Читать книгу Risking the Rapids - Irene O'Garden - Страница 9

Panorama

Most of my siblings are here. One by one we’ll take the oath and testify. We hate to do this, but we have to be here. And we have to speak.

I am sick to my stomach. Who wants to say words that lead to locking up a loved brother? But his behavior has become…so bizarre.

How did we come to this?

Weren’t we just a simple big old-fashioned Catholic family? A mom, a dad, seven kids, a Midwest city. Most of us grown up out of the fifties into the sixties. Sorta normal, right?

They call my name. What will I say? My testimony will be the most urgent. I’ll have to describe his recent strange demeanor, how frightened I was at his hands. We say this is for “his good.” Is it?

Years later when my sister calls to tell me John has died, these are the memories that savage.

•••

I was born in the middle. In the middle of seven children, in a mid-size city in the middle of the country, in the middle class, in the middle of the twentieth century. In a leafy neighborhood neither urban nor suburban. In the middle of surprising anxieties, given the idyllic qualities a mid-century childhood afforded: freedom, autonomy, solitude.

Our parents never beat us. We had enough to eat and wear. But one brother cut all his pictures out of the family scrapbook. Another brother: committed to a madhouse. Another: hamstrung in hierarchy; another: crippled by pain. One sister suffered and drank, one sister trembled in fear. I ate myself upwards of two hundred pounds. What happened to us?

•••

A family is a landscape of its own, as granted as the earth and trees.

Each person, each event becomes environment, familiar, dear, and scary. Emotion is the weather of the family, patterning the faces, the voices, and the hearts.

A family is a landscape changing scope and light and season. One day the father is a mountain peak sheltering a gentle mother river, and the next the father is a fallen pine by a dried riverbed and scattered children rocks.

Dad worked in landslides; Mom in abrasion, erosion. Either way, trees fall.

A family is a landscape, not a house. Houses are intentional—everything picked, planned, placed. Chosen for a reason. A house is what a parent wants to teach a child. Nothing unexpected included.

But a family will spill and charge and go its growing way, resist attempts to still it, clip it, and capture it. Shoots grow into wild events in even the serenest grove when bent against the nature of the plant.

•••

My brother John’s death prompted more than a trip to his memorial service. It impelled a journey through Montana’s living wilderness with other family members and an inner passage through the landscape of family itself.