STOP, kind reader.
First, please read Part 1 of this two-part story, which is available free at Lighthouse. A link at the end of Part 1 will bring you back here.
This is the conclusion of a two-part story, presented from a teenager’s perspective, with a rich collection of familial challenges: generational disconnect, misplaced guilt, and faith.
Photography: “Walking in the Clouds and Fog”/Claudia Dea/CC BY 2.0
I don’t remember much else, although I did go downstairs, and went straight to the kitchen, where I saw Grampy on the ground, and my mom kneeling next to him, sobbing, with his head up on her knees. The kitchen smelled like whiskey and tears.
I called 9-1-1 and I don’t remember what I shouted or cried into the phone, and then a while later, I heard the sirens.
My other memories are like a crazy quilt with missing squares. I don’t remember much else about the scene after Grampy was pronounced dead on our kitchen floor, except for seeing the glass shattered in the sink. And the smell. At first, the whiskey and that bitter, salty smell when someone has been crying or sweating a lot. But then, a sewer stench gradually took over in the kitchen. That was when I saw dark stains on Grampy’s kaki golf pants, right around the crotch.
Later on, the EMTs told us that they tried to resuscitate him, but it just wouldn’t take. I heard that, but I’m not sure my mom did. There was a white sheet over him for a while, until the police came and examined the scene. Maybe they thought Mom had killed him.
There was a lot of sadness in our house for a while. It took a few days before my aunt and uncle—her brother and sister—could fly in from the west coast with their families. I already mentioned that my mom crawled into her Chivas Regal bottles and didn’t come out for about a week. She’d stocked up on it, but then it ran out. She even emptied Grampy’s bottle of Lagavulin 16. Mom couldn’t stand the stuff, until she could. Then, it made her real sick. I actually preferred the Lagavulin over the Chivas when I mixed it with Coke, and I’d sneaked a good bit of it, so the bottle she got was less than half full, thank God.
The funeral was finally scheduled at Saint Gregory’s, but it had to be two weeks after Grampy died, because all these famous people had to fly in from all over the country and pay their last respects. People really liked Grampy. He was an awesome chest surgeon. That was the irony: the chest surgeon dies from a massive coronary. I overheard some surgeons visiting from Baltimore, and they said that he must have known that his heart was a ticking time bomb.
When they were burying him after the funeral, I refused to go up and dump a shovel full of dirt into the grave. I figured I had thrown enough dirt his way recently. Mom was okay with my not doing it, too, or I guess she was. She just sat there, wearing sunglasses on a cloudy day, staring toward the grave.
It was three days after the funeral, on a Tuesday night, and I was drinking some of Grampy’s other liquor that Mom didn’t like. It was ouzo. She hated licorice, but I liked it, so she’d never notice it being gone. I liked to drink it in a tall clear glass, then I’d use a spoon to lower an ice cube carefully into the top of the drink, not disturbing it. Then I’d watch white billowy clouds form right where the water was melting off the ice and mixing with the ouzo. The clouds would shoot down into the glass and then stop, expanding, suspended in the liquid like it was the sky. They looked like real clouds, and sometimes I could see things in them, like a tiger or a whale. And then I started remembering a little of what Grampy had just been saying about clouds and fog: “Mitchell, be careful. When the clouds touch the ground, they become a fog.” And that really pissed me off. Because I still couldn’t completely understand what he had meant. I was a little tipsy, so that didn’t help either. All I could see was him lying on the floor on the kitchen, dead, and that he’d pooped his pants.
Then I thought: That stench. That was like a fog.
In their argument—the argument about me, the one that killed him—Grampy was saying to Mom that he would take me to the Respect Life garden at church and make me work in it, kind of as a punishment. And that was for shit, because there was no way I wanted to do anything with him in that damn garden. Then he died, and it was my fault.
It was past midnight. Mom was probably passed out on her bed, either that or in the indoor jacuzzi. I wasn’t going to check, either. I couldn’t say anything to her since Grampy died, she hardly looked at me. I didn’t worry that she’d drown or anything. They say that it’s impossible for you to drown in a tub if you’re sleeping and you slip down into the water, even if you’re plastered. That a reflex will kick in and wake you. And like there’s no way that two people would die in the same house within two weeks.
So I slammed down the rest of the ouzo, then went out to Grampy’s shed, grabbed a shovel, got on my bike, and rode the half mile to Saint Gregory’s, with the thick wooden shovel handle braced with my hands against the handlebars. Riding there, all I could hear in my head was Grampy’s damn talking about the garden like it was a metaphor for God’s little perfect place where he took good care of the good and got rid of the bad.
Once I got to the church, I left my bike next to a half-dead juniper bush and walked with the shovel over to the Respect Life garden. At the entrance, there was a statue of a young-looking Mary, maybe my age, with a real nice body, and she was hugging a baby, Jesus I guess, up near her face, and she smiled at him with love, and he was smiling back at her, and I spat on that statue, then ran into the garden with the shovel.
First off, I stopped at a statue that said Saint Joseph, Patron Saint of Fathers. He was holding a young Jesus in one arm and some flowers that looked like trumpets in his other. And that was just too damn much, seeing that, since I didn’t have a real father and wasn’t even supposed to have been born, except for some stupid law about abortion being a sin as bad as murder, even though they’re just a clump of cells until the kid’s actually born. The statue wasn’t that tall; Joseph’s head was about level with a good pitch right over the plate. I swung the shovel, caught Joseph right square in the face, and knocked his head off. It felt good and I felt strong.
Then I kept going. All along the pebble path around the garden there were statues of saints who were supposedly important for respecting life. I pushed over the one which was called Saint Gianna, who had three kids standing around her, and she and the kids knocked into two blooming rose bushes which broke under the weight. Then I dug deep with that shovel into the dirt around another one of the roses which didn’t get crushed, and I dug it up. It was tough, since it was a big old rose bush, and I got poked a few times, but I finally got the bastard ripped part-way out of the ground, cocked like it was blown partway over by a tornado.
I wove in between some more saints and tried to push them over, but I found that most of the others were pretty stable, so I just used the shovel to mess up a bunch of the flowers blooming right around them. Finally, I found this one named Saint Carlo, which was a new-looking statue of a fifteen-year-old kid, about my age when he died. I’d heard about him before in church, and how he loved the Eucharist. And that really pissed me off, since the Eucharist started this whole thing with Grampy dying in the first place, so I pushed real hard and then pried the shovel down into the ground, stomping on a lot of flowers, trying to get purchase on the bottom edge of the statue, anything to find a way to tip Carlo over. But it didn’t work. It was like he was fighting back. Then I sat down on the stomped flowers and started bawling my eyes out. Because, I was thinking that since it was my fault that Grampy died, I shouldn’t have been allowed to live. I had just been that clump of cells, but the Church wouldn’t let my mom get rid of me.
After a little while I got up, stumbled back to my bike, and rode off home. Halfway back I realized that I’d forgotten the shovel, but I just swore a bunch and called myself a stupid dumbass over and over again and kept on going.
What I hadn’t noticed, while doing my rampage, was that some security lights had turned on outside of the Parish Center, just next to the garden. If I’d been paying attention when I first got there, I would have hesitated, but I was too drunk, so I didn’t. And I’d left Grampy’s shovel right by Saint Carlo. That was really dumb, since Grampy always wrote his name on his tools, because he was happy to loan them out to people but he wanted them back.
It was Wednesday afternoon when the local news picked up the story about vandalism at Saint Gregory’s Church. It was Wednesday evening when the police came by our house—really, Grampy’s house—and questioned me. The pastor, Monsignor Simmons, came with them, bringing Grampy’s shovel. Mom was actually sober, but she was real quiet.
It all happened pretty fast: their figuring out who did it (I just said “yeah” when they asked), their calculation of the damage (estimated in the thousands of bucks, mostly because of damaged statues), and Monsignor Simmons saying that he knew that things had been rough for me recently, so that he wasn’t going to press charges, but that he would work with me on how I could help repair the damage I’d done.
I didn’t cry, like I had in the Respect Life garden the night before, but I did find it real hard to look into Monsignor’s eyes. “Son,” I remember him saying, “I forgive you, the parish forgives you. God forgives you. What want is for you to askJesus to forgive you, and for that I’d like you to come to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, tomorrow morning before daily mass, and to make a good confession. Can you do that, Mitchell?” I did say “Yes,” and I’m not sure exactly if I meant it or not, but there I was, Thursday morning, bike parked next to the same juniper bush, walking over to the church building for Confession. It was Monsignor, and even though I was behind the screen, we both knew that it was me. We talked for a long time, and I felt bad for the people in line behind me who had to wait, since when I was finished there wasn’t much more time for other people to confess before Monsignor had to go serve for the Daily Mass.
My penance was to pray one decade of the Holy Rosary once a day for five days—Monsignor slipped me a card under the screen with instructions for that, plus a plastic rosary—and I also had to work on repairing as much of the garden as I could, working with the gardener, before school started up in a few weeks. And I think that was pretty fair, to be honest, since I could have gone to Juvie for this. That would have gotten Mom in a lot of trouble, too, and she was already in some deep shit because of her depression and drinking.
On the first day of my work penance, bright and early after Daily Mass, I went into the Respect Life garden with Grampy’s shovel (they’d returned it to me) and gloves and some other tools. The yard keeper, Mister Rafferty, a real nice, retired guy, maybe older than Grampy, stood there with some other tools and a wheelbarrow. He told me to take my lunch bag inside to the fridge in the Parish Center, then started giving me directions, and I said Yessir, and we actually got along okay.
At one point, after we’d been working for about an hour in the August heat, Mister Rafferty stopped me with a tap on my shoulder, then pointed up into the sky. “Look at those clouds,” he said, “you can see all sorts of neat things in them.”
When I turned my head up to look, it was weird, like the clouds were moving away from me, all at once, all moving above and past the topmost part of the church building.
And I finally remembered the other stuff Grampy was saying in the pew that Sunday, when I was so angry and not listening to him, the day of the night that he died. “The clouds, they are lies, Mitchell. They look nice up in the sky. But they’re just vapor. And they can block the sun, darken things. When they touch the ground, they make fog, and you can’t go anywhere safely in a fog.”
Thinking right then about Grampy made me sad again. But not in the depressing and guilty way I had before. My sadness was more about how I’d miss him, really miss him, and his metaphors. But I also realized that he’d always be there with me. Just like looking up at the sky. If there were clouds up there, I’d remember to look out for any fog. But if there weren’t any clouds, I’d understand that the clouds could always come back, and I had to be ready for them. My own clouds, or clouds from other people. Either way, I’d always think of Grampy’s lesson.
After several hours, Mister Rafferty said I had done a good job of “assessing the situation” with him: finding out how many statues were damaged and how badly, figuring out which of the flower plants were pretty much dead and which ones might survive with a little TLC, and counting up how many of what plant needed to be ordered. He handed me the notepad early on, after he had written down a few lines, so that I learned how to record the info. I worked hard to use my best handwriting, so that anyone could read what I’d written.
Around noon, Mister Rafferty said it was lunch time and that I could go get my lunch bag. “Let’s start up again at one sharp,” he said as I headed off. “Again: good work so far, Mitchell.”
It was hard not to smile when he’d given me that compliment. I felt like I’d accomplished something, even if it was to undo something bad that I’d done.
As I walked out of the garden, I stopped at the statue of the young Mary holding Baby Jesus. She was just so beautiful, even more in the daylight. I felt a lump in my throat, how I guess some guys feel when they see a pretty girl that stops them cold. Then I felt extra bad that I’d spit on her and Jesus the other day, but also relieved that I hadn’t damaged them.
Looking into her face, I noticed how her eyes were hollowed out a bit, so that when I moved my head back and forth, or even stepped to the right or the left, it looked just like she was watching me, her eyes locked on mine. But it was a good watching, a kind watching. Like she loved me, as if she were my mother.
If I’m honest—which I am now, or try to be—I know that, to make up for screwing around in Sunday School, I have lots to learn about all this church stuff. Thinking back to that time in the garden with Mary’s following gaze, it actually felt, all of a sudden, like I’d have all the time in the world to do so.
THE END
