“Do you think Mother went to heaven?” Kerri asked Matt, wishing he would answer
but knowing he wouldn’t. She and her big brother were walking back from the store
on the Dixie Highway a quarter of a mile from their house. Matt had made a few dollars
doing farm work for a neighbor, so they’d bought some food to have for supper; no
telling when their dad would get home.
::
They were two years and two states away from the Western Pennsylvania countryside
where they grew up, the first year following their mother’s accident spent
away from each other with different relatives. When their dad showed up to collect
and reunite them, Kerri balked, not sure she wanted to leave the security and sobriety
of her aunt’s home in Akron. “This is the rubber capital of the world,”
he reminded her. “If the Russians bomb us, they’ll hit here first.”
Swayed by his cleverly employed caveat, reminiscent of the nuns’ dire proclamations
of a possible war with the Reds, Kerri tumbled hesitantly into the back seat of
the little blue Ford, concentrating instead on the joy of seeing her brother again.
Don’t lose your head
To gain a minute.
You need your head
Your brains are in it...
BURMA SHAVE!!!
The poetic advertisements unfolded on the signs along the highway, Kerri and Matt
delighting in each new line as if it were a surprise under the Christmas tree. They
scanned radio stations for hillbilly songs and guessed the makes and years of cars
behind them. Under her brother’s tutelage, Kerri could spot the grill of a
1950 Chevy a half-a-block away.
“I’m never gonna talk funny like these people down here,” she
vowed sternly, as they sped across the Kentucky border.
::
She loved it there—long, rolling hills and grass so green it really looked
blue like everyone said. She soon assumed the twangy speech of the region—“reckon,”
“yonder,” and “y’all” prominent in her vocabulary.
She was Southern now and feeling all grown up at ten, proudly donning an apron and
washing the dishes, making the beds, and sweeping the floors in the little house
their dad had rented on the outskirts of Louisville.
For the first month, he took them for supper to a downtown cafeteria a couple times
a week after work, Rosemary Clooney’s “C’mon A-My House”
resonating from the jukebox alongside his admonition, “You’ll have diabetes,
for Christ’s sake,” as Kerri chose potatoes cooked three ways.
He was on the wagon; proudly announcing his sobriety to his two hopeful but skeptical
children, who, growing up, had heard the vow many times from both parents and their
drunken friends. Kerri worried when, several weeks into summer, he announced an
office party that would make him late coming home. She watched for him until midnight,
then slept despite her concern.
She awoke at 3:30, because her light was on, her eyes passing the clock as she squinted
toward the door. She watched in groggy horror as her dad groped for the switch,
lost in his own house and naked, his face red from the alcohol and contorted from
the sudden light. When his fumbling hand finally found its mark and snapped her
back into darkness, she slept again until dawn, when, hoping it had been a dream,
she cracked his bedroom door and the familiar odor hit her nose like a slap. Just
as she’d feared, he had fallen from the wagon—that big wooden structure
that hauled sober people about, a vehicle that spawned her safety, made her world
predictable, and brought her peace.
He was late every night after that, but ironically, evenings comforted Kerri, despite
his absence. The vigil she and Matt kept in the darkened living room was special,
somehow prompting Matt to engage in the kid-talk of a ten- and twelve-year-old as
he would at no other time. They stopped their chatter to stare out the window at
each hopeful glow in the distance, as it increased in size and intensity and evolved
into two lights in the road—teasing lights that, up close, revealed they were
too narrow or too far apart and flanking the wrong grill. When the hesitant, weaving
Ford finally approached and rolled awkwardly into the driveway, they shared the
disappointed relief of their dad’s drunken presence.
::
Today, as they trudged homeward with what would serve as their evening meal, Kerri
was anxious for them to beat the threat of thunder and lightening in the darkening
sky.
She gazed at the clouds, rolling gray and thick. She wondered whether the already-dead—those
who’d been spared hellfire—were behind them someplace, floating about
in their celestial abodes. She longed to know whether Matt thought their mother
was among them, eager for a reason to believe she’d made it to eternal safety
despite her drunken state that night. Drunkenness, according to the nuns who’d
taught her the tenets of her faith, was a mortal sin, which rendered the soul black
and unfit for heaven unless removed by Confession.
Kerri visualized her mother’s tarnished soul a headless, limbless white mannequin,
thrashing about with other lost sinners in a sea of fire someplace in the bowels
of the earth, screaming and moaning from the pain and hopelessness. There’d
been no time for Confession; the car that hit her in front of their house had rendered
her instantly unconscious, then DOA at the same hospital where Kerri and her brother
had been born. Kerri could only hope that God might have granted one of those special
dispensations the nuns talked about in Catechism class, perhaps in exchange for
her unhappiness here on earth.
Kerri had been seven years old when she caught her mother crying in the cellar,
standing over the steaming wringer washer, as it thrashed the dirt from a load of
clothes. She had run down the stairs, the smell of bleach and blueing stinging her
nose, and hadn’t seen the tears until she reached the bottom and circled around
the washtubs.
“What’s wrong?” she gasped, upon seeing the wet, red face and
hearing the deeply inhaled sniffle as she approached. She had been struck with the
sudden urge to help with the wash, picturing herself feeding a piece of clothing
to the menacing wringer—carefully and with her mother’s gentle prompting,
of course—but no, not once she saw the distress. She froze, waited for an
explanation, and upon receiving none, ran out the side door that opened onto the
driveway and made a sharp left toward the willow tree, her favorite, the one that
flowed out over her mother’s flower garden in the front yard.
She didn’t cry. This wasn’t like when she fell and scraped her knees
for the umpteenth time, bellowing and sobbing until she’d had a hug and soothing
words and the gauze and neat crisscross bandage had been applied. Then it was all
better, transitory, forgotten. The dressings were knocked off from play, scabs formed
and fell, and knees were again smooth. That was the natural order of things—kids
cried, mommies reassured, wounds healed.
Sitting at the foot of the tree, she watched intently as a butterfly fluttered past
her face, resting for a mini-second on a nearby weed, just long enough to flap its
kaleidoscopic wings back and forth, as though to warm up before taking off again.
A bee buzzed past her ear, a stray from the row of flowers, no doubt, where Kerri
could see tiny yellow bodies bolting in and out of petals, sometimes plunging downward
to a bed of clover. She scooped up an unwary grasshopper and held it close to her
face, watching intently as the slit of a mouth opened wide and emitted a glob of
brown liquid onto her finger. She released the tiny green creature, who hopped upward
and did a nosedive a few feet away. She was relieved to concentrate on the goings-on
of nature; bug mommies went about the business of gathering food and caring for
their young—present and sober and predictable.
Sometime during their last year in Pennsylvania Kerri knew that her dad had lost
his job—sudden references to a lack of money that she’d never heard
before; they even ate chicken on a Friday once, breaking an indisputable edict of
the Church, because it was all they had in the house. Kerri chewed the thick white
meat hesitantly, imagining an angry God stoking hell’s fire with every swallow
and hoping that the scarcity of food exempted them from eternal doom.
She had seen her mother cry one other time that final summer. After playing at a
neighbor’s most of the day, she had come home expecting dinner, only to find
her mother sitting on the couch with Jean, her favorite drinking friend. It was
going to be one of those weekends Kerri dreaded, both women drunk, the house in
disarray, and even worse, the crying—first Jean bursting into tears after
expounding on her life’s difficulties, then her mother, the two alternating
sympathies and pats on each others’ backs, while Kerri sat staring with a
silent desperation. No use saying anything, no use crying out that she felt scared
by her mother’s unhappiness, that she wanted the house to be clean and orderly,
her mother sitting at the piano, playing a forties hit that Kerri could sing all
the words to.
When the weekend was over, her mother, sober and contrite, cleaned for hours. She
was vacuuming the upstairs when she turned off the machine and sat down on the window
box in the hallway, pulling Kerri into her arms and apologizing for the way she
had behaved. Kerri couldn’t tell if she meant she was sorry for just that
weekend or for every time she’d been drunk, which seemed constantly of late.
“I guess you think I’m not such a good mother,” the hungover woman
said pleadingly, pulling Kerri away and looking into her eyes. Kerri’s honest
answer would have confirmed that assumption, so she peered downward, averting the
expectant gaze, and said nothing...
::
Today the Kentucky sky grew black; large, scattered raindrops threatened to soak
the bags the two kids carried.
“It looks like the end of the world,” Kerri said meekly, cringing at
each yellow zigzag and the detonations that followed.
The nuns had spoken of it—the end—how it might happen anytime, and she
feared its advent with every change of the sky, every atmospheric condition. The
eerie darkness of a thunderstorm, trees pulled sideways by the wind, as though they
might topple, could be heralding its arrival. Rivers and oceans would rise, their
waves swishing jagged peaks into the air. The vivid red sunsets were pilot lights,
ready to be lit by God’s anger at man’s transgressions, exploding into
flames and dropping down to consume the earth. She almost expected to see the face
of Jesus appearing over the clouds in mammoth proportion, here to gather the remaining
population for the final judgment. Every person ever born would be judged, the nuns
had said; every deed, every thought they’d harbored, good or bad, exposed
to everyone else.
“It’s just a storm,” Matt muttered, increasing his pace slightly,
causing her to have to race to keep up.
“Wait,” she pleaded, on the verge of tears, then slowed and conceded,
allowing him to expand the distance between them. She hugged the soggy paper bag
and concentrated on supper; they were having peanut butter, and she liked to eat
the oil on the top with a spoon...
has had stories and articles published in various newspapers, journals, and magazines,
including Chicago Tribune, Woman’s World, Phoebe, and The Pedestal.
She published a book entitled, Murder Gone Cold: The Mystery of the Grimes Sisters,
in 2006. She is retired and lives in Chicago.