Around the same time that my mother was using an outhouse located in the yard near the calf pen, my father was several thousand miles away pissing in a boys' lav, something with tiles all over the walls and a porcelain trough, glistening stainless steel faucets overhead. This bathroom, in my mind's eye, would not be clean nor sterile, but smell of sweat socks and the perfumey scent of grubby boys, musty and dank.
Like a paleontologist who has uncovered something precious but practically destroyed, I must reconstruct the missing pieces with plaster, whatever has been given to me about their lives I must repave into something solid yet unbelievable. I write about them as if they are already dead. That's fear speaking of course, but also a certain sense of reality. I am older now, and as I feel my way through adulthood like a dark hallway leading to a bathroom, assuming at some point I will actually be relieved, they are aging. As I speak. They are growing frayed, chipped and weathered, they're slowing down and things are failing on them. Minds and body parts. So I am working with them for a limited time, I only have so long to gather information before everything becomes fiction. Also, there is the other reason: one speaks but does not remember; the other remembers but does not speak. Imagine the difficulties that presents.
When I was small, my father would take me on outings to whaling museums and hardware stores, to train yards and package shops. Manly things, I felt then. And our car rides were nearly always silent, "House of the Rising Sun" would be playing in the car, or else that song "The Wanderer" by Dion, which were the only songs my father would try to sing along to, and we would sit there wordless between us, a certain unspoken understanding that the radio and the open road with a destination in mind were enough. Sometimes on the ride back he would take the long way home, the scenic route which coincidentally managed to snake its way past his first home for the first 5 years of his life. Up the hill on
.
My mother does not remember, or at least she does not remember the sequence of time or how things happened or the gristle that I want to know to help explain things. If you ask her about her childhood she will paint a picture of a farm with a mother and a father and three boys and three girls who slept in only two beds. And she will tell you the humorous anecdotes about playing sheep with a bunch of pebbles and snorting one of them up her nose; as a child I would hear this story and question the believability of a rock looking like a sheep. And she would talk about her own pet sheep, a lamb that she loved and brushed with a comb and dressed its wool in ribbons until it finally went out to slaughter. And she will tell this story with a smile and teary red eyes from laughing too hard. The death of beloved pets was never a trauma.
My father will mention his own pets, which were not really his pets but the dogs and cats of whichever family he lived with that year: Niggy the cat, Queenie the blonde cockerspaniel. None of these families who owned these animals have names; they go largely unidentified and storyless. Only what the families ate for dinner is mentioned: fish on Fridays, spaghetti on Wednesday, pork on Sundays. I know of his childhood mainly through meals I wouldn't want to have eaten: meatloaves, franks and beans, three bean casseroles.
