C Hribal - The Company Car

It would be safe to say that Okie never got past Nomi. Our mother went inside the house and was gone for several minutes before she started screaming, “Help, help! Somebody help! Help me! Help!”

We took off running, only to be barred from coming inside the house by our mother, who told us to stay outside, an ambulance was coming. Her face was ashen. She admitted Cinderella and Okie; the rest of us sat on the front stoop or milled around, waiting to find out what in Sam Hill was going on.

We didn’t find out until the ambulance arrived, lights and siren blazing. They went in with a wheeled gurney. Father Reardon, Monsignor Kahle’s replacement, arrived all harried moments later, clutching a black valise that looked like a doctor’s bag. The paramedics came out several minutes later, their gurney now holding what looked like a zippered gray garment bag. They put this in the back of their truck and drove away slowly, almost casually, pausing at driveway’s end to put on their turn indicator. There were no lights or siren. Our mother had come out with Father Reardon and Cinderella with Okie while they were loading up the gurney and its burden. Okie had his arm around Cinderella, who curved herself into his chest, and Father Reardon had his arm around our mother, who stood stiffly, the wind ruffling her hair and causing her tears to curve down the slope of her face, which she batted at with her cast.

“She was saying she needed to pee,” our mother said. “And I said, ‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ and she said I needed to hurry, or she’d be sitting there in her own juices. And I laughed, and she laughed”— our mother’s mouth fell open as she was saying this, and she put her hand to her open mouth as though trying to keep something in that had fallen out—“and it seemed, for a moment there, just like old times. And then while I was getting her to sit up so I could scoot the bedpan beneath her”— again our mother’s mouth fell open and she gasped for breath—“she opened up her mouth and everything just came out.” She gestured with her casted hand to indicate the arc of the hemorrhage out of her mouth. “There was just so much of it, all at one time, and there was nothing I could do to stop it, and then she was gone.”

Our mother’s voice had gotten very quiet, and was choked by her crying, which was a queer happy-crying, like she felt better about things now that they were over. “At least it was quick, at least she didn’t suffer. It was just everything, all at once”—she made her gesture again—“and then she was gone, so soon, so soon, oh, my God, she went so soon!”

Six months later, when our sister married Oswald Grunner in a ceremony that came only weeks after the hushed disclosure that she had been impregnated by him, the impregnation itself was classified an accident. That was how Okie maintained it had happened, by accident, and if Nomi had been alive she would have proclaimed Okie was right. It was an accident from the word go.

That was the beginning of the end, but what it was the end of nobody could say. The clock struck midnight on Cinderella—we knew that much. We knew, too, that our father had wanted to believe our move out of Chicago and into the country had made us impregnable. So maybe Cinderella’s pregnancy put an end to that. And though our father was quietly furious, he was also stoic. After all, she wanted to marry the lout, and the lout was amenable to marrying her. Maybe it would all work out. “We shall see what we shall see”—even with a pregnant daughter, our father was a Zen optimist.

He believed, for example, that the itty-bitty creek that ran through our property held fish. Or could hold fish. He had seen a few minnows hanging out in the shade of the culvert one hot day and decided that, yes, though ours was an intermittent creek—some summers it dried up completely—it was part of a great drainage basin. It was a feeder creek for Bear Creek, which fed the Embarrass River, which met up with the Wolf, which flowed into Lake Poygan, which slid into Lake Winneconne, which joined up with Butte des Morts, which flowed into Winnebago, which spilled off into the Fox River, which flowed north— North, goddammit, north! Can you believe it? The only river in North America that flows north —up to Green Bay, where it became Lake Michigan, which ultimately joined the St. Lawrence River, which joined the mighty Atlantic, which was one ocean of four, but Look, he’d say. Do you see any boundaries? In all of that water, do you see any boundaries? No, you don’t. It’s all one ocean, it’s all connected. That creek out there —he’d jab his finger out toward our woods— it’s part of the Atlantic Ocean if you think about it. We could be catching tuna out there some day. Or eel. Or albacore!

This exuberance of our father was not unexpected. His capacity for great dreams was not yet exhausted. His belief in the brotherhood of fish—that we could hook an albacore in our creek—was greater than his belief in the brotherhood of man. This confused us, but it should not have. Leaps of faith were not without pitfalls, and though our father, trained as a biologist, subjected to the rigors of Navy discipline, wanted to believe there was a logic to his leaps, they were leaps all the same. Some hurdles of logic he cleared; others he didn’t. That a sea bass could make its way upstream, past locks and dams and predatory birds and a drastic change in its environment’s saline content, and eventually find its way into our backyard was more believable to him than the notion that all men were brothers under the skin. We’d left the suburbs because they’d gotten ugly, and with more people fleeing to them they were apt to get uglier. A man who dealt with people all day, our father wanted to get away from people. This put him at odds with his adopted religion, but Catholicism itself is a bundle of contradictions and—at least as it is practiced in America—quite tolerant of hypocrisy. That whole notion of “practicing Catholic” appealed to him. You were never a perfect Catholic; you were always practicing, always falling a little short, and with a wink and a nod and a few Our Fathers and Hail Marys you were back on the schneid. Al Capone, our father was sure, was a very good Catholic when he wasn’t killing people.

When our father married our mother, he’d gone from being an agnostic to being an indifferent Catholic, lapsed almost from the moment of his First Communion. But then a strange thing happened. After we were born he transformed himself into a Super-Catholic, the SC emblazoned on his chest. He wore a scapular, a St. Christopher medal, joined the Loyal Order of Moose, had a St. Christopher statue mounted on his station wagon’s dash, put up crucifixes in our rooms. He kept prayer cards in his wallet, a rosary in his Dopp kit. He loved St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers and peddlers. Years later, our father never forgave Rome for taking St. Christopher off its official saints list. And for the flimsiest of reasons—just because the famous ferrying never happened? “So what?” said our father. “None of it is true. It’s all stories. You think that sliver of wood in the glass compass they have us kiss on Good Friday is a piece of the true Cross? Give me a break.” But he believed in that, too, just as he believed in the Shroud of Turin and Mary of Lourdes and Fatima and transubstantiation and the stigmata and the forgiveness of sins and life everlasting. What he loved was ritual. The belief in belief. He loved the Latin Mass, with its chanted Kyries and its incense and the priest at the altar with his back to the parishioners. A clear chain of being—God outside, above and behind the church spires, the priest at the altar, the parishioners in their pews, the mothers in the back with the whiny little ones, and ushers moving among the faithful, directing traffic, taking up the collection, bringing up the gifts, selling the Sunday paper on the steps of the church afterward. Our father liked the idea of being one of God’s ushers—solemn, serene, in charge. A universe that made sense, that was orderly. He saw all that slipping away after Vatican II. The hand-holding, guitar-playing “Kumbaya shit”—he didn’t trust it. A garrulous man, our father was uncomfortable with the rite of peace. He believed in hierarchy, and this new equality among the community baffled him. Still he believed, and what he believed, we believed, at least for a while.