A Good Day for Seppuku

by Kate Braverman

  During their formal family discussions, he talks in a rush about knots, lassos and securing boats at docks. The principles of aerodynamics are demonstrated by archery. He mentions badges for cooking and house repair. He’s nervous and passionate and senses defeat. He wants to dig for arrowheads and fossils in amber, and recognize archeological sites from Indians and wagon trains.

  Tommy is trying to create a dialect in which he will be fluent. Perhaps it’s a language of ropes, flints, canvas tents and sticks that transform into flames. He’s small like his mother, with thin wrists and ankles, and doesn’t play sports with his father. He isn’t chosen for teams or after-school football. He is trying to survive.

  “Your thoughts are so primitive and generic, I can’t process them,” his mother says, taking off her apron.

  After dinner his mother goes to clay class or a lecture at the college. Woman’s Circle meets once a week and she’s taking another sewing class. Democratic Club is mandatory. The county has never voted democratic, not even for Roosevelt. Of course the cause is futile. That’s why it’s so important, his mother tells them. She’s president and has to open the door and start the coffee pot. She has the only set of keys.

  “Uniforms and saluting lead to Idi Amin, the shithead Shah of Iran, and that bastard in Iraq,” his father says. He stands up. “I can’t support that.”

  Tommy feels betrayed. He rides his bike to the college, barely noticing the rain. No one is outside, not on Lincoln Street or Maple Ridge Road. Campus is deserted. As usual, he reads the plaque on the marble statue of Galileo. Then he rides home in the dark.

  It’s the cusp between fall and winter and he’s uneasy. The zone of transition is like a frontier where there are no rules and the unpredictable is constant. Wind rips random paths through the forest and maples’ leaves fall in the shape of broken hearts, mouths, and twisted upended shells. The sun thins as if strained through a colander. Tommy knows the architecture of November. It’s an anatomy of edges and pebbles, gravel-mouthed thunderstorms, and abandoned nests finches left. In the planet’s shift, he has the sensation he may fall off the world.

  He’s surprised to find Captain waiting for him. “What have you got in that backpack?” he asks.

  Tommy takes out his compass, flashlight, buck knife, matchbooks, and paperback copy of On the Road that Professor McCarty gave him. He doesn’t like it and isn’t reading it.

  He places the items on the table near his father. He doesn’t have a canteen. He drinks from 5 Hawk Creek below a colossal maple. It’s one of the oldest in the forest and invariably turns a bold magenta. Its leaves stay on as if somehow attached past the first freeze. The bark is thick and complex, a sort of Braille he tries to read with his hands. There are epics beneath his fingers, formulas and footnotes. Puncture such a tree and the history of the world pours out. Cut it down and time stops. He calls the place where he drinks Cistern of the Sage.

  Under the lamplight his tools are a paltry assembly. They’re squalid and starkly inadequate.

  Captain examines the contents of his backpack. He picks them up one at a time and evaluates them.

  “A substandard Cro-Magnon could rule the planet with this gear,” his father decides. Then he opens a statistics book.

  Tommy can’t translate his emotions into intelligible sentences. He recognizes his father is wrong, but he can’t go further, can’t say You’re an unreasonable, selfish man. He believes he’ll someday navigate back through time, return to precisely this moment, and say, You’re a bully and narcissist. Give me the money. He doesn’t yet know that what is lost cannot be retrieved.

  His mother is gone the next day. After school he finds a recipe card taped to the refrigerator. Under the list of necessary ingredients for banana bread, she’s written Going to New Mexico.

  “Dad, we have to call the sheriff,” Tommy says. It’s past dusk when he rides to the clinic, holding the recipe card in his hand. “File a missing person report.”

  “Jimbo’s an asshole. Give it a few days,” his father replies. “She’ll come back when she wants.”

  His father hasn’t spoken to Sheriff Jim Murphy since the problem with the PETA brigade from Pittsburgh. Tommy chanced to be at the clinic when the delegation arrived. He watched six women get out of a van and enter the clinic.

  They have a list of requests. They want his father to board stray dogs and cats in his storeroom until they’re adopted. ‘Rescued’ is the word they use.

  His father is flabbergasted. They’re inundated with strays as it is. At spring break, students from the Con drop off kittens and puppies on the clinic grounds. They throw cats out of car windows, and kick puppies from cars. Sometimes they drag dogs to their front lawn in Wood’s End.

  “I’m an innkeeper for strays?” His father is infuriated. “Not in this life.”

  His father calls Sheriff Murphy. Jimbo drives his patrol car to the clinic. His father demands Jimbo arrest the delegation from Pittsburgh. The sheriff glances at the women in pastel suits and high-heeled shoes. They aren’t whores or white trash passing bad checks and selling dope. They aren’t hippies bad-mouthing America and whining about Salvador. They look like high school principals and doctors’ wives and smell like Reagan and golf.

  ‘What for?” the sheriff wonders.

  “Trespass, conspiracy to intimidate, harassment, and monumental stupidity,” his father informs him.

  “Hold on, Red,” the sheriff cautions.

  “Call me Red again, I’ll knock your lights out,” Dr. Joshua Sutter threatens. He makes a fist.

  His father has extraordinary hands, long and wide, and his fingers are monumental, graceful, sculpted and purposeful. The bones are clearly articulated like mountain ridges on old globes.

  “Kids in the hollows eat paint chips and bark. Vets sleep in bushes beside highways.” He waves his big-as-branches arms up and down, and in a diagonal implying lightning. Then he spreads his arms apart suggesting the wingspan of an eagle or a flying dinosaur.

  “Can’t do much about that,” Jimbo decides.

  “We’re mass killing peasants in Central America. And they have bleeding hearts for kittens? You kidding me, Jimbo? These folks,” his father pauses and glances at the Pittsburgh delegation, “have the St. Vitus of the 80s. It’s highly contagious.”

  “Can’t help you there, either,” Jimbo says.

  Tommy waits a week. They eat frozen dinners, canned soup with crackers, and have Papa Paulo’s pizza delivered. His mother used a battered Betty Crocker cookbook. Wednesday’s meatless lasagna passes, Thursday’s fried chicken with wild rice, and Friday’s tuna casserole. His father reads a book about differential equations and makes notations in the margins. Periodically, he briefly glances up and says something about the sheriff.

  “Jimbo’s a coward and fool. He got his purple heart for shooting himself,” his father reveals. “Dropped his .45 on his foot and it discharged. What a dick.”

  Tommy stays in his room. He doesn’t have a single arrowhead or fossil trapped in amber. Amber is how history punctuates itself, assuring that some specimens don’t disappear. It’s like an exclamation point.

  “Dad,” he begins.

  “Don’t call me Dad.” His father closes a text book and looks directly at him. “Dad is for whiners. It diminishes and offends me. I’m not just your dad. I have other aspects. Other facets.”

  “What should I call you?” he wonders.

  “Call me Captain like everyone else,” his father instructs him.

  “Where do you think Mom is?” Tommy asks.

  “No idea,” Captain says. “At least a million women disappear every year. Could be more. Police find their cars on back roads. The FBI discovers their suitcases at airports and bus depots. Women vanish like smoke. Poof.”

  His father draws out the word, poooofff, and waves his magician’s arms toward the ceiling. It’s a gesture meant to imply the infinite universe with its inexplicable laws and paradoxes — its force fields, dark matter, black h
oles, sudden blindness, spontaneous combustion and vanished mothers.

  On Sundays when his father is gone tending to sheep and cows, Tommy walks to Madison Street where three churches in a row occupy the whole block. Covenant Baptist, then Central United Methodist and All Saints Lutheran. He makes himself inconspicuous and watches women pass in their special church clothing. They wear big floppy hats, their good shoes are polished, and they have their dead grandmothers’ rhinestone pins on their coat.

  When they are close, almost brushing him, he breathes in their skin. This is what fascinates him, not the singing or sun beating itself against stained glass, but the powdery floral dust rising from the necks and hair of discreetly perfumed women. It’s this muted citrus and tea rose he wants to breathe, internalize and own. This is what he must analyze and possess. It has nothing to do with religion.

  On his 14th birthday, Captain presents him with a color TV. Sheriff Murphy carries the over-sized 40-gallon aquarium from the display window of Peter’s Prize Pets. He has a bucket of water with guppies, neons, red barbs, butterfly rams and angel fish. There’s a bag of coral and gray pebbles and a small wooden box with a ship to sit on top of the gravel bottom. The ship runs on batteries and sends out distress signals in what might be Morse Code. Jimbo produces two birthday hats, candles and a cake from Brenda’s Bakery. Jimbo impales candles in the icing and Captain and the sheriff sing Happy Birthday. They’re out of tune. Tommy blows out the candles and doesn’t make a wish.

  Later, Captain helps him set up the aquarium. They rarely have a project together and Tommy is disoriented by the thrill.

  “What’s your major?” Captain asks. “Austerity and solitude?”

  “Biochemistry,” Tommy answers.

  “Sit alone in a lab with tubes in racks and shakers? Count how many molecules can disco on a pin?” Captain returns with a glass of scotch. “Don’t make the mistake I did. I hate my job.”

  His father loathes being a veterinarian. Animals bore him. They’re too predictable and the stakes are too low. Sheep or cats, horses or dogs, mice or mammoths. Captain often threatens to quit. After all, he has other facets.

  “Go to medical school, Thomas. Nothing serious like surgery. Dermatology is the best bet. It’s an overlay.”

  Tommy doesn’t go into the forest in winter. Trees thin to sticks embedded in deep snowdrifts. Hills resemble the aftermath of an atomic blast. Their nudity is obscene. It’s a sacrilege. His birthday gift TV only receives two channels. The news from Scranton or Philadelphia, and preacher shows. The fish die one by one. His sunken ship no longer sends out distress calls in a smart sequence of three quick red beams every fifteen minutes. The batteries are dead.

  Tommy suspects distress calls fail to lead to search and rescue. There’s the matter of encryption and current conditions. His ship is in the Mariana Trench and nobody is listening.

  When he was in second grade, he realized his parents didn’t actually speak to one another. They only appeared to inhabit the same house on Lincoln Street. But they broadcast on separate frequencies in encrypted codes that changed every day. That’s when he recognized the futility of distress calls. There’re actually posthumous messages. By the time you say May Day May Day it’s too late.

  Six months later, his grandfather, Horace Bowen, telephones. The Captain and Horace aren’t on speaking terms.

  “Well, son,” Horace begins. There’s a pause, as if his grandfather is taking a deep breath. “Seems your mother got a touch of malaria in Africa. She called me for money. They flew her to Germany. She’s OK now.”

  So she didn’t go to New Mexico after all, Tommy is startled to realize. She joined the Peace Corps instead and they sent her to Arusha in Tanzania. She was teaching girls to use sewing machines in a village called Mosquito Creek. They were making aprons with Mt. Kilimanjaro stenciled on the front. They’d sold 231 at the airport when she became infected.

  His grandfather, Horace Bowen, has a northern accent with rolling a’s that are languid but defined, like smooth sandstone boulders slowly sliding down a hill. He lives in an Amish village in Manitoba, Canada. That’s where his parents are from. They grew up on adjoining farms. His mother won the Governor General’s Gold Crescent and was going to Berkeley, California. But she had somehow detoured and married Captain instead. She was sixteen.

  “Is she coming back?” Tommy asks.

  He hasn’t spoken to a relative before. He doesn’t know what the boundaries are. Should he tell his grandfather that his heart is broken and his father ignores him? And they just eat pizza and canned soup? Should he say he needs his mother with her Democratic Club, clay classes, and stained Betty Crocker cooking book with the pages falling out?

  Everything is unfathomable and abstract. Manitoba. Tanzania. Germany. And suddenly a man who is his mother’s father has appeared.

  “Is she coming back?” Tommy asks.

  “She didn’t say,” his grandfather tells him.

  “Why did she run away?” he wonders.

  “That’s not for me to know,” Horace Bowen replies.

  “Did she have a message for me?” Tommy is urgent.

  There is a pause in which his grandfather seems to make a decision. “It was a short call and went by fast,” his grandfather says. “Bad weather here. I have to go.”

  It’s the second Christmas since his mother departed. Tommy no longer believes she was kidnapped by a band of marauding killers, or struck with a rare amnesia. Nothing fell on her head from the sky. She wasn’t stolen or abducted by extraterrestrials. He recognizes that she deserted him.

  Over a million women disappear every year. It’s a phenomenon. Sometimes cars with wallets and passports and antique bracelets are found on abandoned country roads. Suitcases with nightgowns, photographs, wedding rings and ski jackets are discovered in airports and bus stations.

  It’s possible to triangulate location from accidental remnants. A red taffeta dress with ruffles, hoop earrings and castanets wrapped in tissue paper next to a book titled Spanish Basics suggests a certain trajectory. A wedding gown, flannel baby blankets and a two-hundred-year-old lace communion dress made in Belgium indicate other possibilities. But his mother didn’t leave a trace.

  Tommy is stunned. He realizes history isn’t absolute. It’s flexible and offers competing narratives subject to editing and deletion. He has trouble falling asleep. He hypnotizes himself by deriving rudimentary mathematical theorems that can be solved and replicated. This is the prayer that works. This is grace.

  Tommy finds the Christmas decorations in the attic and brings the boxes to his father. Captain has appropriated his mother’s bedroom for a study. He’s moved in a desk and bookshelves, a new sofa, his stereo and TV. He’s put a lock on the door. Tommy has to knock.

  Captain doesn’t look at the box he’s holding. Strands of green and red bulbs and his mother’s childhood ornaments are inside — the miniature gingham dolls with yellow yarn braids and brass button eyes, the cotton snowflakes, each distinct in size and embroidery and the fifteen angels with her name rendered in pink thread. One for each Christmas. Someone who loved her sewed her name in twig-like stitches. Tommy senses they intended to impart a further message in a deliberate script like hieroglyphics.

  “Let’s give it a rest,” Captain says.

  They don’t put up the Christmas lights or drive to Mike Moretti’s lot with its hundreds of freshly cut trees that are fragrant with some dusty, distilled essence of pine. They don’t buy a Christmas tree for his mother’s ornaments or put a wreath on the front door.

  Captain closes the clinic just after Thanksgiving and doesn’t plan to reopen until mid-January. He pauses on his way to the Buick and counts out five crisp hundred dollar bills. He indicates the table where ten silver dollars are arranged to form a squat pyramid. His suitcase and doctor’s bag are already in the car.

  His father hasn’t cut his hair since his mother left. It’s so long he ties it in a ponytail with a rawhide string. Wind knocked off his
ivory shantung straw hat that hides his forehead and part of his left eye. His father doesn’t want anyone to see what he’s thinking.

  Tommy has retrieved the hat and his father puts it in the cardboard box he’s carrying toward the Buick. The hat rests on top of packages wrapped with rows of inordinately festive reindeer tied with pink and blue bows.

  “I’ve got bloat and colic from Pittsburgh to Harrisburg,” his father says. “I’ve got Grass Fever and Nile Fever and widows and orphans in 12 counties. Ho ho ho.” He doesn’t smile.

  “What about me?” Tommy asks. He expects his father to tell him to dial 911. That’s what he said last Christmas.

  “Something happens, I expect you to take care of it,’’ Captain said. “Time you man up.”

  Caroler’s from St. Mary’s and St. Stephens United Methodist offer an unenthusiastic truncated version of “Santa Clause is Coming to Town.” As if sensing the desolation within, they quickly move on through thickly falling snow. The porch light is burned out and the only illumination in the house is the lamp in his bedroom. When the carolers arrive, he turns off the lamp.

  The house is a black hole on the street. It’s a mouth with the front teeth knocked out and it’s snowing hard.

  Mrs. Riggs, the mailman’s wife who lives two houses down Lincoln Street, brings him plates with leftover dinner — sometimes it’s turkey and mashed potatoes with gravy, ham and cornbread, or beef stew and biscuits. When the pharmacist’s wife, Mrs. Sissick, bakes, she sends one of her sons to deliver pieces of pie and bags of ginger snaps.

  Sheriff Murphy passes in his pick-up and issues a blizzard warning through a bullhorn. Then he parks and walks in through the front door. Tommy hadn’t realized the sheriff had a key.

  “Got a bulb?” Jimbo asks. “It’s creepy dark. Probably scared away the preachers. You hiding?”

  The sheriff puts in a new bulb on the porch. Then he opens kitchen cabinets and counts soup cans.