She sits. The carpentry continues, the hammer and saw sounds traveling on the slight breezes. A warm summer day is childhood itself, she thinks. Eric will lie here, she thinks, when the building across the road is finished, and when it has housed a family, and when the family has grown, and when they are all gone, he will lie here still. Even as this is what she knows, it is coming to her now, too, that she has to let Eric go, that he dislikes being restrained, especially on a summer day, that she has to stop holding him and let him go. That after the moment in the funeral home of redoing his hair and of standing to hold his hand, and after the moments during the service of the children from his school singing of his keeping his head on high and of not being afraid and of Jesus calling him home, softly and tenderly calling him home; that after giving him one last kiss before the closing of the casket, and bringing him here to the countryside of his birth; that after these moments of holding to him and waiting for him to rise out of his sleep, it is because she loves him that she has to let him go; that in letting him go he may live again. So it is that she releases him, in this moment; so it is that she lets him slip away from her like a child at play, into eternity.
About the Author
Photo by Marsha Robinson, 2012.
THEODORE WEESNER was born in Flint, Michigan in 1935. Abandoned by his teenage mother at age two, he lived until age five—with his brother Jack, two years older—in a home managed by a 550-pound immobile woman who took in stray children from broken homes. At ages five and seven, Ted and Jack went to live with their father when he set up housekeeping with a farm woman named Hattie Rex.
Elementary school was normal for the brothers, until Hattie was hired at AC Spark Plug and, like their father at Chevy, began working second shift, leaving the prepubescent boys on their own until the shift change hour each day at midnight.
In junior high, Ted and Jack began having scrapes with authorities until, turning seventeen, Jack left high school to enlist in the Air Force. Ted, following into high school and although an avid basketball player, was charged with car theft and incarcerated at the Genesee County Juvenile Detention Home. Ultimately (and permanently) suspended from high school, Ted enlisted in the army as a GED, also at age seventeen, and began a circuitous, personal journey back that would see him graduating from the Honors College at Michigan State University and publishing fiction nationally as a graduate student at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
Leaving Iowa with an MFA, Theodore Weesner went on to publish fiction in the New Yorker, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, Best American Short Stories, and other anthologies such as Audience and Ploughshares. His first novel, The Car Thief, a Book-of-the-Month Club Featured Alternate, was published to critical acclaim in England, Japan, and Germany. While publishing, to date, five other novels and a collection of short stories, Weesner has received Guggenheim, NEA, and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants. Down through the years he has taught at University of New Hampshire and at Emerson College in Boston.
Also by THEODORE WEESNER
THE CAR THIEF *
WINNING THE CITY REDUX *
WINNING THE CITY
NOVEMBERFEST
HARBOR LIGHTS
A GERMAN AFFAIR
CHILDREN ’S HEARTS
*Published by Astor + Blue Editions
The True Detective Page 47
