The “J” on the "K"

They all want to know about the Kennedy.  Some ask to see the scars from the Econolines’ bumper that nearly dropped me onto Montrose Avenue.  Was it true that it almost shattered my hip?  Yes.  Was it true that I lost a finger hanging onto to the guardrail waiting for either fire department/police rescue/arrest me?  No.  You know they are looking to best the J. They scamper across a four lane arterial and suddenly they think they invented competitive jaywalking. It didn’t start with the Kennedy so they are just going to have to hear it from the beginning.

In middle school, my father, who was a mediocre runner in college, talked my way onto the school track team.  “The boy’s fast,” he assured Mr. Ritou, the coach. I was terrible.  I didn’t want to wait for the starter’s pistol, I couldn’t stay in my lane, and, when I was on a relay team, I didn’t share the baton. My father had to return his athletic dreams to the shoebox containing his dusty JV letters. 

Fifteen.  I was hanging out behind the dumpsters with my friends, Matt, Jason and Anwar.  We weren’t really into booze, pot or girls; we were just looking for trouble.  Jason and Matt where talking about a group of guys who gathered to run across Western and Fullerton on Saturday afternoon. 

“Why,” I asked. 

“Cause it’s fun to be an asshole,” Jason said, flashing a pimply grin.

Competitive Jaywalking was simple.  Wait for the light to change and sprint across the street.  You competed on speed and style.  The first time, my heart was in my throat as I watched the Buick bearing down on me, I spun to my left to the sound of blaring horns and just missed running into a Camry.  To my right, I saw a delivery truck barreling up the far lane.  I should have let it pass, but I could see Matt on the curb groping a stopwatch.  There was a small space past the BMW’s bumper and where the truck would be in about 3 seconds.  I took off.  Someone screamed; I felt the truck’s horn in my stomach.  The heel of my right sneaker hit the truck’s rear tire and I pirouetted onto the curb to the sound of cursing (the truck driver) and cheers (everybody else).

We scattered at the sound of police sirens and met up in the parking lot of a shuttered Zayres.  We drank warm beer and watched the shaky tape of my run.  Even the kid from Robert Taylor Homes had to give me props.  Not only did I set a time record for the crossing but no one had ever scored over 16 let alone seen a 17 rating. 

The next week we picked Ashland at Addison, right before a Cubs game.  The east bound traffic clogged the north south lane and so it was like trying to run in front of a dam’s slue.  As soon as the light turned green, cars that had seen at least three cycles of traffic lights pass, floored it and we took off.  Jose, a skinny kid from Pilsen, almost bought it on the grill of an Impala, but had enough sense to roll onto the hood and slip off like a brush at a car wash.  He lost time, but got a shit load of points for landing on his feet. 

I took my time, despite the shit I was getting.  My artist’s eye saw a perfect storm of Camaro, a Porsche and two delayed CTA buses heading in opposite directions.  The light went green, the wheels screeched and I was off, ducking past the Camaro that had to slam on its brakes, I twisted right forcing the Porsche to veer left and I squeezed myself between the two buses, pirouetting out, allowing the side of a Land Cruiser to spin me just in time to spring in front of VW Bug that slammed on the brakes and was rear-ended by a Celica. Smiling, I climbed up on its bumper to hop onto the east side of the street.  17.5.

I was walking down Cullom Avenue when somebody grabbed my shoulder and I nearly shit my pants fully expecting to see a cop staring back at me.  Instead it was some guy in his thirties with big mirrored aviator sunglasses.  His left hand was holding a cane with a ball and claw head.  “Nice run, kid.  You got really talent-speed and style.  Usually, you get one but not the other, but your game is nearly flawless.”  He held up a cautionary, crooked finger.  “Nearly flawless.  But with the right coaching, you could be the Wayne Gretzky of competitive jaywalking.  You interested?”

I nodded.  “Walk with me.  My name’s Stan Tierny.  He waited for me to recognize him. I had never heard for Slam Bam Stan the Man who had almost single-handed invented the sport.  He shifted the cane to his right hand and limped, a souvenir from a panel van on the Tom Landry Freeway in Dallas.

In Stan’s day competitive jaywalking was just something kids did for the thrill without Go-Pros strapped to their heads, hard rock soundtracks and corporate sponsors.  Stan was a pure jaywalker, putting his life at risk for the sake of art and being a dick. 

“Some of us see being an asshole as reward in itself not some sell-out sport.” He fought hard not to follow skateboarding, BMX and snowboarding suckling on the teat of commercialism.  All it took was one kid who misjudged the speed of a semi and got plastered on its grill for Competitive Jaywalking (or as we called it CJ) to enter the mainstream consciousness. 

There were the breathless condemnations in the media.  “We were called idiots, jerks and every synonym in the thesaurus.  Heads were shaken.  Vows to clamp down were expressed and corporate sponsorship nearly tripled in a year.  But to Stan, it was like spray painting the Sistine Chapel. “What the hell’s wrong with just being an asshole without looking like some NASCAR douche-bag with corporate patches all over you?

But the money was great and the adulation better. Stan watched me duck trucks and sports cars realizing I was more interested in the Web hits than being hit.  He shook his head, wondering what the fuck was wrong with kids nowadays, more interested “likes” than being a jerk.

For him, I had to choose which way to go, I could go left (or old school) or I could go right and sell out. I had to decided quickly as I wouldn’t be on the JV CJ circuit for longer.  Right now I was running on mostly arterial streets where the traffic was already backed up that it became simply a matter of speed with no substance.  Some people didn’t even bother to honk.  Stan looked at kids filming us and shook his head.  “If you are going to film something, it might as well be good.  Not this boring shit.”  I guess he wanted to show me that jaywalking for the sake of jerkdom was enough.

“Good” turned out to be the I5 in Norwalk, California; Thursday. 10:05 am.  Three lanes going north.  Cement barrier.  Three lanes going south. Average speed 62 miles per hour.  Kids who got the text were sitting on the hood of their cars blaring Motörhead songs.  I took off, making it past two semi’s and a Corvette, without having to alter my trajectory.  A blaring Tundra made me spin and land on the shoulder and do a 360 over the barrier and onto southbound traffic, weaving between a GTi, an Altima and a Ford Explorer, which almost careened into a F150.  The crowd was hollering as a vaulted over the retaining wall and up the chain link fence.  I jogged across Route 42 just as a flourish and was greeted by a man in a suit who put an arm around me, shoving his business card in my shirt pocket.

Seeing the card, Stan looked like I had just peed on his mother’s grave.  “You’ve got real talent. But CJ is about the art and the attitude, not the endorsements. He hated what would be coming next, but even he had to admit even Michelangelo needed to get paid. 

He grimaced when I signed the sponsorship agreement, limping finally away.  But without the deep pockets of corporations, certain police officers wouldn’t have gone on break as I stood on the edge of the Kennedy Expressway.  Six lanes going north.  The elevated tracks.  Two reversible lanes, going south at the time.  Six lanes going south.  With the thump of helicopters overhead, I wondered what was the point of art if no one saw it.  Flicking on the Go-Pro, I knew how Michelangelo felt when the block of marble said: “I’m David, motherfucker, come find me.”  

A Ginsberg Christmas

He reached into his boxer shorts and gave himself a healthy scratch.  He waited for the inevitable expression of revulsion, either from his mother or sister.  His father, barely registering above catatonia would not comment.  Ginsberg exhaled loudly and let out a therapeutic fart.  Still nothing.  

Was this what his great aunt Fanny called a “machiya,” an alleged Yiddish word to express pleasure? In aunt Fanny’s case, it was a signal she had released herself from the crushing confines of her girdle.

Was this a genuine machiya?  In a life, defined by eternal disappointment, he could not imagine he was eligible.  He perched by the indentation in the shape of his father, carved over the years by his father who had taken up residence on the couch due to a nervous condition.  Ginsberg lifted his right butt cheek and let out another fart.  Ginsberg was convinced he had been irreparably damaged by his father’s infectious doubt and thus was entitled to revenge.  Take that.  Brrap!  He fantasized his father returning from the family trip, dropping himself into his customized hole and sniffing suspiciously.  However, with Ginsberg’s luck, he would probably assume it was his own flatulence.  

How had Ginsberg come to be so lucky as to be left alone in the family’s fading and faltering Georgian that would most likely be torn down when the last Ginsberg was carried out feet-first?  It started, as all things Ginsberg, with bad news.  Ginsberg returned home from another day of irrelevant work as a salesman at United Carbonation at which he sold bubbles.  Mrs. Ginsberg must have been perched behind the front door, awaiting the sound of his slouching shuffling.  She nearly pulled his arm out of his socket as he twisted the knob.  

“There you are,” she said in a voice that would remind a worldly bird watcher of three-wattled bellbird of Panama.  “There you are,” was her usual greeting for him that simultaneously conveyed impatience and repulsion. 

Her eyes darted back and forth.  “Cancer,” she hissed.  Judging by the frequency of its mention, Cancer seemed to be the third Ginsberg child.  Either someone had it, would get it or was lulled into complacency by such nonsense as remission.  Ginsberg’s heart gave a momentary trill as if his mother was reporting she was the one with cancer.  Or maybe she and his father had it?  Hell, why not throw in his sister, Rachel?  Ginsberg was not heartless.  He knew that he would feel an emotion that was related to grief, but for the moment, the situation had a win-win flavor to it.  

“Who has cancer?”

“Your uncle Seymour,” she said, throwing her doughy arms around his neck and soaking his chest with a combination of saliva, snot and the last apricot rugelach.  

It took a moment for Ginsberg to remember who uncle Seymour was.  It wasn’t that the extended Ginsberg clan were not close.  There were cousins as near as two miles, but they might as well be on the other side of the moon.  His mother complained they were always excluded from Ginsberg family functions. On the rare occasions they were accidentally invited, Mrs. Ginsberg interrogated everyone to such a degree that they never made the mistake again.  Needless to say, the Ginsbergs rarely had “plans.”

Uncle Seymour was Mr. Ginsberg’s older brother who, by last count, was on his third wife and second house in Boca Raton.  The Ginsbergs boys weren’t close, even as children.  Seymour was allergic to his baby brother, always itching whenever he was in the vicinity.  He even found a way to beg out of a hug when their parents died.  

After his oncologist informed Seymour his liver cancer had metathesized and he should not make any plans beyond spring, he was further disappointed to learn that his wife, Corina, contacted his brother. Corina was a Filipina and a devout Catholic.  Perhaps Seymour, who hid his Judaism, thought she might put in a good word for him to a God.  Corina issued an all-points bulletins to relatives to make the trek to Florida to welcome Jesus’ birth and say goodbye to Seymour.  

“We are leaving in the morning,” Mrs. Ginsberg said.  

A trip to the ninth circle of Hell had more appeal than being crammed into the family Oldsmobile that seemed to be fueled by disillusionment.  Ginsberg was desperate; secretly willing a blood vessel in his body to burst, figuring hospitalization was the only acceptable excuse to get him out of the trip.  He struggled through the visualization exercise.

Then a Christmas miracle happened.  His mother casually added: “of course, we aren’t expecting you to go.  It is probably too late get permission to take off work. We don’t want to do anything to jeopardize your job.”  Mrs. Ginsberg lived in perpetual fear of Ginsberg losing his job as his meagre salary was all they lived on.

Should he tell his mother that he got off every Christmas? Absolutely not.  He feigned disappointment, but he need not bother. His mother was such a horrendous narcissist; she could find beauty in a fun-house mirror.  “I know it sounds odd but I am sorry that you will be alone on Christmas Eve.  I will miss our Christmas Eve tradition.”

Christmas Eve.  The one day of the year that Ginsberg’s loneliness was elevated to the sublime.  There was the fact that he wasn’t Christian and most people were.  There was the fact that it was a time that most people came together as members of a loving family.  And then there were the Jews.

For the Jewish community, Christmas Eve meant one thing: Chinese food.  They would crowd into large booths and eat Peking Duck and drink unpronounceable lagers.  Although many restaurants were open, Christmas Eve Chinese food was a night of tradition that could not be easily broken.  People made reservations months in advance to host elaborate celebrations of the birth of baby for whom they would be eventually blamed for crucifying. Ostensibly it was the one night when the majority that loathed them were sequestered in their churches or homes.  

Three-quarters of the Ginsberg greeted Christmas Eve like an idiot mongrel who still loved their master despite being hit it with a rolled up newspaper for the slightest infraction. “The whole world is Jewish!” Mrs. Ginsberg crowed as she pulled her dress covered in dreidles.  Rachel, too, looked forward to meeting eligible and hopefully drunk doctors.  Even, Mr. Ginsberg could easily be extracted from his hole in the couch.  He loved egg rolls and would consume at least five at a seating. 

Only Ginsberg, who could have told Pandora not to bother, knew better.  The restaurant would be packed and Ginsberg family fingers would point at each other for forgetting to make reservations. In the end, they were seated at a card table by the kitchen door usually reserved for exhausted delivering drivers.  Every twenty seconds, Mr. Ginsberg would have the back of his head hit, causing him to choke and litter the table with half-chewed egg rolls. Mrs. Ginsberg took the opportunity to make a tour of the room, ostensibly to greet other women who should have been as thrilled to see her as she was to see them.  She rolled back to table like a haar rolling across a loch.  “A bunch of more stuck-up bitches, you could not find.”  She would squeeze into her chair and began the traditional argument with Rachel that shrimp egg foo young was kosher because it didn’t contain any pork or milk.  Rachel was primed for an argument as she discovered all the doctors, eligible or no, were being noble by working Christmas Eve to allow their non-Jewish colleagues to enjoy the holiday.  “Self-important bastards,” Rachel growled.  And so it continued until the waiter brought the check and then waited for them to pay and leave.  

It was one thing to be alone in a country that would prefer you went back to wherever you were kicked out of.  It was another to be shunned by your own people who agreed.  Finally, to be seated at a wobbly table with his so-called family, who had been placed there as some sort of genetic joke.  He did not know how he could feel any more alone.

Until this Christmas Eve as he sat in underwear when he realized his father packed the TV remote control; the knobs being lost years ago. There was also nothing to eat in the house except rigatoni and dried black mushrooms.  The corner store, the only accessible source of food, had closed early so the clerks could be with their families.  Ginsberg tried the Chinese restaurant one more time and, as with the previous 13 times, the woman with the limited English with limited Englosh could not understand him over the din of laughing Jews hung up.  

Next Stop, Valhalla

Ellen sniffed at the cold morning air that compared unfavorable to an abandoned fish packing plant.  All along the lakefront, little silver fish---alewives---had made their lemming way across Lake Michigan to drop dead on Chicago’s shores.  Her husband, Jeff, was stamping his feet by the van we rented, waiting for the signal to cut down the canoe stowed on top.  My husband, Russell, was glancing nervously at his watch, waiting for the hearse driven by his friend Butch to show up.  Everything depended on timing and Ellen’s doubt was not helping.  “Are you sure we have his last one?”  

By “his” she meant our father, Arnold, who, ideally would be in the back of the hearse along with hay bales and accelerant.  According to his final request, we would transfer him to the canoe, light it on fire and pushed him into the lake ala a Viking.  The last one referred to his last (as in final) will and testament.  

Dad had been a successful lawyer, spending all of his career in the general counsel office of a local electric equipment company.  Most of his work involved negotiating real estate transactions or union contracts. Dad was probably the most uncontentious person there was.  In his mind, disagreement only meant he hadn’t worked hard enough to find consensus.  It was a skill that came in handy as he was father to Ellen and me who argued as a hobby throughout our teenage years. Mom was more voluble and would yell she was fully capable of inventing a time machine so she could go back in time and prevent herself from becoming pregnant with either of us.  Being alive, she reminded us, was a luxury and not a right.  

Dad on the other hand would take a more passive role.  According to Dad, we could kill each other, so long as we waited until we fulfilled the dictates of his numerous wills.  While the substance of the wills was the same, our mother, who he erroneously believed would survive him, inherited it all.  In the unlikely even that our mother predeceased him (which she did by almost nine very sad years), Ellen and I would split the estate equally.  

The issue wasn’t what to do with the valuable parts of his estate, but rather what we were to do with his remains.  Dad’s mother had died when he was three.  He had no memory of her and his step-mother was a poor substitute.  Their difficult relationship could be chalked up to mutual disappointment and he buried her without grief. 

Something drew him to the idea of death.  “One moment you’re here.  The next you’re in a hole.”  He wasn’t being lugubrious.  He found it fascinating and as a result something he joked about constantly.  He became a performance artist in which his will was his media. 

The first codicil I remember was when I was fifteen.  He came into the living room, standing in front of the television waving several sheets of paper.  He had written his epitaph.  He shuffled the pages until her found what I like.  “I herby request that my grave shall bear the following epitaph, engraved in suitably large letters as to be legible from a distance of 10 feet: ‘I’d rather be breathing.’”  He lowered the pages and obviously expecting acclaim.  Ellen was mad about something and consequently mad at me. I just wanted to watch Miami Vice and mom just looked up from her knitting and smiled as if she was hearing a toddler prattle nonsense.  “Don’t you get it?  I’d rather be breathing?  I will be dead.  And” he said, he opened his arms, “I’d rather be breathing.”

We nodded so Ellen could get back to being mad at me, I could covet Don Johnson and mom could return to the scarf.  Before Dad went back to his study, he made us each promise that we would adhere to his will’s provisions.  It seemed innocuous if not inane so we nodded.  

Within two weeks, Dad had changed his will to instruct us to engrave: “Told You I Was Sick.”  He flashed the pages again as a sign of his sincerity.  Again, nods as if he had just informed us that the sun rises in the East.  

Later, he announced at dinner that he had changed his mind again.  He was going to copy Mel Blanc’s epitaph and go with “That’s All Folks.” Later, he realized he had no association with that phrase as did Mr. Blanc.  He could not be defined for eternity by a single phrase.  He clearly needed to leave his options after he had technically run out of them.  He hereby declared that there would be a small blackboard inserted into his gravestone and his heirs and assigns would be required periodically (but no less than once a month) write one of the epitaphs he had attached as an addendum to his will.   

Eventually, he lost in interest in what was inscribed on his gravestone and more of what went happened to his body.  The first few iterations were what we came to call the body as practical joke.  The first will in this category stipulated, while most of his entire body was to be donated to science, at least 10% of it would be reserved for what he called “jokes of the practical nature, constructed to cause both shock and hilarity without doing actual harm either physical or psychological.”  He was kind enough to provide examples, such as his head placed in the top of a locker, perched to fall out when the door was opened.  Or his liver strategically placed under the covers of someone’s bed.  The other 90% of his remnant would be Science’s whim.  

He grew bored with practical jokes and soon was obsessed with his funeral.  He wanted his coffin be perched on a trio of chairs at the front of the sanctuary with a sign: “Three Chairs for Arnold.”  The three chairs were replaced with one.  A single chair placed towards the back of the sanctuary on which he would be seated, waiting for an unsuspecting sympathy expresser to come to the realization they are seated next to a corpse.  When Mom wrinkled her nose, expressing doubt that the synagogue would allow it, he went back to his study and came out with the rough schematic for a coffin that would throw its lid open at some point in the service.  He got another mom-shake of the head on that one.  

Mom had the last laugh as a pain in her stomach turned out to be ovarian cancer and she was gone in less than four months. Dad watched her being lowered into the cold dark earth without comment, just his tears drumming on her coffin lid.

He considered having his remains blasted into space.  But as he grew older, he seemed less interested in making people laugh but rather his being present after death.  At first, it was a simple urn on mantle piece, until he learned how cremation released toxins into the air and required nearly eight gallons of fuel.  He discovered promession in which the body is freeze-dried, broken apart with ultrasound and then placed in the ground to nourish a tree.  “Think about it,” you can just look out the kitchen window and there I will be.”  This idea lasted until he noticed Buford, our basset hound watering every plant in the backyard.  I assume that is when the idea of a Viking funeral began.

When Dad was 72, Ellen noticed his sclera were yellow.  Within three days, the three of us sat in the oncologist’s office as he explained that the cancer was in the bile ducts and was inoperable.  Dad had six months at most to make his final choice for the disposition of his remains.  For a man given a terminal diagnosis, Dad was fairly sanguine. I assume years of preparation had softened the blow.  Ellen went to the bathroom; I assume she didn’t want Dad to see her crying.  Dad and I sat in silence while the doctor went to find the hospice brochure.  

Eventually, I had to ask.  “Why did you spend so much time on your funeral arrangements?  Were you that afraid of dying?”  

“No, not of dying,” His face was gaunt and the color of butter.  He looked at bare trees through the window.  His voice was distant as if from the bottom of a well.  “I never knew my mother.  My father never mentioned her. If she had any family, I never met any of them. I guess he wanted to protect me or himself. I don’t know if she was tall or short, fat or thin, a blonde or a brunette, sweet or mean. I don’t even know her name.  He put his golden hand on mine and smiled like a saint.  “I am not afraid of dying.  I am afraid of being forgotten.”

The Eighth Kingdom

In the morning, Ælbert is gone.  Down the hill, either west towards Dyfed or east towards Mercia.  The Kingdom of Norwessex: population one, its King.  King Ælvan.  Me.  Ælbert is my son and my heir.  In any other Kingdom, he would be a leader of men.  Perhaps even be worthy of an epithet like the Brave, the Bold or even the Great.  If he bore any epithet it was Prince Ælbert of Where?  I don’t blame people who have never heard of Norwessex. Most people couldn’t tell Kent from Sussex.  Why should I expect them to know about a Kingdom that was basically one hill with a view of the bad side of Gleawecestre?  Norwessex—blink and you’ll miss it.

Alone in my castle, which is basically a stone hut with a ditch surrounding it, I survey my kingdom.  From here, I can see Æthendun, the capital city.  Actually more like the capital hamlet, three huts, two barns and a manure pit.  Even if the Danes could find it, the plunder would be depressing.  Five cows who all have seen better days and a dyspeptic sheep who follows me around on my Spring progress, baaing critically.  

Every so often, the wars that were tearing the other kingdoms apart play out on my doorstep. I eat my gruel to the sound of hand-to-hand combat and listen to the squeal and the squelch of the loser.  They leave the body at the base of the hill.  Sighing, I grab the shovel and set about burying the body.  I used to have serfs to do this work.  Then it was down to Ælberta, my Queen, and me to deposit the body in a pit.  Now Ælberta is gone, on the arm of some brutish Danish thegn.  Whatever horrors the Aefred, former Archbishop of Æthendun, would preach about the heathen was better than living as queen of a postage-stamp sized kingdom. 

I don’t blame Ælbert for leaving.  I remember the day I figured out that while I was a prince, there was precious little room for me to be prince of.  My father, King Ævery, spoke of great ambitions and of raising an army to seize the other hill just on the other side of the valley, effectively doubling the size of Norwessex. 

“I know Norwessex is small now.  But do you think Northumbria, Wessex or Mercia started out differently?  I am sure they started in the back of some hut when some man turns to his wife and said “why do I have to be a serf to that schlub?  I have land. I have men. I have plans.  Who, besides the Lord God, says he gets to be king?  The fact that I am asking these questions can be interpreted as as sign for God that maybe I am to be king.”

I am not sure how, when and from whom, my father declared independence.  Our hill was somewhere between Mercia, Wessex and the British Kingdom of Dyfed.  All I know is that my father’s men (and there were never more than 13 of them) were positioned strategically around the hill, expecting an invading army that never came.  While all were relieved about not having to fight for our independence, they could not help but feel overlooked.  If one is going to make a grand gesture such as through off the chains of vassalage, it would have been nice to be noticed.  

My father hoped one day we would be the type of kingdom that the Danes would want to pillage.  “You’re nobody, unless you are being raided by the Danes.”

By this time, there was just 10 men, including me, who began the march down the hill for the glory of Norwessex.  We had lost a pair of twin brothers Æelan and Ællen, who had apparently been on the other hill and were convinced that it wasn’t worth the bother.  Another young man named Ælvy became Father Ælvy overnight and informed my father that he was precluded by his order in raising a hand against his fellow man.  

These defections put my father in a tight bind as he was convinced his forces had to be in at least double digits to be called an army.  Which is why I was drafted as a nine-year-old to make my father’s militia minyan.  My mother wasn’t happy about it and almost did not finish his banner featuring a cheesed-off cardinal.  A compromise was reached in which I would carry the banner, but do so from the rear where, presumably, the wind would be stronger unfurling the banner for greater aesthetic effect. 

The march to glory took less than 10 minutes.  The mood of the army going down the hill was high as the clouds parted to illuminate our banner.  It didn’t take a priest to prove that this was a sign from above.  Æarl, who fancied himself to be my father’s second-in-command, when he wasn’t milking cows and shoveling shit, suddenly broke into a hymn.  The rest of us tried to join in but there was disagreement about the lyrics and the tune. 

There aren’t many times you can say with confidence that you are at a crossroads.  But we were with one road representing the boundary between the sad past of a small kingdom that no one had every heard of and our destiny.  If only it hadn’t smelled of goat shit, the moment might have been as epic as the Rubicon crossing.  This was the time of legend and were the stuff of songs, one that people would agree on the lyrics to.  

My father held aloft his sword, Ædequate, urging us up the path towards the small circle of huts clinging to the south face of the neighboring hill.  Resistance was light as we started our ascent, consisting of a gaggle of goats that bleated at us non-committedly.  As they parted, a cheer went up from our side; the first skirmish had been won.  

Looking up, we saw a line of men, maybe fifteen in number, stretched across the path.  The were a motley bunch, dressed in burlap with rusting pots for helmets and holding whatever was sharp from the tool shed.  They outnumbered us and they held the high ground, but we were doing God’s work.  

“Onward men,” my father pointed with Ædequate as if we got lost in the last five minutes, “for the glory of Norwessex.”  The word glory was a mistake.  With each step upwards towards the farm implements of our enemy, we had a chance to look around. Norwessex was nothing to write home about with his bare fields, spidery shrubs and anemic male-pattern-bald trees.  But it looked like a paradise compared to what we were marching through which was either boggy or dusty.  There was nothing glorious to be found.  As we came closer to the business ends of the weapons being thrust in our direction, doubt crept in.  Were we really willing to risk our lives for an ant hill of a country?  What glory could be attained by such a conquest?

“Form battle lines,” my father ordered, careful to position himself behind the line.  If he would fall today, he would have a cushy pile of people to collapse onto.  By now we were close enough to see the faces of our enemy.  The way their eyes shifted back and forth, we could tell they were doing the same mental calculation as us.  Was this dung heap truly worth defending?  Probably not.  

“Pikes forward,” my father ordered and we held out the points of our pikes, rakes, and sticks.  The enemy did likewise and both armies were nearly on each other.  The ambivalent facing off with the indifferent.  The war was over before it started.  The armies just wheeled about in apathy, with the Norwessexians shrugging their way home.  

My father obviously thought about giving a rousing speech or threatening the deserters, but the king of realm in which he knows all the residents on a first name basis knows he has to live with these people.  He shrugged, pointed Ædequate towards home as if it was his idea.

After the war, the kids got bored and walked away to try their luck in Lundene, Dornwaracaester or Wintancaester and Norwessex contracted like a Michigan factory town.  When I was 19, my father stepped on a rake that had been left by one of the many émigrés from Norwessex. He developed a high fever and was soon buried next to his forefathers, not before making me swear that I would one day raise the now-tarnished Ædequate in the name of a great Norwessex.  

Now, with Ælbert gone, I am a kingdom of one.  Empires have come and gone.  The Persians.  The Greeks.  The Romans.  The Mercians.  I suppose Norwessex is now officially on that list.  It is not that I mind the sound of history forgetting me; I just wished the sheep did not sing in harmony.     

The Best Feature

“How long have you been looking,” the unreasonably tall and solicitous realtor asked me.  

“About 66 years, I said, ignoring the elaborately carved banister to my right.  

He resembled Perry, my long-lamented late retriever, displaying both confusion and expectation.  I walked in the middle of an open house; why shouldn’t he assume I was looking to buy?  

Most realtors are not usually comfortable with ambiguity. “I lived here when I was child,” I said by way of explanation that proceeded no further.  

He smiled broadly: “How nice.  You are looking to buy your childhood home.  I should warn you, it probably has gone up in price.”  He chuckled, but had enough sense to stifle when he saw my stony stare.  

“I didn’t sell this house.  I left.”  I received nothing of the proceeds after my mother died. I never wanted anything from her. “Don’t worry.  It is ancient history and I am not interested in revisiting.”

He looked at the brochure in his hand and awkwardly returned it to the dining room table.  He couldn’t help himself and he asked with an enthusiasm reserved for the homosexual realtor. “So this was your home 66 years ago?”

“No, I left here 66 years ago.  I lived here from 1933 to 1949.  It was never my home.”

“Of that’s right, it used to be an orphanage or something.”  I admired the ebullient way he pronounced “orphanage” as if that was a good thing.  

“It was girls’ home.  Some of the girls were orphans, but most were simply girls whose parents didn’t want them.  Before your pout, most of us didn’t want our parents either.”

Perry-like he cocked his head and looked sadly at me with his brown eyes.  “Your parents sent you here?”

“Mother,” I corrected.  “My father passed away when I was two-years old.  Unfortunately, she came with me or, more accurately, we never left.”  Was he going to cry?  It was my sad history, what did it have to do with him?  I could not mourn a man I did not remember; why should he?

“So you and your mother lived here after he passed?”  All I wanted to do was look around the house. I didn’t want to recount the part of my life that served as the firm foundation for a lifetime of emotional vertigo.  

“My mother founded the Reba Place School for Girls when my father ‘passed.’  Curious word ‘passed.’  It seems so arbitrary as if he wasn’t paying attention and thus ‘passed.’”

He blushed.  “I am afraid I am betraying my Georgian roots.  I was raised to never use such words as died.  My mother was that way.”

“My mother was far more direct,” I said, smiling at his discomfort.  “I do not remember when my father died, but I have no doubt she probably told me he was dead and crying would not bring him back.”  

He coughed; he was not trained to have such conversations with potential buyers.  His job was to be enthusiastic, hand out the brochures, point out the woodwork, hint at the seller’s motivation and repeat with the next prospect. He had no use for an 82-year-old-woman who would have preferred to burn the house down.  

“She looks good,” I said trying to be supportive. “Over there, separating the parlor and dining room, was a ridiculously intricate spandrel screen over two ghastly columns,” I said.  “I am glad they’re gone.”  

This he could understand.  “Must have brighten up the place.  That’s what I like about these old houses.  Each generation adds something to it.  Makes it better.  There’s a lot of upgrades in the kitchen.”

“Is that how you see life?” I asked, “a never-ending series of upgrades?  The young, always looking forward with such abandon; absolutely convinced of history’s inexorable march to better.  Don’t worry,” I said, putting my wizened hand on his arm.  “You have to think that way or you just couldn’t go on living.  For the old, we only look backwards.  I blame my mother.  She blames her mother.  And perhaps one day we will discover who is ultimately at fault.”

He nodded sympathetically, but with expectant eyes hoping salvation would appear in the guise of other visitors.

“I loathed my mother,” I said, walking up to the stairs.  “Do you know made me strip this staircase by hand with nothing but a dental pick and a small brass brush?  Someone in the past had decided to paint it.  My mother felt it was garish and needed to be stripped.”

He wrinkled his nose.  I thought he was talking about my mother.  “What a shame. I think the woodwork is the best feature of this house.  Especially the staircase.  You did a very nice job,” he said, nodding like one of those dashboard figurines vulgar people put in their cars. 

 “My mother believed in honoring the past and anything that was not original had to be restored.  She always lived in the past, even as a child.  It wasn’t her fault.  She was desperate to get her mother’s approval, which was like embracing a cloud.  According to her, my grandmother was a cold woman who never wanted children, but, since it was expected, she submitted to my grandfather, who was interested in having a legacy, but not necessarily in being a father or a husband.  Perhaps her uterus knew of her reluctance and belched out fetus after fetus until it missed one: my mother.  Having a miracle baby—as the doctor described her—did little to change my grandmother’s attitude towards children, even her own.  With no son was coming, my grandfather found a younger woman to accommodate him.

“Parenting to my grandmother could be summed up in two words: grow up.  My grandmother urged my mother to become an adult as quickly as possible so as to provide companionship.  My mother was encouraged to talk and walk early.  She was supposed to help with household chores and suffer the consequences of ignorance or awkwardness.”

“They never quite found the sweet spot. Apparently my grandmother’s heart grew up equally fast.  She was barely fifty when criticizing my mother for something perfectly acceptable for a teenager, she grabbed her chest.  The doctor said she was dead before she hit the floor. I hope she was alive while the floor rushed towards her.  But then I am a bitter old woman.”

“I wouldn’t call you old,” he said. 

“But bitter, yes? I winked, which made him even more uncomfortable.  “My mother lived with a series of aunts until she met my father who bought this place as a vain promise of better things to come.  After he ‘passed,’ she founded the Reba Place School to provide love to young women who needed it, but she needed also the money to keep this house. Reba Place was her way of killing two birds with one stone.  Unfortunately, she was a terrible shot.  She thought she could learn to love like she could learn French by eating croissants.  The girls we took in didn’t seem to appreciate the effort.  Perhaps they had higher expectations, despite coming from broken homes.  The mutual disappointment suffused this house like a haar. The more they pulled away, the more she resented them.”

“Would you like to look around?” he suggested as a way to get rid of me.  Wait until you see the kitchen.”

The kitchen was a gaudy affair of shiny appliances and overly-dramatic granite countertops.  My mother would have been appalled. She insisted everything be done by hand---just as had been done in the past.  Who knows what ghost she was trying to exercise? All I know is it led to grated knuckles, cut fingers and skin so stripped by the lye soap that we could have used it as sandpaper on the staircase.

“Can’t you just scream at all this storage?   You could fit two of my kitchens in here.  You should see the master suite on the third floor.  It used to be the attic.”

Images of the attic hove into my mind like a ship crashing through the fog—the cobwebs, the shedding insulation and the wooden hangers that were there as inadvertent correctional devices.  

I returned to the entrance way and placed my hand on the banister.  It was still as smooth as the day my mother finally admitted the staircase was done.  I remember her single nod.  She looked at the spandrel and columns that were covered in layers of thick paint.  “Now those.”

The same desire of 66 years ago rolled in.  Then, as now, I reached out for the well-worn brass doorknob and pulled. “Perhaps this is a bad idea,” I said to the realtor, leaving the way I left years ago.  

Relieved, he could not help by be enthusiastic. “You really didn’t a wonderful on the staircase.  It is the best feature of this house.  Makes my job easier.”      

A Golden Future

The last sign above the rollaway doors said R. Guttierez Tire and Body Repair.  The R was for my father Ramon and the Body Repair was supposed to be my addition to the family business.  Occasionally, I would bang out a dent or fill a quarter panel with Bond-o.  I had a compressor for paint, but hadn’t used it in years.  Most of my customers wanted me to do the very least so they could get back on the road and not be pulled over.  It was hard to build an auto repair empire when my customers thought I ran some sort of pro-bono resurrection service.

My father knew better.  He came from nothing in Michouacan, where he said they couldn’t afford to pave the streets with dirt.  I never knew whether he came here legally or not.  He would change the subject whenever I asked.  He would say “I am here now.  You were born here.  What does it matter?  Your job is to look forward, not back.”  

Selling primarily to poor Mexican immigrants wasn’t much of a business plan.  But there was money to be made in selling things that cost very little.  “Buy low sell everything” was one of my father’s mantras.  The other was “you can take the Mexican out of Mexico, but you could never take Mexico out of the Mexicans.”  

Although they were all here, their minds were always there and so he sold single cigarettes, cold Jaritos that he kept in a styrofoam cooler or something that “fell” off of a truck.  Eventually, it was tires.  He never sold new tires.  There were tires all over the neighborhoods—in empty lots, stuck between garages or even some taken from parked cars—all brought to our back door by kids who “found” them.  My father would pay they with a bunch of greasy bills and ask no questions. The tires were never ideal.  They didn’t have to be; they just had to better than their pancake smooth tires. “Where are they going to go?  The North Side?  Nah, that’s the way to get pulled over.  They drive around La Vilita where the cops know better.”  Such talks always turned to me and how I would continue the northward march to prosperity as if my father had plotted it on a map years ago in Mexico.    

Seven days a week, people would pull up to our garage in the alley, honk their horns and stare nervously as my father would get down on his knees to test the tread with his thumb, so calloused it could drive nails.  He told them the tires were no good.  There was nothing he could do other than sell them a tire that was a little bit better.  They would scrunch up their faces like he told them that they had cancer.  

Mrs. Gonzalez across the alley swore it wasn’t she who called the cops.  But who else could it have been?  Mrs. Gonzalez thought she was the neighborhood’s conscience.  From her second-story perch, she would cluck disapprovingly at the girls whose dresses were too high above their knees.  Toughs who thought they ruled the street would find out better when Mrs. Gonzalez came down the street with her granny cart full of groceries.  I saw the meanest one, with a tell-tale bulge in the small of his back, cringe as she shook her crooked finger in his face.  I am pretty sure the kids nowadays wouldn’t put up with it and Mrs. Gonzalez would find herself with her throat slit, but back then, there was still had a code and abuelitas were on it.

I woke up one morning with my room full of blue flashing lights.  Running the to the window, I saw my father shrugging in the alley while two cops pulled tires out of the garage.  A trash truck rumbled its way down the alley.  I thought my father would be arrested, but it was worse, the police issued him a fistful of tickets they knew he could not pay.  I saw Mrs. Gonzalez her face with a blue smirk looking down.  I would have sworn revenge if it hadn’t been for the code.  

The alderman at the time was a Michouacan, too, and owed my father a favor as he was a precinct captain and for unspecified services rendered years ago by generations long buried south of the border.  I never heard of the tickets again. 

 A couple of weeks later my father came running in calling my mother and all us kids.  He grabbed my mother’s hand and pulled her out the door to the van.  He put her in the front seat and motioned for us to hurry up and get in the back.  At first, it felt like we were going have to run from the cops.  We looked back at the apartment thinking it was the last time we would ever see it.

We stopped in front of a crumbling building with a large garage covered with graffiti.  “There it is,” he said, pointing across my mother’s nose.  

“There what is?” she asked.

“The garage. Our garage. R. Guttierez Garage.  Come look at it.  It is ours.  Not some landlords.  Our foothold in America.” 

He stepped out and stood in front of the two-stories-tall building.  The windows on the second floor were broken and the ones on the first were bricked over.  He fished out a fistful of keys on a ring from from his overalls.  It took him several tries to find the three keys that opened the door.  We kids crowded forward, half expecting Jesus to walk out of the gloom.  My father put his arm around me and told me one day the garage would be mine as if that was a good thing.

My father had big dreams.  He wasn’t going to be repairing and selling old tires forever.  The alderman promised to speak to the local bank for a loan so he could fix the place up and maybe even install a lift.  If the alderman spoke to the bank, it all went by the wayside when he was jailed for bribery.  My father had nothing to worry about, he didn’t have two nickels to rub together to bribe anyone.  

With loans from friends and family and bartering auto work for construction, electricity and plumbing, my father was able to fix up the garage just enough to allow it to pass inspection.  He could never afford the lift.  But even with a real garage, he was still a tire man.  Occasionally, he would buy new tires off of gas stations going out of business, but mostly he went back to patching and selling less-used tires.  As eldest son, building the business was my job, whether I wanted it or not. I was the bearer of the immigrant success story.

I did everything right—going to trade school and taking business classes at a community college. I wrote a business plan and secured loans to pay for the repairs and build a lift.  You should have seen my father’s face when he pushed the button to raise it. His smile was broader than it was whenever one of his children handed him a new grandchild.  The golden future in reach.  Maybe not his, but certainly in mine and those of my children.

My business plan said the neighborhood was changing and could support a full-service garage. That was true, but it never said it had to support mine, especially when the Firestone and Midas’ business plans told them the same thing.  Every year, as the neighborhood improved, new neighbors moved in who had enough money to force out the people who bought used tires.  

The new neighbors didn’t want some greasy Mexican patching up their cars so they looked like a leopard.  I envied my father who couldn’t read a financial report to see the cash burn rate.  He couldn’t understood the graph was pointing in the wrong direction for R. Guttierez Tire and Body Repair.  At family parties, I perfected a noncommittal smile when my father asked how business was going and quickly changed the subject.  “It is going.  You are gone.  What does it matter?”  The undertaker made sure to put a smile on his face before we buried him next to our neighbors who had moved out years ago.  

Driving to my granddaughter’s third -grade graduation miles and worlds away from Pilsen, I can’t tell if I am a success with more than $900,000 in the bank.  Who knew that R. Guttierez Tire and Body Repair was worth more torn down ? They say the developer went bankrupt trying to figure out where the next hot neighborhood would be.  His check cleared so I shouldn’t worry about what he tells his son.  

Family Business

On one hand, my Dad was the best friend a teenage girl could have.  You want someone to buy you beer, Dad was your guy.  If a friend got busted for whatever, Dad was always willing to impersonate a parent to get them out.  On the other, just don’t ask him to be there when you were sad, needed help with homework or attend a track meet, a play or even a graduation.  Mom said his middle initials are M.I.A.  She ran out of excuses and divorced him when I was eleven.  

When confronted by his inadequacies, Dad would point to the scar on his nose, the result of being pushed down the stairs by the owner of the Doo Drop Inn in Hurley, Wisconsin, DBA his father.  If we wanted to see a worse father, Dad insisted, all we had to do was look north.  We were all surprised when Dad left his job as a manager of trucking company to take care of his father after he had a stroke.

Grandpa was dead and buried next to his third wife, Dad causally mentioned in one of his rare phone calls.  The only question Mom asked him was when he was coming back to pick up the crap he had dropped off in our basement when she was at work.  He had a few things to clear up at the Doo Drop and he imagined it wouldn’t be a matter of a couple weeks.  Mom gave him three; he missed the deadline by nearly 18 years.  

Although Dad lived less than a seven hours drive away, we didn’t see him much.  Maybe once a month in the first years, to twice a year after we graduated from college.  My older sister, Cindy moved East. I moved to Milwaukee for a job as a lawyer.

When I was 35, I traveled north to visit a client who owned land in the Northwoods.  His second wife was arguing with the kids from his first wife and he wanted to settle his estate plans.  His house was less than 20 miles from Hurley and I took the advice from the bar’s name and dropped in.  

The bar was as dreary as Dad described it, with a dusty long burned-out Hamm’s beer sign as the only decoration.  Two truck drivers sat at the bar watching some car race on a small television.  I asked for my father.  The bartender, mostly bald with an unfortunate pony tail, pointed with his thumb to the stairs outside.

The metal diamond-tread stairs shook under my feel and I wasn’t sure if the bolts attaching it to the crumbling brick wall would hold.  I knocked on the glass door with a faded lace curtain.  A young woman’s voice told me to come in and the door yielded with the faintest press.  The front room looked like a museum piece from the early 70s.  Shag carpeting on the floor with a worn path towards the back of the apartment.  A couch of brown and orange velvet.  Two arm chairs, one of nubby green fabric and the other covered with an old sheet flanked the sofa.  A glass ash tray, half full of butts.  A three-quarter empty bottle of Wild Turkey next to two dusty glasses, one of them dangerously chipped.  A woman who was probably 20, but dressed like she was fifteen, came out from the back, playing with her dirty blonde braid.  She narrowed her eyes.  “We got blonde and red today.  Twenty-five extra cause you’re a woman and I ain’t no lezzy.”

I wasn’t surprised there were hookers at the Doo Drop Inn. For a high school report, Cindy researched Hurley and its rich history as purveyor of vice for the iron miners from nearby Michigan.  A web search revealed a couple of arrests and fines bearing our grandfather’s name. 

I asked for my Dad.  She shouted over her shoulder and slouched through the bead curtain.   He came out of the hallway, wearing jeans and work boots under a flannel shirt and fleece vest.   

“What are you doing here?” he asked and then:  “Let’s talk downstairs.”  He blocked my view of the backroom and hugged me out of the apartment.  The staircase groaned and shimmied under our weight as we walked down—me first, him following.

Dad opened the bar door and directed me to the least shambled of the three booths.  He motioned for me to sit on the banquette that did not have the duct tape repairing the vinyl seat.  He brushed the bottle sweat and cigarette ash into his hand.  

“Your mother didn’t send you, did she?”  

“Nope,” I said, “I have client not too far away.”

“Do you want a drink or something to eat? All we have is peanuts and they aren’t that fresh. I could go next door and get you a burger.  It’s a shame it isn’t Friday, they have a fried walleye sandwich that is not bad.  

“I’m fine.  Do you sleep with that girl?”

“No.  Not ever.  Not her.  Not Veronica.  Not Shell.  Not any of the girls.”  He stopped to consider something.  “I did date Shell’s mother a couple years back. But Valerie wasn’t…wasn’t working for me.”

“How long have you been a pimp?” 

He didn’t have the creativity to be indignant.  “I am not going to make excuses.  These are rough parts.  Miners and truckers live rough lives and that roughness is deeper than their skins.  When they aren’t working, they play rough.  My father knew that and he knew there were a lot of girls without a lot of options.  He would  bring them home when I was a kid.  I had a series of ever-changing big sisters.  I don’t think he wanted them to be…you know…escorts. He even tried to stop a couple of them.  But they got mad and left and ended up on any other bar along Silver Street where the owner didn’t have the same qualms.  Some got hurt.  Some ran away.  One was murdered.  After that, I guess he thought he was better than nothing.”

“Is that why you moved away?”

“No, that was my father’s caring for the girls upstairs was his only redeeming quality. He may have been nice to the girls, but that didn’t make him a good person.  To me he was just a frustrated old man and he took it out on me like it was my fault his life was a giant u-turn, starting and ending right at those stairs.  We used to fight every night.  There was nothing I could do to make it right so I moved downstairs and slept on a cot in the back. As soon as I graduated high school, I packed my bags and thought I was gone forever.”

A thousand long-unasked questions vied for pole position.  “Why come back?  You didn’t have to.  You had a good job.  You had us.”

He sighed in answer.  “I’ve thrown away more things than most men have.  When I met your mother, she filled me in away I never thought possible.  When your brother and you came along, I had more than I thought possible.  But there was the hole in me that no matter how much I added, it just poured out.”

“When Tim called me and told me that Dad was dying, I decided to come back.  Not for him, but for me.  I wanted to prove I was better than him—giving him more than he deserved. When I arrived, he was already too far gone.  I stayed with him until the end.  He kept calling me Charlie.  I have no idea who that is.  

“Tim would have bought the Doo Drop. He would been okay to the girls.  But Ally, Kate and Diane were upstairs.  They didn’t ask me to stay. I think they expected me to leave them like every man in their lives.  I expected me to leave, too.  That seems to be the only thing I was good at.”

“I couldn’t make things up with your mother and you girls, but I had a chance to make a difference in these girls’ lives.  I give them a place to be safe. I take care of the rough ones. And, yes, I take my cut.  My father might have been a simple man, but he knew there was more money to be made in girls than booze.  So it is just usually four of us upstairs.  When they are all busy, I sleep on the cot.  Eventually they either run away with Johns who promise them God knows what.  But there is always someone to take their place.  When you’ve never had a family, this is as good as it gets.

The outside stairs groaned.  My father looked at his watch.  “Walter,” he said.  “Sure I can’t get you a drink?”

A Croaker Sack of Turnip Greens

Atticus said the best medicine goes down the bitterest.  Nobody was more bitter than Mayella Ewing.  It had been almost 20 years since we last saw each other.  Her family broke up after her Boo Radley killed her father.  The younger kids went to orphanages.  I heard Mayella went west—how far she got I did not know nor cared.  

The letter looked as if it had been written by a chicken in the back of pickup truck: “Come to St. Vincent’s.  Am dying.  Got something to say.  Mayella.” I threw the letter out. There was no reason to bother Atticus who still looked pained every time Tom Robinson was mentioned.  

Two weeks later the phone rang.  The receiver sounded like a storm wave breaking on crushed shells.  I assumed the line was bad and was about to hang up when I heard the croak of a voice.  “Jean Louise, it’s Mayella.  Didja git my letter?  Why haven’t you come by?”

I tried to make excuses. I was busy.  I wasn’t sure who it was.  Her father almost killed my brother.   

The call was interrupted by the sound of a spoon slipping down a whirling garbage disposal.  Atticus taught me the best time to be most patient was when I was disinclined.  I held the receiver away from my ear waiting for her to finish.  I blessed her out of courtesy.

“I’m dyin’ and the dyin’ don’t have no time for niceties.  I need you to visit me at St. Vincent’s.  I’m up in pulmonarily care.  I got cancer bad.  Docs say I need oxygen all day or I’ll be gone by night.  Come.”

I was about to tell her that I would do my best, which meant I would not come, when she whispered— “Come or I’ll call Atticus.”

It was another time I wished Jem was alive.  All the commotion of the night when Bob Ewell tried to kill Jem; all it did was to save him for an accident on a icy road, driving home for Christmas during his junior year at Alabama.  

What I found in bed was asleep. The oxygen mask perched precariously on the Ewell high cheek bones, but the rest of her face was a sink hole. Every breath was accompanied by a hiss that was barely able to raise the blanket.  She still had long, stringy hair—no longer brown, but yellow gray.  One foot was peaking out as pale and scaly as a dried corn cob.  I tried to trace the years since we last saw each other at the Macomb Courthouse.  Clearly, her road was much longer than mine. 

Mayella’s eyes opened and stared at the ceiling, trying to figure how she got there.  Looking down, she examined me through the mask.  With a blind hand she found a pair of glasses that had obviously been prescribed to her as an act of charity.  Big plastic frames that perched as uncomfortably as she did on the courtroom chair.  

“Yer here,” she wheezed.  She sniffed the air.  “Where’s yer brother?”

“He passed,” I said, not volunteering any more information than necessary. 

If it surprised her, it didn’t show.  Death was a fellow traveller for people like the Ewells.  Not many of them made it as far as Mayella.  
“I was gonna ask how, but it don’t matter.  Dead is dead, right?”  She coughed her way into a breath.  “I’ll join him soon enough.”  A pale tongue snaked out trying to moisten her lips.  There was a wet crusty paper towel on her bed table, but Atticus had no words of wisdom to convince me to touch it.  

“Why did you want to see me, Mayella?”  I didn’t exactly tap my foot like Miss Caroline, but I might as well have.

Mayella curled her lip like a mad dog.  “Can’t rush a dyin’ soul.  I wanna talk to yer ‘cause I have somethin’ on my chest that ain’t cancer.  I’ve been thinkin’ a lot about how things went down in Macomb with the trial and that nigger and all.  I got truth to speak before I pass.”

After all these years, Mayella wanted to come clean.  Did it matter?  Did it make anything right for Tom Robinson and his family?  I should have walked out, leaving her to die holding that bag of guilt.  But Atticus said the sick had rights that the healthy just had to respect. 

“I feel sorry for that nigger, Tom Robinson.” She sighed or maybe it was just her oxygen.  

“He didn’t do anything, did he Mayella?”

She shook her head sadly.  “No, he was just walking by whistlin’ like he always do.  Like he had somethin’ to be happy ‘bout.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have invited him in to break up that chiffarobe.”

She narrowed her eyes.  “What are you talking ‘bout Jean Louise?  I never invited him in.”

“Yes, you did.  Both Tom and you testified that you invited him to break up an old chiffarobe.”

“Poor Tom, he couldn’t never disagree with a white woman.  Even if that woman is a girl accusin’ him of taking advantage of her.  It jes wasn’t his nature.”

“I don’t understand.  Who broke the chiffarobe?”

Through the haze of the mask, I saw a half-toothed smile.  “I knew he never tol’ you.”

“Who told me what?”
 Atticus.  He was the one that bust the chiffarobe.”

“Why would Atticus break up the chiffarobe?”

“He didn’t want to break it, it just kinda got busted when we was foolin’ around.  We fell on it.  Hard.” Mayella couldn’t even laugh without coughing.

I grabbed the door knob to prevent me from falling. Atticus said if you choose to root around in another’s closet you shouldn’t expect to find anything pleasant.

“Atticus?  You’re lying.”
“Lying?  No, ma’am.  Atticus used to walk past our house to see the Cunnin’hams.  He was a genyuwine gentleman.  Always raisin’ his hat to me all polite like.  We ‘came friends.  We jes talk by the fence.  And the more we talk the more we talk.  Atticus bein’ a man and me bein’ a girl the talks got serious.  One day he show up and he hand me seven nickels and tol’ me to send the kids to git ice cream in town.”

“You said you saved up those nickels.”

“Jean Louise, where would I get one let alone seven nickels?  It was hard bein' Atticus.  People always lookin’ up to him and all, forgettin’ he were still a man.  It been a spell since you mama passed and a man has urges, even Atticus.  A girl has urges, too, especially for a gentleman.  He walk in and soon my dress was on the floor and we fell on the chiffarobe.  And it busted but good. That’s when I saw my pappy lookin’ in the window.  He was whiter than white.  ‘Git out,’ he yelled at Atticus.  ‘You jus’ can’t take what you want. Not e’en you.’  Atticus were out of there like a bat outa hell.  Half-dressed he was.  ‘magine that, Atticus Finch half-dressed.  He ran right passed Tom Robinson whose eyes were bigger’n saucers.  My pappy gave it to me real good, callin’ me every name in the book.” 

“I don’t understand.  Why blame Tom Robinson?”

“Say what you want about my pappy.  He had a code to never turn on ‘nother white man. He fingered Tom because he knew your father liked him.  He jes loved watching Atticus being so smart in court knowin’ he were guilty and knowin’ no white jury was going to believe a nigger over a white woman’s word.  He also knew Atticus couldn’t come clean, neither.   Don’t look so glum, Jean Louise, ya cain’t always be a saint, even Atticus.”

The floor stopped spinning, but I could be sick at anytime.  “Why did your father try to kill Jem?”

“He wasn’t aimin’ to kill Jem.  He was aimin’ to kill you.  Jem just got in the way. I guess the way he figgerd it, Atticus took his daughter; he was gonna take his.  Besides the whole town was laughin’ at him.  Everybody talk about how smart Atticus was.  How he almos’ got Tom off.  How he made my pappy look like he was just a nothin’.  A nothin’?  The man had a code.  He got himself good and drunk and got himself killed.”

I twisted the door knob, about to walk out, but turned for one more question.  “Why did you want to see me?  After all these years?”

Mayella took off her glasses and put them on the table.  She looked up, breathing heavy as if she just walked up the four flights of stairs with more to go.  Her voice came from the bottom of a ever-deepening well.  “There’s somethings a croaker sack of turnip greens won’t buy.”