The Weight of Glass

by Stuart Heatherington

  “Maybe, I dropped it.” He started grinning.

  “No kidding. It’s beat to crap.” Again, I stared at the distressed blade, knowing it had been fine three days before. “What the heck were you hammering on it with—no, first tell me how you broke off the point.”

  He tossed his shoulders back. “I was throwing it at a tree.”

  “What for?” Amy asked.

  “Trying to get it to stick.”

  “It’s not that type of knife, stupid. Didn’t you realize that?”

  His hands crept up against my chest, pushing back, but not having any luck. “Not until it broke. But I wouldn’t get too upset about it though—it was a cheap knife anyway. Good ones ain’t gonna bust up like that.”

  I wrenched his neck backward, and a gasp of retched breath filled the space between us. “How the crap would you know anything? Just a second ago, you said it was for throwing at trees, stupid. Now you’re some kind of expert?” I knocked him to the ground again, jaw so tight the cords of my neck ate into the shoulders. “Why can’t you leave well enough alone, huh? Why do you always have to take things that don’t belong to you?”

  Amy grabbed my arm and pulled me back as I started to kick him. My hands were bleeding again. Dense patches of red marked Paul’s face and shirt. I didn’t give a damn. My brother sat on the ground crying, Amy at his side, fingers running across his back.

  After a minute, Paul shirked her hand away. He glared up at me, rage filling in the creases of his mouth. “I hate you, Lee. Swear to God, you’ll pay for this.” It was a whisper stretched through tightly clenched teeth.

  “Guess what?” I leveled my eyes at him. “I don’t give a shit. Go near my stuff again, I’ll beat the hell out of you. Understand me?”

  He didn’t say anything as he stumbled to his feet. Dirt streaked his face from where he had rubbed his eyes dry. Amy tried to say something to him, but he wouldn’t have it, walking past us to the car.

  Two hours later, word arrived of the accident. There had been a wreck, one that took our car off the road and left it sinking along the muddy bottom of the Walla River. Taylor Moorehouse managed to drag himself, broken leg and ribs, along with his unconscious wife, up to safety. Later, after the work crews arrived, their trails of mica and silt left glistening along the river’s edge, my mother was found floating, chest down and lifeless, a mile below the disaster.

  It was in three feet of water that Mr. Osgood recovered her body. He still wore a tie when he pulled her from the reeds. The sheriff determined the front passenger tire blew out just as she reached the bridge. Control of the car lost, the tire pulled her off the road, through the guard rail, and into the Walla River, drowning her.

  9

  Excerpt: A Life Less Wasted

  By Amy Macon

  My father was the most caring man I ever knew, but he died at too early an age for me to truly understand what a loss he was until he was gone. As a musician and a gifted composer, he conducted symphonies that reached the deepest depths of the heart and brought tears of joy to even the most unimaginative eyes. For his admirers he produced scores of beautiful melodies, making him famous. But it was the rich understanding of classical music that was imparted upon his family, along with a wealth of knowledge and a tender sense of understanding for the great masters that had not failed to inspire him so many years ago.

  In many ways our house became a conduit for his deep felt beliefs, and in the piano a treasure of sound was discovered in Bach and Beethoven. Compositions of music from the world’s most famous conductors filled our walls and floors almost as if the notes themselves were the nails that held our touching home together.

  Glowing reviews of his orchestra secured his celebrity in Atlanta and, stretched far up the eastern seaboard, earning him invitations to play for two presidents during his lifetime. However, because my father loved his family with such devotion, he would not leave us behind, and he declined their offers each time. Yet this impassioned sacrifice, this faithful act of fatherhood on his part, did not deter these elected officials from coming to hear him play. And at the close of his two most renowned concertos he came home to kiss my mother gently on the lips as was his custom, and tuck his four children into bed after hearing their prayers.

  That the rich and affluent paid to hear Father was not surprising. When on occasion he would allow Lee and me to sit in the orchestra pit, tightly wrenched into a small crevasse next to the row of cellists, we could only watch and listen in awe as the majestic hum of horsehair was set to string, the celebration of music lost in my ears. And as I gazed at my dad proudly, each instrument commanded with the intensity of his baton, I remember the tingle in my fingers and toes, that sense of something larger than life with him, the feeling that all was right in the world. Those grand stages became the clouds that carried me where my father went.

  Without a doubt I loved him with all the steadfastness a captain has for his ship. When the first stroke crippled the left side of his body and he began to founder in the waters of his own grief, I could not be dragged from his side. Yet when he sank into depression I could find nowhere to clamber, and shattered, I watched him slowly slip away at the height of his young career. Pieces of me are still lost in the sea of his passing.

  For the longest time there were so many things I missed about him. His pleasure of life and the spacious quiet that came when he breathed next to my face, camping out in the field behind our dead grandmother’s barn. There was the warm, healthy glow always accompanied by his eyes when he spoke of music. The joy he took in teaching me to play my first recital.

  In the year following the first, a second and third stroke left him completely debilitated, and his wife and two oldest children cleaving to his side in hopes of a recovery we would never see. I assisted mother during this time without fail, watching as she cared for him with her own undying love. She would sit with him for hours, late in the evening, after everyone had gone to bed. I would sneak back downstairs, lying very still at the foot of the bedroom door, where beyond my siblings and I had been conceived so many years before, and listen to her read poetry and love letters she prepared for him earlier that day.

  During those gentle hours I came to understand what losing a father was about, but also what it meant to let someone go. In her own way she said goodbye to him with her heart, by pouring herself out on to paper. Her letters lasted for hours, and she would tell of a lifetime spent loving. From intimate moments they shared, to the first time he confessed his true feelings for her. In that sweetest of moments I began to value the life we would never have again, and in this my mother taught me one of the most valuable lessons a child can learn.

  The fourth and final stroke claimed my dad on a bright Tuesday afternoon in May, and we buried him two days later. I held Lee’s hand, the oldest of my two brothers, and we cried in each others arms on the ride home, our broken hearts needing to be mended with the simple touch that we provided each other.

  My chest like a crushed bird, I found it hard to breathe throughout the entire day. I walked around with the burden of Father’s death weighing heavily on my heart. Lee realized this. That was what made him so special, and he took that burden off of me somehow and carried it upon himself while he held me in his lap, lightly stroking my face. It allowed me, if only for a few precious minutes, to forget the pain, to imagine my father sharing one last secret moment as he tapped with his baton the attention of the orchestra or one more chance to hear him whisper in my ear how he loved me more than anything in the world. Even though I knew he loved us equally, a daughter can never hear those words enough. With that, I knew what I would miss most about him. And that would never change.

  So Mother’s passing brought little in the way of expectations; I was already intimately familiar with death’s techniques and its harsh applications. Instead I turned to the process of mentally extracting the pieces of our mother’s life from my own, those splintery deposits left from her paternally blind eyes, because she was never the
same again after she lost Father. None of us were.

  A certain distance spread out of his loss that could never be closed. Like an open wound it only grew. What I found were the wicked shards of memory, as though her children, found wandering barefoot, had stumbled into the broken reflection of a woman they had given to love wholly, despite her tragedy, and to hate bitterly for her lack of sight.

  I would miss my mother in the years to come, miss her tender touch, the way she reached for her children when they hurt, but not her lack of understanding for the position she left us in or why the pain prevailed or how Lee suffered so greatly at the hands of Warren Tucker. Her death, unbeknownst to me, would change all of our lives for the worse.

  Late into the passing hours of Mother’s death, and long after holding the strands of her still moist hair in my hand, the familiar smells of the river faintly strong about her, of kissing her pale lifeless face, I crawled into my bed alone, surrounded by the restless arms of silence. Like an afflicting embrace, I was made to suffocate over and over again the currents of her death. Out of that endless night, grew the pitiful seeds of a daughter’s loss. And by the break of day, the troubled dreams that held our Mother, lingered like wind sifting through a stir of leaves.

  With swollen eyes, I fought to seek her out within the shadows of my childhood, out of the fog she existed in. I recalled her memory as one where she was everywhere, but nowhere when it mattered. Moist tears swept under my face and spread beneath my throat into a damp pillow, as the ghostly onset of morning crept upon the back of night. Through the window a thinly emerged sun melted through a stir of trees below the house. From a distance they appeared as a twisted horizon of teeth laid black with coal and sadly bright in the face of dawn. Like me, they appeared lost in the thought of death.

  At one point during the night I had gone to the bathroom and heard the faint crying of Lee beyond his door. I remember wanting to go to him. So much had changed in my brother over the years. Because what I had begun to understand, from watching him, was that broken children didn’t just break, they break over time. Whatever pieces of him were left, I wanted to put them back together.

  Having tried the handle and found it locked, I did what I had done so many times before; I gave up for the closeness of my sister’s bed and curled up in the warmth of her sleep.

  Looking back, there were many times I failed my brother; those bitter curtains, still dark chapters in my mind. And all the while, the vaguely bloated form of our mother’s body rested in the coroner’s office. She had been dead for fourteen hours.

  10

  1972 - Sleep did not come to me that morning. I shoved away from the bed and was immediately blindsided by the pain in my back. Jagged little hooks worked themselves into my outer extremities. My knees creaked the first couple of steps I took, and it felt like hot glass poured through my ribs and legs. Not surprising, when I stretched forward for the desk lamp the nerves in my spine crumpled in exhaustion. I swallowed a scream and buckled to the floor, trying to cope with a desire to stand and the inability to do so.

  For the longest time, I laid on the cold wood floor. The pain eased away as I looked around the room. I studied the haggard undershirt guarding my chest, and for a moment, in the glare of silver light cast down from my desk, I began to realize how a body could change almost daily. I was a boy nearing a man and painfully aware of the knowledge I would no longer have a mother to watch those bitter steps I would have to take to survive. On the inside I was racked with the guilt of wanting to care and the desperation of my desire not to. Part of me was learning to hate, but still not comfortable in the blackness of its surroundings. I didn’t want to remember her that way.

  Cool air drifted in with the morning as I sat up and caused a chill to spread against my legs, the sudden sensation of cold mapping the ridge of my spine like a strum of ancient fingers. The longer I sat there, the less everything made sense. Only the tears that came down my face seemed to have any real significant meaning, the way staring into the ground sometimes captured my thoughts and gave me something to believe in, a way to foster, what at times I was sure were the seeds of anger. Used with the right amount of hate, anger could grow into a lush bed of thorns. Understanding it was very easy, because it needed so little to survive. It grew strangely beautiful and, with each breath I took, longed for a different shape. It blossomed into a graceful, violent thing, which I found dangerous to have in the garden of my mind.

  Standing up in front of the dresser, my reflection appeared frightening across the back of a watery mirror. Bloodshot eyes drooped back into sockets. Thin tissue saddle-bagged my cheekbones. I looked like a boy caught in the throws of some terrible sickness.

  Beyond that, I resembled my father every day, except the fine lines that dressed his face had now been replaced by more rugged ones. What I found was disappointment. The sweet nature of his passion for life, struggled to find a place in mine. Although, for a while, like a store-bought suit, I feigned wearing his smile away from home. However, I quickly decided it was ill tailored to fit me and rather uncomfortable to pull on and take off. It looked better on the memory of my father.

  Out in the hall, a sound of footsteps could be heard, shallow forced things, trudging along the wide yellow pine that stretched across to the walls and led away to the stairs past my door. A soft knock caused me to turn away from the mirror.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s me,” Amy said softly. “I tried earlier, but your door’s locked.”

  Raw, half moons of swollen skin shaped her eyes in shades of gray. Her right hand kneaded a ball of tissues into a fist. Looking tired and older than possible, she stood in the doorway, nightgown draped to her thin ankles.

  “How are you holding up?” I asked.

  She shrugged and pressed the tissue to her eyes. I realized we both felt something completely opposite in our loss. Mine stirred a darker place. Sometime ago I lost my way with our mother and chose not to share anything with her. In some ways, it marked my closing off, of learning to keep everything inside and sheltered from the hurt that evolved around me.

  “Darla okay?”

  “I don’t think I can do this…go through missing her, Lee.” Amy’s knees seemed to unfasten as she came away from the jamb and her legs collapsed beneath her. The right words never came; I just took in the floor where she sat. There was no excuse for my indifference.

  Eventually I found my way to her side, helping her up and guiding her across the room until we sat down on the edge of my bed. The soft murmurs of her crying ceased. “Find a way,” I said. “You don’t give yourself enough credit for that. We’re going to survive this. All of us will.” On the inside I knew what a liar I’d become. At times I even believed myself.

  After a while I tried to guide her back down to her room. When I opened the door, I saw Darla asleep in Amy’s bed, wound up tight in a pool of sheets, spilled over onto the floor, like ripples of frozen red water. She slept peacefully, as though unaware our mother was dead. “She with you all night?”

  “She cried a lot. We both did. It was like losing Dad all over again.”

  I nodded my head. “At least she didn’t go through that, too.”

  Amy had had a great relationship with our dad. But while she loved everyone, I easily chose sides; I was my father’s son and no one else’s, and when he died part of me died with him. I had been a child in love with his father and left with his shadow.

  My brother’s door creaked open beside us, and out came Marcus into the hallway, his body a rail of bones struggling under his new height. He was an inch taller than I was by then. He hesitated, nose tilting down when he saw me, and ushered himself across the entrance of the bathroom. From the underside of his right eye, as he turned towards us, was an artist’s palette of colors: blue, gray, purple, a tinge of green and yellow, and the mark of my knuckles high into the crest of his cheekbone, like an arch of small islands in a sea of flesh. I watched the door move open behind him as he stepped further in, th
e slight indecision of his hand as he gripped the wood and began pushing the door shut. Right at the time it nearly closed, he smiled at me. Not an ugly smile, but a wait and see one.

  “Jesus, did you do that?” Amy whispered. “Lee, look at me.”

  Like a drill my eyes bored into his head as the door pushed slowly into its jamb, metal clicking into the striker plate with a hollow thud, that terrible knowing smile fresh in my mind.

  “What? Do I need to spell it out for you?” My teeth ground into one another. “Yeah, I gave him a beating yesterday. One that he won’t forget.”

  Amy grabbed my arm in one hand and twisted my face with the other, catching me off guard. “You can’t do that. It’s wrong.” Her eyes quivered with sadness.

  Something in me wanted to lash out. You don’t have the right to judge me. The disappointment on Amy’s face swelled up inside me with contempt. I resented her for not understanding. “Every time I have to deal with the Good Shepherd, I’m going to beat the hell out of him. And I don’t need to hear anything from you. You’ve already cast your part, now you can just play it.”