Wednesday, November 26, 2008

The Table of the Dead

Published in The Chattahoochie Review

















The Table of the Dead

by

Jack Steele



     When the boy was five, he didn’t understand why his mother was afraid, but when his father was away, she would often come to his room long after he’d fallen asleep and whisper his name, and when he opened his eyes, she would be there staring at him, his baby brother asleep on her shoulder, a flashlight in her hand.
     He would follow her to the basement door, open it for her and then walk beside her halfway down the stairs, just far enough to look carefully into ever corner with the beam of the flashlight.  Had she heard something?  He never asked and she never explained, but he didn’t worry about it too much because after the inspection, and after she put his brother back to bed, she would lead him into the kitchen, sit him down at the table and make hot chocolate at the stove.
     They called it a basement, but it was also a garage.  The house was built on the side of a hill, the lower level for the car and storage.  He played down there occasionally, especially on rainy days, riding his bike in circles over the concrete floor, often having to maneuver his way through wet towels and sheets on his mother’s makeshift clothesline.  During the day, it was just another part of the house, a place for the water heater, garden tools, and fishing tackle.  He knew it well:  the oil stains on the concrete floor, the old paint cans, and the dirt dauber nests in the plywood cabinets.  He was not aware at the time that his mother hated it.  In fact, as he discovered later, she hated the whole house, but especially the basement.
     “It was the wrong side of the tracks,” she explained to him when he was grown, “and I didn’t know a soul in town.  Not one.  And there I was by myself with you kids, the wind sometimes shaking and rattling that old house like nobody’s business.  I thought I heard something down there every two minutes when your father was away, and I just knew somebody was going to come up those steps and get me some night.  I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
     He didn’t know anyone in town either, but he was perfectly content on rainy days to ride his bike in the basement and on nice days to play near the house on big piles of sand that probably belonged to the railroad, since the tracks ran near the house, but he was too young then to wonder where they came from.  He took them for granted, as he did playing alone with toys that he got from coaxing his mother into sending off box tops to radio shows.  His favorite toy was a pair of plastic glasses with dark red lenses that made him invisible.  In particular, he liked to sit on a sand pile, invisible with his glasses on, on cold and clear days when the sun was out the wind up, his cheeks and nose and ears practically frozen, until his mother called him in to supper.
     In the evenings, he sat on the floor of the small living room and listened to the radio and drew pictures with a ballpoint pen that cost more than the usual number of box tops because it wrote in three colors, and when his father was home, his parents sat nearby on the couch and talked.  Quite often, his father got in too late to eat with them, and after changing into a pair of khakis and an old t-shirt, he would drink a bourbon and coke while his supper stayed warm in the oven, and that was when the boy learned that his mother thought it was unusual that he didn’t mind playing alone.  They laughed when he asked what “unusual” meant and told him he wasn’t supposed to be listening.  And when he asked again for an answer, his mother said, “I’ll tell you when you get older.”

     His sixth birthday, which fell on a Saturday, was the day he learned about the pain of love.  For lunch, they had hot dogs, a chocolate cake his mother baked, and homemade ice cream.  After they ate and he blew out the candles, he opened his presents.  He probably received several gifts from relatives who lived out of town, and his parents no doubt gave him a few toys, but the only gift he remembered was one that came in the mail from his grandmother, a gold ring with his initials engraved on it.  When he put the ring on his finger, he could not take his eyes off of it.  He stared at it for so long at one point that his mother, noticing that he was allowing his ice cream to melt, became concerned.  “What’s come over you?” she asked, which prompted his father to tell him to pay attention to what he was doing.
     He was particularly happy to go to the movies that afternoon because he would be free there to indulge himself as much as he wanted in his admiration of the ring.  He paid no attention to the movie and ate his popcorn and drank his coke much faster than usual so that his hands would be free.  He raised the ring up to look at it in the flickering light of the film.  He touched it all over, moved it around on his finger, and finally took it off.  He wanted to hold it.  He put it into the palm of his left hand and touched it with the tips of the fingers of his right hand.  He liked everything about it:  the circle it made, its flat inner surface, its curved outer surface, the raised portion for the engraving, the cut of his initials.  Touching it made him feel good.
     When it hit the floor, it made a little tinkling noise, and he got down on his hands and knees and began to feel around for it.  The floor was sticky and littered with popcorn boxes and candy wrappers.  It smelled funny, perhaps like licorice.  He crawled down the row directly in front of his own, feeling and looking under every seat, and did the same on the next row.  He wanted to go further but his father had told him never to leave his seat, no matter what.  He’d never thought about why, but now it occurred to him that if he got too far away, he might forget where he’d been sitting, and his father might have trouble finding him.  What would happen then?  Would his father look for him or just give up and go away?
     He went back to his seat, as certain as he could be that in fact it was his seat, but still a little anxious about it.  He couldn’t be as certain as if he’d never left it.  At the same time, he felt as if someone had drilled a hole in his stomach.  He could almost feel the air moving through it.  He could almost hear the shrill whistle of the air as the realization that he had lost the ring came over him.  It had been too good to be true, or at any rate, to last.  The little tinkling noise it made when it hit the floor had been its farewell, and now he would have to tell his father, and his mother, and his grandmother.  “She must think you’re something special,” his mother had said at lunch.  “So don’t lose it.”  He felt himself blushing.  He wanted to shrink until he disappeared, but somehow he forced himself to get down on his knees again and again, hanging onto his seat with one hand, knowing it was hopeless.  After a while, though, he just sat in his seat with his eyes closed and let the air move through the hole in his stomach, hoping as hard as he could that the next time he looked it would be there.
     When he and his father followed the usher down the aisle, they bent over and looked under all the seats of all the rows between his seat and the first row.  The usher shined his flashlight at the floor from several different angles, but they didn’t find it.  The usher promised to look for it when they turned on the lights and cleaned up that night, but nothing ever came of that.  When his father called the theater, he got the answer the boy expected.  They hadn’t found it.  He never went back to the theater again, and even when he was grown, just the thought of the lost ring would make him blush with regret.

     It was a simple transparent dream:  everyone he knew who was dead sat at a table in a restaurant, only a few feet from him, motioning for him to come join them, and he wanted to, but between them was a maze of glass corridors, and he could not figure out how to get there.  It was mostly family:  mother, father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins.  No brothers or sisters yet.  No sons or daughters.  He’d been fortunate, but the decades, nonetheless, had taken their toll.
     And he could see now the appeal of flowers, the point of the Day of the Dead.  He wished he had sat up all night with his mother, and then with his father, and all the others who sat at the table, instead of leaving them alone in the funeral home.  He wished he had heaped flowers, candy, toys, snapshots, any everyday thing he could think of around their caskets and their graves, not to honor them, but to surrender shamelessly to the longing to touch them, to not let go.  Such things are silly, he decided, only when you don’t know or manage to forget about dying.
     And so he went back to the town to look for the house, knowing only that it was near the railroad tracks, but he found it anyway, and when he got over being amazed that it was still there, he continued to sit in his car and stare at it for a very long time, not dwelling for long on any particular time or person, but thinking about a lot of things as they happened to cross his mind, like hot chocolate, the ring, the colored glasses that made him invisible, the wet clothes on the line.      
    
























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