Deena Goldstone - Tell Me One Thing

Carrie wouldn’t come to the cemetery. She said there was no way she could watch her husband of fifty-four years lowered into the ground. Her children would have to bear witness at their father’s burial. It was her sister, Norah, who took her back to the house — the same narrow house they all grew up in — to help her lay out the food and wait for the children’s return.

As the oldest son, it falls to Hugh Jr. to pick up the shovel. Jamie can tell he’s barely sober enough to do it. Stumbling a bit, Hugh hefts a mound of damp earth and dumps it into the open grave. The sound of the clods hitting the wooden casket is startlingly loud. Jamie looks around — it’s the stillness of the air in the cemetery that accentuates the sound. They are the only family there. No one else is being buried on this April day, so he can hear the rustle of Kate’s silk dress as she shifts her weight onto her other leg, impatient. She wants this all to be over, bored and restless as she always is.

It’s warmer than it has a right to be this time of year. The air is lovely and expectant before the grand rush of spring. The breeze only a whisper through the leafless trees, certainly not strong enough to cool the air, and the grandchildren, scattered around the other sides of the open grave, are already shedding sweaters and jackets.

Drew clears his throat and Jamie looks over quickly to see that Drew is trying hard not to cry. Jamie can’t believe it, after all the grief the old man gave his brother.

When do you stop loving a parent? Jamie wonders. How much can a child take before that stubborn flame of necessary love sputters and dies? Moira would know the answer to that, he thinks, because she’s busy whispering to her teenage son, Sean, and doesn’t seem to take much notice of the dark brown casket lying just below her feet.

What happens to you , his train of thought goes, if you never let that feeling in? He can’t remember a time he ever felt anything but fear toward his father. Fear and a desire to get away from him. Even on those nights when Hugh had had just enough to drink so that he was expansive and not so much to drink that he was dangerous, even then Jamie kept his distance. He knew the line could be crossed with lightning speed, well before anyone else could figure out where it was, and that his father would reach out and grab him, force him to stand in front of his blustery, perspiring face as he shook him and yelled accusations that made no sense to a seven-year-old.

What did it matter that the next morning while his father was drinking his coffee and reading the sports section that he would reach over and ruffle Jamie’s hair with some sort of all-purpose, one-size-fits-all endearment? “There’s my boy” was about as far as Hugh Sr. would go, and even at seven Jamie was sure his father didn’t know which son he was talking to, head in the paper, his attention on the box scores from the day before.

And then, as the boys grew and their transgressions progressed into teenage rebellion, their father’s punishments escalated accordingly. Hugh Sr. thought nothing of beating his sons until his arm or the belt gave out, or kicking them down the stairs, or even, one time when Jamie was fourteen, chasing him around the house with a butcher knife grabbed from the kitchen counter in a rage.

“He’d had too much to drink” was his mother’s attempt at an explanation the next morning. “You know how he gets.”

“I know and so do you,” Jamie’s voice rising in pitch. “So why do you put up with it?”

“Ahhh, Jamie, you wouldn’t understand” was his mother’s only answer.

“Would you have let him kill me?” burst out of him before he could think about it. “That’s what he was yelling — that it was my time to die!”

“You’re making too much of it.” Carrie turned away, packing lunch boxes in the small kitchen.

“He had a knife!” Jamie fairly screamed.

“Did he not apologize this morning?”

“What difference does that make?! He’ll only do it again.”

And then Marianne came into the kitchen with her hairbrush and two ribbons for Carrie to make her braids and their mother turned gratefully away from Jamie’s accusations, stated and implied. Where were you , he wanted to ask, why didn’t you protect me? But he didn’t, because he understood finally, clear as day, that nothing was going to change in his parents’ house. He shut up about it and began to plot his escape. He set his sights on college as his savior, a goal so far from his father’s world that it felt safe.

Hugh Jr. wasn’t interested in college at all. To no one’s surprise, he joined his father in the small plumbing business the old man had been running for more than twenty years. That way their ongoing battles could continue. Now they argued about the quality of copper piping or the need for low-flow toilets instead of about grades or curfew, but it didn’t matter — the battles were what they wanted, the particulars were as changeable as the weather.

Kevin won an athletic scholarship to Holy Cross but never managed to distinguish himself in any sport once he was there. Jamie wasn’t surprised when he got a coaching job at St. Sebastian Prep, not twenty minutes from the house they all grew up in.

Drew never managed to settle himself into any work. He took over the third-floor dormitory where all four boys were once housed, a ghost now, who came and went without explanation. Carrie shrugged her shoulders when one or another of the children would ask about Drew. “He’s finding himself,” she’d say and change the subject.

Jamie knew from the night of the kitchen knife attack that he was putting as much distance between himself and his father as he could. He applied only to colleges on the West Coast, those in Oregon, Washington, and California. When he chose San Diego State, where he reasoned the weather would be warm and the academic demands would be manageable, his father flatly refused to give him a dime, not for a school in California that wasn’t even a Catholic college. That was his explanation, but Jamie suspected he just didn’t want to spend any money on him.

Jamie went anyway. His first semester was paid for by money carefully saved from working summers all through high school, and still he had to work two jobs to make it through. Each semester after that was touch and go. Sometimes he managed the tuition, sometimes he had to drop out and work for a while to be able to reenroll. It took him longer than most to get his degree, but he accomplished it as well as another year of graduate work, which gave him his teaching credential. Now he taught English to middle schoolers at a charter school in San Diego and managed to never go home to visit. His father’s funeral was the exception. He thought about skipping it, had talked to Moira about the fallout if he did, but allowed himself to be persuaded. “You need to do this for her,” she had said, “not for the old bastard. I can’t imagine how she’d get through it without you there.” And Jamie didn’t argue. He knew he had to go.

AT THE BRICK HOUSE ON CROSSLEY LANE where they all grew up, cars start arriving, one after another of his brothers and sisters and their families. Everyone parks on the street out of habit. It was a pet peeve of their father’s — finding somebody’s car in the driveway when he wanted to put his car into or take it out of the garage. So the edict — anyone parking in the driveway would be in serious trouble. What that trouble might be was never spelled out, but it didn’t matter — the driveway remained bare.

As Jamie turns left onto Crossley Lane after his father’s burial, he heads straight for the empty driveway and parks his rental car halfway up, just by the kitchen door.