The Road Runs Both Ways

Not sure.

What is this?  Are these segments fiction?  Did you make up all this?  What are you going with this? Is there more following?  So many questions, so here is a scanty explanation. 

When I visited my parents back “home” until my father’s death in 2005 and mother’s in 2011, we always did these few traditional actions, without fail. I had a sense that these were essential rites that we absolutely must do.

We always went to Pam's Cafe, and ate catfish or buffalo carp “fritters”, deep-fat fried, served with two slices of white bread, a big slice of strong onion, and cocktail sauce at Pam’s, the best and only restaurant in their town. Dad always had a cup of the blackest coffee I had ever seen at that time.

The waitress, usually a wild exotic teenager who grew up to be a worn-out waitress--Wanda?  Betty?, brought refills of coffee by.  She never asked if my father wanted a refill; he would tap the cup on the saucer to let her know.

My folks always sat in the same corner table that gave them the best view of the front door.  That way they would know who came or left, and then they would tell stories about them to me.  Oh, those stories. What these old wrinkled people who walked through those doors did with their lives could make a sailor blush.  

We always went across the “new” Missouri-Illinois Pike Bridge that spanned the Mississippi River (The River)to drive up Hwy. 79 in Mih-zer-uh (Missouri).  

The bridge was built in the early 1920's and opened up for traffic with a Gala Potluck. He was only six years old and had to pee.  Badly.  "Ma" told him to pee over there on the slope next to a tree.

Well, then.  He was  in his best clothes--knee pants, high socks, seersucker jacket--and just as he was getting his business done, he slipped on the long grass, sliding down the slope into the mud.  That is all he told me about that.  

We would drive up and around that road until we came to the places to stop—could stand there and look down The River and its spots of little islands.  Each stop gave us a new love for The River.

And we always went to visit  the cemeteries.  My father’s side of the family was buried in the small Nebo Cemetery in Illinois, while my mother’s side were buried in the sizable Crescent Cemetery in Pleasant Hill, Illinois. The farm where we lived for 40 years was a mile north of Nebo Cemetery.

The most interesting things about these places are that I did not know 97% of its occupants, and I really didn’t care.  My folks would walk around looking at headstones, talked about what those people did in life, and my father would speculate whether or not if they made it to Heaven. 

His staunch opinion was they did not.  In fact, my father generally believed that most of the people he knew were damned to hell.

Nebo Cemetery became interesting to me when two of my brothers were buried there in 1997 and 1999. I would go by myself in my rental car to place silk flowers at their graves, talk with them a bit, and look around the corn fields, at the rusted abandoned train tracks, and try to remember the town as it was in my childhood.

Now, I cull volumes of photos of those visits and re-live it all with stories my folks told me. Connecting those memories with faces, and reading letters not meant for my eyes have connected me with a totally different world one hundred years ago.

*The stories here in following posts are non-chronological and have a strong basis in truth.  A few tidbits here and there have been added for the story's sake. But, I have to say, just a few. 

** This is actually a re-post from years ago, which now can be called a back story.  I apologize for not providing readers with this cement.

***My mother told me other stories--oh my goodness, the stuff she knew!  Another day. 

What happens now?

Theodorus Peck, 1927?, during Good Times

Over the decades after Theodorus had died, my father spoke very little about his own father, hardly at all.  It was a door he had nailed shut, never opened unless a sudden flash of a memory appeared. 

The photos of him growing up and changing into a man showed how he and his siblings handled grief by never allowing themselves to grieve.  The three of them posed for photos, three wooden soldiers with hands to their sides and awkward half-smiles pasted on faces.  The gray photos never permitted them to touch each other, to hold on to each other. Their eyes were still, frozen where grief had met them the day their father did.

Aunt Helen is the tall girl in the back row.  My father is holding the basketball.

“What happened to your pa?  Why’d he die?”

Those questions had been asked throughout my own growing years and answered only with a few words, usually provided by my mother.  So, it was only when grief had struck my father’s house twice more that my father allowed tears to fall and feel the bereavement long denied to him. 

Robert Peck 

First, death stole in, when my older brother, Robert, died at age 46 years with a brain tumor.  Then two years later, death returned like a thief and took a second younger brother, Bill, at age 44 years with blood poisoning.   

Bill Peck

My father aged in front of us and finally, nearly 70 years after Theodorus Peck died, Dad began to talk about his pa.

It was summer, a hot summer when we sat out on the back yard and listened to the night crickets start their songs.  Still dusky light slanted over the porch roof and bathed us in silver, black and white. The porch seemed to take a deep breath as a silence settled over us, heavy and filled with long held sorrow.  Mom’s hand snaked through Dad’s arm and interlaced his silver fingers with hers.

 

“My pa....” Dad began, and then paused, searching for words that were choked back before he could speak them.  Finally, he spoke, his voice a stranger’s voice.  “The night he died, my sister and I were upstairs in my Grandma Peck’s house.  The phone rang and I looked at her and said, “Sis, Pa’s dead.  They’re calling to tell us that he’s dead.”  
 

"She didn’t believe me, but I knew it as sure as I knew what day it was.  I heard Grandma say that they’d wait to tell us the news in the morning.”  Dad raised his head, his strong angular face lit with moonbeams, and we could see a slow snail trail of tears.

Mom’s hand squeezed his, as he continued to speak in that stranger’s voice.  “I got up as soon as it was light, went out to the back porch to watch the sun come up.  Pa’s work boots were there, where he had taken them off not two days ago.  I lifted them up, smelling Pa’s smell on them yet.  A piece of mud, dried in the sole’s instep, fell into my hand.  When he last wore those boots, the mud was soft.”  Dad’s head ducked down into the black night as he continued.  “I wrapped that piece of mud up in a handkerchief and ran home with it.  I kept it in my drawer for years....”  And the story ended.

Memories folded up in that handkerchief and drawer slowly crept out over time.  Not big memories, but ones speaking about the loneliness of a ten-year old boy trying to harvest the corn field by himself.  Such loneliness and despair swallowed up his youth.  And when his sons died, something had to break free.

My father slowly released parts of his grief over the remaining years of his life, but I know that when he closed his eyes at night, the images of his pa and two sons were the last to leave when sleep came. 

My father in about 1944