by Mark Richard
NO ONE IN THE HOSPITAL who knows you are your father’s son seems to like you. Not at all. When you meet your father’s doctor, the first white person you have met in the place, you ask him about your father’s condition, what his chances are, and the doctor says, Why don’t you just make your peace and hit the dusty trail?
Your father’s wife is there and his stepdaughter, and they are perfectly nice. Your stepmother says she had thrown your father out of the house just before all this happened. He had wrecked his truck, drunk, and split open his head. He had spent a night in jail, making friends there telling jokes in his orange jumpsuit.
At his bedside your father says he wants to talk himself to death. He says he’s ready to die, what do you think about that? Before you can answer, he says, Everything is could have, could have, could have.
They start giving him morphine. You ask him if his pain is specific or general, and he says, It’s endless.
He asks you if you remember taking the St. Francisville ferry across the Mississippi with your grandfather, and you have a vague recollection of bright light on shallow water and watching your father and his father eat shrimp and drink beer in a place on pilings where you could see the river between the floorboards, and then your father starts talking about you as if you were someone else. He says you turned out all right in spite of it all. He says he can’t figure out what made him trip off the end of the dock. He looks at you and asks, Are you me?
You tell him your name. You say you are his son.
Who is that grey-haired man standing in the corner of the room? he asks you, and you don’t turn to look, because you know there’s no one there. There’s a cat in the room, says your father, I can hear it.
YOU TAKE A ROOM at a motel across the street from the hospital. Often when you go over, your father is sleeping. When he’s awake, you’re careful to let him spend time alone with his wife and stepdaughter. A black nurse finds you leaning against a wall in a hallway staring at your shoes. She tells you to be sincere in your forgiveness and walks on. When you see your father again, he says he’s down to the bottom of the deck.
When your father is lucid, you ask him about all the work he did on the lake property. He says the black man who sold him the lake property feared retribution if he allowed your father to build an access road through his property. That’s why your father hired so many local black workers to help him, the black stonemason who built the beautiful wall that was the only landmark on the lake for years. When the black road contractor lost the bid to pave the road, he wanted to see the numbers of the winning bid. As your father tells you this story, he begins to search through the top sheet on his bed looking for the paperwork from forty years before. Save all these bits of paper, he tells you; he says he wants to read the history later. When you try to ease out the door, he says, Nobody likes to be left out, is what I’m trying to say, please?
YOUR FATHER IS DYING, and he is angry with his own father. He tells you a trip to his father’s grave affirmed all the hunches he’s always had, but he won’t say about what. He says he had a little room off the garage to build his radios and his father took it over to work on his clocks. Your father is getting himself agitated. His wife says for him to think of a quiet safe place, and he settles down. You ask him what place he’s thinking of, and he says it’s a stand of bamboo in the back corner of his house where he used to hide when he was ten years old.
One morning you go to the hospital, and there’s a rush of people in and out of his room. Your father says he’s going, right now, call a priest. You ask a nurse to call the local Episcopal priest as you and your stepmother try to comfort your father. A little while later a large black man in vestments comes in, and your father rallies to ask, Who the hell are you? There’s been a mix-up; the nurse called the African Methodist Episcopal church by mistake. The pastor says he can still pray for your father, and your father tells him to get out. Your father’s anger rejuvenates him, and it’s good to see. Now the pastor is angry, saying that maybe your father could at least pray for all of us, since people close to death are closer to God, and your father refuses to pray for anyone, and you can tell that if he had the strength to get out of bed and bum-rush the pastor out the door, he would.
You get ahold of Ben, and Ben comes as quickly as he can. Your father is glad to see him. With you standing there, he tells Ben that it’s going to be hard to say goodbye to you this time. He says you’re a lot like him and that’s what scares him. Your father apologizes for not dying. He says he got his times mixed up.
Your father slips deeper and deeper into the morphine. The last night you remember having a conversation with him, the movie Carousel was playing on the overhead TV with the sound off, and your father was watching it intently. He motions for you to come over, and when you do, he whispers, Who are those two men folding that shroud in the corner?
After that your father sleeps and sleeps. You go across the street to a funeral home and make arrangements with the undertaker. Your father has said he wants his ashes to be scattered offshore of the Outer Banks. The undertaker has just installed a new crematorium; your father will be the first to go through it unless someone else dies in the next day or so. The undertaker tells you about a sixteen-year-old boy who was just visiting two weeks before on a school trip, the teacher wanted to show the students what life on the streets could lead to, and at that time the sixteen-year-old boy had laughed the loudest when they toured the embalming room, and now the sixteen-year-old boy is in the back on the table himself, draining.
YOUR FATHER HAS BEEN ASLEEP for two days and two nights; you don’t know what to do. You have a feeling that they will keep upping the morphine drip until it’s over. You’ve been there two weeks. He may never wake up.
And then you get a call from Melvin. You haven’t spoken with him in months; he says he has just had you on his mind, how are things in California? You tell him you are actually in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where your father is dying. He says he’s on the interstate driving home from Greensboro and he’s coming up on the Rocky Mount exit with the blue hospital sign, and in about ten minutes he meets you in the hospital lobby. Long ago you have stopped believing in coincidences.
Melvin takes a room in your motel, and he has a quarter of a plastic bottle of bourbon, and you and he finish it and go out to dinner at a chain steak house, and you tell him all about what’s been going on and what’s been said these last two weeks. At the end of dinner Melvin says he thinks it’s time that you went home to your family, and you both later realize that that is the supernatural permission he had come to give you, though neither of you know it at the time.
In the morning Melvin goes up to the hospital room where your father sleeps and helps you rouse him. You introduce Melvin to your father, and Melvin leaves to let you say your goodbyes, and Melvin says later that your goodbye was awfully fast, that it was almost as though you were following him out the door into the hall.
You follow Melvin to his home in Virginia Beach, and you cook a big pot of gumbo for his family and leave it to simmer, and then you go down to Sandbridge Beach, way past the cottage Melvin saved you from before, you go down to the preserve where you had taken the girl from California on a break from handing out campaign literature and you had seen a red fox with a bushy red tail and had taken it as a sign that you would marry her, and you go out on the empty beach, and a couple of miles down you find the keel spine and wooden ribbing of an old shipwreck that a nor’easter has thrown up on the beach. From where you are to Hatteras south they call it the Graveyard of the Atlantic; there are over six hundred shipwrecks out there, and this is not unusual. The next storm will take the wreck back out again.
You sit, and you are very tired, and you try not to repeat the Rolltop Mantra of being disappointed in yourself. You worry a hand-hewn wooden peg from a joist on the keel of the wreck and put it in your pocket and start to walk away, then feel superstitious about taking it, so you walk back and kick the peg back into place, and th
e next night you are sleeping soundly at home in your bed with your wife and sons in California. You had said goodbye, and when he had asked, So, this is it? you had said, This is it, and when he had offered up his hand, you had taken it and shaken it and put it back in the folds of his sheet.
BEN’S GENERAL PHILOSOPHY IS people are generally doing the best they can. He tells you this as you wait for a Wanchese charter boat to take you through Oregon Inlet to the ocean buoy beyond, where you will scatter your father’s ashes off the Outer Banks per his request. You talk about your father and his famous anger. Ben says he may have inadvertently angered your father when your father appeared one afternoon at one of Ben’s little parishes with his next wife-to-be and insisted Ben marry them on the spot. Unprepared but willing, Ben cast around for a witness and was only able to enlist a handy black janitor. Ben says your father fumed and didn’t call him for years.
You tell Ben how you had adopted the Rolltop Mantra to defuse your father’s anger after the aquarium incident. The thermostat on your father’s beloved aquarium went on the fritz, and your father kept turning the heater up and up until the neon tetras and black mollies and guppies leaped out of the hot tank, landing in little gummy blobs on the dining room floor. While cleaning out the aquarium in the kitchen sink, your father saw a much smaller boy give you a thorough whupping in the backyard. Tapping on the window with his class ring, he summoned you inside. Your father shook some water off his fingers, landed a flying tiger across your face, then went back to rinsing the aquarium. You learned that whenever your father summoned you, especially to stand next to his rolltop desk, where a hundred cigarette butts smoldered in a large glass ashtray, you could re-cage the tiger simply by reciting, I am very disappointed in myself.
You rent a beach house for yourself and your wife and your two young sons, none of whom will be going on the charter boat. The morning of tending to your father, you go into the ocean alone at dawn, just when the convenience-store posters say not to, reminding people about the two fatal shark attacks that have recently happened just north and south of where you enter the water. AVOID SWIMMING ALONE AT DUSK OR DAWN IN A RISING TIDE. You make it out past the double sandbar, feeling the edge of a rip current so strong at one spot that it’s as if your legs are tangled in sheets. The waves are confused but insistent. They keep coming—their nature, their job. You swim and then try to make it in without dislocating either of your two new hips.
Your surgeon would not approve of this. Even with the two new hips you are still in the habit of looking down so as not to trip. You have always hated the way you walk. Once, walking with your wife, holding hands on a boardwalk, she said to look down and see your shadows together, and you refused. You won’t watch the reflection of yourself approaching storefront windows. A friend, possibly the boy from college with the melted face, said it wouldn’t be you without the way you walked. He said it’s as if you’re wading through something no one else can see. You stagger up onto the beach, find your towel, and wonder if that noise you heard was a sonic boom from Oceana Naval Air Station to the north or something else. With several pounds of titanium hip and femur in your body, you’re cognizant of lightning. You’re the first off the beach when thunder rumbles. When you lived in Virginia Beach that summer in the rich girl’s attic, a beautiful black-haired girl who rented boardwalk bikes and always wore a long one-piece bathing suit was split open down her chest when lightning found the zipper there.
Like Sam McGee happily sitting in the flames of the wrecked barge Alice May, you have considered cremation, as you can never be too hot, though going to hell, as you are learning, is not a compulsory thing to do, and in your mind you really don’t want some funeral director handing your sons a box of ash and molars and a shovelful of scorched titanium parts.
Your father hated the beach, had sand issues, couldn’t swim, and, like you, was actually terrified of water. At age four, you fell into a chocolate creek in East Texas. Your father stood beside you, fishing, you don’t think he pushed you; you were just the type of child who accelerated the odds of inevitable mishap. You stood beside water, therefore you fell in. Your father, unable to swim, saved your life by lying prone on the dock and reaching around frantically in the water until he found your shirttail. You were landed, drowned, and resuscitated by a doctor’s wife who later bathed you in a sink and tweaked your erection to staunch your crying.
Freud said storytelling is an unconscious desire to summon fears in order to be able to exorcise them. Your firstborn son with the twist in his spine accelerates the odds of inevitable mishap by sheer proximity to slick floors, wobbly chairs, sharpened pencils, hot stoves. You imagine him in these Outer Banks being sucked out by the notorious undertow, which has almost drowned all of your friends at some time during the last forty years. Stupidly surfing a big onshore hurricane break years ago, you got tumbled and spiked on your left shoulder, splitting the scapula in two. The doctor said it takes at least seven hundred pounds of pressure to split a scapula. Lucky it wasn’t your neck, he said. But what are you going to do? Not go back into the ocean, ever? Freud also said the most important day in a man’s life is the day his father dies. For now, you would suggest it’s the day your first son is born. You were your father’s only son, his firstborn.
On the day of the ashes, you quote Ben, loosely, the favorite collect that he used in services thirty years before—Come, Holy Spirit, come, come as a wind and cleanse, come as a fire and burn; convict, convert, consecrate our lives for our great good and Thy greater glory. Ben says he doesn’t remember where it comes from. Have you ever thought of the ministry? he asks. You tell him about being talked out of it by the visiting Anglican bishop. Ben says the bishop must have thought you were a good writer. Or else he was Satan, you say. You ask Ben if he thinks they would have let someone like you into the seminary, and he says when he went through, he girded himself for what he had been told was the toughest interview in the whole process. He says his interviewer mainly wanted to talk about airplanes. When Ben asked him shouldn’t they be talking about more serious matters, the interviewer said the main purpose of the interview was to comb for messiahs and homosexuals, and he could tell Ben was neither.
On the way out to where you’re going to attend to your father, your sister joins you, and you and Ben spot a white disk, like a Communion wafer, and the disk hovers over the south end of the beach before slipping westward. Maybe it was one of those banners pulled behind an airplane advertising reggae and fish tacos; maybe it was something else. You can’t tell, and neither can Ben, even with his Air Force eyes. The captain of the Captain Duke asks if you’ve brought a camera or flowers. You’ve brought neither. You have a tape with one of your father’s favorite songs on it—a song about Lake Charles, the place of both of your births, but the mate says the tape deck hasn’t finished chewing up the last tape they put in a while back.
Ben, in full vestment, begins when the charter boat captain, a Wanchese native and part-time preacher himself, cuts the engines after pushing his bow into the wind. The words come hard for Ben at the commending of the ashes; he knew your father as well as anyone could know him. Ben puts his hand on your shoulder to steady himself as the boat drifts a little, side to side, during the gospel. He pets your shoulder twice at the place in the service where you’re supposed to lean over the rail and pour out the last mortal remains. You wonder about the particle density of the remains, the way they seem to stream straight to the bottom, only the finer specks leaving a ribbon of beige pollen-like dust on the surface that clings to the boat’s waterline.
The rest is the ride in, your quiet sister grieving over the paucity of good memories, you reciting the Rolltop Mantra at the thought of allowing the twenty-year estrangement between you and your father.
YOU AND BEN ORDER FRESH GROUPER SANDWICHES in the South Nags Head restaurant where once you were Sven and where sometimes over the years your father went looking for news of you. He’s at rest, Ben says of your father after you are quiet at the
table for a long time.
He’s where he wanted to be, he says.
THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN is dark and cold and roamed by Pleistocene fish that science has forgotten. One night you and Steve were culling through what had emptied from the tail bag—scallops, fish, ballast stones, sand—and something jumped up and ran to the rail, and you’re glad someone else saw it. It looked like a hairless monkey with webbing between its arms and body. It hopped up on the rail and turned its head and hissed like a cat through cartilage-looking teeth. It had been a strange trip already. A submarine, spooked by the fathoms of cable strung behind your trawler dragging its dredges, had surfaced in an eruption of ocean the previous night off the starboard rail. Its brightening, pulsing amber light lit the water from below the area of a football field, signaling Everything Must Yield moments before the submarine leapt like a giant fish, roaring and snorting ballast blasts of foam, its bow wave nearly sweeping everyone off the deck. The crew had been taking little white pills that flapped shrouds in the edges of the deck lights already. The boiled-looking furless monkey hissed at everyone on the rail again before diving overboard. No one would have believed you if you had told about the monkey thing, but there was a guy on board who said he had seen worse. He couldn’t talk about it without tears welling up in his eyes. That’s the kind of thing you find at the bottom of the ocean, where your father wanted to be.
The day after your father’s ashes you take your elder son down to Wanchese. Wanchese was the bad Indian, your fifth-grade history teacher used to say, the one who turned against the colonists after they kidnapped him and the good Indian Manteo and took them to London. Returning to the New World, Sir Walter Raleigh’s men repaid Chief Wingina’s kindness of feeding the starving colonists by shooting him in the buttocks and then severing his head. Wanchese defected back to his own people. Manteo was named Lord of Roanoke. Not much has changed in Wanchese: the derelict cars, broken marine gear, old culling boxes rotting in the marsh; the fish houses, the old trailer on the canal where you and Steve lived. Your son notices how many stop signs have been knocked off their corners. Grocery store accounts are still kept in spiral-bound notebooks. You ask about the notorious captain who first hired you twenty-five years before. Someone says he doesn’t know, maybe Alaska, maybe South America, maybe sumwarz up norf.