by Sam Savage
Though I know he did in fact burn them.
It was not as if she had forgotten the notebooks on a park bench somewhere, or left them in a taxi, as someone did just recently with a Stradivarius violin, I saw on television, in which case she would have had only herself to blame.
If she had left them on a bench or in a taxi it would be possible that one day in the future somebody would find them and be devastated.
The afternoon she came home I was on the front porch. Gracie heard them first. She lifted her head from her paws, pricked her ears, and padded down the steps to the yard, where she stood listening, and then I heard the car turning in from the highway. It had rained hard in the night, and when they came to a puddle Papa gunned the engine so as not to get bogged down in the middle. The car went into a huge puddle and tipped and wallowed, and the engine roared and it climbed out, I could tell just by the sound of it. The dogs ran barking down the road to greet them and escorted them back, racing in circles around the car, nipping at the tires. Papa stopped the car in front of the house and got out. “Goddamn dogs,” he said, kicking them away.
I came down the steps. I didn’t say anything or look directly at her.
She was thinner. Never buxom, she had melted away. Her hair, which was beginning to grow out again, was standing up in spikes. She looked like a little old man.
She knelt and let the dogs come around her, wriggling and wet.
She stood up. She said, “What dog is this?”
It was jumping up against her, it was nearly as tall as Gracie. Papa pushed it away with his foot. “Why that’s Gracie’s puppy,” he said.
Edward came down and held the puppy. He didn’t look at Mama. He talked to the puppy so as not to look at her. “That’s Mama,” he said, kneeling by the dog and fluffing its ears, “That’s Mama.”
Mama looked perplexed. She said, “What time is it?”
We had television now, in the library, all of us there at night looking at it.
I remember walking on the dikes, the cattails, brown and broken, barely visible on either side, and hearing the quivering voices of ducks murmuring in the fog. I don’t know when that was. I have no feeling of my own size in this memory, standing alone on a dike, listening to the mewing and whimpering of the ducks and feeling the terribly cold dark water on either side.
I remember an impenetrable blackness coming at me from the cold dark water visible through the cattails.
I remember coming out of the cold into the warm house and sitting with the others and watching television.
The time she stood by the sideboard at suppertime and drew on a notepad that we kept by the telephone, glancing over at us from time to time, while we went on eating and pretended not to notice what she was doing. She came over and placed the drawing in the center of the table where we could all get a good look at it, but no one looked at it and no one took potatoes because the bowl of potatoes was next to the drawing. It was not her first drawing since coming back, so we knew how it would turn out: a table tilted at a crazy angle, stick figures seated at it, scarcely recognizable as human beings, the whole thing just a scribble, like something done by a talentless child.
The time my mother stood on the upper porch looking out across the yard, speaking to my father who was seated behind her but not turning to face him, as if talking to the trees. “You have destroyed my soul,” she said, her voice cold and flat with hatred, “I will never forgive you.”
Later, when only the two of us were left at Spring Hope, I sat with her on the porch glider. The cushions of the glider were covered in a plastic material. I remember my legs and back sweating and sticking to the plastic when I moved. Chameleons crept along the banisters, hunting flies. Mama hummed to herself.
When she had gone back inside, I would lie down on the glider. An oak tree rose and fell on the other side of the banister, moving up and down with short, quick jerks, different from the sweeping rise and fall of the magnolia from the hammock that had rotted away and that I would sometimes think about when I lay there sweating on the plastic of the glider, beginning to remember.
Hour after hour I heard the squeaking of the glider. The times I woke up in the night and heard it.
We fed stray dogs together. Mangy, sick, skeletal, some of them when they came, they followed us everywhere, cringing, grateful. After she died, I let them sleep in the house, but I never gave them names, knowing I wouldn’t keep them. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking “three legs,” “blacky,” “one eye,” and so on, sorting them in my mind, but I never taught those names to the dogs.
The night I was awakened by the noise of breaking glass, the dogs barking and whining, when two teenage boys stood outside in the moonlight and threw rocks at my windows.
Walking around the house with Thornton, I looked at everything, thinking I won’t see the sideboard again, I won’t see the kitchen again, and so forth, and watching for broken glass, stepping around those places. Thornton walked right over the glass, grinding it with his shoes, and I remember thinking that of us all he was the one best equipped for life.
Maria thinks she will see her parents when she gets to heaven.
Imagine.
If I envision meeting my mother now, meeting her as she was at the end, as I am now, I get a picture of a vast green field and two crazy old ladies rushing madly across it into each other’s arms.
I think my mother really was extravagant, and it was this, her artist’s soul, as she would have called it, that undid her finally.
She saw the sky reflected in the window glass and flew into it.
I have now come to a point beyond which I think there is no point going on, no further points of any significance, I mean, to get to and stand on and feel that I have arrived somewhere. I don’t know where time has gone.
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SAM SAVAGE is the best-selling author of Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, The Cry of the Sloth, Glass, and The Way of the Dog, all from Coffee House Press. A finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, Savage holds a PhD in philosophy from Yale University and resides in Madison, Wisconsin.