As he continues to speak, the doctor, who looks much younger than my father, shakes his head. “Liar,” the doctor mumbles under his breath. When the president says, This is an historic moment, the doctor shouts, “This is blood for oil!”
My father shakes his head. “It’s to protect us,” he says. “We’ll go in, do what’s right and we will get out.”
The doctor’s face contorts for a moment like he might lunge at my father, but he only takes a deep breath.
“The nurse will be in with your wife’s prescription.” The door closes behind him, and my brother and I stare at our father.
After a moment, he says, “Let’s pray over your mother.”
We walk to the bed and lay our hands on our mother, deep in her opiate sleep. My father begins praying in a whisper; my brother and I join him with our own prayers. On the television, the president continues to justify the war: These are the times that try men’s souls.
X
The saw blade rips through a board of cherrywood with a savage cry. My father blows on the edge to clear the sawdust and squints through his safety glasses. He frowns as he runs a fingertip over the edge and tosses the board onto a discarded stack of wood on the garage floor.
“I can’t get any of these boards right,” he says. I hold a new board for him to saw in two. “The work can’t be faulty. Everything has to be perfect.”
He takes the piece of cherrywood out of my hands.
“This wood is expensive,” he says, “but I want our table to last forever.” I think about how odd it is that my father is wasting materials. He is a man of thrift. His shoes are worn until superglue and duct tape can no longer repair the rubber soles. The cracked frames of eyeglasses are glued at the bridge. He takes my brother and me to Kmart to buy school clothes, encouraging us to choose sweatpants that are too big so we can grow into them.
He lays the new piece of wood on the platform of the table saw. Pushing it forward, the blade catches the meat of the wood.
“Shoot,” my father says after inspecting the fresh cut.
“Those cuts look good,” I say. The scent of sawdust hangs in the air. A cool evening breeze comes in through the open garage door. The neighborhood kids play baseball in the street.
My father shakes his head. “The cuts are off on each of these boards,” he says. “It’s clear as sin.” He tosses the two pieces of wood on the stack of scrapped boards and pushes a new board through the steel teeth. The board screams as it comes undone. I fear we’ll wake my mother who rests on the couch in the living room with a damp towel over her eyes. The new medication has softened the hard edges of her nausea, but I still wake every few days to the sound of her being sick in the bathroom.
My father completes the cut and inspects the board. “Scrap wood,” he proclaims, dropping the board on the cement floor with a clack that rises above the whir of the blade. He reaches toward me for another board.
“No,” I say. My tongue is dry from sawdust. My eyes burn.
He flashes me a look, as if seeing me for the first time this afternoon.
“Look at those boards again,” I yell over the saw blade. I don’t know where this nerve is coming from.
His hand hangs there like the immovable steeple of our church. “I’ll get the cut right on this one,” he says. “I’m starting to get the feel for this wood.” The way his eyes dart from the board in my hand to the spinning blade scares me.
“One more,” I say. He nods. I place the board in his hand. He turns back to the saw, sets the board on the deck and pushes the wood toward the brutal whir. The wood shrieks as it splits. My father holds up the board, slowly runs his fingertip along the cut.
“I think I need a new blade,” he says and drops the board on the pile of scrap wood.
He reaches out his hand without looking at me. I move in front of him. He looks down at me.
“What are you doing?” he asks. The saw blade sings.
“No,” is all I can say.
He shakes his head and pushes past me. I try to resist, but I’m a child and he is a man. This understanding bites into me.
“Go inside,” he says. “And don’t wake your mother.”
In the kitchen I lean against the counter where I can see into the garage. The figurine of St. Anthony and the child Jesus he’s holding stares down at me from the shelf by the phone. In the living room I hear the low breathing of my mother, flattened from chemo. Her breathing tells me she’s sleeping despite the whine of the saw blade. I sneak into the living room and stand over her. The blinds are closed; the room feels impossibly hot. I wipe sweat from the back of my neck and take small breaths to keep from waking her. The damp washcloth covers her eyes. She makes a muffled snoring sound. I want to wake my mother and tell her that my father needs help. He’s coming apart. In the garage the saw screams in the ceremony of my father’s self-destruction.
My trance is broken by a crashing sound. I rush out to the garage. The saw blade still hums. My father stares out at the driveway where the headlight of our car is shattered and a piece of cherrywood lies on the ground beneath the front bumper.
“Kickback,” my father yells over the sound of the saw blade still turning. “Knocked the wood right out of my hand.”
Red droplets fall on the spinning blade. The red is brilliant, beautiful. I follow the beads up to my father’s hand.
“You’re bleeding,” my mother’s voice says from the kitchen door. My father still doesn’t understand. He holds up his hand. The meat of his palm is splayed open—red blood drips on the concrete.
* * *
The lilies are dying. Last summer when we moved from the trailer park, my mother planted the flowers that line the front of the house and the porch in the backyard. In our trailer, she always kept lilies, and at our new house she planted yellow and white lilies in the front, orange tiger lilies in the back. I can’t remember a summer without lilies. Their bodies fully open, their sweet smell in the afternoon.
But the thick petals have shriveled from lack of water, the bright yellows, whites and oranges pocked with holes from Japanese beetles. The flower beds are overrun with crabgrass. Grubs eat at the roots. Without my mother to tend them, they will die.
On an afternoon after another round of chemo, I’m driven out of the house by the smell. Mixed with the fetor of cat piss, the house now stinks like a hospital; we’ve been bringing home the cruel antiseptic scent with each trip. The house is sick with it.
The neighborhood kids play basketball a few houses down, but I’m watching an iridescent beetle chew a hole in the freckled petal of a tiger lily. Its body glows neon green as it works at the orange sepal.
“What are you doing?” my father asks. He clutches a dowel that will hold the boards of the table together. His right hand is wrapped in a bandage from the saw blade cut. Like everything else this summer, we agree with a nonverbal covenant to not talk about the expensive wood he ruined or his cut that my mother sutured with medical tape in the bathroom, my father refusing to get stitches because of the cost.
He catches me looking at the splotches of red blood encrusted on his bandage. I look away. “The flowers,” I say, “they’re dying.”
My father looks at me, confused. I motion toward the row of tiger lilies that sag toward the earth.
He nods. “You should be playing. Don’t worry about the lilies.”
“I’ll try not to,” I say.
He looks over the wooden dowel in his hands. “It’s warped. Why don’t they make things right anymore?” he says. He looks at me. “Go play with the other kids. Your mother wants everything to be normal.” He adds, “Pray for the lilies when you pray for your mother.”
* * *
The white lilies start coming back first. It’s a week later. In some kind of miracle, they stand tall and erect beneath the summer sun. Their petals are a sharp white against the front of
our gray house. Sticky yellow pollen dusts the white petals. Bees work at the stamens. The creamy sweetness of their fragrance has returned. The yellow lilies still droop like willows toward the ground, but the white lilies vibrate from the wind without falling over. I have been praying for them. This is a sign.
I pray for my mother each night until I fall asleep. In the morning I get mad at myself for not staying up later, praying. We don’t take my mother to church anymore to be prayed over. She’s too sick. Someone brought over a vial of water from the Jordan River where Jesus once stood, and my father spreads a droplet on my mother’s forehead every morning as he talks to her about tank guns and his reports that were ignored. Father Brian hasn’t been around much lately to organize the prayer sessions or anything else for that matter. There are rumors that he might leave the parish. If my mother weren’t so sick, Father Brian’s alleged transgressions—that he’s neglecting his weekly duties and, worse, that he’s been seen in town with a woman who doesn’t attend our church—might be the most important issue in our house.
In the garage my father works wood with power tools gripped in his bandaged hand. My brother hasn’t been around a lot since the chemo started. He has a girlfriend in a neighborhood I’ve never been to.
* * *
A week later the yellow lilies, like their white counterparts, are resurrected from their state of dying. Their beds have been weeded and the stalks stand proud in front of the house. Now all the lilies in front of our house have been brought back to life.
“What’s happening with the lilies?” I ask my father. We’re in the garage. He’s reading the label on a can of polyurethane.
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“The lilies out front—they’re not dying anymore,” I say.
He looks up from the polyurethane can. “Have you been praying?”
I nod. And it’s true. I have. After I pray for my mother in the morning when I wake up and when I’m in bed at night, I say a prayer for the lilies.
My father smiles. “That’s the power of prayer.” He goes back to the polyurethane can. Behind him the table is beginning to take shape now that he’s started keeping some of the wood he’s cut. The cherry boards aren’t sanded, but it’s beginning to look like a table. Soon it will be finished and it will come into the kitchen and we will sit around it and eat as a family once again.
“It’s coming along, isn’t it?” my father says when he sees me staring at the table.
“Yes,” I say.
“You keep praying for your mother,” my father says, “and for the lilies.”
* * *
I’m smoking one of my brother’s cigarettes when I find the beetle trap hanging from a metal stand in our backyard. The trap is green with yellow fins at the top. It’s shaped like a bomb. I take a drag from my cigarette and hold in the smoke until I’m dizzy. My brother told me that’s how you can get high from a cigarette. He taught me how to smoke last summer and now that he’s gone all the time I sneak them alone. At confession, I ask for forgiveness.
I exhale cigarette smoke from my lungs and peek inside the beetle trap. The small bodies of beetles writhe. Their legs strain for a solution. The bag is pregnant with beetles. The trap has been hidden in the trees behind the house out of sight in the spot where my brother and I used to smoke our mother’s cigarettes together.
By the bright green plastic and the fresh chemical scent, I can tell it’s new. I take a drag and blow the smoke into the bag. The tiny neon bodies struggle.
I mash the orange cigarette cherry against the sole of my sneaker. All around me beetles buzz toward the trap. Without the smoke of my cigarette to bother them, they land on my arms and neck. I slap at the beetles and run out of the cluster of trees into the clearing of the backyard. My throat is dry from the cigarette, and I cough, staring at the house.
The orange tiger lilies still slump along our back porch.
* * *
That night my brother is supposed to be sleeping over at our neighbor’s house, but I’m sure he’s at his girlfriend’s. He doesn’t tell me anything about her. I want to know the details about her bare chest and her warm thighs and the space where her legs come together. But he’s going into high school. That’s enough to break our bond.
It’s late but I can’t sleep, frenetic with the summer. I look at baseball cards with a flashlight, listen to cassette tapes my brother and I keep hidden under our mattresses, jerk off thinking about the naked collarbone of my brother’s black-haired girlfriend, consider how I’ll confess this to Father Brian, read comic books, and pray for my mother.
At four thirty in the morning, I hear low whispers in the backyard. I’m beginning to fall asleep, but I stand on my bed. Out my window, my father spreads something along the edge of the garden. The sun is just beginning to appear over the horizon. When he’s done, he places the bag on the lawn and kneels. It’s pesticide, I realize. I knew it was him. He whispers again. There’s the voice of someone else. I squint but can’t see anything in the darkness.
A trowel scrapes the earth as it turns over soil. The sun inches in the sky. I stare out at the yard and watch the dark bodies slump toward the ground, tending the flowers. Their hands drop weeds into a bucket. They laugh quietly.
Sunlight pierces through the trees in the eastern sky, revealing my mother, on her knees slowly working the soil. My father isn’t digging up weeds; he’s holding up my mother as she leans forward, their bodies seeming to be one in the darkness. They inch carefully along the flower bed. I listen to hear if my father is talking about what’s going on at work, but they only talk about the lilies. My father has brought out the small trash can from the bathroom that he places next to my mother in case she gets ill. How many mornings have they done this?
My mother’s hair is thinning. My father rubs her back. He whispers, “Take it easy. We can come back tomorrow to finish.”
My mother doesn’t stop digging the hand trowel through the earth.
I watch my parents perform this ritual of saving the lilies before I realize how exhausted I am. I lie down on my bed and listen to their whispers and the rasping sound of digging. I fall asleep before I can say a single prayer.
XI
The brick convent sits on a hill next to the lake that, in a few decades, will become so contaminated with mercury the town will declare its fish unfit to eat. By then, the convent will have closed, the land sold to the town, who will build a chain-link fence around the abandoned building. Ivy will climb the brick walls until almost everyone has forgotten that the Sisters of Mercy ever walked its halls.
But in 1969 the lake water is clean and sixty-four nuns live at the convent, praying, fasting and serving meals all in the name of the Lord.
That winter, snow piles on the sides of the long driveway leading to the front steps. Tall oak trees droop in the yard around the brick building from the weight of snow.
My mother is a senior in high school. Many of the boys in her class talk of going off to Vietnam. Vietnam is a long ways away. So is God. She wants to get closer to God. She yearns for the convent lifestyle: prayer, service to the poor and sick, a peaceful life tucked away in the rural mountains of Vermont.
Mother Superior stares out the window into the January cold. My mother knocks on the open door. The nun turns in her chair. “And who are you?”
“Father Raymond told me to come today,” my mother says.
“Ah, we’re ready for you.” Mother Superior is plump with fierce eyes and an alto voice that frightens my mother. The seventeen-year-old girl wants nothing more than to be accepted by this woman as one of her own. “We need young ladies,” Mother Superior says. “The sisters are getting older.”
“I would love that,” my mother says, “to become a sister.”
A few weeks earlier Father Raymond had told my mother he saw the light of God in her and that she would make a wonderful Sister of Me
rcy. She rode the fever of that compliment for weeks, rode it right into the brick-walled convent and Mother Superior’s office, but sitting here now in front of this aging nun, my mother’s confidence wilts.
“We’ll start you in the kitchen. You’ll come every Saturday morning at eight and go home Sunday evening,” the old nun says.
My mother giggles from nerves and delight. Her smile is cut short when she remembers her dead front tooth from the field hockey accident in October. She covers her mouth with her hand, a habit she will continue long into adulthood.
In the kitchen Sister Agnes shows my mother how to wash the dishes and return them to their proper place after meals. Sister Agnes is missing her right arm. It was ripped off in a childhood accident at her family’s farm in Canada, she tells my mother. The armless sleeve of her habit flaps like a wing as she leads my mother around the kitchen. My mother runs her fingertips over the stacks of dishes in the cupboards and along the row of coffee mugs used by these women of God. This will be her home someday. She is delirious with the idea.
* * *
My mother tolerates school during the week until she can get back to the Sisters of Mercy. For a month Sister Agnes picks apart her lack of attention to the nuanced duty of dishwashing, until she is finally moved to housekeeping. She had tried to live Sister Agnes’s words when the nun insisted, “Dishwashing is the humble work of God,” but my mother is relieved to be out of the basement with the crippled woman. She confesses to her priest that Sister Agnes’s missing arm gives her nightmares.
“You aren’t the first one,” Father Raymond laughs.
Sister Ava is young. On the first day they work together, she tells my mother, “I’m twenty-seven, but I have always felt older.” My mother nods earnestly, hoping to communicate that this is also how she has always felt.
Soon the Light Will Be Perfect Page 7
