Month: April 2019

Gram died when I was 11, almost 12. That’s a weird age for death. On the one hand, I understood she was dead and gone, and I felt sadness, but more because I’d lost something, or maybe because it’s what I thought was expected of me. 

On the other hand, I was too young to realize how much would be missing from my life because of her passing: the stories, the history, and the love. That’s what I should have been mourning. Santiago Holmes used to say, “you don’t know what you don’t know.” It took me a long time to understand what it meant.

From nowhere, Gram was diagnosed with lung cancer. She hadn’t smoked a cigarette in my lifetime, and when I asked Ma, she said she’d never known her to smoke. 

Gram did love to cook. Not too long ago I read an article saying smoke from cooking was now being linked to lung cancer. Sometimes it feels like there’s inherent risk in everything, no matter how mundane. Gram was an excellent cook. I can still taste her Bolognese.

Her death was a long drawn out affair. Eight months in, the diagnosis was terminal. Nine after that the cancer was in remission. Four months later it was back. Two months after that she was gone.

Watching her decline was more difficult than her actual death. She cooked until she could no longer hold her wooden spoon. It had eaten away at her figure. By then she was little more than a pale sheet stretched over tiny bones.

Pap couldn’t stand to see her this way, so he found frequent excuses to spend more time in the cemetery shed. Sometimes I would walk over hoping for a ride in the backhoe and I’d hear him talking to himself, pleading, “please don’t take her. I will do better. I’ll do anything you ask of me. I can change myself, but I can’t live without her.”

I’d turn as quiet as I could, somehow knowing this was not something I was supposed to see, and head back to the house where I’d find gram and give her a big hug. I didn’t say a word to her about what I’d seen.

Still, I think Gram knew Pap would struggle without her. Gram always knew. When I came in from the shed, she’d squeezed me even harder than normal, like she had before her strength was stolen.

Ma did what she always did when things were difficult, she turned in on herself and worked harder, as though the work could stop the inevitable. There was more determination in her movements and not a single one was wasted. She continued to work two jobs, but she also started cooking and dinner and she carved out time to take Gram to appointments and treatments. I never saw her shed a tear or ask why this was happening Ma just kept going.

Gram passed in the evening, while I was sleeping. When I woke the next day Ma came in to tell me the news. I can still see the sadness hanging about her face. For as much as she worked, she was smiling most of the time, but that morning, the hurt tugged at the corners of her eyes and tears pooled, but she wouldn’t let them fall. They made her eyes shine in the sunlight.

The night before we’d been to visit her in the hospital. Her condition had deteriorated, but the doctors were continuing to treat her as though she had some time left. I missed her around the cottage, so I was excited at the opportunity to see her.

Pap, who hated hospitals, hadn’t left her beside since she’d been admitted. He’d left Santiago in charge of the cemetery, hoping for the best. He was waiting in her room when we arrived.

“She’s been taken out for a procedure,” he said, with a glance at my mother that meant something I was too young to understand – they’d found a middle ground in Gram’s illness and were speaking in civil terms to one another, “she should be back soon.”

“How was she feeling?” Ma asked.

“No better, no worse. I think she’s ready.”

“They think she’s close.”

“They haven’t said it in so many words, but she has the look.”

“I can imagine. Are you?”

“Is anybody ever?”

“I suppose you’re right. Can we sit with you and wait? He wants to see her.”

“Yeah, that’ll be fine. It shouldn’t be long now.”

The normal harshness had left Pap’s voice, replaced by a heavy sadness. His chin quivered as he spoke to Ma, and I think he was fighting back tears. I wasn’t sure how to act, having never seen such vulnerability in Pap before.

I followed Ma’s lead and we sat in silence with Pap for half-an-hour, but Gram didn’t return. I had a queasy emptiness in my stomach making me feel hungry and sick at the same time. My stomach made a noise, and as it was close to dinnertime, Ma told Pap we’d head home to put dinner on.

We’d just exited the elevator and were headed towards the door when a set of swinging doors opened and Gram was wheeled through on a hospital bed.

The bed and the sheets were white as was the gown she wore. She was so pale from the toll the cancer was exacting it was tough to tell where she stopped and the bed began. 

She was moving fast as the nurse pushing the bed appeared to be racing to catch the elevator we had just left. Time slowed down for a moment as Gram raised a weak hand to us, and attempted a smile, though it was difficult to see with the oxygen mask covering her face.And then she was gone. Whisked away down the hall towards the elevators. Ma handed me the keys and told me to wait in the car before running down the hall after her. It was the last I saw Gram. It is burned into my brain forever

The Tortoise was a dive of ill-repute down by the river. It’s clientele smelled worse than the polluted Melanski. The bluer than blue-collar workers drank there. Some were seasonal workers who picked berries in the summer and apples in the fall before heading to warmer climates for the winter. Most often it was filled with workers from the textile mills stopping in to warm their stomachs before heading home in the winter or to cool off with an ice-cold beer after a hot summer day.

Now, the heart of the Tortoise was Berwick’s population of drunks and ne’er-do-wells – a population that increased with the closing of the mills. They kept the seats of the bar filled from the time it opened for the graveyard shift workers still hanging on at the mills at 6am until its doors shut at 2am. Many were the nights Pete Smallman the rat-faced owner, allowed them to curl up in booths or around tables and sleep it off, confident they’d repay the kindness with a couple of rounds when they woke up.

The police spent a minimum of two nights a week at the Tortoise breaking up fights. Throughout the year brawls would break out between out-of-work drunks who needed a night away from home. In the summer and fall they sprinkled in bouts between the seasonal workers and the locals, who appreciated neither color nor foreign tongues. 

It was inevitable the question of who was faster, a tortoise or a hare would come up, and then one of the regulars would turn on his stool and ask a seasonal worker if he thought, as a black man, he had cornered the market on speed. The other men at the bar would laugh and the seasonal worker, whether his English was good or not, would understand he was being offended and rise up to challenge the speaker.

Knives were frequent guests at the Tortoise and with the police would always come an ambulance. More than one combatant over the years had ended up down the road at Mt. Hope, its proximity to the bar a metaphor lost on the bar’s patrons.

Santiago Holmes was a regular at the Tortoise. He was there so often; he had his own stool in the darkest corner, with a two-stool buffer between himself and the next drinker. When he first started drinking, not when he had his first beer, or got drunk off champagne at one of his mother’s parties, but instead, after his parents were gone and he started drinking, he’d come to the Tortoise.

At the Tortoise if you looked old enough – even if you didn’t – and weren’t scared off by Little Jimmy, the massive tattooed cousin of Pete Smallman who worked the door with two knives in eight-inch leather sleeves riding on each of his hips, you could get in. His doughy gut, the black eyes that peered out from behind his bushy black beard and the knives had turned more than one aspiring underage drinker away.

By the time Santiago decided to stop drinking in his rooms above the garage, he’d been working for Pap for a month and had the rough, wiry look of one who spent their day at hard work. The layer of baby fat he’d had through high school melted away with the work and his face took on a more angular, hawkish appearance. He still possessed the arrogance of the elite, which gave him the courage to get past Little Jimmy for the first time at the Tortoise.

Up until that point, his journeys out in public consisted of trips to the grocery store, where he felt the burning hatred in the eyes of the unemployed mill workers’ wives as they passed food stamps or a few precious dollars into the hands of the cashiers. Though the trips were infrequent, he knew he was loathed. Pap took a certain amount of glee in recounting the town gossip he’d picked up over beers at the Tavern of whatever Gram brought home from her ventures into town. Santiago knew where he stood.

After a month, the edge seemed to come off the anger in the stories Pap told, or so Santiago felt. He was still young enough to think drinking alone wasn’t a good thing. Weighing those two ideas, he decided it was time to try and head out into the world for some company while drinking. The town couldn’t stay angry with forever him just because his last name was Holmes, or so his thinking went. Never having had to mix with the blue-collar majority of Berwick, he didn’t realize he could not have been more wrong in his assumptions.

The mill workers of Berwick kept desperate hold of their grudges, not letting go for anything, or anyone, even if the grudge had been resolved. In 1970, the mill workers went on strike for higher wages and a better pension plan. Mr. Holmes, already beginning to feel the financial strains, gave in within a week. More than 40 years later men would gather at the Tortoise and refer back to how ill-treated they had been in 1970 as they discussed their current financial straights.

So when Santiago passed by Little Jimmy and entered the Tortoise, all eyes fell on him. This was normal practice for anyone who entered the bar. What was not normal was the cold fury each set of eyes held.

Many would have crumbled under the weight of those glares, or at worst, have turned and left. Santiago, felt the rage in an instant, and realized people weren’t close to done with their anger. In that moment, he realized he would be treated as an outsider for the rest of his days. He also realized he didn’t give a damn.

He met each set of eyes with a fury of his own; the pent up rage of having been abandoned by his mother and deemed an outcast by a town that didn’t know him reflected back at these hard drinkers in the glare he cast upon them. He took his time, making sure he looked deep into each set of eyes, meeting their hate with his own, until they were forced to look away.

Having established that he would not be bullied, Santiago took the only available seat at the bar: at the far end from the door next to the bathrooms. Pete Smallman, who believed all dollars were created equal, placed a Bud and a shot of Jack in front of him.

As he would every night from that day forth, Santiago sat taking long pulls of his beer and short sips of the whiskey, staring hate out at the world until he felt the arms of drunkenness, calm some of his pain.

Ma raised me on her own. She had some help from Gram and Pap. More Gram than Pap. Pap didn’t much interest in me until I could work. In fact, he told me on my first of work, “Now, you’re interesting.” That was also the year Gram died.

Ma was tough like Pap. She refused to take charity from anyone, so when she was 19 and I was born, she gave up her plans for college and took a job as a teller at the Berwick Trust. She was already a bartender at the Berwick Tavern. She’d been a server for three years before the promotion. After I was born she continued to work three to four nights a week as she felt she couldn’t give up the money. Some nights when she left for the Tavern I’d see Gram shake her head and mutter, “That’s where it all started” as the door closed behind Ma.

I’d ask Ma why she kept working the two jobs, even after she’d been promoted to head teller and was making enough to care for both of us and chip in quite a bit to Gram and Pap.

“You never know what might happen. There may be an emergency of some sort; Pap or Gram might get sick and we might need the extra money. It’s always good to have a back-up plan.”

If Pap was around he’d pipe up with disdain, “or any plan at all. Remember the Five Ps.” This was one of Pap’s favorite slogans: preparation prevents piss poor performance.

Gram would shush him, but not before a look of anger would flash across Ma’s face. “I also do it because I enjoy it,” Ma said.

I think she did like the job, and I know we needed the money, but I think she also liked the attention she received behind the bar and the escape it provided from Gram and Pap’s house. 

It was never spoken of in my presence, but you could feel the rooms of the small house were thick with it in the early years of my life. My birth was a cause of some contention between Ma and Pap. Gram loved me, but the tension between Ma and Pap sat heavy in the air. 

Pap thought I was a parasite or some sort of infectious disease. Whenever possible, he would steer clear of me. If by some chance we were in the same room together, he might upgrade my status to that of a dog by asking me to “fetch a Bud from the fridge” for him. When I’d left the room, I could hear him talking to himself about “the planet’s overcrowded enough without another mouth that can’t feed or do for itself.”

I suspect another reason Ma worked two jobs was so she wouldn’t have to accept anything from my grandparents, who didn’t have much. They lived in the caretaker’s cottage next to the cemetery. That was the biggest part of Pap’s pay: the rent-free housing. Gram didn’t work. She volunteered at the library and the church.

Ma also had a point to prove. Neither one of my grandparents was pleased when I came along – Ma being just 19 at the time – though Gram got over it the fastest, telling Ma, “this is a great thing, we will get through it together.” Pap, harder to please and more upright in his sense of what was proper – despite his rebellious streak – was a different story.

He’d take any opportunity to poke at Ma about my birth. Pap was irate when he found out Ma was pregnant, his anger increasing when she wouldn’t tell him who the father was. Over the years I heard the hint of rumors throughout town, but by the time I understood what they were, Ma had squashed most of them.

She worked two jobs to prove to Pap we could make it without his help. I think she succeeded. By the time I went to work for him in the cemetery, Ma was paying all the utility bills, car payments for both her and Gram and Pap’s cars, all the groceries and whatever other upkeep was required around the house.

It’s easy to see now how much like him she was, though she’d never admit it. Her stubbornness came from him, as did her rigidity and sense of what was proper. I’ve tried to point it out to her, now that I’m older, but she always steers the conversation in a different direction.

Because she worked the two jobs and was caring for me the rest of the time, Ma never had time to go out with friends or go out on dates. I think that’s why she liked the attention working at the bar brought. She needed to interact outside of the stuffy environment of the bank and the cottage. The bar kept her feeling young and in touch with her friends. Everyone in Berwick spent a night or two at the Tavern, unless they were regulars at the Tortoise.