Читать книгу From the Dark Domain - Keith Potter - Страница 16

Gray skies over Eugene are like furled brows over childhood. If those brows afford just enough sternness to enforce crucial boundaries and instill appropriate fears, they’ll serve to produce green buttes and fertile fields like the seed grass of the lush Willamette River Valley. But if they stay gray or heavy for too long, then the land and all who dwell therein grow a dampness of character that no intermittent rays of yellow sun can dissipate.

Mommy didn’t do well with gray. It brought out the color of her aura—shadowy, rusty reds and pale greens.

Of course, it had to be such a gray day when you came home from a three-day disappearance at age fourteen. In fact, the skies had been gray from the moment we found your empty room and your satchel missing from your closet. No note. No good-bye.

When I finally came home from church that Sunday, it was so good to see you home. I’d been so worried. But your left eye already protruded in black and blue and your face and neck shone in splashes of red. The cut on your cheek still seeped blood through your makeshift bandage.

She missed church that morning, so contrary to her obsessive want to be perceived as the perfect pastor’s wife. She was always front row, pulpit side, with a regal smile, dressed in smart suits and finely cut dresses that we could never quite afford. Week after week for years, she greeted congregants in formal tones of blessing and well-wishing. Posture erect and officious, she fielded affirmations of her husband’s elocution and philosophical dexterity; and then berated me in the parking lot with a stream of invectives. To avoid that ritual, I’d begun scheduling appointments for the hour directly after church.

So, I didn’t arrive on the home front until long after your altercation. Perhaps you have a better descriptor for all that transpired in my absence.

I was thrilled to know that you were home. Your secret departure had frightened me as it had terrified her. Yes, Mommy was scared more than angry; though like all negative emotion, her fears presented in rage. Can you believe that her anger somehow was seeded by her love, and then fertilized by fear, and even fed by the flood of relief so polluted by fury that it spilled over you in violence?

Seeing your wounds, I feared—or actually hoped—that you’d been on a binge of hard living or wanton carousing. Had you run to drugs or something worse? Three days, Donnie, you were gone. Had you been beaten by others?

Or were you beaten again by your more obvious oppressor? This was the clear answer that I tried to hope against. Am I correct in surmising that you came home to a mother literally looking down the road for her prodigal? And instead of a warm embrace, a robe on your back, slippers for your feet and rings to adorn your fingers, you met the bite of Mommy’s diamond ring as it cut through your cheek?

You never said a word about her. When I asked, “Where have you been,” all you did was pull out the trophy from your satchel and lay it calmly in my lap.

National Association of Science Education

Grand Champion

Don Gilliam

Not Donnie, my name for you. Or Donald, as your Mommy called you. Don, the National Eighth Grade Champion.

How could one man feel so much in one moment? Pride laced with embarrassment; sadness for all I’d missed and elation for all you’d accomplished. The picture of where you’d been for three days filled in while the truth about your parents spilled out. You didn’t want us with you in D.C. The victory wasn’t ours to prize. It belonged to you, forged in your own room and poured out in your own labors in those moments and days and weeks when you conjured a pathway to turning exile into adventure and ran laughing from the host of our betrayals.

Yes, Mommy would have gloated at the contest as if she’d inspired your genius and concocted your winning project. And I would have stood like a blundering fool not knowing how to stop her, or how to stop me from being so completely useless in the face of her pretentious babblings.

For a moment, sitting on your bed, you let me look into your eyes. We connected, though I dread to think of what you saw in me. I wanted you to see love in my gaze and a fatherly phrase like, This is my beloved son in whom I am well-pleased. But I knew then as I know now that my eyes deceived me; as much as my paralyzed instincts for protecting my only son deceived the will of my true self and froze me in fear.

What did I see in your flaming eyes, even through your pain and fury and detachment? Joy. And I prayed a silent prayer to the God I barely knew that your joy would be full and forever.

You do understand why she hit you, don’t you Donnie? Again, not to dismiss her atrocities, but she simply had no respectable language for her love; no tongue or dialect to convey all that she must have felt in her own love-starved heart. No way or means for conveying anything good or pure.

Remember when I asked you to help me install our sprinkler? Mommy wanted the finest yard in all of Eugene, so she insisted on an automated system even in a climate that dripped and drizzled all through the year. So, we cut trenches and dug out rocks and placed pipe and glued and fitted everything just so. You were marvelous. At ten years of age, you laid more than half the grid. But remember how the heads spat and fizzled at first? Impurities of every kind had infiltrated our grand design. So, we screwed off the heads and ran water through the whole works until the whole worked. As we cleared and replaced the heads, no more dirt. Functional fountain heads. Total coverage for the thirsty lawn. So much satisfaction for us. It was one of my favorite memories with you.

Donnie, your Mommy’s core self got laid out in a field fraught with so many varieties of grime and dirt and slime. She was so badly infiltrated, so that I’m sure she dreaded all of her days what might come oozing out if she dared to let anyone remove those clogged dispensers, even one at a time. A culture of true malevolence crept into her soul works and clogged her arteries. Monsters evolved into being and fed on her sadness and fear and bitterness and found their voices and bared their claws.

If I’d known the gospel in those days, I’d have preached it to her. Week after week, as she sat in the front row critiquing my humble forays into cleansing truth, something would have been absorbed. One day, Jesus would have broken into her tormented mind and she would have been convinced to risk an open-heart surgery to free up her arteries again. But on those Sundays upon Sundays she heard nothing because I said nothing. One cannot teach what one does not have.

I’m not asking you to forgive her; only praying that you will, so that your own fountains will flow freely and water your soul and feed the parched world around you. You have so much to give—somehow, you were not ruined by us—but you will give more and better and joyfully if all of your innards aren’t gummed up by angst toward a woman who loved you so badly from a heart so utterly congested.

By the way, I’m sorry I told her where you’d been and about the award that you’d won. Honestly, I was trying to protect you and defend you.

And I’m sorry that she broke your trophy.