This winter at Blame Cannon I’m rotating posts about global warming in prehistoric times, stories of coal, and memorable departures.
John Jones
John Jones was my dad. He was tall, handsome, with curly brown hair, and a ready sense of humor. He loved the Marx Brothers and Mel Brooks and telling stories about his gang of neighborhood friends—stories that fused in my young mind with the antics of the Little Rascals, which for kids in the 1970s were the only option on Saturdays once the cartoons were over.
Mostly, John Jones was kind. I don’t mean nice. He may have been nice too, but that wasn’t really on my radar. As a kid I saw adults as kind, mean, or boring. Whatever else they were didn’t much matter. (Approaching the end of my own middle age with America collapsing around us—I’m increasingly returning to that trichotomy.)
I had known John Jones since before I could walk. I don’t ever remember not knowing him. He even lived with us for a couple years when I was still in preschool. It was a big house in Mississippi my mom filled with friends and boarders—including my aunt Clarice—to protect her mentally, and maybe physically, from my biological father and my two older stepbrothers. Then when John Jones was drafted to serve in Vietnam, and my aunt Clarice joined the Peace Corps, my mom finally took Bret and me, and fled for Charlottesville where her aunt and uncle took her in.
When John Jones mustered out of the army they married, and we four went to live in his hometown of Laurens, South Carolina, a small town in upstate. He became a high school English teacher at Laurens District 55 High School. My mom became a housewife who candystriped at the hospital. We were happy. I loved Laurens. I loved my new dad. I loved my new grandmother Bubba, rocking on her porch swing, my head in her lap. I loved going to school during the year and not going to school in the summers when the pavement was too hot to walk on barefoot but we did anyway. I loved my aunt Estelle who had a lake house on Lake Greenwood. I loved seeing my mom and dad happy together. I loved my new baby stepbrother, Ben, who was born in September, 1974 only two weeks before my tenth birthday.
In March of 1975, fifty years ago today, we were all in what we called the “family room” one morning as a thunderstorm wailed outside. Storms were frequent there in the spring. I would see distant flashes and count the seconds until eventually the flashes and booms were simultaneous, surrounding us, hot and cold and wet at the same time.
That morning my dad was hesitating by what we called the “side door” in a fat-knotted seventies tie, with a briefcase and an umbrella waiting for a pause in the storm. My mom was feeding Ben in his high chair. Bret and I were waiting for our carpools, Bret near the front windows, I staring out the sliding glass door into our backyard. Finally, as the rain seemed to lesson, dad leaned, opened his umbrella into the door crack, and scurried out.
A moment later the windows flash and a boom shakes the house. A scream of agony emerges from it, and I see my mom and older brother running out the side door.
I follow.
My dad is lying in the driveway next to his car, my mom already at his side. Dad’s umbrella rests open a few feet away in the grass.
Mrs. Keith, our carpool, pulls into the driveway.
Now my mom is running next door to get Mr. Anderson.
Now Mr. Anderson, Mrs. Keith, and my mom are lifting my dad into the open tail of my dad’s hatchback. Someone has backed it into the driveway.
Now the car is driving slowly off down the curving hill to the right where we play kickball. My mom is kneeling in the open hatch sheltering my dad’s face from the slowing rain.
Someone told me they were going to the hospital but I don’t remember who. I’m not worried. I’m pretty excited because this means I will get to visit him! Maybe we’ll have ice cream. My older brother got to stay in the hospital when he had his tonsils out but I never got to have mine out. The closest I ever came was getting some stitches above my eye after hours in the doctor’s office when my brother accidentally whacked me with a golf club.
Since Laurens is a small town in upstate South Carolina, our house is soon filled with neighbors and relatives and people from church. Women are bustling in the kitchen. I don’t know where they come from or how they got there but whenever anything goes wrong in a small Southern town, lots of women are soon bustling in the kitchen.
Bret, who is twelve, loves the explanations of things. He reads slender books with lots of diagrams that explain science, stuff like weather, electric motors, and magnetism. I wander into his room and he explains to me that dad would be fine because dad was grounded and electricity isn’t dangerous when it’s grounded. That’s just how electricity works.
I wander into the living room, empty despite the rest of the house being filled. The living room has a wide four-sash window looking out on the front yard like a giant aquarium. I sit on the couch with the lights off and listen to the rest of the house and watch out the windows at the gray, dripping remains of the storm.
Finally a car pulls into the driveway and my mom gets out of the passenger side. I run out the front door leaping along over the path of slates, set like islands in the grass ocean. I ask mom how he is and when we can visit him. But she doesn’t answer and she doesn’t look at me. She unfolds one arm enough to put it around me as we walk slowly back to the house.
That’s when I knew he was dead.
Charlottesville
Three years later, in 1978, we moved to Charlottesville, Virginia. It was not that much bigger than Laurens in 1978, but it was a college town and Laurens was a lonely place for a single mom with no blood kin. Plus Clarice was here and mom’s aunt and uncle.
Belmont 1
Twenty years after that I owned a house in Belmont on Monticello Road. By this time baby Ben had graduated from college in Boston and didn’t know what to do next, so he came back to Virginia to figure that out. I had an empty room and he wanted a place in town, so he moved in with me.
Ben was average height with blonde hair that was curlyish enough to remind me of John Jones. Ben liked Tom Waits and Jim Jarmusch and he liked to laugh especially at things unexpected and barbed. Also Ben had a sneaky streak. Whenever he had hidden knowledge or plans, his eyes would twinkle and his mouth would smile a little. An example is that he would change his name—John, Jigsaw, Brodrick, and just plain Jones—and spring the new name on me in some unexpected way, such as showing me an article where he’d been quoted in a newspaper with a new name or give me a business card with a new name. Other examples include announcing he was dating someone or had stopped dating someone or was moving somewhere. Always the twinkle and the slight smile.
Ben and I would often sit out on the porch talking and smoking cigarettes. (We’ve both given up smoking since—at least I have, and I hope he has.) He had no memory of his father, and I would sometimes tell Ben stories about the man, what I knew at least, to give him some sense of where he came from.
Once we were sitting on the porch and I told the story of how dad died. The story I told above. I’d shared with friends and girlfriends but I’d never told it to Ben.
And when I told it that day to Ben I discovered a new part of it: an unexamined stretch of time when dad is dying, the umbrella is lying in the yard, Mrs. Keith has just pulled up, and my mom is running next door to get Mr. Anderson. I realized that in all my retellings of the story I never talked about what I was doing then. Because I wasn’t doing anything. I just stood in the driveway while my dad was dying a few feet away.
If it were fiction there would have been some meaningful interaction:
“O Beloved Father!” I said running to him and taking his trembling hand, “Do not perish and leave behind your wife and children! How shall we live without you?”
“Beloved Son, be certain that I love you with all my heart! My life may depart for other realms but my spirit will be there for you always!”
It wasn’t like that.
Telling Ben this story I realized that I didn’t tell him that I loved him, I didn’t comfort him, I didn’t say a word. I stood there staring at him, our eyes locked, as he died.
I stood there like a drooling idiot. In a daze. Not even sad. Of course I was ten and hadn’t ever had a father struck by lightening before. I understood that. I didn’t feel guilty about not doing anything; I felt ashamed at being a person who wouldn’t do anything. I wanted John Jones to have a better son that that and a better death than that. His last conscious sight may well have been a silly ten-year-old kid standing slack-jawed in the driveway gawking at him—and him helpless to comfort me or communicate at all.
So as I realized all this, I found myself telling this to Ben. Some version of my shame at doing nothing came out. Suddenly it wasn’t me telling stories to help him see but me telling a story to help me see. It became a story for my sake, not his.
Over the course of the year Ben did figure out what was next for him. One day with a twinkling eye and slight smile he told me he was going to get married to someone named Darby. I’d met her, but barely, and hadn’t sensed they were in love. But Ben and Darby soon left on a trip to meet her parents in Georgia.
One afternoon while they were gone I fell asleep on the couch downstairs. I love to take naps on couches. And while sleeping I had a dream so vivid it felt like I was more than awake, like this wakefulness was more real than ordinary wakefulness. I’d never had a dream like that before. In my dream the couch was a bed and I was lifted up into a seated position to see at the foot of the bed my father, John Jones, hovering upright a few feet off the ground. I understood, in the wordless logic of dreams, that he was a ghost coming from death to talk to me.
“It’s okay,” he said in his kind, good-humored way, “I know.”
He had heard my conversation with Ben.
“I know you know,” I said, “But I’m still sorry.”
“I know. It’s okay.”
“I know. But I really am still sorry.”
“I know.”
I woke up.
It was afternoon, the sunshine bright and the air alive, but I didn’t know what to make of a dream that felt so powerful and present, yet with dialogue so stilted. Shouldn’t the afterlife have better writers? But somehow the unevocative prose made it seem more real like an actual conversation with a person and not an encounter with a symbol.
Belmont 2
Ben came back the following week and we were on the porch talking and smoking.
“How was the trip?”
He says it was fine and describes some of the details, but then he perks up a little as he tells me that by the way they had made a slight detour to visit Laurens, South Carolina.
It hadn’t occurred to me that they would be driving by Laurens. “Wow, that’s really interesting because while you were gone I had this dream about dad.”
“What was it?”
I told him about the dream. The same story I shared above, and I notice that Ben is smiling. He has that sneaky twinkle in his eyes.
He takes a puff of his cigarette and asks me what day I had the dream. I count backwards and tell him. Ben nods and says that that was the day they visited Laurens. In fact that didn’t just drive through Laurens, they stopped at the cemetery, and found the grave, and Ben prayed there, asking our father to let me know he’d forgiven me.
Thanks for reading Blame Cannon! For the next couple of months I’ll circle between a series on global warming in prehistory, a story about coal, and a series of true stories about departures and goodbyes.
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Wow. What a story. My god.
And your dad looks so much like Ben in that picture in the suit. Spitting image. Wild.