The Broken Path
Fiction by Christopher S. Wilson
Grandpa died face down in a pot of chili. It’s a family legend. They told that story every Thanksgiving and all the children loved it. I was four when Grandpa Jim passed away but what I remember from that day is seeing my own father sobbing into a couch cushion, not knowing why he was doing that, and being upset that we weren’t going to have chili for dinner that night. I remember little about Grandpa Jim the person except for his enormous belly and the hair on the back of his hands, which fascinated me. Ignominious death was always the story my family preferred to tell itself. Great Aunt Helen ate a bad pickle. Uncle Collin died at the porno store.
“You know, your great-great-grandfather lost his marbles and married a beautiful statue in Hamburg. Crushed him to death on their wedding night.” My Aunt Linda told me this one year at Christmas. Her breath was a thick mix of cigarettes and chilled gin. I was nine and by then my understanding of death was that it was usually amusing, and also that gin was just Christmas tree water with an olive garnish.
I grew up and left the house. And nearly as soon as I was gone I began fantasizing about all the funny ways my own parents might die.
So one morning, at thirty-four years old, when I got a call from my sister that Mom hadn’t shown up to work for three days, I reflexively called to mind all the dark fantasies I’d collected: she died watching reruns of Hee Haw. She died eating spaghetti. She belly-flopped off a dock, and died of belly flop complications.
I took my son to daycare and came home to wait for word from my sister. I imagined Dad telling me “Your mother died taking a dump at Denny’s. She didn’t even have time to pinch off the loaf!” I imagined him looking at me through salty dad tears, but with pride that the mother of his children would join the rest of our family in the all-time greatest hits of death.
An hour later my sister called back. A neighbour went next door and found Mom at home, in my childhood room, on my childhood bed, which was still as it was when I left home at seventeen. Not an accident, but a comment.
Seven hours after the phone call I boarded a plane to San Diego. Four hours after that I was at my father’s house. My sister, who never left the east coast, drove down to Virginia to start putting things in order, calling relatives, making arrangements for the funeral. It was agreed between us that I be the one to console my father as I had a better relationship with him, and lived closer anyway. I arrived at his tiny coastal bungalow at ten in the evening. His girlfriend was there, and two men I guessed were his drinking buddies. I was unaware of him having any other friends. Just as it was when I was four, dad was on that same couch, clutching the same cushions, twice reupholstered, thrice moved.
Mom’s death was not unexpected, given her return to drinking. My sister and I had both found the stashed bottles of Dewar’s or Canadian Club whisky — in the hall closet buried in the linens, behind the pickle jar, under every bed. Everyone saw it coming but my father was not prepared. I guessed the devastation he wore was as much his confronting his own mortality as his love of his first wife. He told his friends Mom tripped over an owl. I thought that was pretty clever, but his friends didn’t understand the routine. Eventually they got bored and left. His girlfriend gave him some of her sleeping pills and we all retired for the night. I slept on the couch.
Dad wouldn’t fly, so in the morning I took the wheel of his Pontiac to drive him and his girlfriend the 2,600 miles to Richmond. At a gas station on the way out of town I bought an old gift set of Bruce Springsteen cassettes to play for him in the car. I didn’t know what else he listened to.
We drove in silence the first day, except for the noise of the highway and the music coming from the car’s struggling speakers. I marked the miles turning tapes. Three songs into Nebraska, he finally spoke up.
“How did your mother go? I don’t think the owl idea is gonna work.”
We were doing eighty across Arizona, past the packed grey earth and endless distant mountain ranges along I-8. It was silent, though not quiet, and his words were oppressed by the sun and the noise of the freeway. I turned down the music. Three and a half decades of family deaths had trained me for this moment. She died in a . She fell into the . She got bitten by a . I felt a total blank in that spot. I was not an artist or an architect or writer like a lot of my family. I managed a furniture store and had long ago been pegged as an uncreative. I told him the only good story I could think of.
“Mom died on my bed. At home.”
Dad looked out the window and gently cleared his throat.
“That isn’t funny.”
It was silent again for a long time as we slowly made our way across the map toward El Paso where we would spend the night. I turned the music back up to fill the air. Dad turned it back down.
“What are we going to tell Ruby?”
The highway was too perfectly flat and the desert too infinite to be real. Everywhere you could stand there was ground; there was nowhere to fall. But if you walked far enough through this desert, at some point the ground would end, and you would slip into a great chasm, tumbling a mile down a rocky escarpment to your death.
Staring into the distance, I realized that every death I’d ever heard about must have been manufactured in a conversation in a car. Great Uncle Lenny on the Ferris wheel. Great Aunt Evelyn, flattened by a runaway caboose. I knew the stories were probably fake but until that moment it was never important I challenge the mythology, and its role in our family. I was always a cheerful consumer of these stories. Now I was being asked to be a producer.
I thought of my four-year-old son, and what story I would tell him when he and my wife met up with me in Virginia. I thought of how every story about every death likely covered up some awful truth of painful decline, isolation, and abuse. And how my own son might never learn the fable of the grandmother who drank too much wine and ate too many pills and died alone surrounded by no one in a dusty cluttered home long abandoned by her once perfect family. Where the only thing that moved was the spiders.
“Mom died of a drug overdose. She died alone.”
Dad grunted and looked through the passenger window at the passing scrub. His girlfriend’s hand extended silently up through the seats to touch his shoulder. No one was there to touch mine. Dad knew Mom’s death was my story to produce. I was the only one in our family who still talked to her regularly during her final months. And I cried for her after every phone call, grieving the loss of my mother while she was still alive. Dad hadn’t spoken to her in seven years.
I flipped over Nebraska and slid it back into the tape deck. I turned up the volume again, giving up the hope my father had anything else to say. But again, his voice broke through the hot air.
“Your grandfather drank himself to death, too. Did you know that?” Of course I knew. Everybody knew. But it wasn’t the story. “No one in the family wanted to explain it to you guys.” He meant the kids. The cousins. Maybe an elderly parent or sibling already deep in dementia, like Ruby. But he was wrong. The stories weren’t for the kids. The stories were for the adults. Even the story of the stories was a story. Dad continued.
“Aunt Helen hung herself.”
“Collin went to Canada and we never saw him again.”
I asked about Uncle Lenny.
“I never found out what happened to Lenny. That one might even be true.”
At thirty-four, with my own burgeoning family, I was fully conscious of my singular attempt to break the cycle. Out with friends, at parties or barbecues, I refused every drink offered. I saw my son every day. Reading to him. Going on adventures. My son loved exploring paths through the woods, just as I had when I was a child, but I don’t think my father ever knew that. He was always out somewhere, supposedly building houses in the suburbs but that was probably a story, too.
We passed the miles those four days in silence, drinking roadside coffee, reading the billboards and counting the mile markers. We stopped again near Dallas, and picked up a family friend in Atlanta. With nothing to say to each another, we were all relieved to have an extra body in the car, who brought his own family stories and talked us all the way up to Virginia. In Richmond I dropped them all off at the hotel where my sister and some of the family were gathering. There was a whole house available nearby but no one wanted to stay there. They’d all been to those houses before, empty of life and no longer homes. I left for the airport before any of the extended family could come at me with their condolences, their grief, their personal questions, their stories.
I met my wife and son coming off the plane at Dulles. Exhausted from faking strength in front of my father for five days, at last I broke down. We sat in the terminal while I wept into my wife’s hair for those first few moments, and then we stood and walked back to my father’s car. My wife drove us the two and a half hours back to Richmond.
I cried quietly in the front seat of my father’s car, where he had sat next to me for four days hardly speaking. I cried for my mother but also for the family that would let this keep happening, down through the generations, like a young man tumbling forever down a rocky escarpment toward a bottom that never comes. And then I paused to catch my breath, and looked back at my son, who had been patiently watching his father. I climbed through the centre console to the back seat and put my arm around my son, who was getting his first sense of what grieving looked like.
He had lots of questions. »