After The Leaves Have Fallen

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2008

One sunny spring day, my brother and I were riding on the open tailgate of the family station wagon, bouncing along the long dirt road that led to our rural home. I remember most of the ride as being like a roller coaster or carnival ride, without the safety bar of course.

The dusty lane was filled with potholes from every preceding winter rain and innumerable automobiles and trucks passing over it. Some family drivers living on that road drove carefully and slowly around the holes, while others simply drove as fast as they dared, leaving great clouds of dust in the dry season.

My father was one of the more cautious drivers. Asking him one day, why some drove so fast, or rather, why he didn’t drive faster, he told me there were two theories of driving over potholes. The first being the way he himself did, driving the road slowly and avoiding many of the holes by driving around them and when that wasn’t possible, driving as carefully as possible through them thereby avoiding possible damage to the car. The second method was much simpler. Just drive as fast as possible, hitting only the tops of the bumps.

That particular day our ride felt more like my father was using the second method, and it was quite exhilarating until we rounded a particularly sharp corner and I lost my grip on the hinge of the tailgate. In turning the corner the car had hit a rather deep pothole and launched me skyward, forcing my hand loose from it’s anchor and as the car sped forward, I merely remained where I was, poised in the deep blue sky for what seemed like an eternity.

Then my electrifying flight ended abruptly as I hit the dusty road, somersaulting endlessly backward in the direction from which we had come. Now a number of things went through my mind as this happened, the first being, this hurts. Another thought was about the steepness of the hill whose downward slope I was traversing rather acrobatically. The last thought was really about whether I would survive my tumble, but that was interrupted by the sounds of my brother and someone else in the car yelling that I had fallen out.

The strangest thing was I don’t remember if my father stopped the car or just kept going. It was only a matter of few dozen more yards to our driveway and it wouldn’t have been unheard of for him to simply look in the rear view mirror, see me moving and think something like, “he’s okay, he can walk home.” He had done similar things before and certainly afterward. I believe he stopped; I’m just not sure. I may even have waved them homeward, or returned to my seat on the tailgate. I seem to remember the car continuing its progress homeward and walking the rest of the way.

What has occurred to me is this: even if he did stop, there was no examination of my possibly abraded body or even a questioning of whether I might be seriously hurt, even while moving. My father did say later while laughing, that he had seen me rolling down the hill in his side mirror.

I have realized watching parents lately that when one of their children, whether self-induced or otherwise, has had an accident, there is at least a cursory examination to determine possible injury. My parents lived by a very different philosophy I think and, while it may have had the appearance of treating their children in a ‘rugged pioneer’ sink or swim manner, as I look back on it, it seems more psychopathic than anything else.

In another incident, as I was coming out our front door one day, the family dog came to greet me rather enthusiastically and tripped me, pitching me into a decorative rock wall erected by my father at my mother’s request. The stones were sedimentary shale with the rocks laid with the layers perpendicular to the ground, giving the edge a scalloped look. The shale’s edges were also razor sharp. Although those walls have since been relayed in a more conventional manner minus the shale, it is clear that at the original erection safety wasn’t a primary concern.

As I fell, my hand slid along the edge of one of the stones, slicing into my right palm deeply. The blood immediately began to flow copiously out of the cut. I ran to an outside faucet and started to wash the hand free of dirt and realized how deep the cut was by how far into my hand I could see, muscle tissue and sinew exposed to open air. What I did was try to pinch the cut closed with my left hand to slow the blood flow, which didn’t work, so I cupped my right hand, which actually seemed to have an effect. I knew, even at the time, I needed stitches.

Since I knew my mother would not appreciate me bleeding on the floor, I tried to get someone’s attention by yelling but that didn’t seem to work. I also knew that moving quickly would increase my heart rate thereby speeding the bleeding, so I slowly walked into the house to the kitchen where the family wall-phone hung near the breakfast table.

My mother was in the kitchen occupied in something like washing the dishes and saw the blood cupped and over-flowing from my hand and asked what I had done. When I told her that I had been tripped by the dog and fell on the rocks, her response was as close to boredom as I ever saw in her. It almost seemed she didn’t believe the cut was deep enough to warrant inspection and that maybe I had been saving up the blood in my hand for some unknown purpose. When she told me to open my hand flat, internally I was worried about getting blood on the floor, and rightly so, because when I opened my palm, the blood seemed to form a waterfall and the cut began to hemorrhage quickly.

Her first reaction was the statement; “You’re getting blood on the floor, close your hand.” Then she said, “You may need stitches.” She edged her way around me and the pool of blood on the floor and picked up the phone to call our family doctor’s number, but as this was the weekend probably got an answering service that referred her to another office. She then called that office and every once in a while looking at my hand, described the situation in tones that sounded to me like I was interrupting her day’s activities. At one point in the conversation she asked the person on the other end, “well, yes the cut is pretty bad, but can’t I just put a bandage on it? Do you think that would do?”

Evidently the answer was that I’d better be brought in so the doctor could examine the problem first hand. We had to wait for my father to return from somewhere and then I was taken into town for a visit to the only woman doctor then practicing in our county. She was an older woman who looked like an owl with large glasses and iron-grey hair piled into a large bun on her head. The receptionist saw my father and I enter and said, “Doctor will be right with you. Sir, you need to fill out these papers.” Then she did an odd thing to me; she requested to see the cut and exclaimed rather excitedly, “Oh! It looks just like it was made with a doctor’s knife!”

After the subsequent five large stitches, my father and I returned home where dinner was waiting. When we were all seated the conversation turned to the event of the day and the only part that my father seemed to remember rather scornfully was the receptionists comment, which he misquoted as scalpel. When I corrected him he brushed it off with, “Who cares? What a stupid thing to say.”

When one of my siblings asked how I was supposed to wash my hands, my father answered. My mother commented after hearing how many stitches I’d received, that, “Your brother needed seventeen stitches in his finger when he got it caught in your grandfather’s saw.” Then the rest of the conversation was about injuries my parents had received, and another retelling of how my grandfather was blown off a truck and burned.

I admit, rehashing an injury is not the most interesting or stimulating conversation but I am still amazed at how quickly the subject turned back to my parents. When I try to remember the initial conversation with my mother, I try to keep in mind that I was probably in shock and maybe the conversation wasn’t as casual as I thought it was at the time. But I am pretty sure I am not misremembering the words she used, or my father’s strange commentary on what the receptionist had said. Were those comments just prompted by panic and used to calm some internal dread?

I sometimes ask myself that if some of the things I saw my parents do I might have given too much significance in memory. Here’s one example.

My parents, I believe had developed a kind of us against them mentality and the ‘them’ was everyone other than themselves, including their children. I state this merely as belief, not necessarily fact, because they are dead and cannot argue for themselves. They did argue between themselves a lot.

After we moved to the Sierra foothills, my mother stated in an announcement whose tones suggested a Sibylline prediction that ‘we’ were going to start a herd of cattle. My father must have agreed because he bought rolls of barbed wire and numbers of cedar fence posts and my brother and I assisted him inclosing about five acres. He also reused some of the ancient fencing already laying about the place and built a ‘corral’, which was actually just a wooden addition to the end of the pasture with a gate made by sliding wood six by two planks across the opening. The planks could be easily removed if an animal needed to be led out or in.

The ‘herd’ consisted of two bovines, which they bought as calves. One was a bull calf and the other a heifer. I don’t remember where they purchased them, but I remember being taken along in the back of the pickup as some kind of wrangler and had the job of steadying them and keeping them from falling out of the truck. Even though the calves were small, they were still big enough that had they fallen on me, or against me (and they did) I would have had difficulty getting them off. I remember they were quite frightened.

Those two cattle were actually terrific breeders and between them had two offspring, one that we aptly named Ribroast. The bull was temperamental and both my brother and myself had run-ins with him where he tried to finish us off. He caught my brother unawares walking through the pasture one day and mauled him. On the day I was caught by him he had gotten out of the pasture and in trying to bring him back, he flipped me into the air and butted my chest with his head, which doesn’t sound bad as I write it, but one thousand pounds of angry bull pushing on your chest wasn’t fun. In flipping me to the side with his head, I landed with my back against some sheep fencing with my right leg twisted so far under and behind me that my foot was pressed between my back and the fence. My youngest sister, who had followed me, saw all this and came charging forward, yelling and waving, what I seem to recall was, a surveying stake like a scimitar.

I guess two against one didn’t seem fair to the bull and he ambled off to return to his previous occupation, watching a neighbor’s cow on the other side of a more escape-proof fence. It was a bit of work but my sister helped me stand and the pain was excruciating. It was like I had done the splits and then some and to get to the standing position I had to drag my leg from under and behind me. I do not know this but it could have been dislocated because I couldn’t put any weight on it without blinding pain and then there was a kind of adjustment and while it still was a ten on the one out of ten pain scale, at least it wasn’t a twenty. Using my sister as a crutch, I limped back to our house and as we were making our way to the door, my mother leaned out her upstairs window yelling, “Did you bring that bull back?”

At that question, I wanted to throw a rock at her head if I could have bent to pick one up. I angrily asked her if she was paying attention and that I could hardly walk. Her reply was to tell me that I needed to go back and bring the animal home, to which I replied, “If you want it so bad, tell Dad to go get it.” I will never forget her very angry response.

“Your father hasn’t had his breakfast yet!”

I was so angry I couldn’t speak but my little sister, bless her heart said, “Neither have we.” In a united act of disobedience we continued into the house. I limped painfully for months afterward.

I try to excuse my mother’s actions and reactions because she spent so much time in and out of mental hospitals and wards, but what I saw my father do, I have no reliable explanation for.

Many years after the bull attack, on a late summer day, the cow had become trapped in some fencing near the house. She had a hind leg entangled in the wire somehow and was bawling loudly and continuously. I think I must have just arrived home from a walk because I heard the ruckus and went to see what was going on. When I rounded the house I saw my father, trying to disengage her leg from the fencing. I ran up to assist but he didn’t seem to want my help much, and when I started to go around to the cows head to lead her forward, which is easier to do with a cow than pushing them from behind, my father became quite agitated, angry even and demanded that I return to where he was to assist.

I asked if maybe it would be easier to cut the fence but he very angrily retorted that he wasn’t going to fix the fence because the cow was stupid enough to get caught in it. We spent the next few minutes trying to get the cow to pick up her hind leg or pushing her to see if she could walk forward and drag the leg out of the fencing but nothing helped. Again, I said maybe if I went around to her head and put a rope on her I could pull her forward, or at least encourage her to come forward, but he got even angrier. There wasn’t any exact thing the cow did or didn’t do differently that provoked him but at one moment he just seemed to pop.

My father habitually carried a Buck clasp knife in a hard leather case on his belt. The case had a snap cover that was difficult to unsnap and the knife itself was difficult to unclasp. I say these things because what he did looked vicious to me. He had to stop pushing the cow or whatever he was doing to accomplish what he did. He had to turn, and using one hand to hold the case and the other to pull that hard snap loose then remove the knife and using both hands pull the blade away from the handle, very deliberately. Then he stabbed the bawling cow in the haunch rather like it was something he really wanted to do, and not because it would get the cow to move her leg or maybe make her panic her way to freedom, but just because he wanted to and could. Because she was already panicked, it was useless as a motivating action, and then he stabbed her again and maybe because that didn’t work or because he hadn’t got the response he was seeking, he calmly refolded the knife, which was even more complicated than unfolding it because a lock button had to be pushed very firmly, and he put it away in the snap case.

I remember watching him struggle a little to close the snap because it was designed, I think, not to open easily, and thinking why did he do that? Why did he do that? I have no answers.

I honestly believe that it was because he didn’t get the reaction he wanted that he said, “Well then, she can get herself out, unless you want to help her. But do not cut the fence! I couldn’t tell if the last was a reminder or a warning to me. He then gave the animal a last disgusted look and walked away. I know I got the cow loose but I don’t remember how, but I do remember him asking, and me just saying ‘yes’.

Another incident of this variety caused me to make up my mind to enter the Naval service.

On the occasion of my graduation from high school, a notice had been sent out from the school that only parents were to be guaranteed chairs in the audience section and anyone else would need to stand, so I invited only my parents. This was in some ways unnecessary because when my brother and older sister had graduated the only other family members to attend was our immediate family. But it was obvious from the crowd that many people other than parents were attending.

During the procession to our seats I was paired with quite possibly the most desirable girl in the graduating class and I received at least a half dozen offers of payment to trade places from male classmates. One so lucrative, I asked the young lady in question if she would rather walk with the fellow who made the offer; I received a resounding negative response and she grabbed my arm and said, “Don’t you dare! He’s a creep.”

When the ceremony was over, my mother’s first question was, “Who was that girl you were walking with?” in a strangely suggestive tone. I know that parents imagine their children with various partners, but this was the first time she had ever asked such a question to me. I tried to laugh it off at the time, but her insistence in knowing also prompted a rather ingenuous addendum to her first question, which was, “Have you had a date with her?” (The only dates I had ever been on had been group dates.) I explained several times that we were simply put in alphabetical order and our pairing had been a complete accident.

When the conversation ended my best friend Mike walked up with his family, including an uncle, aunt and brother, as well as his mother. His mother made the statement that if she had known the true situation she could have gotten a lot more family to show up and made an apology to Mike.

In response, my mother said that it wouldn’t have mattered in my case, no one else would have wanted to come. My father said, “Congratulations, son.” When my father called my brother or myself ‘son’ it was his way of putting us in our place; it was not an affectionate recognition of blood connection.

After saying a cursory ‘nice to meet you’ to Mike’s family my mother said with finality, “Okay, let’s go home.” I must say I did not expect very much but the abrupt treatment of my friend’s family and that ‘we’re done here’ kind of attitude placed another black mark in a book already filled with them. Mike had just previously invited me to dinner with he and his family and I simply told them, “Mike invited me to have dinner with them and I accepted. I will see you later tonight.”

I think it was my father who said, “Well, you’re eighteen, I guess you can do what you want.” They both turned and just walked off. I wonder if they thought I was being snooty.

The look on my parents’ faces was so startling that Mike asked me after a few minutes if everything was all right. I remember taking a breath and saying that even if it wasn’t, it didn’t matter, I’d made my decision, and I have never regretted that decision once.

The dinner was delightful and it was one dinner I remember for the chief reason that there was not even one little argument; it was actually fun. Afterward Mike drove me home and wished me well and told me to keep in touch. I did the same and braced myself for an unknown reaction when I entered the house.

My parents were sitting at the table, drinking the red wine that anaesthetized so many of their nights, when I walked into the dining room. My mother’s first words to me on seeing me enter were, “Your dog is dead. You'll have to bury him.” That was my greeting.

I know they had not planned any kind of special graduation dinner for me at home. They had not given my brother or my sister any kind of graduation present and I certainly was not expecting one. There was no ‘hello’, no ‘how was dinner’, there were no other words of congratulation, just, “Your dog is dead. You'll have to bury him.” I knew in that moment I had broken through some unspoken and unwritten rule they had about parental precedence and this was a kind of revenge. I could give a number of reasons why I believe this to be so but I will not.

That night I lay in my bed unsleeping, wondering what I was going to do now that I no longer had school as an escape and after hours of thinking of the dog’s bloated body and the efforts made by my two little sisters and myself to transport that corpse somewhere away from the house, and hearing my mother’s words burning in my ears and trying to blot them out with the rock-and-roll of Wolfman Jack, I finally changed the station to listen to KCTC.

KCTC was an easy-listening station, elevator music, that I hoped would put me to sleep, and the inspiration came from there. As I listened to the boring violins of Mantovani and Hugo Winterhalter into the night I counted bars of music and tried to breathe quietly to avoid bothering my brother. At around two or three in the morning, a rather insipid choral version of a Noel Coward song played that I had never heard or known of:

Matelot, Matelot,
Where you go my thoughts go with you
Matelot, Matelot,
When you go down to the sea.

I do not even remember what the rest of the song was about but in that moment I made the decision to enter the navy, and for that night at least, gratefully entered sleep.

In the years since my mother’s suicide and my father’s slow death from alcohol, smoking and pulmonary emphysema, I have asked myself many times what kind of people were these? I still wish to know.

I haven’t forgotten that both of them liked to laugh, and were creative, gifted, intelligent people, neither have I forgotten nor forgiven their cruelties, and this is what I wish and seek to do.