One night as Buck danced before the fire, Rebecca stole out carrying the trusty shotgun. As she crossed the field, the fire suddenly went out. She was alone beneath the moonlight. Her heart raced. Where was Buck? She listened. She turned to run back to the cabin. Then he was upon her. He threw her to the ground, knelt on her, pinned her, his horrid horse liver breath in her face. He hoisted high a great knife, freeing one of Rebecca’s hands. It was his fatal mistake. With the derringer hidden up her sleeve, Rebecca fired one cool, almost silent, round into his heart. He jumped back, as if snakebit, then rolled over on his back on the prairie grass. He lay looking up at the stars in some vast final wonderment. Smiled faintly. Then expired.
Mother chuckled a couple of times when she read the story, but overall she was not pleased.
“I said you could embellish, but did you have to make it so silly? Now I want you to write the real story.”
“Okay. Okay. I’m sorry,” I said.
So I wrote it again. I kept it straightforward. The shotgun was relegated to a minor role.
This time she said, “It seems kind of flat.”
Critics! Editors! My own mother!
I gave up; I avoided the project. The years went on and mother kept compiling our roots. Near the end she became obsessed with getting it all down.
She called one day to ask for my help. She wasn’t counting on me for too much, she said. She’d farmed out a lot of the project to my brothers and sisters. I could just do the part about her great grandmother Rebecca. I’d always had a flair for her character, she thought, a kind of affinity. I could embellish. A bit.
I brought the shotgun back into use. A few Indians and outlaws menaced the ranch, but I was more subdued about the bloodshed. Buck made a reappearance as a traveling whiskey trader with a certain glinty-eyed, leering expression. I depicted life on the range as accurately as one who does not know much about it can. With trepidation, I mailed the story off to my mother. A few days later she called me. She sounded happy. As happy as she could sound with her labored breathing. She liked it, she said. She liked it very much.
“There’s another story about our roots that I’m going to work on, Mom,” I said. “I want you to read it when I’m through.”
She paused. “How long will it take?”
But I was busy with work and with the kids and the call from my father came sooner than I’d expected. She was back in the hospital. I needn’t come home yet, he said. He didn’t think it was too bad. Then it got worse. Then it got better. We thought. There was an operation the doctors could do. They could remove a blood clot from her lungs. You don’t need to come home, my father said, it’s not so bad yet. And my mother from her hospital bed got on the phone and wheezily echoed him. “Don’t come home. You’re needed there.” Then she paused, gathered her strength. “I love you. I love all of you.”
She was too weak. She did not live through the operation.
And I was not there.
In the other story I wanted to write, I would have told of my mother marrying my father when she was seventeen. I would have told of her working at the drugstore and at her parents’ small boarding house when my father, nineteen, went off to war. I would have told of her raising six children and of the sorrow (what I could imagine of it) of losing one to an institution. I would have written of small things; of an evening while my father was still away at work, when she might look up from the pinto beans she was cooking, cast a long gaze at a darkening sky and pronounce, “It looks like a blue norther,” saying it in such a way that set it as far apart from a regular old norther as night is from day. We children marveled at the forces of wind and rain descending upon us. We huddled deliciously close. The beans, flavored by ham bone, simmered on. Mother was near; our house would not buckle.
Last year, after my mother died, my oldest son, four then, remarked, “Grandma got extinct. Like the dinosaurs.” But rather than missing her less, he seems to miss her more, or perhaps it is only the idea of Grandma he misses.
More and more, he asks me why his grandmother died and what he is really asking is: Why does anyone die? And his heart is heavy at times with a new fear—that I too will die and abandon him. And there is even a darker fear, one which he can’t articulate yet, one which he doesn’t want to articulate.
He remembers his grandmother’s struggles to breathe, and he knows something about that himself. He’s been too many times to the far edge of an asthmatic attack, been rushed to the hospital in the night, injected with epinephrine. And during the milder attacks I’ve walked him in the night, singing to him, gentling him into my shoulder, whispering to him the names of the stars, the few I know, and when I am quiet he nudges me and says, “Show me the stars again, Daddy, show me the stars,” and I make up names for the ones I don’t know. We walk on through the night, gazing in wonder at the stars, the dogs next door going berserk on the other side of our rickety cedar fence.
He usually asks his questions when we are driving in the car, just the two of us. I try not to avoid the subject, but then again I’m only too willing to hustle us off to a T-ball game or a swimming or soccer practice. I cheer him on, whacking my palms together, trying to lose myself in the resounding clap of hands.
But riding home he returns to the question, and it is worse now because it is twilight and the autumn is deepening, the days growing short. The tires hum on the road and the lights turn on in the houses, and as I drone on and on, trying to explain about life and death, the nature of time passing, he looks at me and I realize I sound, more and more, like I don’t know what I am talking about.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following publications where these stories first appeared: The Missouri Review: “A Night at the Y”; Mississippi Review: “The Hellraiser”; Kansas Quarterly: “Improvising”; Confrontation: “The Unfolding”; Crescent Review: “The Pearl Diver”; Sycamore Review: “Soft Song of the Sometimes Sane” Shankpainter: “My Life as a Judo Master”; Peregrine: “The Yellow House”; Zone 3: “The Things I Don’t Know About.”
Grateful acknowledgment is also made to John Daniel and Company, the original publisher of the collection A Night at the Y. To avoid duplication with stories that have been published in Let the Birds Drink in Peace, the following stories have been omitted from this reprinting: “The Dishwasher”; “Back in Town”; and “First Day.”
A Night at the Y Page 11