Carpet Cleaner's Daughter
by Summer Hammond
Second Runner-Up, Fiction Contest
On a bitter evening we get the call. Come to the farm. He’s dying.
Almost instantly, a fight breaks out. Breaks out roaring, like it’s been caged, pacing back and forth between them for days. It has.
“Don’t look at me that way, Ron!” MAM jumps to her feet, slams her chair in so hard, everything on the table rattles. I reach to steady the milk, and knock it over myself. White liquid spills across the plastic red-checkered tablecloth. I right the glass, but let the milk go. Then I sit. “You know I’m not going!”
Dad clutches the phone, face streaked with sweat and grime. Neither of us have had the chance to clean up. I know I look just as rough, after a twelve-hour day. A run-down complex, half a dozen apartments, one right after another. Hauling hoses up three flights, every step a battle, because of the ice, pull, heave, and wrestle those hoses, hands raw with cold, the despair of losing my grip, watching those hoses slide and bump all the way back down the stairs, coming to rest in a snaky pile. Dad gritting his teeth, veins popping in his arms as he pushes the cleaning wand over and over across that ancient, threadbare carpet, ground in patches of fossilized filth. Dad says, the problem is, these landlords and rental managers, they’re cheap, don’t want to fix things and don’t want to get new carpets. Don’t even want to pay him properly for giving all his might and strength to get clean what can never be truly gotten clean again.
Barely in the door, and the phone rings. And MAM’s been off her medication. Cleaning jobs are scarcer in winter. We haven’t been able to afford it.
I guess I knew this day was coming. Even though Dad hasn’t talked about it. I’ve seen the sorrow, the fear, etched in his face, shouldered the heaviness in his quiet as he drives the cleaning van back and forth over the I-80 spanning the Mississippi between Iowa and Illinois, our favorite, Johnny Cash, serenading us from the depths of the radio. Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie, where the coyotes howl and the wind blows free, where there’s not a soul that will care for me. The way he flicks the radio off. Instead of singing with me, staring hard down the highway.
The Corn King, my grandpa, fell sick in the fall. Tuberculosis, the doctor said. I hadn’t even known that was a sickness you could still get. Grandpa was a farmer all his life. In his head, that’s what he was, and who would he be without it? He kept working on, in spite of losing weight, coughing up blood, rib cage howling through his flesh. It was when his doctor got fierce, ordered Grandpa away from the tractor, away from the shovel, the rake, the hoe, all the tools that were his bones, his vertebrae, holding him upright. That’s when Grandpa gave up, went to bed.
“Mar,” Dad says now, a white-knuckled hold on that phone. “It’s my Dad.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass!” MAM whips her robe closed, ties it tight. “They’ve always hated me, and I hate them right back!”
Dad winces. “Can’t you just…”
“Can’t I just! Can’t I just!” MAM waves her arms around. “No, Ron! Duh! After all these years? I can’t just!”
She’s got a point. MAM’s never been out to the farm with us to visit. Not a single time. My eyes follow the pool of milk over the edge of the table.
“But you should.” Dad swallows hard, knows he’s pushing it. Should is MAM’s favorite word.
She draws herself up, eyes opening fantastically wide. “Oh is that right? I should, huh?” Chin up, she swivels, marches to what she calls her Fun Drawer. She flings it open, roots through. The sharp clink of bottles. I wonder. What will it be. A Xanax, or her sunflower pipe. Maybe a tiny bottle of rum, cute, like it was made for a doll. She whips out a crumpled pack of cigarettes, finds a lighter. The sharp flick. Flame, darting up like a snake’s tongue. “Tell me more, Ron.” She pushes her butt back against the drawer and leans in, sucking on the cigarette. “Go on, know it all.” Like some rebel movie star, she winks. “Just tell me why I should.”
He holds her eyes for a long moment. I hope this time he won’t do it. Throw his heart right into the tornado. But he does. He always does. “For me.” He says it, real soft.
I watch the long fall of milk to the floor.
“Ha! Ha!” With each Ha! MAM stands on tiptoe in her pink bunny slippers, jabbing her cigarette at Dad. “For you! You selfish piece of shit. I know all about you. You’ve never cared about me. Never done a damn thing for me. Just used me, is all. Like everyone else.” She raises her cigarette high, a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Lady Liberty with her torch. The scream rips out of her chest. She throws the cigarette at him. He flinches, throws a hand up. The cigarette bounces off his chest. She takes off one slipper. He ducks. It hits the wall over his head, smack in the middle of her silo painting. The painting drops down, crashes onto the counter, then smacks onto the floor.
MAM lopes down the hall in one bunny slipper, crying at the top of her lungs. The door slams. Another muffled scream, then a crash.
Dad, still gripping the phone, bows his head.
Drip drip drip goes the milk onto the linoleum.
I watch, wonder if there’s a poem in that.
When I come out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, MAM’s waiting just outside the door. She’s all dressed up. She’s wearing one of her Prom dresses. She has a collection of them. This one I haven’t seen before. It’s purple organza. It’s got puffed sleeves and sparkles across the heart-shaped bodice. “I’m going,” she says. Her blonde hair is teased high and freeze-sprayed. She grabs my elbow, steers me toward my room. “Get dressed, Ron Junior. Make it quick. I’ll meet you in the kitchen.” She marches off, purple suede heels clicking down the linoleum. A second later, I hear the metallic twist of a bottle opener. The gasp of a cork popping.
I’m named Geraldine, for some strange and terrible reason. I go by Ronnie. But Ron Junior is what she calls me when she’s pouting, when she gets even a whiff of a suspicion I’m taking Dad’s side.
Numb, I go to my room, open my closet. I stare without seeing. I’ve never watched someone die. I’ve never even been to a funeral. I don’t want to. I think of Dad. I pull out a black sweater with rhinestone beaded flowers. I’ll wear this with some jeans.
When I get to the kitchen, it’s empty.
I pull out my chair, sit. The milk’s a puddle on the floor, drying.
The silo painting’s been rescued, placed flat on the table. I pick it up. A tall brown silo with a silver top, rising up beside an old red barn that looks like it’s fallen to its knees, sighing out its last breath. The silo is proud, like a sentinel, haloed in light, something from heaven, rooted in earth. This is the kind of thing you see over and over again in Iowa. Hundred-something-year-old barns, shivering to the ground. Silos catching sunrise, sunset, starlight. Rural Iowa, my home. Crumbling, and sprouting to life. So picturesque, they’re almost holy, the cornfields you’re born deep into, swaddled by, the beginning of the world, and the end. My eyes go to the bottom right corner of the painting. MAM. Her initials, how she signs all her art. Big tall Ms with peaks, like the mountains she grew up with in Colorado, but doesn’t have here. MAM. It’s what she trained me to call her. Don’t call me Mom, call me MAM. That’s my artist name. What I was born to be.
Her art’s all over the trailer, and when she’s well, she sells it at big craft fairs, booths she sets up by herself, painting while people come and go. She’s obsessed with murals, and fairy tales. Well, you can see that, everywhere you look. On the kitchen wall, Princess Aurora in her luminescent blue dress pricks her finger on the enchanted spindle. Small rubies of blood, drip dropping. I’ve grown up crunching Corn Flakes, morning after morning, spell-bound by that blonde haired Princess, thinking she was MAM, mesmerized and terrorized by those tiny rubies of blood, checking MAM’s finger for the wound.
In the bathroom, it’s Cinderella, sprawled in the wreckage of a broken carriage, half of her decked out in a magnificent sparkling ball gown, hair pristine, the other half blighted, in rags, hair falling down, one glass slipper caught in the wheel, twisted and cracked. MAM sure spent a lot of time capturing every fracture in that slipper, so you feel the break of it in your bones while trying to pee.
On my bedroom wall, she painted the three little pigs. Each pig wears a midriff baring pastel sweater, fat pink tummies pooched out, naked beneath. They carry little nosegays, sprinkles of white, yellow, pink flowers, tucked daintily between their hooves, like bridesmaids in a wedding. The pigs’ curly tails are drawn, but never painted. Did she forget about them? Why didn’t she paint their tails? She painted a Big Bad Wolf sneaking up behind them. His long drooping snout, sharp teeth bared and dripping saliva, hairy arms up, claws out. That wolf made me gasp, then cry, waking up in the middle of the night. I begged her, please paint over the wolf, please MAM. She finally gave in. Now, when I tell that story, she protests. I never painted a wolf! God, baby, why would I do that? God, I’d never paint a wolf and scare a little kid!
So maybe I dreamed the Big Bad Wolf.
Dad walks in and I lower the silo painting, give him the once over. He’s wearing his one pair of good jeans, a flannel shirt tucked in too tight, a woven leather belt. I’m so used to seeing him in his work pants with holes in the knees, the ones that embarrass MAM. “You look nice.” Seems terrible to say. His Dad’s about to die. I don’t know what to say. Dad doesn’t like to acknowledge hard truths. So maybe what I’ve said is just about right.
He sets his hand on the bald part of his head. “Where is she?”
I look around. The house is quiet in that deep lonely way it is when she’s not there at all.
Dad and I catch eyes. He puts his hand to his chest. An absent motion, but packed. We’ve been here before, too many times. I scoot back, and stand. He heads one way, and I another.
“Marlena!” Dad calls.
“MAM!” I call. And again. And again. With everything inside me. “MAM!” A scream, a plea. Even though I know better.
Ten minutes later, Dad’s outside, walking up and down the gravel lane of our trailer park, Riverview Court. All the way up to the row of dented, shiny mailboxes on Quarry Road. All the way back to the gate that separates our trailer park from the woods, and beyond, the Wapsi, the river we can only smell, not see. Riverfishstink Court, they should call our trailer park. All the way Dad goes, calling and calling, so everyone knows. There’s Ron Marsh, searching for his wife, again.
I slump onto the couch, holding onto a pillow, ruffled and flowered. I know where she is. But she’d made me promise to never tell him where she goes. I punch the pillow. Again and again. I throw it hard as I can at the window when Dad walks past, for the fifth time. Is he dumb? I guess he thinks, hopes, maybe she’ll feel sorry for him, this time.
I drop my head in my hands. Jog my feet on the floor. I was going to come home and work on my Secret Project. Something totally unrelated to school. Something big. Something I’d never tell anyone about. Something I’d barely confided to myself. I was just doing it. Because I had to. I had to try. The deadline was in a few days, and I’d barely begun, and now this. This instead. Death and Drama.
I dig into my back pocket, wrench out my tiny notebook and pen, flip the pages. The thing is, there’s no money for college. Of course there’s not. We don’t even have enough to move out of a place that’s killing us slowly. One day, Dad took me around our trailer, flung open the cabinets, tapped on the walls, said, “There’s bad stuff in this particle board, Ronnie. You know that pickled smell you complain about? Formaldehyde. The chemical used to preserve the dead, that’s what we’re breathing in.” He said MAM was already sick enough, but he thought the formaldehyde got in her head, screwed with her circuits, and made things worse. We all had strange symptoms. Sudden nosebleeds, bad coughs, stomach aches. “These trailers are easy to make, cheap. Easy to sell to poor people who want a crumb of the American dream. A poison crumb. But the manufacturers don’t care if poor people get sick, die.” Like the rental landlords, never replacing the carpets, letting them degenerate year after year into pure toxic filth. I know Dad thinks he’s failed because he hasn’t been able to make enough yet to move us out.
I’m not all that interested in college anyway. I don’t think they’d want me, and I don’t think I’d fit. I love books. School, not so much. I can’t focus in school, can’t do the work. Last year I scored an F+ in math. Failure par excellence! I wonder if the formaldehyde’s pickled my brain cells, making me bad at learning. Slow to process, my teachers tell my parents at conferences. My teachers push to have me tested, but MAM puts up a fight. She says she doesn’t want me labeled for life, leashed to medication. Not like we’d be able to afford that pharma-studded leash anyway.
The truth is, at school, I’m doing a different kind of work. Work I don’t think most of my teachers understand, or care about. But it’s the work that matters most to me, alongside cleaning carpets with Dad. I find the page I started today, in the crummy apartment kitchen with the nasty blackened linoleum, writing down words fast on the permanently stained countertop. I read what I wrote, chewing my pen.
beauty cleaning van equipment rattling gravel roads
When I’m trying to find a poem, deep in the wilderness of my head, I make a trail of words to follow. I close my eyes, take myself out of body and time, like I do in school in the middle of another lecture on another thing that doesn’t seem to matter. Gravel roads matter. I go back to summer, Dad training me how to wind and unwind the hoses, cut out cigarette burns, lift up Kool-Aid stains. Getting pizza from Casey’s for lunch, the best treat. The long rides home together on rural roads, sky soaked in sunset. I return to things I didn’t know then were magic.
Tires clouds of dust windows elbows out Johnny Cash rows of corn
Tap tap tap. Dad’s by the window, waving for me to come out, his shoulders hunched. I grab my coat and zip it up so hard, I almost break it. So what. It’s half-broken anyway. I’m always breaking zippers. Must be where you let out your anger, MAM says with a laugh. Dammit though. Why, just this once, can’t she cooperate? Cooperate. Another one of her favorite words.
I slide into the backseat of our little blue Honda. Leave the passenger seat empty. I know the drill. Even when she’s MIA, that’s still her seat. I yank the seatbelt across me. It has old gum pieces stuck on it, hardened, from when I was little. We pull out, jostling over the driveway rutted with potholes.
From where she is, she can watch us leave. She’ll hear our gruffling car, lift her head, and watch us, creeping down the road, giving her every last inch of a chance. I flick my eyes to Dad’s face in the rearview mirror. Brows pulled together. Eyes moving left to right, still searching.
I hate her.
A zap of lightning races through me. The first time, in seventeen years.
Hand in my lap, I let my middle finger rise slowly. Hold it there, firm. Bumping down the lane, hoping, just hoping, she has her binoculars, and sees. I wave my fuck you finger a little.
This one’s for you, MAM.
At the end of the lane, by the long row of mailboxes, stands a big old elm, a gentle giant. As we near, Dad flicks the blinker, signaling a right turn onto Quarry Road. Lo and behold, she steps out from behind the Elm. Dad and I both sit up, pulled forward as if by invisible strings. MAM, appearing like a queen, rockstar regal in Dad’s old black leather coat, black tam cocked sideways, a pair of black snow boots. We draw up, and the bitter cold wind whips her frothy purple dress to and fro round her knees. Her blonde hair lifts high. Her lips, a bright red poppy in an endless field of gray sky. She sucks on a cigarette. Dad presses on the brake. She glances at him, haughty, then takes one last puff, throwing her head back, shooting smoke to the sky. Some Midwest Madonna, my mother.
The sorrow on Dad’s face eases as she climbs in beside him.
She crosses her arms, doesn’t look at him, or me, the whole way there.
I’ve never been to the farmhouse at night. The barn looks like the ghost of a barn. A dark shadowy thing, hunkering. The old two-story house, white by day, is silvered by the cold stone of the moon. The corn fields lay beyond, mown down into stumps, silenced. This spring, who will it be, out there planting? For the first time in over fifty years, someone else.
My Grandpa was a corn farmer. These were his fields.
The poem seeps in, along with the chill. The way you become, one day, was. The way the things you did, the things you loved, the things you lived for, worked your whole life for, roll away into nothing.
We get out of the car, and the cold is stunning. Dad takes MAM’s hand, and they walk ahead of me. God, it’s cold, it’s cold, it’s knife-in-your-guts cold. Yet on the porch, MAM breaks free from Dad. “Ron, I’ll be there in a minute.”
Dad looks at her, fear rising.
She takes his arm. “I promise.”
Not that that means much.
But we have a long history of believing her.
He goes inside, the old screen door whining open, closing with a slap. I try to follow but she pulls me back. “Stay here with me, Ronnie John Jonnie.” One of the things she calls me when she’s being cute and wants her way. It works. We stand together on the porch and the cold grips my spine. How can she stand it, her legs in hose in that purple dress? Who knows. Maybe she’s got whiskey in her. Knowing where she was hiding out, I bet she does.
“Ronnie, I need courage. Say something.”
I open my mouth. I have no idea what MAM needs. Ever. Well, her medication, for starters. Something we can afford sporadically, in really good months when a heck of a lot of people move out, or we get some nice residentials, people willing to pay.
MAM shakes my arm. “Come on, Ronnie. Say something beautiful. Something about the stars.” She points up, as if I don’t know where they are.
“You’ll have to put a quarter in,” I say.
She gives me a look. “Smart mouth.” But she likes it when I talk back. She paces and the old porch creak-creaks. She stomps her boots. Then presses her palm to her forehead. “Goddamn. I don’t want to go in there. Fuck! I hate that old woman. You have no idea.” Hand shaking, she brings her fingers to her mouth, takes a puff. When she’s somewhere she can’t smoke, and she’s losing it, she smokes her phantom cigarette. “Just so you know,” she says, expertly holding her phantom cigarette to the side, blowing the smoke of her own breath into the frozen air. “I showed up for you.”
“Me?”
“You’ve never watched someone die,” MAM says. She takes another puff. Holds it in her lungs, the phantom smoke. Then, with an exhale. “How are you feeling?”
“I don’t want to see him.”
“You’re just gonna have to be brave. You know? The two of us. We’re just gonna have to go in there, and grab our big old, brass-plated bull balls.” She mimics this, pushing her hand between her legs, sticking out her tongue, going cross-eyed. I laugh. She laughs, too. Moments like this is why – it’s hard to hate her for good. I get it, I do, why Dad’s so captivated, why he puts up with the rages, the tantrums, the running away. She’s larger than life. Day to day, never knowing what you’re going to get, is a head rush. Chaos. Maybe her chaos interrupts his despair.
MAM lets her hand drop, gets serious. “I should’ve done with you, what my mother did with me and my siblings.”
I straighten, instantly alert. MAM’s past, when she lets me in, is like entering some magic wardrobe, finding Narnia. Both her parents are dead now. One brother, dead, killed in Vietnam. A sister, living in California. I’ve never met her. “What’d she do?”
“She dressed us up and made us go to strangers’ funerals.”
My mouth falls open. “No, she did not.”
She raises her hand in the air. “God’s honest truth. Her mother made her do the same. Gets you used to seeing death, looking at other people’s kin before you have to look at your own. Should be part of every school curriculum, come to think of it.”
“Funerals 101?” I’m already imagining the field trips.
She nods. “You’ve got it.” Then sets her hand on her hip. “Ready?”
“One sec.” I lift my own fingers to my mouth and suck in a smoke. MAM smacks my hand. “Don’t you start, young lady! It’s a bad habit.”
“MAM, it’s invisible.”
“Invisible doesn’t make it not real.”
It must be extraordinary to live in her head.
MAM hooks her arm through mine. Our teeth chatter. She says, “What’s that thing you do, you know, when something bad is happening, and you’re freaked out.” She rubs her forehead with her knuckle. “That game you play, you know, with poems…”
I swallow hard. I’m surprised she remembers. I only told her about that once. When I was twelve. She’d left us again, only for a long, long time. The longest time. Day after day I checked, and she didn’t show up in any of her usual hiding spots. I’d gotten so spooked. Every day as I went around searching, my mind would go nuts. I’d think she was never coming back. My nightmare had finally happened. Out there wandering around those country backroads in the pitch black dark, in her little lace and silk nightgown with a coat slung over. She’d been picked up by a crazy. Raped and murdered. Her body tossed in some ditch. I could almost see it, her blue eyes wide open with fear, staring through the bright wildflowers she wasn’t alive to see. I’d have to sit, breathe, soothe myself. That’s when I started looking for poems. Little beautiful things along the way, to carry me. It was amazing, once I started looking, how many poems I found. To keep panic at bay, I counted them as I walked. The pink fungus that looked like mollusks. The crow, perched like an ornament on the tippy top of the pine, ha-ha-ing like he knew the joke. The Wapsi swirling around my ankles, splashing my calves, a big old river flirt. I’d write down as many as I could. I filled up notebook after notebook with the poems I found, in my hunt for her.
Only to find her one day, curled up in the backyard behind the broken down old dog house, fast asleep. Her hair dirty, riddled with rat’s nests. It was the first and only time I’d yelled at her, cried, told her how she had the power to break our hearts and God, how I wished, I wished, I wished she’d stop doing that.
Now, meeting her gaze, with that memory on my heart, I find it hard to speak. “I look for poems,” I say, soft. “I count them.”
“Yeah, that,” she says, unlatching the screen door. “Take a deep breath, hon. And do that.”
It’s over. He’s over. The Corn King is gone. No one cried. I’m not surprised. MAM calls Dad’s family heartless. She says I got all my feelings from her side. But even I don’t feel what I’m supposed to feel. For me, it was the practice MAM suggested, like watching a stranger die. When we left the room, after, MAM whispered in my ear, “Brrr. Colder in here than outside.”
Grandma Marsh and her boys, my Dad and three brothers, pull out chairs and sit at the dining room table.
The rest of us find other places.
Aunt Mary brings an afghan from Grandma’s sewing room. Aunt Mary, the only one besides the boys who can go anywhere in the farm house. MAM says, that’s because Aunt Mary with her barn owl glasses graduated college, and that’s what Grandma respects. Grandma hates women, treats her daughters-in-law worse than pig shit, but not Mary, because Mary’s got a degree. MAM had to stay with “Old Lady Marsh” while Dad was in the service training for Nam. Grandma put her on a diet, snatched food right out of her hands and threw it away. Said if her son married trash, and was coming back home to trash, least she could do was stay skinny, and be pretty trash. Grandma made soup one night, ladled a big bowl for MAM, and what with the diet, MAM was ravenous. Old Lady Marsh didn’t tell MAM what was in the soup until she was nearly through, slurping the rest down. MAM spent the rest of the night in the bathroom, and she said, you’ve never truly puked until you’ve puked cow brain soup.
Now Aunt Mary tucks the afghan around Grandma’s shoulders, making motherly noises that sound forced, fake. MAM catches my eyes, wrinkles her nose, checks her phantom wrist watch.
The Uncles talk. They share their favorite Corn King memory. Uncle Luke starts in about a sledding incident, and they all laugh like they know what’s coming. My eyes stay with Dad. He’s just listening. Elbows propped on the table, chin on folded hands. Sometimes MAM calls Dad a cold fish. I don’t know why I keep coming back to a cold fish. He doesn’t love me, he’s a cold fish. She spits it in his face. Cold fish! Punches his chest. Cold fish!
It surprises me now to realize, I believe her. I’m always searching for the poem in him, and coming up short. Whenever I’ve tried to talk with him about a hard thing, such as MAM’s rages, her leaving, he’s quick to evade, to duck, like by showing emotion I’ve thrown a left hook. He’ll point at something, a weird bug, or an unusual stain in the carpet he’s suddenly keen to identify, diverting the whole conversation. The other day, in the middle of what felt like a futile job, trying to get out greasy tire tracks in a living room where the tenant had kept his motorcycle, we’d taken our lunch break in the van. I’d asked him if he wanted to hear a poem. “A poem? You know I don’t get that stuff, Ronnie.” He’d shaken his head, already giving up.
“Just listen.” I opened to Chicago by Carl Sandburg. I was in love, could not stop reading this poem. It was a love letter to grit and machines, to sweat and shoveling, that made me think, for the first time, there were poems to be found, in the rust of our van, a slow fire, in the thunder and growl of our cleaning unit, switched on, the pungent rotten egg scent of muck, muscling hoses down sidewalks, up stairwells, the side-to-side dance of spraying down carpets with hot water and soap, the fierce suck of the cleaning wand attached to the hose, the crisp musical clatter of dirt and dead roaches sliding away, the clack of the scissors clipping out cigarette burns, Kool-Aid stains lifted out with a towel and an iron, raking the carpet after, the gleam and shine of it.
I’d never thought of Ron Marsh Carpet Cleaning as poetry, until Chicago. So I read it aloud while we ate our bologna on white, van idling with the heater on. Sometimes, it seemed to me, MAM was the stormy center of our lives, the lightning strike, the thunder roar, the wind tearing loose through the trees. Beautiful, terrible, riveting. Sometimes in a storm, the steady rain gets forgotten, isn’t seen. But it’s soaking the ground all the while, growing vital seeds. I wanted Dad to see he hadn’t failed. I wanted him to see the good in his work, the good it brought to our lives. For him to find the poem, too.
But afterwards, he was silent.
He wrapped up the rest of his sandwich, set it back in the cooler.
“Well?” I’d said, closing the book.
Without looking at me, he’d shrugged. “I told you, Ronnie. I don’t have poetry in me.”
Now at the table, Dad speaks. When he was growing up, the youngest of his brothers, after a lifetime of work and struggle, the farm was finally stable. Grandpa had more time to go fishing, and took Dad on trips. They went to Florida. He and Grandpa went out on their small motor boat on Lake Okeechobee. They shared a lunch packed in a cooler.
While he’s talking, I feel it all. Images flood me like they’re my own. The rumbling whirr of the motor, the quiet skim of backwaters, the peace of green trees caught in that mirror of lake, Grandpa still wearing his farmer overalls, his John Deere cap, the tacklebox falling open like a treasure chest. Most of all, what I see, what I feel, is how much Dad loved being there with his Dad.
“I caught a pickerel,” he says, and he smiles. “It was gorgeous. White spotted, fins like a tiger’s hide. A long snout full of sharp teeth. Dad took my picture, he was so proud…”
Dad collapses to the table, weeping into his open hands.
He cries so hard his shoulders shake.
I am shocked, pinned in place.
I look at Grandma. She studies him, no feeling on her face.
One by one, everyone looks away.
Even MAM.
Even me.
The Pickerel is a poem that will never let me go.
On a Sunday, Grandpa’s coffin is lowered into the hard open mouth of the ground.
The ground he babied his entire life takes him now, swallows him up for good. The land owns him. The earth will farm him, take him back piece by piece, grow new things from his flesh.
I glance around at the mourners, family and friends, shadows in dark clothes. I dig my hands deeper into coat pockets, think, if I told anyone what I’m thinking, about the earth farming my grandfather, they’d hate me. That’s why I keep my thinking for poems.
Then, it starts to snow. Not a lot. Just a little. The flakes are large and slow. They take their sweet time, getting to earth. We all look up, watch them amble and drift, down, down, down. They are like small lace doilies. Some get caught in the tops of the tall stoic pines. Others dance down to our hair, our coats. They cling to marble angels, heads bowed. They land, soft at our feet.
I blink back tears that have nothing to do with Grandpa.
At the gas station, on the way here, Dad stepped out to fill up the Honda. His face looked a thousand years older. MAM saw it, too. She said, “A son never gets over losing his father.”
I don’t disagree. I just don’t think it’s only sons. What will it be like when the day arrives for me? I’m scared, I don’t want it to be empty, like saying goodbye to a stranger. Tonight is the deadline for my Secret Project. I try to stop hope in its tracks, but I imagine anyway. Winning an award. Handing him the prize money. Saying, “Here, this is for a month of MAM’s medication,” or, “Here, this is for the savings I know you have, to get us out of the poison trailer, into a house where we can see the river, not just smell it.” Or “Here, this is for you, for that shiny, red tacklebox I see you pining after, when you think no one sees.” These hopes are more haunting than this graveyard. Because I still haven’t put the words together.
A wind whips up and MAM pulls me closer, a huddle of warmth. She wears her scarlet red coat with the hood pulled over her hair. From the sky, I imagine she looks like a drop of blood on the dark landscape, like Aurora’s blood after pricking her finger on the spindle.
Dad steps forward. He stands at the grave. He’s wearing a long black trench coat over his suit. His coat tails billow out as the wind blows, and it’s breath-taking against the backdrop of gravestones, and falling snow. He starts to pray, and we all bow our heads. MAM says Dad has a strain of religion in him. Every once in a while, it comes out. Then she calls him Preacher Man. Usually when he slips into lecturing her. Okay, whatever you say, Preacher Man. With a salute.
But his prayer in the snow, about Jesus and Lazarus, the Last Day, the Lord calling forth the dead from their graves, loving them, not forgetting, giving them new life. Dad sets his hand upon his father’s stone, and speaks beauty into the world. I look around and see faces, moved, hearts drawn to the surface, by him, by the words he doesn’t think he has, the feelings he tries to keep on mute. I feel rise in me the love I don’t want it to be too late to give. I find my poem.
Almost instantly, a fight breaks out. Breaks out roaring, like it’s been caged, pacing back and forth between them for days. It has.
“Don’t look at me that way, Ron!” MAM jumps to her feet, slams her chair in so hard, everything on the table rattles. I reach to steady the milk, and knock it over myself. White liquid spills across the plastic red-checkered tablecloth. I right the glass, but let the milk go. Then I sit. “You know I’m not going!”
Dad clutches the phone, face streaked with sweat and grime. Neither of us have had the chance to clean up. I know I look just as rough, after a twelve-hour day. A run-down complex, half a dozen apartments, one right after another. Hauling hoses up three flights, every step a battle, because of the ice, pull, heave, and wrestle those hoses, hands raw with cold, the despair of losing my grip, watching those hoses slide and bump all the way back down the stairs, coming to rest in a snaky pile. Dad gritting his teeth, veins popping in his arms as he pushes the cleaning wand over and over across that ancient, threadbare carpet, ground in patches of fossilized filth. Dad says, the problem is, these landlords and rental managers, they’re cheap, don’t want to fix things and don’t want to get new carpets. Don’t even want to pay him properly for giving all his might and strength to get clean what can never be truly gotten clean again.
Barely in the door, and the phone rings. And MAM’s been off her medication. Cleaning jobs are scarcer in winter. We haven’t been able to afford it.
I guess I knew this day was coming. Even though Dad hasn’t talked about it. I’ve seen the sorrow, the fear, etched in his face, shouldered the heaviness in his quiet as he drives the cleaning van back and forth over the I-80 spanning the Mississippi between Iowa and Illinois, our favorite, Johnny Cash, serenading us from the depths of the radio. Oh, bury me not on the lone prairie, where the coyotes howl and the wind blows free, where there’s not a soul that will care for me. The way he flicks the radio off. Instead of singing with me, staring hard down the highway.
The Corn King, my grandpa, fell sick in the fall. Tuberculosis, the doctor said. I hadn’t even known that was a sickness you could still get. Grandpa was a farmer all his life. In his head, that’s what he was, and who would he be without it? He kept working on, in spite of losing weight, coughing up blood, rib cage howling through his flesh. It was when his doctor got fierce, ordered Grandpa away from the tractor, away from the shovel, the rake, the hoe, all the tools that were his bones, his vertebrae, holding him upright. That’s when Grandpa gave up, went to bed.
“Mar,” Dad says now, a white-knuckled hold on that phone. “It’s my Dad.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass!” MAM whips her robe closed, ties it tight. “They’ve always hated me, and I hate them right back!”
Dad winces. “Can’t you just…”
“Can’t I just! Can’t I just!” MAM waves her arms around. “No, Ron! Duh! After all these years? I can’t just!”
She’s got a point. MAM’s never been out to the farm with us to visit. Not a single time. My eyes follow the pool of milk over the edge of the table.
“But you should.” Dad swallows hard, knows he’s pushing it. Should is MAM’s favorite word.
She draws herself up, eyes opening fantastically wide. “Oh is that right? I should, huh?” Chin up, she swivels, marches to what she calls her Fun Drawer. She flings it open, roots through. The sharp clink of bottles. I wonder. What will it be. A Xanax, or her sunflower pipe. Maybe a tiny bottle of rum, cute, like it was made for a doll. She whips out a crumpled pack of cigarettes, finds a lighter. The sharp flick. Flame, darting up like a snake’s tongue. “Tell me more, Ron.” She pushes her butt back against the drawer and leans in, sucking on the cigarette. “Go on, know it all.” Like some rebel movie star, she winks. “Just tell me why I should.”
He holds her eyes for a long moment. I hope this time he won’t do it. Throw his heart right into the tornado. But he does. He always does. “For me.” He says it, real soft.
I watch the long fall of milk to the floor.
“Ha! Ha!” With each Ha! MAM stands on tiptoe in her pink bunny slippers, jabbing her cigarette at Dad. “For you! You selfish piece of shit. I know all about you. You’ve never cared about me. Never done a damn thing for me. Just used me, is all. Like everyone else.” She raises her cigarette high, a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Lady Liberty with her torch. The scream rips out of her chest. She throws the cigarette at him. He flinches, throws a hand up. The cigarette bounces off his chest. She takes off one slipper. He ducks. It hits the wall over his head, smack in the middle of her silo painting. The painting drops down, crashes onto the counter, then smacks onto the floor.
MAM lopes down the hall in one bunny slipper, crying at the top of her lungs. The door slams. Another muffled scream, then a crash.
Dad, still gripping the phone, bows his head.
Drip drip drip goes the milk onto the linoleum.
I watch, wonder if there’s a poem in that.
When I come out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, MAM’s waiting just outside the door. She’s all dressed up. She’s wearing one of her Prom dresses. She has a collection of them. This one I haven’t seen before. It’s purple organza. It’s got puffed sleeves and sparkles across the heart-shaped bodice. “I’m going,” she says. Her blonde hair is teased high and freeze-sprayed. She grabs my elbow, steers me toward my room. “Get dressed, Ron Junior. Make it quick. I’ll meet you in the kitchen.” She marches off, purple suede heels clicking down the linoleum. A second later, I hear the metallic twist of a bottle opener. The gasp of a cork popping.
I’m named Geraldine, for some strange and terrible reason. I go by Ronnie. But Ron Junior is what she calls me when she’s pouting, when she gets even a whiff of a suspicion I’m taking Dad’s side.
Numb, I go to my room, open my closet. I stare without seeing. I’ve never watched someone die. I’ve never even been to a funeral. I don’t want to. I think of Dad. I pull out a black sweater with rhinestone beaded flowers. I’ll wear this with some jeans.
When I get to the kitchen, it’s empty.
I pull out my chair, sit. The milk’s a puddle on the floor, drying.
The silo painting’s been rescued, placed flat on the table. I pick it up. A tall brown silo with a silver top, rising up beside an old red barn that looks like it’s fallen to its knees, sighing out its last breath. The silo is proud, like a sentinel, haloed in light, something from heaven, rooted in earth. This is the kind of thing you see over and over again in Iowa. Hundred-something-year-old barns, shivering to the ground. Silos catching sunrise, sunset, starlight. Rural Iowa, my home. Crumbling, and sprouting to life. So picturesque, they’re almost holy, the cornfields you’re born deep into, swaddled by, the beginning of the world, and the end. My eyes go to the bottom right corner of the painting. MAM. Her initials, how she signs all her art. Big tall Ms with peaks, like the mountains she grew up with in Colorado, but doesn’t have here. MAM. It’s what she trained me to call her. Don’t call me Mom, call me MAM. That’s my artist name. What I was born to be.
Her art’s all over the trailer, and when she’s well, she sells it at big craft fairs, booths she sets up by herself, painting while people come and go. She’s obsessed with murals, and fairy tales. Well, you can see that, everywhere you look. On the kitchen wall, Princess Aurora in her luminescent blue dress pricks her finger on the enchanted spindle. Small rubies of blood, drip dropping. I’ve grown up crunching Corn Flakes, morning after morning, spell-bound by that blonde haired Princess, thinking she was MAM, mesmerized and terrorized by those tiny rubies of blood, checking MAM’s finger for the wound.
In the bathroom, it’s Cinderella, sprawled in the wreckage of a broken carriage, half of her decked out in a magnificent sparkling ball gown, hair pristine, the other half blighted, in rags, hair falling down, one glass slipper caught in the wheel, twisted and cracked. MAM sure spent a lot of time capturing every fracture in that slipper, so you feel the break of it in your bones while trying to pee.
On my bedroom wall, she painted the three little pigs. Each pig wears a midriff baring pastel sweater, fat pink tummies pooched out, naked beneath. They carry little nosegays, sprinkles of white, yellow, pink flowers, tucked daintily between their hooves, like bridesmaids in a wedding. The pigs’ curly tails are drawn, but never painted. Did she forget about them? Why didn’t she paint their tails? She painted a Big Bad Wolf sneaking up behind them. His long drooping snout, sharp teeth bared and dripping saliva, hairy arms up, claws out. That wolf made me gasp, then cry, waking up in the middle of the night. I begged her, please paint over the wolf, please MAM. She finally gave in. Now, when I tell that story, she protests. I never painted a wolf! God, baby, why would I do that? God, I’d never paint a wolf and scare a little kid!
So maybe I dreamed the Big Bad Wolf.
Dad walks in and I lower the silo painting, give him the once over. He’s wearing his one pair of good jeans, a flannel shirt tucked in too tight, a woven leather belt. I’m so used to seeing him in his work pants with holes in the knees, the ones that embarrass MAM. “You look nice.” Seems terrible to say. His Dad’s about to die. I don’t know what to say. Dad doesn’t like to acknowledge hard truths. So maybe what I’ve said is just about right.
He sets his hand on the bald part of his head. “Where is she?”
I look around. The house is quiet in that deep lonely way it is when she’s not there at all.
Dad and I catch eyes. He puts his hand to his chest. An absent motion, but packed. We’ve been here before, too many times. I scoot back, and stand. He heads one way, and I another.
“Marlena!” Dad calls.
“MAM!” I call. And again. And again. With everything inside me. “MAM!” A scream, a plea. Even though I know better.
Ten minutes later, Dad’s outside, walking up and down the gravel lane of our trailer park, Riverview Court. All the way up to the row of dented, shiny mailboxes on Quarry Road. All the way back to the gate that separates our trailer park from the woods, and beyond, the Wapsi, the river we can only smell, not see. Riverfishstink Court, they should call our trailer park. All the way Dad goes, calling and calling, so everyone knows. There’s Ron Marsh, searching for his wife, again.
I slump onto the couch, holding onto a pillow, ruffled and flowered. I know where she is. But she’d made me promise to never tell him where she goes. I punch the pillow. Again and again. I throw it hard as I can at the window when Dad walks past, for the fifth time. Is he dumb? I guess he thinks, hopes, maybe she’ll feel sorry for him, this time.
I drop my head in my hands. Jog my feet on the floor. I was going to come home and work on my Secret Project. Something totally unrelated to school. Something big. Something I’d never tell anyone about. Something I’d barely confided to myself. I was just doing it. Because I had to. I had to try. The deadline was in a few days, and I’d barely begun, and now this. This instead. Death and Drama.
I dig into my back pocket, wrench out my tiny notebook and pen, flip the pages. The thing is, there’s no money for college. Of course there’s not. We don’t even have enough to move out of a place that’s killing us slowly. One day, Dad took me around our trailer, flung open the cabinets, tapped on the walls, said, “There’s bad stuff in this particle board, Ronnie. You know that pickled smell you complain about? Formaldehyde. The chemical used to preserve the dead, that’s what we’re breathing in.” He said MAM was already sick enough, but he thought the formaldehyde got in her head, screwed with her circuits, and made things worse. We all had strange symptoms. Sudden nosebleeds, bad coughs, stomach aches. “These trailers are easy to make, cheap. Easy to sell to poor people who want a crumb of the American dream. A poison crumb. But the manufacturers don’t care if poor people get sick, die.” Like the rental landlords, never replacing the carpets, letting them degenerate year after year into pure toxic filth. I know Dad thinks he’s failed because he hasn’t been able to make enough yet to move us out.
I’m not all that interested in college anyway. I don’t think they’d want me, and I don’t think I’d fit. I love books. School, not so much. I can’t focus in school, can’t do the work. Last year I scored an F+ in math. Failure par excellence! I wonder if the formaldehyde’s pickled my brain cells, making me bad at learning. Slow to process, my teachers tell my parents at conferences. My teachers push to have me tested, but MAM puts up a fight. She says she doesn’t want me labeled for life, leashed to medication. Not like we’d be able to afford that pharma-studded leash anyway.
The truth is, at school, I’m doing a different kind of work. Work I don’t think most of my teachers understand, or care about. But it’s the work that matters most to me, alongside cleaning carpets with Dad. I find the page I started today, in the crummy apartment kitchen with the nasty blackened linoleum, writing down words fast on the permanently stained countertop. I read what I wrote, chewing my pen.
beauty cleaning van equipment rattling gravel roads
When I’m trying to find a poem, deep in the wilderness of my head, I make a trail of words to follow. I close my eyes, take myself out of body and time, like I do in school in the middle of another lecture on another thing that doesn’t seem to matter. Gravel roads matter. I go back to summer, Dad training me how to wind and unwind the hoses, cut out cigarette burns, lift up Kool-Aid stains. Getting pizza from Casey’s for lunch, the best treat. The long rides home together on rural roads, sky soaked in sunset. I return to things I didn’t know then were magic.
Tires clouds of dust windows elbows out Johnny Cash rows of corn
Tap tap tap. Dad’s by the window, waving for me to come out, his shoulders hunched. I grab my coat and zip it up so hard, I almost break it. So what. It’s half-broken anyway. I’m always breaking zippers. Must be where you let out your anger, MAM says with a laugh. Dammit though. Why, just this once, can’t she cooperate? Cooperate. Another one of her favorite words.
I slide into the backseat of our little blue Honda. Leave the passenger seat empty. I know the drill. Even when she’s MIA, that’s still her seat. I yank the seatbelt across me. It has old gum pieces stuck on it, hardened, from when I was little. We pull out, jostling over the driveway rutted with potholes.
From where she is, she can watch us leave. She’ll hear our gruffling car, lift her head, and watch us, creeping down the road, giving her every last inch of a chance. I flick my eyes to Dad’s face in the rearview mirror. Brows pulled together. Eyes moving left to right, still searching.
I hate her.
A zap of lightning races through me. The first time, in seventeen years.
Hand in my lap, I let my middle finger rise slowly. Hold it there, firm. Bumping down the lane, hoping, just hoping, she has her binoculars, and sees. I wave my fuck you finger a little.
This one’s for you, MAM.
At the end of the lane, by the long row of mailboxes, stands a big old elm, a gentle giant. As we near, Dad flicks the blinker, signaling a right turn onto Quarry Road. Lo and behold, she steps out from behind the Elm. Dad and I both sit up, pulled forward as if by invisible strings. MAM, appearing like a queen, rockstar regal in Dad’s old black leather coat, black tam cocked sideways, a pair of black snow boots. We draw up, and the bitter cold wind whips her frothy purple dress to and fro round her knees. Her blonde hair lifts high. Her lips, a bright red poppy in an endless field of gray sky. She sucks on a cigarette. Dad presses on the brake. She glances at him, haughty, then takes one last puff, throwing her head back, shooting smoke to the sky. Some Midwest Madonna, my mother.
The sorrow on Dad’s face eases as she climbs in beside him.
She crosses her arms, doesn’t look at him, or me, the whole way there.
I’ve never been to the farmhouse at night. The barn looks like the ghost of a barn. A dark shadowy thing, hunkering. The old two-story house, white by day, is silvered by the cold stone of the moon. The corn fields lay beyond, mown down into stumps, silenced. This spring, who will it be, out there planting? For the first time in over fifty years, someone else.
My Grandpa was a corn farmer. These were his fields.
The poem seeps in, along with the chill. The way you become, one day, was. The way the things you did, the things you loved, the things you lived for, worked your whole life for, roll away into nothing.
We get out of the car, and the cold is stunning. Dad takes MAM’s hand, and they walk ahead of me. God, it’s cold, it’s cold, it’s knife-in-your-guts cold. Yet on the porch, MAM breaks free from Dad. “Ron, I’ll be there in a minute.”
Dad looks at her, fear rising.
She takes his arm. “I promise.”
Not that that means much.
But we have a long history of believing her.
He goes inside, the old screen door whining open, closing with a slap. I try to follow but she pulls me back. “Stay here with me, Ronnie John Jonnie.” One of the things she calls me when she’s being cute and wants her way. It works. We stand together on the porch and the cold grips my spine. How can she stand it, her legs in hose in that purple dress? Who knows. Maybe she’s got whiskey in her. Knowing where she was hiding out, I bet she does.
“Ronnie, I need courage. Say something.”
I open my mouth. I have no idea what MAM needs. Ever. Well, her medication, for starters. Something we can afford sporadically, in really good months when a heck of a lot of people move out, or we get some nice residentials, people willing to pay.
MAM shakes my arm. “Come on, Ronnie. Say something beautiful. Something about the stars.” She points up, as if I don’t know where they are.
“You’ll have to put a quarter in,” I say.
She gives me a look. “Smart mouth.” But she likes it when I talk back. She paces and the old porch creak-creaks. She stomps her boots. Then presses her palm to her forehead. “Goddamn. I don’t want to go in there. Fuck! I hate that old woman. You have no idea.” Hand shaking, she brings her fingers to her mouth, takes a puff. When she’s somewhere she can’t smoke, and she’s losing it, she smokes her phantom cigarette. “Just so you know,” she says, expertly holding her phantom cigarette to the side, blowing the smoke of her own breath into the frozen air. “I showed up for you.”
“Me?”
“You’ve never watched someone die,” MAM says. She takes another puff. Holds it in her lungs, the phantom smoke. Then, with an exhale. “How are you feeling?”
“I don’t want to see him.”
“You’re just gonna have to be brave. You know? The two of us. We’re just gonna have to go in there, and grab our big old, brass-plated bull balls.” She mimics this, pushing her hand between her legs, sticking out her tongue, going cross-eyed. I laugh. She laughs, too. Moments like this is why – it’s hard to hate her for good. I get it, I do, why Dad’s so captivated, why he puts up with the rages, the tantrums, the running away. She’s larger than life. Day to day, never knowing what you’re going to get, is a head rush. Chaos. Maybe her chaos interrupts his despair.
MAM lets her hand drop, gets serious. “I should’ve done with you, what my mother did with me and my siblings.”
I straighten, instantly alert. MAM’s past, when she lets me in, is like entering some magic wardrobe, finding Narnia. Both her parents are dead now. One brother, dead, killed in Vietnam. A sister, living in California. I’ve never met her. “What’d she do?”
“She dressed us up and made us go to strangers’ funerals.”
My mouth falls open. “No, she did not.”
She raises her hand in the air. “God’s honest truth. Her mother made her do the same. Gets you used to seeing death, looking at other people’s kin before you have to look at your own. Should be part of every school curriculum, come to think of it.”
“Funerals 101?” I’m already imagining the field trips.
She nods. “You’ve got it.” Then sets her hand on her hip. “Ready?”
“One sec.” I lift my own fingers to my mouth and suck in a smoke. MAM smacks my hand. “Don’t you start, young lady! It’s a bad habit.”
“MAM, it’s invisible.”
“Invisible doesn’t make it not real.”
It must be extraordinary to live in her head.
MAM hooks her arm through mine. Our teeth chatter. She says, “What’s that thing you do, you know, when something bad is happening, and you’re freaked out.” She rubs her forehead with her knuckle. “That game you play, you know, with poems…”
I swallow hard. I’m surprised she remembers. I only told her about that once. When I was twelve. She’d left us again, only for a long, long time. The longest time. Day after day I checked, and she didn’t show up in any of her usual hiding spots. I’d gotten so spooked. Every day as I went around searching, my mind would go nuts. I’d think she was never coming back. My nightmare had finally happened. Out there wandering around those country backroads in the pitch black dark, in her little lace and silk nightgown with a coat slung over. She’d been picked up by a crazy. Raped and murdered. Her body tossed in some ditch. I could almost see it, her blue eyes wide open with fear, staring through the bright wildflowers she wasn’t alive to see. I’d have to sit, breathe, soothe myself. That’s when I started looking for poems. Little beautiful things along the way, to carry me. It was amazing, once I started looking, how many poems I found. To keep panic at bay, I counted them as I walked. The pink fungus that looked like mollusks. The crow, perched like an ornament on the tippy top of the pine, ha-ha-ing like he knew the joke. The Wapsi swirling around my ankles, splashing my calves, a big old river flirt. I’d write down as many as I could. I filled up notebook after notebook with the poems I found, in my hunt for her.
Only to find her one day, curled up in the backyard behind the broken down old dog house, fast asleep. Her hair dirty, riddled with rat’s nests. It was the first and only time I’d yelled at her, cried, told her how she had the power to break our hearts and God, how I wished, I wished, I wished she’d stop doing that.
Now, meeting her gaze, with that memory on my heart, I find it hard to speak. “I look for poems,” I say, soft. “I count them.”
“Yeah, that,” she says, unlatching the screen door. “Take a deep breath, hon. And do that.”
It’s over. He’s over. The Corn King is gone. No one cried. I’m not surprised. MAM calls Dad’s family heartless. She says I got all my feelings from her side. But even I don’t feel what I’m supposed to feel. For me, it was the practice MAM suggested, like watching a stranger die. When we left the room, after, MAM whispered in my ear, “Brrr. Colder in here than outside.”
Grandma Marsh and her boys, my Dad and three brothers, pull out chairs and sit at the dining room table.
The rest of us find other places.
Aunt Mary brings an afghan from Grandma’s sewing room. Aunt Mary, the only one besides the boys who can go anywhere in the farm house. MAM says, that’s because Aunt Mary with her barn owl glasses graduated college, and that’s what Grandma respects. Grandma hates women, treats her daughters-in-law worse than pig shit, but not Mary, because Mary’s got a degree. MAM had to stay with “Old Lady Marsh” while Dad was in the service training for Nam. Grandma put her on a diet, snatched food right out of her hands and threw it away. Said if her son married trash, and was coming back home to trash, least she could do was stay skinny, and be pretty trash. Grandma made soup one night, ladled a big bowl for MAM, and what with the diet, MAM was ravenous. Old Lady Marsh didn’t tell MAM what was in the soup until she was nearly through, slurping the rest down. MAM spent the rest of the night in the bathroom, and she said, you’ve never truly puked until you’ve puked cow brain soup.
Now Aunt Mary tucks the afghan around Grandma’s shoulders, making motherly noises that sound forced, fake. MAM catches my eyes, wrinkles her nose, checks her phantom wrist watch.
The Uncles talk. They share their favorite Corn King memory. Uncle Luke starts in about a sledding incident, and they all laugh like they know what’s coming. My eyes stay with Dad. He’s just listening. Elbows propped on the table, chin on folded hands. Sometimes MAM calls Dad a cold fish. I don’t know why I keep coming back to a cold fish. He doesn’t love me, he’s a cold fish. She spits it in his face. Cold fish! Punches his chest. Cold fish!
It surprises me now to realize, I believe her. I’m always searching for the poem in him, and coming up short. Whenever I’ve tried to talk with him about a hard thing, such as MAM’s rages, her leaving, he’s quick to evade, to duck, like by showing emotion I’ve thrown a left hook. He’ll point at something, a weird bug, or an unusual stain in the carpet he’s suddenly keen to identify, diverting the whole conversation. The other day, in the middle of what felt like a futile job, trying to get out greasy tire tracks in a living room where the tenant had kept his motorcycle, we’d taken our lunch break in the van. I’d asked him if he wanted to hear a poem. “A poem? You know I don’t get that stuff, Ronnie.” He’d shaken his head, already giving up.
“Just listen.” I opened to Chicago by Carl Sandburg. I was in love, could not stop reading this poem. It was a love letter to grit and machines, to sweat and shoveling, that made me think, for the first time, there were poems to be found, in the rust of our van, a slow fire, in the thunder and growl of our cleaning unit, switched on, the pungent rotten egg scent of muck, muscling hoses down sidewalks, up stairwells, the side-to-side dance of spraying down carpets with hot water and soap, the fierce suck of the cleaning wand attached to the hose, the crisp musical clatter of dirt and dead roaches sliding away, the clack of the scissors clipping out cigarette burns, Kool-Aid stains lifted out with a towel and an iron, raking the carpet after, the gleam and shine of it.
I’d never thought of Ron Marsh Carpet Cleaning as poetry, until Chicago. So I read it aloud while we ate our bologna on white, van idling with the heater on. Sometimes, it seemed to me, MAM was the stormy center of our lives, the lightning strike, the thunder roar, the wind tearing loose through the trees. Beautiful, terrible, riveting. Sometimes in a storm, the steady rain gets forgotten, isn’t seen. But it’s soaking the ground all the while, growing vital seeds. I wanted Dad to see he hadn’t failed. I wanted him to see the good in his work, the good it brought to our lives. For him to find the poem, too.
But afterwards, he was silent.
He wrapped up the rest of his sandwich, set it back in the cooler.
“Well?” I’d said, closing the book.
Without looking at me, he’d shrugged. “I told you, Ronnie. I don’t have poetry in me.”
Now at the table, Dad speaks. When he was growing up, the youngest of his brothers, after a lifetime of work and struggle, the farm was finally stable. Grandpa had more time to go fishing, and took Dad on trips. They went to Florida. He and Grandpa went out on their small motor boat on Lake Okeechobee. They shared a lunch packed in a cooler.
While he’s talking, I feel it all. Images flood me like they’re my own. The rumbling whirr of the motor, the quiet skim of backwaters, the peace of green trees caught in that mirror of lake, Grandpa still wearing his farmer overalls, his John Deere cap, the tacklebox falling open like a treasure chest. Most of all, what I see, what I feel, is how much Dad loved being there with his Dad.
“I caught a pickerel,” he says, and he smiles. “It was gorgeous. White spotted, fins like a tiger’s hide. A long snout full of sharp teeth. Dad took my picture, he was so proud…”
Dad collapses to the table, weeping into his open hands.
He cries so hard his shoulders shake.
I am shocked, pinned in place.
I look at Grandma. She studies him, no feeling on her face.
One by one, everyone looks away.
Even MAM.
Even me.
The Pickerel is a poem that will never let me go.
On a Sunday, Grandpa’s coffin is lowered into the hard open mouth of the ground.
The ground he babied his entire life takes him now, swallows him up for good. The land owns him. The earth will farm him, take him back piece by piece, grow new things from his flesh.
I glance around at the mourners, family and friends, shadows in dark clothes. I dig my hands deeper into coat pockets, think, if I told anyone what I’m thinking, about the earth farming my grandfather, they’d hate me. That’s why I keep my thinking for poems.
Then, it starts to snow. Not a lot. Just a little. The flakes are large and slow. They take their sweet time, getting to earth. We all look up, watch them amble and drift, down, down, down. They are like small lace doilies. Some get caught in the tops of the tall stoic pines. Others dance down to our hair, our coats. They cling to marble angels, heads bowed. They land, soft at our feet.
I blink back tears that have nothing to do with Grandpa.
At the gas station, on the way here, Dad stepped out to fill up the Honda. His face looked a thousand years older. MAM saw it, too. She said, “A son never gets over losing his father.”
I don’t disagree. I just don’t think it’s only sons. What will it be like when the day arrives for me? I’m scared, I don’t want it to be empty, like saying goodbye to a stranger. Tonight is the deadline for my Secret Project. I try to stop hope in its tracks, but I imagine anyway. Winning an award. Handing him the prize money. Saying, “Here, this is for a month of MAM’s medication,” or, “Here, this is for the savings I know you have, to get us out of the poison trailer, into a house where we can see the river, not just smell it.” Or “Here, this is for you, for that shiny, red tacklebox I see you pining after, when you think no one sees.” These hopes are more haunting than this graveyard. Because I still haven’t put the words together.
A wind whips up and MAM pulls me closer, a huddle of warmth. She wears her scarlet red coat with the hood pulled over her hair. From the sky, I imagine she looks like a drop of blood on the dark landscape, like Aurora’s blood after pricking her finger on the spindle.
Dad steps forward. He stands at the grave. He’s wearing a long black trench coat over his suit. His coat tails billow out as the wind blows, and it’s breath-taking against the backdrop of gravestones, and falling snow. He starts to pray, and we all bow our heads. MAM says Dad has a strain of religion in him. Every once in a while, it comes out. Then she calls him Preacher Man. Usually when he slips into lecturing her. Okay, whatever you say, Preacher Man. With a salute.
But his prayer in the snow, about Jesus and Lazarus, the Last Day, the Lord calling forth the dead from their graves, loving them, not forgetting, giving them new life. Dad sets his hand upon his father’s stone, and speaks beauty into the world. I look around and see faces, moved, hearts drawn to the surface, by him, by the words he doesn’t think he has, the feelings he tries to keep on mute. I feel rise in me the love I don’t want it to be too late to give. I find my poem.
I can’t ever make you know what it’s like, the beauty in
the bounce of a carpet cleaning van
equipment rattling a percussive beat in the back
down long gravel roads
clouds of sparkling sunset dust
mid-west magic, kicked up by tires
our windows rolled down, elbows stuck out
we are singing together to Johnny Cash
serenading the shimmying ribbons, green rows of corn
the big Iowa sun falling down, down
leaving wild and bright marks down the face of the sky
magnificent as the sweat and dirt and grime
falling down our faces
I look at you
and do you even know
how happy I am
to be the carpet cleaner’s daughter
the bounce of a carpet cleaning van
equipment rattling a percussive beat in the back
down long gravel roads
clouds of sparkling sunset dust
mid-west magic, kicked up by tires
our windows rolled down, elbows stuck out
we are singing together to Johnny Cash
serenading the shimmying ribbons, green rows of corn
the big Iowa sun falling down, down
leaving wild and bright marks down the face of the sky
magnificent as the sweat and dirt and grime
falling down our faces
I look at you
and do you even know
how happy I am
to be the carpet cleaner’s daughter