Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [67]
When I get to my desk I power up the computer and open my e-mail. As the new messages roll in, a simple subject line catches my eye: “Tim.”
The e-mail is from the sister-in-law of a dear friend in England. I double-click it.
Hi Mike,
Some time ago Tim was diagnosed with cancer of the liver and was told that he hadn’t got long to live. He chose not to tell you as he wanted you to remember him as he was.
Tim passed away on 20th April at 3.am, he died as he wanted to without any fuss.
We weren’t sure how to contact you as you are often on the road and thought this was possibly the best way.
Don’t know what else to add at this point, we are sorry we know this will come as a shock Mike, but I know we will talk very soon.
Claire Amy Sylvia and Ronnie.
Aw, Tim, I think. I raise my eyes to the wall directly across from the desk: Tim, in an old photograph framed and hung from a nail. Twenty-three years we were friends. Last time I saw him he was fine. I check the date in the e-mail again. Six hours’ time difference—he would have died last night while I was frittering at the end of day.
When my mother was a child, she had a passel of international pen pals. Over the years the correspondence waned, but she and an English girl named Pat kept in touch into adulthood. In 1984, fresh off my first year of college, I traveled to England and my first stop was at Pat’s house. Pat had two daughters. One of them was dating Tim. We met the night I arrived, went to the local pub together the following evening, and got on like well-worn pals from that time forward.
His given Christian name was Timothy Swift. I always thought this an eminently toff English moniker, but you wouldn’t peg him to it if you saw him in the pub. There was nothing Jeevesy about the boy. He was a resident of Cannock, England, a Midlands lad, born near enough the environs of Birmingham that he carried the working-class Brummie accent (think Ozzie Osbourne with a cold), although how much of his accent was geographical cottonmouth and how much was just Tim is hard to know. Even his friends and relatives frequently found him indecipherably mumbly. I spent enough time in his company over the years that I grew to understand him relatively well, and during his visits to the States I happily served as translator. My advantage lay in the fact that the night we first met, Tim was convalescing from having his four upper front teeth knocked out in a pub parking lot the night previous. From my perspective, his locution only improved thereafter.
We called him Swiftie. He stood maybe five-four, favored Motor-head T-shirts and black socks with his tennie trainers, and wore a rose tattoo on his forearm. The rose was smudgy and prone to bubbling in the sun. The year we met he had just completed the English equivalent of technical college and was working at a factory, building motorcycle frames. This was a great relief to his mother, as a few short years previous he had been a greasy-haired headbanger with no evident prospects of a legal or supportable sort. In the one photograph I ever saw of him from that earlier era, he was devil-eyed and grinning around a remarkably misaligned cluster of incisors. In fact, he once confided that although he might have preferred a more professional procedure, having his teeth head-butted to the tarmac was actually a bit of a windfall, as the court instructed the other fellow to purchase Tim a new set that in the end were implants