morethanenoughtruth

Of course it was my fault.  These things are always my fault.  In my universe, if I love something it dies.  Dick Hellman was a most ardent fan, especially when I wrote of things that might raise eyebrows.  He actually liked them.  His favorite was Massage, a piece that recounted a top to toe titillation that somehow led to a rip-roaring release of absolutely everything.  I managed to tell the tale with honesty, yet hold on to a degree of decorum.  Dick loved it and made a point of telling me so.  He liked my stories about inventions created in service to military aero-space, engaging his own memory of personal engineering triumphs.  We shared a similar work history.  He, ever the gentleman, hesitated to veer into what might be viewed as braggadocio but, spurred by the group’s acceptance of my own chest-beating, felt inspired to write some of his own at-a-boys.  It was good to be one of the guys along with the likes of Dick Hellman, but now he’s dead. 

I just this month wrote an exposé concerning our string-theory strung-together universes postulating that we humans each create our own.  Mine is the one wherein my one-of-a-kind only daughter is terminated by a vehicle—and now there’s Dick getting harvested by a car that seemed not to give a damn.  Jesus famously said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.”  It follows as the night the day: “So is the kingdom of hell.” 

My fateful day in 1963 Pennsboro, West Virginia, April eleventh to be precise, was the first lovely day of spring following yet another ravaging winter of frozen.  Everybody was outside enjoying that first morning when even sweaters could be tossed aside.  Not I however.  I had to write.  Completing my baccalaureate at a local teachers college, I had to finish a term paper or bust.  I was up and down, first writing, then up patrolling the windows to check on the kids.  Dale was trustworthy, and Melanie was way too smart to get into trouble.  Of that I was sure.  All would be well.  When a motorcycle broke down and pulled off the road at the far end of our property, the kids came and asked permission to watch the effort to get it up and running.  I agreed, reaffirming my instruction to stay off the road.  They promised, and I returned to work.  Then…

Dorothy sat at her typewriter fingering the keys, not choosing any to strike.  She looked out the window, past the ancient oak tree and saw an old car coming round the bend, emerging slowly from beyond the fringe of willows where a two-lane bridge spanned the creek.  It was a sedan, faded green, dust from the road etching a soft haze on the window glass.  The old man inside wore thick bottle glasses, a concession no doubt to cataract surgery.  In 1963, intraocular lenses had yet to be invented.  He strained, stretching and squinting, to see over and beyond the steering wheel.  An oncoming car had stopped for a chat with the across-the-street neighbor, pulling over onto the wrong side of the road.  Confused, the driver’s decision wavered as he veered to the right, off the asphalt and onto roadside gravel.  He didn’t see Melanie who had spied a pretty pink stone and decided to harvest it.  Time slowed, then inched forward, like the old car.

Dorothy looked out the window, unseeing.  Instead, she huddled, now only a slash of thought in a crook of the oak tree, where lowermost branch joined trunk.  It was a good place to be, the breeze sorting through new green leaves.  It reminded her of her tree at grandpa’s house, where she could swing higher and higher, flying with the wind right into blue bowl of sky.  Her mind reached for the dense center of grandfather oak.  She whispered, “Tree, I am here.”

“I see you,” breathed the oak tree, rattling his branches.  “I know you and your children.  You love them more than life, but now you aren’t seeing them.  Look!  The car comes closer.  It’s going to impact your little girl.  Don’t be afraid to see what is real.  You think you should stop it from coming, but there is nothing you can do.  Nothing.  Humans are strange and wonderful creatures.  I have always known them since first I split that acorn husk.  They are good, for the most part.  But they don’t know themselves, don’t have the courage to be who they really are.  Maybe it’s because they aren’t firmly planted like me.  See my roots?  You can see how strong they are even before they dig deep—deep into the earth. 

Well now!  Humans have to move about.  With no roots they must have a hard time knowing they belong anywhere at all.  Isn’t that true?”  The old oak sighed, leaves rustling gently.  He sensed the young woman standing by the window, her eyes first wide with terror, then dead with denial.  A firm understanding with the earth was for him a source of substantial pride.  But in some ways he envied the woman her ability to freely walk upon the earth, to move and act and yes—to accomplish.  “No wonder she toils at her pitiful little typing machine.  I wish I could create a poem, or a story.  God knows what a tale I could tell.  I’ve seen so much, felt so much, remembered so much.”  My heart shelters hers, he thought, arching his branches over the spot where her soul huddled, a refugee from terror.  “Dorothy,” he spoke firmly, the north wind gusting through his topmost branches.  It sent chills rippling down his bark, “You know what is happening to Melanie.  You do know.  If you keep that from yourself you will be slashed from top to bottom like a tree split in a lightning strike.”  Dorothy shuddered, her center of knowing dancing a phosphorescent jig on the tree limb.

“I know,” she said and dived off the branch, tumbling over and over, finally steadying into a glide.  She veered to the right, banked a degree to the left, willed herself up and up, just clearing a roof’s ridge, and thudded down onto an eaves-trough.  She clung to the metal edge, reeling from what she had let herself know.  She could see her oak tree, now far across the yard standing quiet and still, and she missed his solid center.  As she visualized the strength of the oak, she became that strength and was thankful.

“If indeed you are strong and brave, and have good eyes, you can see everything from here,” a crisp voice beside her announced.  Startled, she jumped and turned to face the corner-most clapboard shingle that was pointing urgently toward the road where the green sedan approached, crunching roadside gravel.  The shingle gathered up his importance and nodded.  He inspected this fragment of a human, feeling strange to address a consciousness so foreign, albeit just a disarticulated thought.  He brushed the edge of empathy, but skirted it with care.  “She wants to see,” he mused.  “Needs to, if I am correct.  But won’t let herself, if I am equally correct.”  He gazed past the disambiguated thought and watched as the car rolled forward, the bumper nudging the girl’s shoulder, spilling her onto the roadway.  The right front tire caught her shoulder and slowly rolled over her head, crushing her skull like a hairy melon.  “You saw,” he said.

“I saw,” Dorothy gasped, and pitched forward, tumbling from the eave and dropping to the walk below.  The spirit that was her knowing spiraled and coiled tighter, spinning into itself until it was a ball and rolled slowly down the walk, bounce-bounce-bouncing gently down-down-down the steps, out to where the child lay sprawled beside the road.  It nudged a still small hand and stopped.

The road rumbled to the ball, “Why are you here?”  She waited for an answer, and hearing none, stretched herself from east to west, and from west to east, on around the bend and across the bridge.  It felt good to stretch, since it was what she did best, extending in her mighty concrete and asphalt web from sea to shining sea.  The road was a well-grounded entity, more in contact with the earth than even the oak tree with his venerable roots.  The road rolled over the land seemingly forever.  She perceived more than any human could ever hope to see or know.  And she did even more.  She understood.  She knew why that living sphere of anguish hid beneath the child’s pale hand.  In that moment she pitied the woman, still standing by the window, having sent her soul alone to acknowledge what she herself could not.  The road smoothed her mighty lap and accepted the child as she lay ruined, her blood slowly pooling about her head while the siren from the approaching ambulance grew louder and louder.  The road groaned, touching the pain of the woman and of the child, one of body, one of mind.  And in the touching was born an understanding shared by the woman and by the road.  Dorothy turned from the window and walked slowly back to her desk.  She sank to her chair and began—began to type…

Did I see what happened?  I must have, but now fifty-six years later I have absolutely no real memory of it.  Blocked?  I hope so.  I have tried to tell that story, tried to write it down, but have always failed.  I got close with this silly fiction told in the voices of inanimate beings and objects.  Maybe leaning on Dick’s Hellmann’s strength I can do better:

Much later in Ritchie County’s main courthouse, Judge Max DeBerry personally             questioned witnesses to the accident.  It was my first time to hear the information:

Gale Hammet, retired Pennsboro High School Principal explained how he made ice cream that first day of good weather and wanted to share it with the neighbors.  His expansive nature came through in his testimony:

“I made some peach ice cream in my old hand crank mixer with what was left of last year’s canning.  It was super good, and I wanted to share it.  I hailed a couple of ol’ boys headed into town and they crossed over to my side of the road.  We were catching up while they ate, and then everything happened.”

Judge DeBerry asked, “Did they come into your house?”

“No, they stayed in their truck and ate while we talked.”

“Who else shared your ice cream?” the Judge queried.

Hammet gulped and cleared his throat.  “A boy whose motorcycle had broken down, and the Taylor children, Dale and Melanie.  They all came over and had some.”

“Did the children have permission to cross the road?”

“I told them it was alright if they were careful.  Then after they got their ice cream, I made sure they were back on their side safe and sound.”

“Where was their mother?”

“In her house.”

“Did you see the accident?”

 “I saw it all.  When the old man came around the bend he slowed down and looked confused.  My buddies were parked on my side but were heading the wrong way to match his understanding of things.  The old man pulled off the asphalt onto the Taylor side, to go around the wrong-way truck, and ran over the girl.  It was horrible.  I picked her up and carried her to the Taylor’s front porch.  I called out.  Mrs. Taylor came to the door and       asked what had happened.  I explained that Melanie was gone.  Mrs. Taylor didn’t seem to miss a beat and said that moving her might make it hard to heal her injuries.  She said to put her back carefully just like she was, so I wouldn’t get into any trouble.  Worried about me, she was.  She went back inside then and closed the door.  She must have called the ambulance, ‘cause in just a couple of minutes I heard it while I was watching over the     child’s body.”

 The Judge, pale in spite of his long experience with such matters, told Mr. Hammond to provide personal identifying information about the men in the truck to the Clerk of the Court, and to step down for now.

    
  I heard one of my attorneys whisper to the other, “Let’s sue the whole kit and caboodle!”

Later I told him to forget that.  I didn’t want to make any money out of what had happened.  My daughter was not for sale.  The old man took the accident especially hard and swore to never drive again.  That, I agreed, was for the best, but I felt bad for him.  I remembered how my grandfather, a retired preacher and Watkins Products salesman felt when returning to his Model T after a sales call at a private home.  He drove off, crushing
one of the children who had crawled under his car to enjoy the shade.  One evening as the sun was setting, I gathered my thirteen month old, Lane, snug for the night in his footie pajamas, and walked down the road with Dale, my five-year-old, to call on the old man. He cried when he saw us, but I comforted him.  “Don’t worry,” I made my mouth smile and crinkled my eyes, dry with what felt like a fixed stare.

“See, I have two more babies.  We’ll do ok.  I know you didn’t mean to do it.”  I left then before I might intrude into his personal grief.

 Judge DeBerry came through for me, granting me custody of the remaining minor  children, but in keeping with West Virginia jurisprudence, I had to wait for seven years before I might be granted dissolution of matrimony…

All this came boiling to the surface last week with the killing of yet another loved person.  Dick Hellmann liked my writing; I liked his.  That’s what we do at the Monday Morning Writers Group.  He was definitely part of my universe of constructed reality.  Since 2010 when I first joined the group, I have been making a place for myself at the writer’s table.  I come early every week and make sure the furniture is arranged to accommodate the group’s needs.  I like to make sure any extra chairs are rendered inaccessible to those who would camp on our periphery, engage their smart phones, and spoil our time reading and listening and socializing.

It’s been a time for me to try and understand myself, even though I thought it was about getting them to understand me.  They are still wondering what I am about.  There are some things yet to be explained—like why I wouldn’t accept that Melanie couldn’t be fixed and needed to be given a soft berth in the house rather than being carefully fit into some crime scene configuration along the extended berm of Mountain Drive.  Why was I the only one who couldn’t cry?  Why did I run around consoling everybody else when I was surely dying inside?  My thought process doesn’t yet arrange itself around that part of the story, but it will.  If I keep attending MMWG, and singing in the choir at Church of the Redeemer, and showing up for the camaraderie of bible study, and if I keep on writing and writing and writing, maybe I’ll get it figured out.