to the L even on cold days; it clears my mind.  I went to Mass and I talk to the priest every Saturday now, he’s a good guy.

The good news was that I could keep my deposit, and they reimbursed me for all the new doorknobs.  They put the old ones back.  The handyman figures she showed herself because of the new door handles.  He told me she was usually quiet with women tenants and she hadn’t shown herself in several decades.  No one knows why she hung herself in the closet.

“One lady told me she thinks she did if for love.”   Leela was a former neighbor.  “The manager and owner think everyone’s crazy but hey, they gave you your deposit back.”

The handyman was a nice guy but I wish he would have told me she had hanged herself in there, I’m sure I would have known we wouldn’t have been compatible, women just don’t get me.

Posted on by Lydia Ink

The Driftwood Gatherer

Part of the Ghost Stories of The Great Lakes Series

The art of silence?  Do not hide, for when you are among siblings, out of sight does not mean out of mind, especially when an order is easily delegated.  Prepare to be busy, not look busy. This is essential to survival.  Plan your day, but do not hope for the best.   I had several chores, the major one being the gathering of driftwood–no matter what the weather–I became the driftwood gatherer, and I planned my days around the search for driftwood.
The weather made me, I’m sure; great gusts of wind, cutting sleet, rain in deluges, and heat that baked the sand to an almost dead white kept me in one piece.  Never once did I ever hear an anxious voice from the house as I drug the driftwood from the shore to the door. 

This was my job. The others had theirs.

No one wanted driftwood gathering.

Annie, bless her heart, wasn’t up too much.  She was always sickly and kept close to Mother.  We harried mother and busied her.  She spent most of her life it seemed scolding my brothers and clucking over Annie, who stood still to have her tears wiped away in a rough but tender way.

I hated school but loved to read–as most readers discover.  School distracts.

They shunned me for the books I read, but I read them anyway.  I was the driftwood gatherer, I could face the disdain of any long nosed librarian.  When we went once a week to the library (my classmates in purgatory), I felt she only pretended to put on her worst face for me. 

As driftwood gatherer I felt it incumbent upon me to be observant.  There were several old Bibles in the library–thus and so Bible donated by the family Captain Daniel McGuire, a Catholic and thus and so Bible, a Protestant, donated in the memory of Captain Joseph Fenton.  When the Librarian had her back to me I touched their leather bindings and sometimes gilded edges and wondered where the families of these old captains were now.

Selecting books by George Elliot, Jane Austen, or any of the Bronte sisters and ignoring the looks of disdain from the Librarian, I went back to the line of Bibles awaiting my class mates. A donated Bible meant shipwreck. It also meant leaving the big lakes that took down their loved ones and frankly being sickened by the whole idea of setting sail. They left the Bibles in memory of someone who wouldn’t see dry land until God’s kingdom came to this leaking earth.   I felt that I was connecting to the driftwood I found along our shores by touching those Bibles.


I was young when I was first sent out to gather driftwood.  The shoreline to Huron was close to our house, and it was cold in the morning, any time of year. The mist was often low to the ground.

One October morning lost for some time, trying to find my way back with driftwood, I despaired of seeing my house and mother again.  The driftwood was water logged and worn smooth by the roughness of the fresh water waves.  So many don’t understand that fresh water has no plashy, saltwater softness to it–ever.  The ships wooden and even the new long boats take a beating within the sharp and hardened waves of Huron, Superior, Michigan, Erie, and Ontario.

My father found me first.

“Well, at last I find my daughter hard at her chore.  What has become of you?”

“Huron was in every direction,” I sniffed a little hardened in attitude because of the heaviness of my load and the ache in my shoulders.  “Even on shore Huron mists up and hides shelter.”

“Nah, not true.  Huron is only along the east here.  She sent the mist to confuse you.  She didn’t want you to leave.  There is no harm in her.”

“Why doesn’t she want me to leave?” I felt little regard for her at the moment, and I felt myself struggling not to pee.

“Well, Huron loves all lovely young maidens.”

I looked up in hope at my father.  His hair was gray and his eyes a sharp sky blue.  He seemed tall but not so tall among other men at church.  Until that moment, I was not sure father noticed me — ever.  I could feel a thin mucus crust along the edge of my nose and my eyes felt swollen and my shoulders ached with pulling the driftwood beside me, in what seemed to be all day.

“Now let’s see what you have here.”  My father pulled up the driftwood I had gathered; gray and black, heavy and long.  “Yes, yes, I knew you had it in you.  This is from my ship, I’m sure.  Don’t you see pretty girl, Huron loves you and wants to keep you near, and has given you a piece of what I worked so long and hard for.”

“I think I should find Mother.”  I told him.  His fine blue eyes stared long and hard at the driftwood I had drug along behind me; he said nothing.  So I started off again, away from Huron’s shore, my shoulder’s aching and my legs dragging deep within the sand.  When I looked up again, the house was in view and I fought the urge to weep openly; a sure sign of weakness.

“Where have you been, you dolt, looking at rocks again?” asked my Mother.

“No,” I said, “looking for driftwood like you said.”

“I’ve told you not to be so long — what would your father say if he could see you?”

I thought of the Bibles in the Library and how ours remained on the shelf at home; mother wouldn’t leave him, you see.  I shrugged and went into the warm kitchen.

Nearly every day, I look for driftwood and wonder which sailors clung to the edges and then let slip away and which Bibles are donated, which remain.

Posted on by Lydia Ink

We Watch The People Go By

Frankly, shit was falling from the sky and I was tired. If you’ve never been in Chicago late January, you have no idea what I’m talking about. And that’s fine, too. Whatever.

I bet I’ve walked past that old church 10,000 times. I walk because the buses are full of weary, sick people and most of those have miserable sick kids.

On shit days in January my umbrella is up and covered with rain, snow, ice or whatever the mayor is throwing out of his or her window at the time and telling us to like it. Chicago. I love the place, but in January it’s a chore.

Where was I? Yeah, shit and church. So the wind off the lake was mean and high, and my umbrella was turning into a weapon. For no reason I walked up the worn stone steps of the old worn porch in front of the old worn church and watched the people bustle by.

I remember feeling at the time that my life was pointless. Walk to work, walk home to the cat. Five, sometimes six days a week with just enough to pay the rent, the vet bills and dinner out alone once a week. No cable, public WIFI when I could get it and books, lots and lots of books.

“Would you like to come in?”

I bet I jumped a foot because I remember coming back down on my feet and wanting to pee. The voice was low and right next to my ear. I turned, expecting to find some priest or deacon and… nothing.

I pinched the bridge of my nose and dropped my soggy umbrella on the steps. I watched the shabby black thing tumble down the steps and wondered if some good samaritan would notice it lying there on the soggy, wet sidewalk. There I stood, looking at my umbrella. There it lay, looking as forlorn as a wet cat.

I sighed, took a step down because that old umbrella was a particular favorite of mine, but I stopped when it rose out of the wet and advanced up the stair as if held by an invisible hand. I reached out and grabbed it with a fleeting idea that I had to stop its progress. I scrambled back up the steps. Why I didn’t grab it and run for home, I don’t know.

Silence. Complete silence. Just the shuffle of feet on the wet, cold sidewalk and the sound of traffic on the street. The old stone porch in front of the old stone church was silent.

“So do you think you can make it stop sleeting until I get home?” It was a smart ass question, but I was worried about my state of mind.

“No, but you’re welcome to come inside.”

I was done. I hopped down the steps and joined the moving crowed. I didn’t stop; I didn’t raise my umbrella, and I was soaked when I got home. Hot tea, a hot bath, and a deal of pacing filled my evening.

“Father, I believe your church is haunted.”

“By what?”

“A ghost! I had an… experience on the front porch. A voice and something picked up my umbrella.”

“What did the voice say.”

“That I was welcome to come in.”

“And you are.”

“But, there was no one there. No one! I’m not crazy.”

“So there is a ghost. Maybe a lost soul in purgatory. Why don’t you stay and pray for that soul?”

“You believe me.”

“I believe in transubstantiation, walking on water, big boats and extensive floods and yes I believe you. What you tell me is common place if people would take the time to stop for a little while and reflect.”

So I stop. It’s never happened again and shit still falls from the sky and another January has come and gone but I do feel at home on those stone steps and we, whoever we are, stand and watch the people go by.

Posted on by Lydia Ink

The Scariest Time of Day

The scariest time of day is just after lunch and on the playground.  It’s better if the clouds are low but when the sun is out, yes that’s the scariest time of day with only a few adult eyes roving the playground who don’t play.  No, they don’t really play.

I know a boy who walks through insults.  No one will play with him, so he plays by himself and doesn’t seem to notice the noise of taunting and teasing.   I watch for him near the swing set when his mother drops him off in the morning.  His mother always has worry marks on her forehead, but the boy kisses her goodbye, anyway.

We met at the beginning of the school year.  He didn’t run about the playground trying to fit into games.  He looked around, his bright blue eyes scanning all the children, laughing, fighting, crying or hiding; surviving.  The sun was high, the entire school exposed and running like ants outside the tunnels of their slave mill.

Turning back to my quiet place, he was there, right next to me, his big blue eyes staring.
“Hello,” he said.  I said nothing.

He told me his name, but I won’t tell you.  He’s my friend now; none wanted him, so I keep him safe, at least on the playground.

“Why are you always at this swing set?” he asked. “There are lots of places to play.”  He reached out his hand; I shied away.  It was broad daylight; I needed to stay in the shadows, so he sat down and played in the grass next to me.

Once a playground assistant came to him and asked what he was doing.  “Looking for a four-leaf clover for the girl who won’t tell me her name.”

“What girl?”

“The girl who can’t come out into the sun because she’s afraid.”

The playground assistant peered into the shadows where I stood and narrowed her eyes at me.  I became suddenly angry at the intrusion.  Adults always come too late and always pretending. The playground assistant shied away.

“You shouldn’t do that,” he said to me.  “People don’t understand.”

“What does that mean, ‘people don’t understand,’?” I asked.

My friend shrugged. “I don’t know, it’s what my mother says when I’m sad that nobody likes me.”

“I never told my mother nobody liked me,” I said

“Where is your mother now?” he asked.

“Sad.” I said.

My little friend didn’t sympathize.  He gave a little shudder, looked about the loud, clamorous playground.  The worried-looking playground assistant always glancing our way.
“Would you like to come home with me?  You can stay in my room, out of the sun, and play with the toys I have in the closet,” he said.

“Who would take care of you on the playground if I’m in your room?” I asked.

“Does it need looking after?  The playground?”  he asked.

“Sure,” I said.  “Every playground needs looking after, where else would adults go to pretend everything is okay?”

Posted on by Lydia Ink

I Use the Bar Stool Dad Used

Some lives are flattened by the deception that the future is at least foreseeable. The eye only sees ahead to the horizon and not to the treacherous and bone splitting pits disguised as not there.  Those with flat lives makes a hell for those who look to see where to place their next step. 

There is upon the earth a place of fresh water, Lake Superior.  The land around this fresh water slopes and curves to hide to remind us that attention to the few feet in front of us is paramount to longevity.   It’s not the glory of God, it’s a lesson in gratitude for those of us with a will to live.  We suffer the carnage of those who continually look ahead until the lake and the land consume the self-enlightened and fortune tellers.  

Aside from that, there is not much else to do around here but go to church and the bar, (not bars–there is only one bar where I live). My dad went to the same bar for years and he died getting off the bar stool on Saturday night right around closing.  I make a point of sitting on the same bar stool when I go for my sip of sherry.  Joe, the bartender said he died in the parking lot, but Mike, the other bartender said he died right there in the middle of the floor, after sliding off his bar stool, sorta kickin’ and turnin’ purple. I figured Dad would die pissed off.  I sit on the same bar stool and order sherry. First time I ordered sherry, Joe smiled.

“Not the hard stuff like your old man, huh?”

“No.”

“What you doin’ here, anyway?” Joe asked.

I shrugged. Dad left me everything–everything by accident. The acres of land that his Dad bequeathed him only because his Dad did the same; all came to me. Dad left me everything and the sound of Superior singing and the wolf pack that howls late at night. I think Dad figured he’d live a long, flat life, seeing everything before it came to him.  And to be spiteful. But he didn’t and all that money he was socking away, working for the state of Michigan, maintaining roads in the Upper Peninsula came to me.  And all the life insurance money that Mom thought she’d live to see, well that came to me too. I’m very careful with the money, nothing too opulent for me. That’s what Mom would say, “Nothing too opulent for me.”

Mom liked to read the novels by the Bronte sisters.  

I remember my Mom younger than the day she died; younger with the sun shining on her brown hair, curly and soft against her neck. I see her in her best dress, pale yellow with a V-neck, simple and straight. She would sit in the old wooden chair next to my Dad, he asleep in a heap and she with a book in her lap, looking toward Superior. She might have heard Superior in the daylight, I never could. I imagine her getting up with her dress swaying about her thin form and walking toward the big lake and allowing it to wrap it’s big waves all around her.  

Superior always loved her with a soft acceptance contrary to its nature.  Superior loves me too with all the determination that sparing me any sort of rod would spoil my outcome.

When Lake Superior and my Mother met there was longing on her face and a longing in the song I heard Superior sing, soft and abject at her feet. Perhaps that’s why she stayed in her seat and only listened to Superior’s calling song.  Soon enough, they both seemed to say.  

I think of her now walking the slopes and curves of the land, the morning mist parting for her as the intruding morning sun pushes the night away.  Yes, my Mother drifting quickly toward Superior’s shore to spend the heat of the day beneath the glacier cold waves. She didn’t stay for my sake.

Mom and I would dream in the heat of the day, under the weight of daily chores about the little house we would have someday.  In other words when Dad died. We discussed the floor to ceiling bookcases, and the little dormers in our bedrooms.  Plenty of windows to watch the snow thicken upon the ground in winter and the quiet to listen to the ice boom at night. We dreamed of smaller spaces and larger ways to live around corners and window casings painted glossy white against dark blue walls.

That was a bad day, me standing on the outside of her grave with Dad breathing heavy and stone cold sober beside me. That was a terrible day.

Two years later he was gone. Two years.

I thought perhaps that would be the case; him dying because when Mom went he stayed longer at the bar and they reprimanded him at the job for being late. The union protected him; I heard others talking. The union men, they would talk in the bar that Joe and Mike, the bartenders and owners of the one bar in town. The only bar in a twenty-mile radius. It had a pool table shipped in from down below and it had mirrors behind the bar so people could watch people drink and play pool and dance slow and clumsy. 

These men, these union men, seemed to understand my father’s suffering. The men, who with two days’ beard on them, would throw back a quick one, nod their sage heads and commiserate. Losin’ his wife that way–and his daughter not worth much. The only thing that kid could do was drive down and make sure he got home from the bar. But I didn’t care what they said or thought. It worried me he wouldn’t die with benefits, but he died in time.

After he died, I took over his bar stool; I sip sherry and talk to Joe, sometimes Mike too. I walk across the land to the shore of Superior.  Superior was hers during the day. It is ours at night. 

Nobody else talks to me, they all pretend I’m not there. Some women would talk to me at first, they were a little older and wore too much makeup and were too thin, but they would talk to me. Then they grew tired of me and asked men to dance. I disappeared to them in time.

I sip sherry on the same bar stool my dad fell off of while Joe tries to talk some sense into me; that I shouldn’t hang out in the bar while so much of life was goin’ on.

Joe has always been nice to me but never refused a whiskey and soda ordered up by my Dad. Pondering that fact I study Joe’s face; the skin creases like small fans from the corners of his pale blue eyes, the deep lines across his forehead pucker while he’s lecturing me.  I feel him grow uncomfortable under my gaze, so he talks more and faster.  Sometimes he slams down my sherry in front of me, takes my money and stays at the opposite end of the bar, while Mike sends me a sympathetic smile once in a while.

Joe asked me if I have any plans to travel or maybe go away to school. He tells me about his time in the army and his trip to Vietnam. He asks how the construction of my new home is going–the home my Mother and I planned together for so many years. Joe tells me how lucky I am to have so much land and such a nice little brick house to live in, that Dad had set me up. Too bad my Mom died sort of young. I nod and sip my sherry.

Joe asked me one day, “why don’t you go home and get up in the morning and go to church, find some nice young man there and settle down?”

“Mom told me not to look for men in church,” I said, sipping my sherry and maneuvering for a comfortable position.  A comfortable position on my Dad’s bar stool is still something I’m trying to find.

I could tell Joe was about to laugh–and a part of me was sorry he didn’t. Perhaps at the sound of his laughter, I might have fit in. If the regular crowd heard the bartender and I sharing a joke, maybe I wouldn’t be treated like an unwanted guest or like I was that icy shiver in everyone’s spine. But instead of laughing he paused and looked at me and his big blue eyes sorta got bigger and he said, “What?”

“Mom said that nice men at church have a funny notion about women and that I shouldn’t go there to look for men–I should go just to worship God.”

“So, you go to church?”

“Sure.”

“And what do those men at church say about you coming to a bar?”

“They never ask how I spend my time.”

“What will you do when they ask?”

I shrugged and look away from Joe because no one will ask me. He didn’t understand. Some people at church, they are very nice and call me and tell me if I need anything, I should let them know.  People make me nervous when they are people and not a congregation singing or taking communion. They seem to me to treat God like a police officer. I don’t think they are sick, but deep down lonely.  Church people are like people in the bar; they talk to each other and not to God.  Neither notices how the sun in the morning shines to expose the undulating land, and the sun in the evening hides those things living on the land.

I feel sorry for them because Jesus made things so hard for us and simple too. I like to think of Jesus talking to women; talking to His Mom and to the lady at the well and Jesus just staring at the prostitute at His feet. I think women made Jesus think of Superior singing; sort of sad and wistful and sorry that things weren’t different or the way they should be.

“What are you thinking about?” Joe asked one night, a quiet, slow night.

“Jesus.”

“In a bar?”

I smiled at Joe. The men at the bar really do not differ from men in the church. That was something I would have to tell Mom when I saw her again. There was Joe, all gray and tired looking. He fought in the jungles and lived in Detroit for a while, and he smoked pot when a kid. Did he think of God at all? Sure, he did. He thought of God keeping score but not as someone to talk to.

“I was thinking about when Jesus told the crowds of men they were all guilty of adultery when they thought of committing adultery.”

“He said that?”

“Yeah.”

“Tough guy.”

“He’s God.”

“Tough God.”

“He’s okay though–God I mean because He sacrificed His own Son to save our souls, so we think right.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

Joe walked away; I had made him uncomfortable.  Wanting to laugh out loud but knowing people wanted to burn me at the stake already, I sipped my sherry.  There I was with all of my dead Dad’s money, staying in the middle of nowhere; dirt roads, a tiny bar (not bars mind you–we have only one, one gas station and one paved road that the state of Michigan maintains) and thinking about Jesus in a bar and avoiding men at church and listening to Superior sing; the crowd was becoming annoyed.

Imagine God’s own Son slapping His open palm up against His forehead and saying, “Are you kidding me? I made you. Talk to Me, discuss your desires with Me. I know you did your neighbor’s wife in your head while on top of your own wife.” Men around Jesus looking about sheepishly and feeling uncomfortable mumbled and murmured and then Jesus moving in with a zinger–“of course, your own wife was not mentally there because you’re all boring lovers. Yes, she talks to Me, I listen.” Then they’d drag Him off and nail Him to a cross because they don’t want to listen.

Joe’s wife left him several years ago and everyone knows why, but nobody discusses it. To me, the aloneness of everyone is normal. Men like Joe push things aside and pretend they understand other men who outlive their wives or marry women who are never satisfied; women who think the landscape is romantic.  Men like Joe or my Dad could never understand my Mother and her ability to hear Superior sing the song of knowledge that things aren’t what they ought to be.

My Dad woke me up two days before he died. He woke me up rough and smelling of something awful. He told me to make him some coffee, but I didn’t want to because after Mom would make him coffee, I would hear her crying in the bedroom. But he shook me again, so I got up and made him coffee.

He sat at the old kitchen table and watched me.  Fighting back sobs I talked to God. Praying real words, I went about putting the coffee together like a robot and felt my hands shaking with cold and weakness.  For comfort I remembered sitting with my Mom the last time. She looked all swollen, but she said she was in no real pain; she was smiling at me and talked to me. “Debbie,” she said, “Debbie men of power do not want to save anyone. Men of power want dependency,” my Mom told me. “Jesus went through life so we could stand on rocks and part the Red Sea of loneliness, so we could raise our hands and win the battle of raising our children. He died on a cross and healed us of snake bites–even though the snakes bite us over and over again and never go away. He died for us so we can live to run our race and meet God, that’s what Jesus did.”

She worried about me so I didn’t mind her talking about God. “Don’t worry about me, Mom. Dad won’t live forever.”

“You build our little house; I’ll come and visit you.”

“I’ll build it.”

“Build it strong.”

I only nodded at Mom. But when I stood there shivering in the kitchen, the very kitchen where Mom taught me of Jesus and God and I felt all the hate of a dying man grind into my back, I felt the thinnest of my entire life, paper thin and not so sure. A life full of pits and cliffs.  Placing the coffee in front of Dad but not look into his eyes I went back to my bedroom, locking the door behind me.

Never staying until the bar closes; I just sit there until I don’t want to anymore, maybe an hour or two. It’s funny because when I’m at the bar I think I just want to be in my nice quiet home where no one has lived except me and where I feel my Mom visit at night. She waits for the mist of Superior to rise up, thick and white.  We listen to the wolf pack at night and wait for Superior to sing.

He banged on my bedroom door, my Dad did, and the door shook as if the Devil himself was demanding entrance.

“Monday! That’s right, on Monday, I’m making sure you don’t get a dime missy–not a dime. You’ll finally work. The oldest work known to man–if you can get anyone stoned enough to pay for it. That’s three days away little Miss Debbie. It’s my way of making sure you won’t die a virgin–you’ll thank me later.”  My Dad shook the thin door of my room upon its hinges. “Your mother can’t protect you anymore. And her water stained shadows on the wall don’t frighten me.”

He said it in a high-pitched shout and for the first and last time; I felt a pang of pity for my Dad and an almost certain knowing he wouldn’t last three days. I wished that I could see my mother’s shadow, like he did, for I was certain it would be a comfort to me. I never did, and I had that old shack of a house torn down soon after it spent its purpose. The water-stained shadows and the echoes of my Dad’s terrified screams crumbled together.

I still pray in real words though fear is gone and I think of things Jesus would say while sipping sherry on the bar stool my Dad used, among other things in his flat life.