VII
My father died in 2003, having outlived his wife and two of his five children. Claire Morton Overton wasn’t yet thirty when her estranged husband took her life. Both my mother and my eldest brother died at the age of fifty-one.
Question: Death, where is thy sting?
Answer: Every-fucking-where.
I went home to Harlow for Dad’s memorial service. Most of the roads were paved now, not just ours and Route 9. There was a housing development where we used to go swimming, and a Big Apple convenience store half a mile from Shiloh Church. Yet the town was in many essential ways the same. Our church still stood just down the road from Myra Harrington’s house (although Me-Maw herself had gone to that great party line in the sky), and the tire swing still hung from the tree in our backyard. I suppose Terry’s children had used it, although they’d all be too old for such things now; the rope was frayed and dark with age.
Maybe I’ll replace that, I thought… but why? For whom? Not my children, certainly, for I had none, and this place was no longer my place.
The only car in the driveway was a battered ’51 Ford. It looked like the original Road Rocket, but of course that was impossible—Duane Robichaud had wrecked Road Rocket I at Castle Rock Speedway in the first lap of its only race. Yet there was the Delco Batteries sticker on the trunk, and the number 19 on the side, in paint as red as blood. A crow came down and roosted on the hood. I remembered how our dad had taught all us kids to poke the sign of the evil eye at crows (Nothing in it, but it doesn’t hurt to be sure, he said), and I thought: I don’t like this. Something is wrong here.
I could understand Con not having arrived, Hawaii was a lot farther away than Colorado, but where was Terry? He and his wife, Annabelle, still lived here. And what about the Bowies? The Clukeys? The Paquettes? The DeWitts? What about the crew from Morton Fuel Oil? Dad had been getting up there, but surely he hadn’t outlived all of the home folks.
I parked, got out of my car, and saw it was no longer the Ford Focus I’d driven off the Hertz lot in Portland. It was the ’66 Galaxie my father and brother had given me for my seventeenth birthday. On the passenger seat was the set of hardbound Kenneth Roberts novels my mother had given me: Oliver Wiswell and Arundel and all the rest.
This is a dream, I thought. It’s one I’ve had before.
There was no relief in the realization, only increased dread.
A crow landed on the roof of the house I’d grown up in. Another alighted on the branch supporting the tire swing, the one with all the bark rubbed off so it stuck out like a bone.
I didn’t want to go in the house, because I knew what I’d find there. My feet carried me forward, nonetheless. I mounted the steps, and although Terry had sent me a photo of the rebuilt porch eight years before (or maybe it was ten), the same old board, second from the top, gave out the same old ill-tempered squawk when I stepped on it.
They were waiting for me in the dining room. Not the whole family; just the dead ones. My mother was little more than a mummy, as she had been as she lay dying during that cold February. My father was pale and wizened, much as he’d appeared in the Christmas card photo Terry had sent me not long before his final heart attack. Andy was corpulent—my skinny brother had put on a great deal of meat in middle age—but his hypertensive flush had faded to the waxy pallor of the grave. Claire was the worst. Her crazed ex-husband hadn’t been content just to kill her; she’d had the temerity to leave him, and only complete obliteration would do. He shot her in the face three times, the last two as she lay dead on her classroom floor, before putting a bullet in his own brain.
“Andy,” I said. “What happened to you?”
“Prostate,” he said. “I should have listened, baby brother.”
Sitting on the table was mold-covered birthday cake. As I watched, the frosting humped up, broke apart, and a black ant the size of a pepper-shaker crawled out. It trundled up my dead brother’s arm, across his shoulder, and then onto his face. My mother turned her head. I could hear the dry tendons creak, the sound like a rusty spring holding an old kitchen door.
“Happy birthday, Jamie,” she said. Her voice was grating, expressionless.
“Happy birthday, Son.” My dad.
“Happy birthday, kiddo.” Andy.
Then Claire turned to look at me, although she had only a single raw socket to look out of. Don’t speak, I thought. If you speak, it will drive me insane.
But she did, the words coming from a clotted hole filled with broken teeth.
“Don’t you get her pregnant in the backseat of that car.”
And my mother nodding like a ventriloquist’s dummy while more huge ants crawled out of the ancient cake.
I tried to cover my eyes, but my hands were too heavy. They hung limply at my sides. Behind me, I heard that porch board give out its ill-tempered squeal. Not once but twice. Two new arrivals, and I knew who they were.
“No,” I said. “No more. Please, no more.”
But then Patsy Jacobs’s hand fell on my shoulder, and those of Tag-Along-Morrie circled my leg just above the knee.
“Something happened,” Patsy said in my ear. Hair tickled my cheek, and I knew it was hanging from her scalp, torn off her head in the crash.
“Something happened,” Morrie agreed, hugging my leg tighter.
Then they all began to sing. The tune was “Happy Birthday,” but the lyrics had changed.
“Something happened… TO YOU! Something happened… TO YOU! Something happened, dear Jamie, something happened TO YOU!”
That was when I began to scream.
I had this dream for the first time on the train that took me to Denver, although—fortunately for the people riding in the same car with me—my screams emerged in the real world as a series of guttural grunts deep in my throat. Over the next twenty years I had it perhaps two dozen times. I always awoke with the same panic-stricken thought: Something happened.
At that time, Andy was still alive and well. I began calling him and telling him to get his prostate checked. At first he just laughed at me, then he grew annoyed, pointing out that our father was still as healthy as a horse, and looked good to go for another twenty years or so.
“Maybe,” I told him, “but Mom died of cancer, and she died young. So did her mom.”
“In case you didn’t notice, neither of them had a prostate.”
“I don’t think that matters to the gods of heredity,” I said. “They just send the Big C wherever it’s most welcome. For Christ’s sake, what’s the big deal? It’s a finger up your ass, it’s over in ten seconds, and as long as you don’t feel both of the doctor’s hands on your shoulders, you don’t even have to worry about your backdoor virginity.”
“I’ll get it done when I’m fifty,” he said. “That’s the recommendation, that’s what I’m going to do, and that’s the end of it. I’m glad you cleaned up your act, Jamie. I’m glad you’re holding down what passes for a grownup job in the music business. But none of that gives you the right to oversee my life. God does that for me.”
Fifty will be too late, I thought. By the time you’re fifty, it will already have taken hold.
Because I loved my brother (even though he had in my humble opinion grown up to become a moderately annoying God-botherer), I made an end run and went to Francine, his wife. To her I could say what I knew Andy would scoff at—I’d had a premonition, and it was a strong one. Please, Francie, please have him get that prostate exam.