Untitled - December 2007

"Death will give us back to god just like the setting sun is returned to the lonesome ocean."
-Conor Oberst

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After my brother's death, my mother and father retreated into the separate countries of their grief, observing the strange customs of these new lands in the wake of untimely loss. I can say nothing so eloquent about myself; I watched a lot of television, mostly things my brother would have watched.

It was 1968, and my brother was a hero in the way only war makes heroes, and I could have been next but I wasn't. I was fourteen and struggling with so suddenly becoming the oldest and the only. At the funeral I sat with my cousins who dropped baseball cards into the casket and talked too much, looking lost and getting high behind the funeral home.

In the months that followed everything was dull down to the knives at dinner, so when Mom left and the screen door slammed and shook against the house I didn't care until my father sat down at the kitchen table and cried.

The men in my family do not cry. This is not a personal choice but a biological irregularity, having less to do with tear ducts and more with brain receptors and whiskey. The sight of my father at the table with a sob stuck in his throat like a chicken bone that won't go down brought a strange kind of fear to the surface of my brain, and I realized I did not know what to do. My father defied biology and sat at the table and cried fat tears of shame and humiliation.

His wet eyes shone with embarrassment and failure, his hands trembled as he lit a Lucky Strike on a kitchen match. I remembered after a football game where I had fallen and sprained my ankle, my father dragged me upward and punched my shoulder, called me Pal and brought me a root beer. So I punched his shoulder, light and quick and because he was crying the unfamiliar sting of tears harrassed the backs of my eyes and I punched him harder, each meeting of fist and body asking Why have you betrayed me, Where is my mother, Why are we crying in the stark light of this room with the light swinging and the moon so silent above us? Why do you look at me with failure sketched on you so undeniably written and so obvious?

But my father did not have answers for these questions left unasked at my tongue, he only had tears and the sloppy sounds accompanying them, stupid smoke signals I could not decipher rising from the cigarette perched in his stupid lips.