Snow and Death

Snow and Death

I knew the snow was coming. We had been warned for days. Still, when I crawl from under my blanket, the blanket my Chickasaw grandmother made for me years before. The one full of colors and love, the one in which her laughter somehow remained even after she was gone. The one now draped over my shoulders as I leave my bed to open the door. Before me another blanket, this one white now covers the earth. Snow is rare on the plains and despite the warnings, always comes as a shock. So does death. I only wish it were as rare.

When my brother called, I knew immediately that it was one of those calls you hope you never receive but eventually do. His voice was too upbeat when he said, “Hey man whatcha doin?” I was sitting on a bar stool at my kitchen counter with my laptop open. I was trying to write, but nothing was flowing. I had made a wrong turn in Mr. Creative’s neighborhood and ended up in the dreaded writer’s cul-de-sac.

“Nothing really, what’s going on?” There was the standard awkward pause. I said his name to make sure he was still on the phone, “Mike?” His voice cracked as he simply said, “Dad died.” In some strange way I already knew it, or maybe felt, is a better word. I replied with a perfunctory “Okay.”

My brother composed himself and gave me the details. I was listening but then again, I wasn’t. When he finished, I actually thanked him for the call and hung up. I was alone and walked out on my balcony, but the tears didn’t fall. They would fall later. I watched the sun sinking below the horizon as the color orange crawled up a blue wall of western sky.

I closed my eyes and let the sun’s waning rays shine through my eyelids lighting the darkness behind them. Memories of my dad ran through my mind in a quick succession like a movie clip that’s playing much too fast. I did nothing to stop them. Memories of his life mixed with memories of mine creating an indistinguishable blur. He was finally gone, and my feelings were just as mixed.

Like the blanket my grandmother made me, my dad’s life was just as colorful. He had been many things. A Chickasaw, a Vietnam infantryman, though not by choice, a horse trainer, a comedian, though not on a stage, a womanizer and a fighter, though not in the ring. He was all those things and more, but never a dad. I really think he wanted to be, but the alcohol and the women, and the horses, and Vietnam were all stronger than his want. I was okay with that, or at least the years had tried to convince me, or maybe just numb me, to what was evident.

My brother isn’t a romantic. On the contrary he is a pragmatist, and can be harsh as the Oklahoma wind. If he likes you, you know it, and if he doesn’t, you not only know it, but depending on the circumstances, may feel it as well. He had settled all accounts, closed the store, and finished with our dad years ago. And me? Well, I was the one that walked into the buzz saw again and again. It didn’t matter how many times it cut me, I absorbed the wounds and kept coming back for more. I had reached the point of diminishing returns years ago and yet, invested myself with abandon never once considering the cost.

After his death the creative spark returned, and I began to write with a freedom I hadn’t known before. I wrote before bed, and when I woke, before meals and afterwards. I wrote in my head when my hands couldn’t find a keyboard. I wrote on bank deposits at ATMs, and on napkins while dining. I even wrote on the back of a receipt in a fast-food drive through.

I was compelled to write, and it came effortlessly, like I was on the back of one of my dad’s thoroughbreds and had relaxed the reins to my fingers. They moved like the racehorse’s strides, natural and easy, like that’s what they were born to do. I wrote about the currents of his life mixing with mine and the tumultuous waves that flowed down through time altering the landscape not only in my life, but in the lives of all born downstream. Like a protracted ground soaking rain I wrote, and I wrote, until one day, it stopped.

There on the table, my completed transcript. My soul poured out on paper, my dad’s blood mingled with mine in the ink, but I was broke. How could I afford to have it published? If I could somehow find the money was it even worth publishing? It wasn’t so much that I wanted it published, but I needed it published, for my dad and for me, and in doing so, somehow redeem us both. The money eventually came, and my book was published. But how it came is still hard to believe.

After dad’s death I returned to his home, drawn there by some irresistible force. It was a hot summer day. The kind of hot that climbs under your clothes and steams them from the inside out. You can do nothing but surrender and slog along with a resignation that silences all protest and suppresses any hope of a rogue breeze. I turned off of a blacktop road onto a gravel driveway that ascended gradually upwards toward a nice brick home that looked out of place on such a barren piece of land.

The sky was a pale blue with no clouds to mitigate the sun’s rays. It baked the earth mercilessly. Grass was sparce and the weeds were many. In between the grass and the weeds, nothing but red dirt. When I reached the top of the hill, the brick home was framed with mountains sitting off in the distance behind it. They weren’t mountains really, but flat hills that jutted up off the Oklahoma plains like tree stumps that once were part of something much bigger. On one of those mesas, my dad had been born.

Like so many nice things in dad’s life, the homestead once his, now lost, foreclosed, and empty. Instead of continuing on to the home, I turned off on a side road that was nothing but tire tracks leading through a pasture that led up to a horse barn my dad had built hastily without forethought and could never afford the materials to complete it. There, next to a rusting horse walker was a small travel trailer barely 10 feet long, my dad’s final residence.

I knew he was gone, but just being where he had been made me feel close to him, and even though the trailer was obviously empty, I knocked out of respect, opened the door, and stepped inside. There were empty whisky bottles in the floor beside where he once lay. I walked towards the back and found his bed covered in horse tack, Louis L’Amour books, and belt buckles.

I turned to leave but stopped in the kitchen next to a small sink filled with dirty dishes covered with flies. A few of which made their way to where I stood, and I waved them away in rhythmic intervals. I glanced around at what could only be described as squalor. A thought I had buried many times before now rose defiantly breaking the surface of my mind’s consciousness. This was my dad. The man I was born to, and this was the culmination of 7 decades that he spent on earth.

A deep mourning filled my chest and produced a groaning I didn’t expect. I felt so many emotions that words fail to describe, but one emotion eclipsed them all. It was shame. Shame for having been born his son, and shame for being ashamed of being his son. I covered my face and the tears captured on my balcony, now broke free. I began throwing up years of buried sadness.

The tears flooded my face as sobs came in convulsions I couldn’t suppress. I cried for all that was lost and for all that could have been. I cried for the life my dad had lost and the loss I suffered with him. I cried simply because he was my dad, and despite all the bad that had passed between us, I loved him still.

I left his trailer and walked to the horse barn. The smells there always comforted me. An old Panasonic radio that he wired outside of one of the horse stalls was playing country music. The smell of hay, horse feed, and liniment was still in the air and a breeze blew through the entry way mixing the smells and drying my face from tears shed earlier. I walked into his old tack room in search of nostalgia.

There on the wall was a picture of dad in the winner’s circle from years ago with a horse he had owned and trained named, Danny’s Blaze. His racing colors were purple with the number 10. My dad’s deeply tanned faced was accentuated by his white cowboy hat. His black eyebrows furrowed over dark eyes filled with satisfaction and pride. I moved an exercise saddle and some horse blankets and noticed a little black book.

Like my dad’s latter life, it had seen better days. I thumbed through it and found training schedules for his horses, some notes from the racetrack on horses he had bet on, and to my surprise, a dilapidated hundred-dollar bill. I smiled recalling a trip we had made to the track together in my teens. He was drinking heavily that day and was afraid he would bet all of his money. He had given me a hundred-dollar bill to keep until we left the track.

Dad had told me while smiling his mischievous grin, “I don’t give a damn what I say, you keep this until we’re away from the track. It may be all we have to eat on for a while.” I knew he would use it for whiskey but obeyed anyway. I grinned and closed the little black book and slipped it into my pocket wondering if it could actually be the same hundred-dollar bill. I walked from the barn to my truck and drove away, the dust from the gravel drive obscuring everything behind me.

A few days later I made a trip to the racetrack, something I rarely do, but once again, wanted to feel close to dad. I had the 100-dollar bill and the little black book with me. I waited until the last race of the day and walked to the betting window. I bet the hundred-dollar bill on a trifecta, using numbers from my dad’s black book. I couldn’t bring myself to watch the race. When it was over, I glanced at the winner’s board. The top three finishers were wearing my numbers.

Unbelievably, I won 20,000 dollars. Enough to publish my book, and I parlayed that, as they say in the betting world, into enough money to buy the house and the land where I now live and write. It’s secluded and quiet, and I even completed the horse barn dad never finished. I have a dog, three horses, and barn cats. It’s not the Pondarosa, but I think dad would approve.

Standing in the doorway I see the snow has drifted on the plains like white rolling waves. In the distance the silhouette of a buffalo moves slowly like a ship across a white sea. Rumors abound of their presence, but seeing one is as rare as snow on the plains. The wind kisses my face, and it stings. My eyes fill with tears. I pull my grandma’s blanket tightly around my neck, close the door, and begin to write.