The House Party
Rebecca Carroll © 2008
We came from Knoxville, Claxton, Maryville, Petros, Chattanooga, Cookeville, Georgia, Kentucky, from across the road, down the road, and from across Middle Ridge. My five siblings and I and our various offspring and attachments gathered at dad’s for few days of togetherness. We made cookies, ordered pizza, drank wine and cans of soft drinks, and reminisced. The trash can heaped with the remnants: bottles, cardboard boxes, paper plates, and cans. The dining room with its extra long table that Mom was so proud to seat most of the family around became the center of command. From there siblings and grandkids directed their laptops and scanners, keeping a finger on the outside world and scanning old photos. We came and went; some went to work for a few hours; others called in–there was always a cell phone playing a confessing tune and someone going outside to take a call. At night, we slumbered on the sofa, in the spare bedrooms, in the recliner or wherever there was an empty spot. At some point in the few days, I realized it was the first time I had spent a night in my parents’ house since I left there thirty-six years ago. It could have been true for some of the others; we didn’t discuss that. For certain, it was the first time in thirty years or more that more than one of us had stayed overnight in the house at the same time. And here, there were five of us there–and some of the spouses–all laying our heads under the same roof.
We had lively discussions about movies, politics, obnoxious neighbors, religion, distant cousins, old friends, our peculiar but deceased great aunts, and our mother. The grandkids laughed at old picture albums, trying not to comment, but failing, on our big hair and the obvious differences in weight. At times, they interrupted the older adults to find who the baby or child was in a certain picture. Most of the time we knew, but other times we were grateful that our mother or grandmother had written on the back of the picture the names and dates. We laughed; we had disagreements. We kept our outbursts to the kitchen and dining room.
Somewhere between the kitchen and the hallway that led to the back bedroom, there was a line that the noise must not cross, an unspoken rule, an entrance into an unknown vastness we did not really want to visit, but had to. For in the back bedroom, our father lay dying. Daddy, our dad, our acropolis, was yielding to the depleted blood cells, to the wearied heart, the filling lungs, to death.
Nurses came, aunts and cousins, friends called. Some brought food; others just carried a prayer, a thought. One by one, we left the boisterous dining room and found our way into Dad’s room. There we sat and talked to him, petted him, held his hand. We wondered what it was like, physically, to have your blood dry up. Soon there would be no talking; the conversations had been strange for about a week. Just a week ago, he sat in his chair in the living room, weak, but fully dressed, his still handsome face not revealing the turmoil inside his body. He was confused. Where was his wife, he asked. But it wasn’t our mother or stepmother that he was speaking of. He was convinced there had been another wife. We tried reasoning, but when we realized how serious he was, we just agreed with him. Dad even felt so well one day that our brother took him for a ride in his truck, the truck the had worried that we had sold already.
Now, with us all gathered but one–he had made his peace a few days ago and had to go back home to Georgia–we waited. We talked of miracles but knew there were none. It felt the same as it had with Mom. Why couldn’t he just wake up and be himself again? We asked, knowing there was no answer, no solace, no Daddy to comfort us. It was us who had to be strong for him as we walked to death with him as far as we could go.
It came on a Sunday morning, about 9 a.m–Mom had also passed on a Sunday morning. Wasn’t it harmonious that this happened on Sunday, a day that had meant this family with the pretty red-headed wife and the tall handsome man gathered their growing family for the weekly journey to church? On Sunday mornings of long ago, hadn’t Daddy helped get the little girls ready for church, retrieving black patent leather shoes from various corners and trying to match them up with the correct feet, and struggling to tie the sashes of the four little girls’ dresses while Mother prepared the Sunday dinner and finished getting herself ready. Just a couple of years ago, Dad had mentioned how he could never get the sashes right, and funny that we hadn’t even known that–we thought it was always Mom taking care of the girls’ frills.
Now, none of us were getting ready for church at all but sitting around the kitchen table greeting the undertaker and trying not to cry or to look as they took our foundation, our strength, out of the house he had built mostly by himself, onto the front porch where he and Mom had sat watching a summer storm roll in from the west or the frost on the distant mountain peaks, and past the pink dogwood and the sleeping daffodils and tulips. Just one more night, we all secretly wished. Just one more night, could we not be lying in our sheltered beds when Dad would sing–from his and Mom’s room–us to sleep? It was a special song–a cowboy song, “When the Work’s All Done This Fall.” The cowboy was near the end of his life and was dividing his possessions, and Dad always used our names to hand out his saddle, his hat. We would fall asleep to that beautiful, clear voice we heard so much in the car, from the basement, and in church.
The soul of the house was truly gone now–half of it left when Mom died. We would wash the last load of Dad’s clothes, clean out the refrigerator, and carry off the bags of trash we had accumulated in those last days. In the next few weeks, we would begin the dismal but necessary task of dismantling two lives. There’s the rocking chair where Mom rocked the grandbabies and the great grandbabies. Someone mentions all the grandbabies that Mom never got to rock, and already, there’s a baby that Dad has missed, just born, and he carries Dad’s name. There’s Dad’s chair where in the last few months we would usually find him, surrounded by his books, his medicines, the trappings of a cancer that had become a fixture in his house. We sorted, claimed, and boxed endless mementoes of our parents’ lives. Finally, the house is mostly empty; a couple of us go to the basement to see what is left there–our brothers had already carried most of it out.
My eyes could barely stay dry; I wanted to hear just one more time Dad’s cheerful whistle as he worked in the basement with his rocks or his wood projects. The sound was gone from the basement, but I knew that it lived on in our hearts, and we would never forget its meaning, the devotion he carried for his sweetheart and the six children she bore. We would hear the sound through the way we live our lives, through the kind of people we are because of our father and our mother, the imprint they had left on each of us.
