THE VILLAGE REPORT Driving slowly along Whitman Road past where the lovely red barn was before they moved it a few hundred feet further down; I always drive slowly down this stretch searching in the low beams for the glint of reflecting eyes in the grass and shrubs. Coming down the mountain road, just before the right turn onto Whitman, a young doe tentatively picked her way across the macadam, hesitating near the road’s edge. I slow, and sensing her uncertainty ready to brake hard if she decides to bolt backwards. Her behavior unsettles me. She is wholly indifferent to the presence of the automobile that is nearly upon her, and unfazed by the bright headlights; but it is not indifference suggesting confidence. She is thin, scrawny even, a juvenile. Why so thin in a summer of abundance? Her right hoof paws gingerly at the low greens abutting the asphalt, my right foot presses slightly harder on the brake pedal and with the minimum level of effort possible she glides off the roadway and I watch her flank slide between the bushes into the darkness. Is she domesticated, I wonder, already so accustomed to human and machine that our presence no longer matters? On the car radio they are playing old time music – mandolin, banjo, guitar, fiddle – every song on the subject of father. Two different tunes about “my daddy’s violin.” After awhile it sinks in, yes, it will be Father’s Day in the morning. The last Father’s Day with my father alive was 49 years earlier, maybe to the day, but while I remember well the day he died I no longer recall the exact date. The voice on the radio is singing about remembering, about tears, about life without that man. They are moving words set to a fine endearing melody. I try to put the chorus to memory and think I have it at last but in the morning they are gone and I am left with the remembrance of that summer morning, the sun just coming up, when two policemen looking about as awful as men can look and still be erect knocked at my grandmother’s door and asked for my mother. I knew them both as childhood friends of my parents. Please get your mom. She’s sleeping, I said. Better wake her, they said, somehow managing to look even worse by the second. Is it my father? They nodded. Is he dead? He and I had a disagreement on the phone several hours earlier and I was not feeling at all sympathetic. I was 17 and there had been too many trips to that well. Billy looked at Pinky and Pinky looked at Billy and I thought for a moment that we’d be needing an ambulance for Pinky, who with great effort brought himself to say that it was serious and she’d better come. I got her up, they spoke at the door using first names, then she dressed and they took her in the cruiser down to Saint Luke’s. I followed shortly in my grandmother’s car. My uncle had been called and he arrived about that I did. I left the two of them sitting on the wood bench outside the emergency room and walked down the tiled corridor to the hospital canteen and ordered some coffees. I had the cups on a tray and was almost through the canteen door when I was struck full force by an onrushing cold wind followed by the rapid and gentle beating of feathers, like the tips of tropical birds’ wings caressing my face and shoulders and hands and arms. In a second or two it passed and I felt that his soul had somehow sought me out and he was gone. I walked out and headed down the hall. My mother was crying and my uncle looked up at me and his face said everything. A few more steps and in the open emergency room I see my father, mouth agape, lying on a table. The nurse sitting next to my mother realizes where I am looking and quickly gets up to go close the door. The songs on the car radio are still playing as I pull over by the beaver pond and aim the headlights across the surface hoping to spot a moose. But there is nothing to be seen and the rest of the ride is uneventful. In the morning I arise and go into the kitchen. It is Father’s Day and the radio made in the shape of a Chevrolet grille is tuned into a Country & Western station. They have upped the Father’s Day sweepstakes ante and are playing songs about daddies who, like mine, were also military veterans. Inwardly, I salute. Father’s Day 2013
Posted on: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 05:08:01 +0000
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