A Logical Man

I am a logical man. Truly, I am. 

I am a realist. I only believe in what I can touch.  

But…

But.

My mother, my beautiful mother, passed away five years ago. I miss her terribly every day. I can see her clearly in my mind, tall, slender, her dark brown hair framing her face. But I know she is dead and there is nothing that will change that.

Even though I know that she is dead, I also know that she woke me from a deep sleep a few nights ago. She sat on the corner of my bed and the bed creaked. At least, I thought that was what woke me, but I know that a ghost, if she were a ghost, wouldn’t have the weight to cause creaking. Still, I woke right up, eyes wide, my breathing harsh in my own ears. And there she was, in a skirt and button-front blouse with the sleeves rolled up above her elbows, the way she always wore them. 

“Honey, it’s all right,” she said. “Everything is all right. I am fine. You are fine. And your father… I’ll take care of him, too. We’ll all be happy. Now go back to sleep.”

I know she loved me. I know she still does.

I went back to sleep, although I’m not quite sure how. I know I was calmer after she talked to me, so I guess I just drifted off.

In the morning, she was gone. I went to work at the firm, losing myself in the numbers, the numbers that are so soothing, so organized. 

I always want to be organized. My mother taught me that. Even when I was a child she wanted me to be organized, to not cause havoc, to leave a scattered mess behind me. I did that sometimes, left things a mess. But my father was much worse. To him she used to say, “It would be easier to burn this house down than to clean up after you.” 

I went about my business, never telling anyone what happened, not even my father. Especially not my father. 

My father is not like my mother. Where my mother was beautiful and caring and encouraging to me, my father was hard and angry and punishing. I could never please him, not ever. Not as a child, and certainly not as an adult. 

Most days, I don’t see much of my father. We keep different hours. He’s a laborer who gets up at 5:30 in the morning to catch whatever ride he can to the job site. My mother told me that when I was a baby, he managed a work crew for a construction company but the company went out of business. It was hard on him and he changed, she said. It seemed to me that it must have been my fault somehow. He was and is angry. Always.

He works his eight or ten or twelve hours, then goes to the bar with his fellow workers and drinks away whatever money he earned that day. He comes home late, having eaten little or nothing, and roots through the refrigerator to see if I left anything for him from my dinner. He usually eats whatever he can scrounge with the refrigerator door hanging open. Doesn’t bother with a plate. Doesn’t bother with utensils, either, unless dinner is soup.

I wanted to tell him about the dream I had about Mother, about how we were all going to be happy, but he didn’t come home until after I went to bed. He was gone before I got up. Maybe he never came home, I don’t know. I just know I didn’t run into him until a few days later. He was eating leftover brisket with his fingers, juices running down his face.

I tried to talk to him. 

Pointless. 

“You weak, pathetic excuse for a son,” he said to me. “You’re so lazy you can’t even find a real job. Son, huh. You sit at a desk all day with the other girls probably helping them polish their nails! Do you answer the phone, too? Get the real bosses coffee? You wouldn’t know how to handle a shovel if I hit you over the head with one.” He ate another bite of brisket and said, with his mouth full, “I oughta do that. Knock some sense into you.” 

He pushed by me to get to the couch in the living room where he obviously intended to finish his meal. An open bottle of beer and a partial bottle of whiskey were already sitting on the coffee table, waiting for him. 

I closed the refrigerator door.

 “You’re not my son. If your mother was here, she’d tell you. You’re some other guy’s seed, that’s for sure. They were too smart to hang around to see what kind of lame bastard you are.”

My mother would not have said that. 

“She would have told me long ago if that was true,” I said. No, I was sure I belonged to the man with juices dripping down his hands and onto the floor. “You’re my father, much as I hate the thought.”

“You asshole!” he said, then returned to where I stood and pushed me into the door jamb. I glimpsed a vision of my mother nodding to me. 

The next thing I knew, my fingers were around his throat. I was surprised at how their length seemed to wrap just right around his entire neck. I pushed down with my thumbs into his windpipe and felt how easy it was to close off his air.

But he was a fighter and, with veins popping on his forehead and around his bulging eyes, he fought to knock my arms away. I let my thumbs up just enough for him to get some air and sputter, “Bastard!” into my face. Horrified at what I realized I was doing, I pushed him away and I backed into the kitchen. He stumbled into the living room. He must have lost his footing because I heard him hit the coffee table, knocking the bottles to the floor with a crash. 

Silence.

I waited for a few seconds, and when there was no sound of rage following the crash, I peeked around the door. My father was sprawled across one side of the coffee table and half onto the floor. I thought he was dead, but then I heard throaty snores coming from deep in his chest. He just passed out. My fault. I had choked him almost to the point of death, but he must have hit the corner of the coffee table because his head was bleeding. 

I sighed angrily. Not only did I have to clean up his mess on the floor, I would also have to bandage his head. 

I set to work on the floor first, to get the blood and alcohol sponged up and the food swept out of the way, but his head would not stop bleeding. By the time I managed to find bandages, he had slipped into a deeper sleep and his snoring had stopped. A coma, I thought. I shifted him off the coffee table and onto the couch and blotted up the residue from under his body. I was surprised that the whiskey bottle didn’t break and luckily the cap kept it from spilling, unlike the beer. 

I went upstairs to my room, overwhelmed with what to do next. Too many courses of action, too many what-ifs. I was exhausted. I lay down to think, only for a minute I told myself, but of course I fell asleep. A hand on my shoulder woke me.

“You should get up now. There’s more to do.”

It was dark. Hours must have passed. My head was thick with sleep. The voice was familiar. I blinked and when I finally got a look at the speaker, I didn’t know what to think. 

It was my mother.

“Don’t look so surprised,” she said and helped me to stand. “You have to clean up the rest of this mess. You know what to do.”

Did I?

Yes, I did. Mother did not like messes.

I went downstairs with Mother whispering to me, “Get the whiskey bottle.”

In the kitchen I found the whiskey where I’d left it. I took it into the living room and put it where my father would want it, on the coffee table. 

“No,” she said, leaning into my face, wrapping one arm around my shoulders. “That’s not where you should put it. Let me show you.”

Mother disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a box of wooden matches. She opened the whiskey and poured it all over the couch. Then she lit the matches and, one by one, dropped them around my father. 

I watched for a few minutes as flames boiled up from the surface of the couch. I was tired again. So, so tired.

Chief Adams crouched in front of the young man wrapped in a blanket who was sitting on the ground. Adams patted him on the shoulder, then stood and waved the medical technicians toward him as they filed out of the ambulance. 

“I think he’s pretty disoriented,” Adams told them.

The medics bent over the man. “From the look of his clothes he must have been pretty close to the fire,” one of them said.

“Yup,” Adams said. 

Adams studied the smoking house. One of his men ran toward him at an ungainly trot, the weight of his equipment slowing him down.

“There’s a body in there, Chief,” said the firefighter. “First floor.”

“I was afraid of that,” Adams said. “Tell the sheriff to call the coroner.”

The firefighter nodded and ran back toward the rubble of the house. Neighbors clustered to gossip and gawk, their voices a low, urgent din. 

“And get those people to move back!” Adams called out. 

The sound of a chilling laugh among the rubberneckers caught his ear. When Adams looked to see who it might be, he could have sworn he saw a tall, thin woman with dark brown hair in a skirt and button-front shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows.   

The End