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By Root 15402 0

I reflected with a stab of anguish upon my guilt (ineffaceable to that very moment), but it was anguish mingled with a queer tender gratitude for the grace with which the old man had confronted and dealt with my dereliction. Ultimately (and I don’t think I have alluded to this) he was a Christian, of the charitable variety. That gray late afternoon—I remember the pinpricks of snow which began to dance in the wind as the Packard rushed homeward—my father returned from work and was at my mother’s side half an hour before I got there. When I arrived he was muttering to himself and massaging her hands. The stucco walls of the modest little house had let winter enter like a foul marauder. The fire had hours before died out and he found her shivering helplessly beneath her afghan, her lips bitter and livid, her face chalky-dry with cold but also fright. The room bloomed with smoke from a smoldering log she had tried futilely to shove onto the fire with her cane. God knows what Eskimo ice-floe visions had engulfed her when she sank back amid her best sellers, all those bloated books of the month with which she had tried to barricade herself against death, propped her leg up on the stool with the onerous two-handed hitching motion I remembered, and felt the rods of the metal brace slowly grow as chill as stalactites against that wretched, useless, carcinoma-riddled limb. When I burst through the doorway, I recollect, one impression captured my soul so completely as to seem to envelop the room: her eyes. Those hazel bespectacled eyes and the way that her ravaged, still terrified gaze caught my own, then darted swiftly away. It was the swiftness of that turning away which would thereafter define my guilt; it was as swift as a machete dismembering a hand. And I realized with horror how much I resented her burdensome affliction. She wept then, and I wept, but separately, and we listened to each other’s weeping as if across a wide and desolate lake.

I am certain that my father—so ordinarily mild and forbearing—said something harsh, scathing. But it was not his words that I ever remembered, only the cold—the blood-congealing cold and darkness of the woodshed where he marched me and where he made me stay until long after darkness fell over the village and frigid moonlight seeped in through the cracks of my cell. How long I shivered and wept there I cannot recall. I was only aware that I was suffering exactly in the same way that my mother had and that my deserts could scarcely be more fitting; no malefactor ever endured his punishment with less rancor. I suppose I was incarcerated for no more than two hours, but I would willingly have stayed there until dawn or, indeed, until I had frozen to death—so long as I was able to expiate my crime. Could it have been that my father’s sense of justice had instinctively responded to this need in me for such a fitting atonement? Whatever—and in his calm unflustered way he had done his best—my crime was ultimately beyond expiation, for in my mind it would inescapably and always be entangled in the sordid animal fact of my mother’s death.

She died a disgusting death, in a transport of pain. Amid the heat of July, seven months later, she faded away in a stupor of morphine, while all the night before, I pondered over and over those feeble embers in the cold smoky room and speculated with dread on the notion that my abandonment that day had sent her into the long decline from which she never recovered. Guilt. Hateful guilt. Guilt, corrosive as brine. Like typhoid, one can harbor for a lifetime the toxin of guilt. Even as I writhed on the McAlpin’s damp and lumpy mattress, grief drove like a spear of ice through my chest when I recaptured the fright in my mother’s eyes, wondered once again if that ordeal had not somehow hastened her dying, wondered if she ever forgave me. Fuck it, I thought. Prompted by a commotion next door, I began to think of sex.

The wind rushing through my father’s deviated septum had become a wild jungle rhapsody—monkey cries, parrot yawps, pachydermous trumpetings. Through the