Читать книгу The Lyncher In Me - Warren Read - Страница 16

CHAPTER 8

Like his father, my grandfather worked in the sawmills, as did his father before him. The timber trade spread from Minnesota to Washington State and the Dondinos followed. The men in my family were loggers and sawmill workers, embedded in the grain of the lumber industry. Among the family portraits and backyard snapshots scattered in a shoebox of old photos are several pictures of my forefathers standing proudly in front of enormous felled logs, saws or axes in hand, plaid shirts tucked firmly into rugged jeans. For four generations, the men in my family have worked hard to provide for their families, clearing the natural landscape of its towering timber in the process, cutting the fallen corpses into neat boards that would one day be used to create a framework for the new homes of happy families everywhere.

When my own parents met in Edmonds, Washington, in July 1965, their future family was already nearly complete. My mother came to the marriage with my sister Karen in tow, a two-year-old who had been born out of wedlock (a crime worthy of ostracizing in 1962; Karen would forever be the living embodiment of Don’t Ever Think It Can’t Happen the First Time). My father arrived at his second marriage with his own children as well: Julie, also age two; Brad, age four; and Beth, age five. The two single parents had been introduced by a well-meaning, albeit shortsighted, friend. My mother desperately needed new tires for her car; my father worked at a service station and knew how to use a lug wrench. And maybe the coupling, if not perfect, was at least deemed socially acceptable for each of them.

In hindsight, I can see that their union might have been driven more by their desire for stability than by chemistry or any real emotional connection. I don’t remember witnessing a great deal of conflict between my mother and father, really, but those moments of gentle affection, shared laughter, the joy in one another’s company that a child sees here and there when his parents are in love—those things just weren’t there for me to see. And when I speak with my mother about it today, it becomes uncomfortably clear that, at least in her eyes, they were together simply because they were there for each other.

“It was 1965 and I was an unwed mother in a small town,” she explains. “That wasn’t okay then.” Hearing my mother describe her ostracism is heartbreaking to me today. But people who had been friends to my grandmother for years, women who had accepted recipes and prayers and heartfelt good wishes from her, walked past without so much as a glance, ignoring her as if she’d been a complete stranger.

“It was hard to see her go through that and it upsets me even today,” my mother goes on. “Anyway, your dad was a nice guy, we got along well and he had a stable job. He definitely understood the need to be a responsible parent. I think we were what the other one needed at the time.” They settled about thirty miles north of Seattle in the Boeing and Weyerhaeuser suburb of Everett. Almost a year after they married, I came to join this colorful and raucous bunch.

For as long as I can remember, my father worked the lumber mills. The vernacular of the sawmills had become such a part of me that for a time I believed I was destined to do the same. I imagined myself like him, leaving the house before my kids came home from school, returning home well past the hour they’d been tucked into bed. Sawdust-caked boots, soft yellow earplugs, and a nagging, sore back would be the future I had to look forward to.

One of my earliest memories of my father is of him coming out of his shift at the Simpson Lee mill. I’m young, maybe four, and it’s one of the rare occasions when it’s still daylight by the time he’s finished his shift. My mother, my brother Brad, the girls, and I are crammed into the back seat of our Volkswagen Fastback, me lying across the ledge in the back window the whole ride, a human projectile just waiting for a hard brake. In this scene we’re all sitting there watching the doors intently and suddenly I hear the voice. The booming, ethereal, disembodied voice that echoes from the tower says something I can’t quite make out but I know that whatever it was, it means that all the men (and a few women) will be coming out the doors any minute. And sure enough, my dad ambles out, lunch pail a’swinging, the one that looks like a plain, skinny, black barn. My brother asks him if he has anything left in his lunch and he pulls out a package of pink, coconut-covered mounds of cake and marshmallow. He tears open the wrapping with his huge hands and breaks off pieces of cake for each of us, popping the last bit into his mouth.

Some years later, my father moved from Simpson Lee to Welco Lumber, a mill across the river and farther north, in Marysville, and we kids saw him even less. He began working the swing shift, 3:00 to 11:00 PM, the schedule that would dominate much of the final act in his role as my dad. Other than a few treasured memories of bedtime read-alouds and the occasional serenade as he strummed his guitar, my father’s presence during those years is best illustrated by the oil-splotched empty space next to our fence in which his blue Chevrolet pickup sometimes sat.

In 1970, when I was three years old, we moved from a rental home in a more rural part of Everett to a planned residential neighborhood in the suburbs. We were part of the first wave of families to move into this development, several of whom took advantage of government subsidies to help purchase their homes. The development was named Heritage North, perhaps an homage to our struggling pioneer forebears, our tract houses circling seemingly sacred mounds of dirt in cul-de-sacs like wagons protecting the last standing trees. (For some reason, years later, our neighborhood would inexplicably be renamed Heritage West, causing my friends and I to suddenly question all that we had assumed about the geography of our little world.)

The cul-de-sacs of our neighborhood sprang from the main drive like leaves from one long, slightly curving stem that snaked its way lazily through the development. The houses in each had been designed and built by the same contractor, so each cul-de-sac was a jumbled replica of the one across from it. There were three styles of houses: the one-story rambler, a rectangle with a carport on one side and a windowless wall on the other; the split-level, where families could coexist without ever actually seeing one another; and the model we had, the two-story A-frame, a house that was mostly roof from the front and mostly triangle from the sides.

The fact that our neighborhood was structured in such a predictable way created an often surreal experience for me as a child. At any given time, I would find myself in a sort of Bizarro world of my own, visiting a friend whose house was identical to mine only with a reversed floor plan, better-groomed pets, and nicely coordinated furniture. I’d walk through the rooms, thinking to myself, “This is what our living room would look like with orange shag,” or “It’s amazing how a wall of mirrored tiles makes the dining room look huge.” But strangest of all was the relative peace and quiet I’d often find in these homes, a sense of calm that was seldom present in my own. I could pretend that there had been a switch at the hospital where I was born and I’d gone home with this family. Same house, different family. A father who mowed the lawn on weekends and wrestled with his kids and a mother who passed out Kool-Aid like it was pouring from the faucets. In some cases, I think my friends played the same imaginary game. They liked to come to my house so they could play hard and not worry about tearing up the yard. They tolerated the occasional sting of a sprouting thistle or the unpleasant discovery of a forgotten pile of dog manure because there was no one yelling at them to ease up on the lawn.

On the surface, my memories of childhood seem idyllic. Summers in our neighborhood were long days of darting through the woods that surrounded us, undeveloped land filled with alder and cedar perfect for nailing salvaged plywood and pallets into a crude fort. Sticks were guns, pinecones were grenades. We came home when our mother yelled for us, hands covered in pitch that would have to wear off in its own time. Our summers were more or less a predictable montage of weekend camping trips, hikes to the nearby lake and—one highlight—the annual Welco Lumber company picnic.

The gathering normally held few surprises. We kids would be free to roam the park near the lake where we could keep busy all day and out of our parents’ hair, darting back and forth to and from the red plastic treasure chest of normally forbidden sugared drinks. My father appeared in cameos on these days—this, the one day of the year that I ever saw him drunk. He’d disappear into the crowd of men holding brown bottles, the swoop of a red R on the labels; we’d see him pop up between the shifting shapes of his buddies, shades of red growing deeper in his face and eyes by the hour until at last my mother would gather us kids and help him into the van as he happily channeled Johnny Cash. Strangely enough, those moments in my memory are calming, my father happy, silly, no risk of him suddenly losing his temper and angrily swinging his arm at the passengers behind him.

* * *

July of 1978. I had turned eleven years old three months earlier and this would be the last summer of my parents’ marriage. Everyone at the picnic knew that my father and Kelly, a nineteen-year-old coworker, were having some kind of intimate relationship. About four days before the picnic, a friend of my mother’s who worked at the mill confided that there was indeed “something going on” between my father and a woman on his shift. That night, my mother drove to the mill and confronted my father. He denied it, tried desperately to explain it away as just a rumor, but when the lies finally collapsed under their own weight, he had no choice but to admit it was true.

I remember seeing Kelly for the first time at the picnic, though I wouldn’t realize her significance in my life until much later. I noticed her at the picnic because the coziness, the familiarity she seemed to share with my father was something I’d not seen before, not even with my own mother. A laugh, a playful sock to the arm, a gentle touch to his lower back. She didn’t look like the kind of person my father was typically with. A woman in Levis, flannel shirt with the sleeves ripped off, no hips, long stringy black hair, she was a tomboy who looked like she had more in common with my brother than my father. I gravitated toward the two of them where they stood surrounded by men from my dad’s crew and my father introduced me. I was excited to finally meet the man I knew over the CB radio as the Great Pumpkin, and when my father drew my attention to Kelly, his tone changed. It was softer, expectant, as if he were showing me a new car he’d bought, something of which he was supremely proud and would likely be using with care for some time. She said “hi” in a quiet voice, stealing a look at me and glancing around nervously, as if the two of us were doing something horribly wrong. I heard my mother call my name and her voice was completely the opposite of Kelly’s, stern and direct. I turned and hustled away, understanding that I had intruded on the adults long enough. The jungle gym was calling me now.

* * *

“The picnic was at Lake Goodwin that weekend,” my mother explains. Understandably, the last thing she wanted was to go to the picnic that day and she didn’t see the need for the family to make an appearance. “I think it’s stupid,” she’d told him. “I don’t want to be there.”

He pleaded with her, telling her he had to be there. “I’m on the planning committee and they’re expecting me,” he said, and it became clear to her that if she dug her heels in too deep, he might go on without her. So she relented, agreeing to go on the condition that my father do absolutely nothing that might humiliate her.

“The first thing he did was start drinking beer from the keg there, which was unlike him because he didn’t usually hit it so hard so fast,” my mother recalls. “Then Kelly showed up.” The other picnickers had noticed Kelly’s arrival too, and a portion of the crowd became like spectators at a rumble, nervously looking between my father, Kelly, and my mother, waiting for the shoe to drop.

At some point my mother began walking toward the lake, passing Kelly on her way down. “I want to talk to you,” my mother said sharply. She walked on with Kelly a good twenty feet behind her. When they were a safe distance from the crowd, my mother turned around to face her. “You need to know that if he leaves, we don’t have the income to support two houses,” she said. “And then there’s child support. I only have a part-time job.” Kelly looked over my mother’s shoulder and my father suddenly appeared, seemingly from nowhere.

“What’s going on?” he asked. My mother glared at him, turned and went back toward the picnic.

As the day went on, my father continued nursing the keg. “I was standing around, trying to look like everything was great,” my mother says. “The Kentucky Fried Chicken dinners had come and most everyone was sitting down at picnic tables, eating. Suddenly, I looked up and there was Kelly leaning against someone’s pickup truck with a beer in her hand.” My father stood between my mother and Kelly, facing his new young girlfriend with a beer in one hand; the other was planted against the truck, next to her head.

“I guess I just lost it,” my mother says matter-of-factly, and the rest I remember with an oddly muffled clarity. I don’t recall seeing her run at him like a linebacker, her arms stretched out in front of her. Nor did I see her slamming into his upper back, pushing him right into Kelly. But I do have a distinct memory of the crash, the yells, and beer flying in all directions. Across the table from me was an older gentleman with bushy eyebrows and thinning hair slicked back over his head like a scarf and he was frozen mid-motion, his fork halfway between his plate and his gaping mouth.

“I told you not to embarrass or humiliate me!” my mother screamed at my father. Whirling around, she stomped over to our table, where my sister Karen and I were eating. “Get your brother and sisters; we’re leaving now,” she ordered.

We left the picnic with two empty seats in our van: my father’s and my fifteen-year-old brother Brad’s, who had been nowhere to be found (he’d be dropped off later at the house, stumbling and retching from the effects of too many stolen beers). As I quickly packed clothes into a brown paper shopping bag for a long weekend at my grandparents’ house I heard a car door slam. I pressed my face against my bedroom window just in time to see my father walk sheepishly through the gate. The front door opened and my mother stepped out on to the porch.

“I don’t think you have a clue what you’re doing,” she told him. “But I want you to get your shit out before I get back on Tuesday.”

* * *

Like logs turning into lumber, what has once been viewed as sturdy and reliably forever often finds itself carved into something completely new and different. The massive red cedar, towering, majestic, and seemingly eternal ultimately finds itself lying flat on a hillside, limbs being methodically torn from its sides, its bark eagerly stripped away. Change can cut to the quick in a dangerously sudden motion; the spinning blade of the band saw shapes a massive trunk to fit other needs—studs for a house, a row of fence posts, the beveled frame for a cherished family portrait. I could never have fathomed the significance then, but as I returned home from my grandparents’ house that day my life would be forever altered. The blue Chevy truck was gone from the cul-de-sac, never to return with any real permanence. And for an eleven-year-old boy who adored his mother but feared a father he barely knew, this change would be at once terrifying and strangely exhilarating.