by Owen Thomas
My father nodded in some secret, silent confirmation. He gave a small, bitter laugh to himself.
“And I had information to give. I surely did.”
I pulled the car up to the airport terminal loading zone and hit the hazards. Airport security walked past, giving a look inside.
“I told Darius Knotty that it looked to me like Dillon was going to marry Minnie Watson. I told him that I imagined Grace Watson was on cloud nine, planning the wedding. I didn’t plan on saying those things. They were just… there, hiding behind my shame and resentment. Waiting for an opportunity to be said.”
He was staring down into his lap at his large, fatherly hands. His fingers worried for a few quiet seconds. Then he looked up at me.
“I’ve never told anyone that story. Only you. I will add it to the stories that only you and I share. I will add it to the big one. It was the most spiteful thing I have ever done in my entire life, Tilly. And I have never forgiven myself for it. Never.”
The security guard eyed us again, making the let’s move it gesture with his finger.
“Dad… I don’t understand.”
He gave me a bittersweet half-smile and I knew he was not going to help me.
“Someday, when you and I can… communicate better… I’ll tell you the whole story. It’s a long one. And I’ve only recently come to realize that it’s the only story, encompassing everything else. Each of us only has one story. You, Tilly, only have one story. Zack’s a part of it. And Angus is a part of it. I’m a part of it. And your mom, and David and Ben. Everyone you’ve ever met and everything you’ve ever done, good or bad, right or wrong. And they’re all connected. They’re all connected.”
He interlaced his fingers in front of his face, more intense now and candid than I have ever known since the day we stared at each other through the open door of the basement junk room. Time collapsed. Once again, I saw my father as my father, the man I was born to love and admire, in a place and time I least expected him.
“I want to hear your story, Matilda. All of it. And I want to tell you mine. Whatever you have to go through and whatever I have to go through before we can do that will only give us more to tell. However long it is, Tilly, I will wait for that day.”
The security guard knocked on the window, but neither of us flinched.
“And when we are done, maybe we’ll both understand.”
* * *
Young Sadie is reading now. I can feel the new stillness of the room. Her sound is so different than the news with its hurricanes and predictions. Louisiana, back in the mouth of the beast. Sixty years to prepare and yet they are once again lambs to the lion.
They call it Katrina’s Mother coming for land. Coming now for some sort of atmospheric vengeance. As if Katrina had been but young Grendel. They say it thus because they want to entertain more than inform. Terror is more interesting, and everyone loves a good story. And when there is pain, everyone loves to point a finger. But if there is any truth in their fiction – and there is always truth in fiction – then it is this: we create our own monsters and we invite their savagery. And when they are done, if we have survived, we prop ourselves up against the trunk of a stout tree, bleeding and in pain, and we wait for them to return. And they always do. For they are us.
But that is done now and silent at last and the pump behind me is still bellowing into my exhausted lungs. And Sadie is reading. She does not know it, but I have left to her the bonsai. The one she loves to stroke and ponder whenever she visits. My father’s bonsai. My bonsai. Full and magnificent in its way, with little pink flowers. I have left her my tools, as well. The little saw and the clippers in their leather cases.
The rest is up to her.
But for now, she reads. She is picking up where she left off: the long flight to Rhuton-Baker. I cannot move my lips. But I imagine that I can. And in that way, the most important way, I do move them.
* * *
It was many years before my father and I actually traded stories. It took three divorces, two of them mine, and one of them his, before that stage was set. I had left one career and was well into my second. I had, by then, lived in and left California, Washington, and Colorado and moved back to Ohio. I bought a house outside Elyria, which was within reasonable proximity to Oberlin College, where I taught creative writing for twenty years and satisfied my father’s dream of having at least one of his children attend an institution of higher learning in the state of Ohio. I was not a student, but it counted.
I taught class and wrote my books and tended my garden and took long walks with Angus Mann through the woods around his fish shack cum cottage cum two-story home at Leesville Lake. We spoke mostly of writing and of books, written and unwritten, and he proved to be both a brilliant editor and reliable muse for my work. Every now and then, whenever he owed me a favor or lost a bet, I took him out to see a movie.
There were a few times that we spoke of Julia and of Iris Rhuton and of those memories, but very rarely, and only when we both had had too much to drink after dinner, listening to the hardwoods around the lake move in the breeze. Those same trees, of course, had seen everything of that terrible night. They remembered, like Greta remembered.
Afterwards I helped him to pretend that the subject had never come up and we talked of other things. But that part of him was never very far away. I learned to find it in his eyes, a sadness even when he was laughing or lecturing or railing. In the darkness of his pupils those two red taillights were still burning up on that broken bridge. Iris Rhuton was still driving away, off into the pouring pitch of his own memory. I think it was helpful in some small way that I knew. That I knew enough to judge him – that I had judged him – and that I loved him anyway. I looked after him. I tried to be a good friend. He was a good friend to me to the end. Like a father.
But Angus was not my father. My father was my father. And I never once thought differently. At no time was the difference between them more clear than when I saw them together, both in their eighties, wearing their ridiculous fishing hats, sorting their gear out in the back of Angus’ truck and arguing over which lures were the most reliable. I had grown to love Angus dearly, and on the cold winter day that he died, a part of me surely died with him. I buried him as the daughter he and Julia might have had, but never did.
But of the two men leaning over the sides of that truck, my father was the one who is eternal. The one whose voice and manner and laugh, and whose unmistakable shape silhouetted against the dying Ohio sun can never be exiled from my heart. The one whose memory is wholly my own. The one whose story is my story.
I have had many loves in my life, and ever since poor Racer Greer in Telluride, I was smart enough not to marry any of them. I was perfectly happy to remain notoriously single and to enjoy my freedom from the expectations and compromises of matrimony. As for children, I was sufficiently content to share those of my brother whenever they visited and of my students over the years. Between lovers, my need for companionship was more than sated by a friend I met one day on Murray Ridge Road where it connects with County Road 112: a St. Bernard someone had beaten and abandoned and left to wander the roads looking for sustenance and explanations. I took him home and fattened him up and gave him the run of the place. I called him Angus.
It was my brother Benny whom I credit for finally bringing my father and I together to complete the trading of stories begun on the LAX loading ramp. Ben died of heart complications when he was forty-eight, which was pretty good back then for someone with his condition. He had been married to the same adorable woman with challenges similar to his own – Mikki – for twenty-one happy years. Because I am a writer and because writers are obnoxious in this way, I like to think of those years as an homage to the extra twenty-first chromosome that made Benny such a pure and special person. He and Mikki lived in a special needs community that allowed for a measure of supervised independence and my parents and Mikki’s parents spoiled them shamelessly. I brought Angus by often and we would all g
o for an off-leash walk in the park, Mikki and I trailing and talking about girl things as Benny and Angus bounded on ahead after an unpredictable football.
David and Cait and their kids came home for the funeral and we all spent a week in each others’ arms grieving. Of all of us, my father may have been the most affected. He loved Benny in a way that he could never have loved any of the rest of us. Benny was the only one who could look back at him with eyes that did not judge him for the past. Benny was the only one that loved him – Benny was the only one that loved any of us – unconditionally in the moment, with whatever there may have been to forgive, already forgiven. He was a kind of weightless perfection that all of us strived for and that none of us, being so bound to history and so unable to let it go, ever attained.
Ben was Zen.
* * *
Young Sadie is floating now. Her voice is no longer fixed in space. No longer coming from the side of this hospital bed. She is a single, continuous stream of sound, like a thin jet of ink in cold water. There is another jet of ink, this one fatter and quicker to lose its integrity and I can tell that a nurse has popped in like a cuckoo in a clock to remind her about visiting hours.
Now it is just Sadie again, continuing to read. I can approximate where she is in the story by how long she has been at it and by the shape of the vibrations that she recognizes as sound. There are patterns of dialogue and narration that are distinct to a trained ear.
She is approaching the mid-point of the story and she will not finish today.
It is entirely appropriate, when I think of it. Appropriate that we end in the middle. That is surely how we start. And how we live. We are always in the middle. Why should the end be any different?
Sadie will mark the page and stand and kiss my forehead and plan to return in two days time to pick up where she left off. But, I suspect that her mother will tell her tomorrow that there is no point in returning.
The lines of ink in the water around me are thinning. The water is evaporating, absorbed by empty space. Sadie’s voice dissolves. Her continuous vibrational presence begins to atomize into separate words and syllables. I perceive them almost as if I was conscious again, almost as if I were swimming toward the surface rather than away from it. They are words and syllables in my ears, imprinting on my dimming awareness. They are made of individual letters, threads of ink bent into special shapes and hammered onto a white sheet of paper, decades ago, by a man I was destined to meet.
Every sound now is a tiny burst of light, in a widening sea of space.
Joining billions.
* * *
Some people will remember me as Tilly Johns, an actress and would-be a movie star who may or may not have made a sex video and sold drugs and slept with her directors and broken the hearts of her leading men. Many others will remember me as Matilda Johns, a writer of one biography and forty-two novels, named after her great grandmother, Matilda Leona, who escaped from an all-but-arranged marriage and a mysteriously burning Barcelona home, smuggled herself to America, and after many years of notorious independence as a teacher and a writer of women’s stories, married a German born farmer twice her age growing corn and potatoes in Southern Indiana. Others will remember me as a professor of writing, and still others as an old crone who liked to come to parties and drink and tell stories. All of them will no doubt have their opinions of my various creative expressions.
It doesn’t matter. What they think, I mean. It really doesn’t matter.
My most meaningful expression as an actress was as Col. Elena Ivanova in a movie that very few people went to see initially, lots of people saw eventually, and probably no one really understood. The stories I told at parties were all meaningful to me, even if the wine kept them from being entirely comprehensible to anyone else. The most meaningful hours I ever spent with Zack West, my friend Zel, was not in the studio or in the bedroom; it was out surfing the Pacific Ocean, and I was a terrible surfer.
It doesn’t matter what other people think. They are all but so many tabloids. What matters is what we feel about ourselves at the end of the day. After that, after we have made our own peace with that, then as Charles Compson would say, fuck the rest and all who would judge us for it.
As an author, the most meaningful thing I have ever written is something very few people will ever read and even fewer will understand. And that is the biography of my father, Leonard Hollis Johns, with all of his hard truths and self-conceits lain bare in the context of a full life and a redemptive heart, that great ennobled muscle, while he was alive to read it and to feel, at last, forgiven.
EPILOGUE – Angus
The Lion Tree, by Angus Mann
The water fell in its unending rhythms, drenching the dark air of the dome.
She would send someone for him, thought the Leaving Man. The Preemptive Man. She cared at least that much. She would give him that chance to rejoin the world.
Except that there was no world left to join. Not without her. This was his world now. Rhuton-Baker. Ten times the size of his beleaguered Earth and his was the only beating heart.
He gazed out through the wet wall of the dome into open space. Waiting.
They were visible soon enough. Too soon, for seeing them meant she was gone. Two steady crimson glows engulfed by the blackness of space. They were like the eyes of an enormous galactic cat looking back in at him, this mouse of a man under glass.
Were that it was true.
For they were not eyes. They were the burner lights of the Pazienza and the Coraggio, gliding slowly but deliberately out of orbit, ready to push the Santa Maria back across the black sea.
The lights grew smaller. Fainter. The falling water filled his ears and blurred his eyes.
He felt her watching. Somewhere, in the part of him that remembered the self he had long abandoned, the self who did not fear love enough to destroy it, somewhere there, he felt her looking back down at him, picturing him at the table somewhere inside the gleaming white shell on the surface of his world.
The Leaving Man, now left, the Preemptive Man, now preempted, lifted his waterlogged arm from the table.
He waved and answered.
“Goodbye, Elena.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Owen Thomas, a life-long Alaskan with an abiding love of original fiction, is a product of the Anchorage School District and a graduate of Duke University and Duke Law School. While managing an employment litigation practice in Alaska, Owen has written three novels: Lying Under Comets: A Love Story of Passion, Murder, Snacks and Graffiti; The Lion Trees, winner of thirteen international book awards, including the Kindle Book Award; and a novel of interconnected short fiction entitled Signs of Passing, winner of over a dozen book awards including the Pacific Book Awards for Short Fiction and the Indie Reader Discovery Award, and was included among the 100 Most Notable Books of 2015 by Shelf Unbound Magazine. Owen maintains an active fiction and photography blog on his author website at www.owenthomasfiction.com.
