Greg Baxter - A Preparation for Death

My mother lives in a small trailer on a couple acres of land that she and her husband, David, have turned into a little farm with vegetables and chickens and rabbits. To get there you have to cross a deep, muddy, litter-polluted gorge, and this cannot be done without a four-wheel-drive truck. It is a sinister-looking spot, the abandoned development where they live, just bulldozed roads that have turned, in a thousand heavy rains, to clay and slime. Everywhere you look there are hand-painted signs nailed to skinny pines that say Trespassers Will Be Shot, or DOG, and you are quite certain you’d rather be shot. Drive one minute up my mother’s road and you find an empty two-storey house that used to be a meth lab. Part of it is collapsed, and a dozen cars rust outside it. My mother has lived in all sorts of places, but this is where she will die, someday, and I think she will die satisfied.

This is my second landscape, of muggy green woods and scrub pines and cut-out, semi-paved neighbourhoods. My second novel is about this place, but since it sits unfinished, memories remain and stir a great deal of lingering antipathy. Gas stations in the middle of nowhere. Long country highways narrowly forged out of unhealthy forests. Vast car dealerships, giant stores along the interstate, wide roads with closed-down groceries and industrial bottling complexes, colonies of chain restaurants at ten-lane intersections, creosote plants, pawn shops, sad diners with my mother, always working, always broke, who was, for a long time, the loneliest person on earth. But never defeated.

I arrived on the evening of the 27th. I don’t remember the first night much. We saw a few relatives. We had dinner and a few beers and watched a movie, most of which I slept through. I woke the next day at around nine. It was warm and bright. My sheets were wet from night sweats and I felt better for it. My mother made coffee. We sat in front of the large television while she read a book about gardening and I read over a story I’d been meaning to edit — it had been accepted for publication, but I had to make some changes, make some connections more explicit. David was just up: he is a tall, white-haired man with short legs, hulking, monolithic and rectangular, except for his large belly. He is absurdly large in the situation of the tiny trailer. And he had looked better. He’d had cancers removed from his face, which was red and scabby — too many hours working outside, fixing roofs, rebuilding houses, and he hadn’t the skin for it.

We ate breakfast, a real feast — a dozen eggs hatched a hundred yards away and scrambled into very yellow huevos rancheros, a whole foot-long roll of ground country sausage fried in patties on an industrial skillet, a loaf of toast. I still didn’t have an appetite, and my mother looked upon my plate with disappointment, suggesting, without a word, that I had grown too skinny. It was true, and I could see my mother was weighing the risks of approaching the matter. No doubt the first sight of me in a year had been shocking: thin and green-grey, suddenly bald after quitting medication, and bird-legged. After breakfast, I gave my mother something of mine to read — a new essay just published in an Irish journal. I hoped, perhaps, that it might speak to my new attitude toward intent, my lucky torment — the lucid and lyrical substance of flesh in mid-rot, a song of self in dissolution. She read too silently, so I went for a shower. I checked myself in the mirror. I examined my body. The muscles in my arms were gone. I flexed and became winded. When I was out of the shower my mother said nothing of the essay, except, Have you started smoking?

We had some more coffee on the back porch, a wooden platform David built that is as wide and nearly as long as the trailer. From it, the yard drifts downward. A garden, an old barn, a greenhouse, another road. Little interrupts the serenity. A flushed toilet, and the shallow sewage lines gurgle toward the septic tank. Gunshots. Dogs barking or howling. From time to time a neighbour flies up or down the road in his battered Suzuki SUV, a fourteen-year-old on thrill rides. He, Dustin, who is my size but doughy and boyish, has no father and his mother is in jail for selling crack. He lives with his grandparents. He’s got no friends. He explodes fireworks and shoots inanimate objects. He paid us a short visit nearly every day, mainly to eat scraps and tell nigger jokes — he was, quite obviously, half black, but his grandparents told him he just tanned well. When he went by that morning he honked and my mother waved.

The sun was out but the day was hazy. A chicken hawk began to circle and my mother screamed at it a dozen times to get the hell away — she speaks with animals. It hid on a treetop and my mother shrieked, I see you, you sonofabitch! It shot off. When enough time had passed and it had not come back, we let the chickens out and fed them carrots. You hold the stalks tightly and let them peck, and when there is not much left they peck your fists and wrists. They are immensely healthy-looking animals — glossy and fat. Very calm, for chickens. Sometimes one hops on your leg, or shoulder, and squats for a while like an aloof and overweight potentate. When they had eaten all they wanted, we fed the rabbits.

I watched my mother tend her garden. The chickens followed her like lieutenants attending a contemplative general around a tent on the eve of battle. She is both sad and youthful, like a lovesick teenager. I know that she has regrets. I dream that I may somehow make up for the potential she threw away — she was endlessly creative and intelligent, but she sacrificed. The story is an old one, but your mother is your mother. You love her pain like you love your own. The blonde colouring in her hair was old, and an inch of grey roots was showing. She wears thick glasses because her work, refurbishing houses with David, is too messy for contacts.

My mother has always been at home around violence. She has, from time to time, a maniacal blood-temperature. Once, our cat, a poor, declawed thing we transplanted from San Antonio to Conroe after the divorce, was killed by a handful of Dobermann pinschers that belonged to a neighbour. They were in the middle of eating it when my mother walked up behind them with a.357 and, without shouting, not angrily, shot two of those dogs. She called the neighbour and told him to come pick them up. When he threatened to call the police, she dared him to. He relented. Another time, when I was eleven or twelve, a cousin hid a bag of weed under my bed. In the middle of some night he crawled through my window to retrieve it — but it had already been discovered. My mother woke and called him into the living room. She beat and bloodied him with her bare fists. Years before that, at a youth soccer game in San Antonio, some father got irate about some penalty, and ran to his truck to get a weapon — in my memory it was a crowbar. Everybody scattered but my mother. She stood between the man and the referee and told him if he hit her, he had better kill her, because she would chase him to the ends of the earth and get revenge. Not one man came to that referee’s aid.

Her work selling insurance, after the divorce, took her to far-flung homes in the rural wastelands of east Texas, and sometimes I went with her. We often encountered frothing and outraged guard dogs. They would gnaw on fence posts as she approached — I was too afraid to leave the car, but she would step through the gate, kneel, speak to the dog, and at once it would fall under some spell of love and pacification. The owners would say, I’ve never seen anything like that. Soon the dogs would be lying at her feet, and the owners would be writing cheques. I try to remind her of these things, and she pretends they never happened.