By Sherri Harvey
The whippoorwill is so named for its call—three whistled notes that sound like “whip-poor-will.” It could repeat this call 400 times without stopping. Relentless. Haunting. Haunted?
#
The accouterments of my mother’s party last night decorate our family room. There is a man, my uncle, passed out face down on our couch, breathing heavily and drooling all over the gold velvet sofa pillow where his head is resting. I decide, passive-aggressively, to start cleaning up. I open and close the closet door heavily three times. I yank the vacuum out of the closet. Let it hit the wall. Slam the closet door. Cough. Cough louder. I plug in the vacuum and turn it on. Then off. Then on again. He does not move. It's nearly eleven a.m. His head is glued to the pillow by saliva. The pillow is stuck to his lips and expands and contracts with his breathing. I steer the growling appliance around the couch like a shark circling a baby seal.
I spy something tiny and green on the floor. I leave the vacuum on and bend down to pick up five tiny green pills with the letters “WY” on one side and tiny crosses on the other. I have no idea what they are, but I know where they came from. I slip them into my pocket and continue to vacuum.
As I'm circling the couch, I take a long look at this man, my mother’s second youngest brother. Although technically he is my uncle, I struggle to even think of him as blood. He is twenty-seven. My friends have a crush on him, think he’s sexy, love the attention he gives them. I do not share in this sentiment one iota. He serenades my friends—especially the cuter ones—with Neil Young poetry as he plays his guitar...
Woke up this morning
With love in mind
It was raining outside
but my love still shined
Kept me warm
till my plane touched the sky
He’s a charmer.
I can’t stand talking to him.
Brent is passed out on our couch. He has two kids who don’t live with him. Never have—never will. He had the first one when he was sixteen. My cousin Quinton is twelve and my cousin Brandy is seven. They live with their mom in Evansville, in the house that’s in my grandparent’s cemetery. I don’t know where Brent is living today.
I have friends coming over at noon and I want him to get up. The last thing I need is my uncle passed out cold on the living room couch when they arrive. I considered waking my mom up, but she doesn’t have to work today so I want to let her sleep. Instead, I decided to kick the couch. Brent, the dead man, finally sits up and looks around, his eyes ancient and hollow, underlined by dark, bold commas. He grabs his Marlboro Reds and starts to light one there, inside, in the living room.
I throw a fit, as only a self-righteous non-smoking, fourteen-year-old can. Tell him to go outside, call him a lazy bastard, remind him that his lungs are inevitably, disgustingly, black.
He stands up and feels the front pocket of his jeans. Bends down and looks under the couch. Feels the other front pocket. Feels in the back pocket. He is looking for his little green friends. I say nothing. And neither does he. He scowls at me, eyes becoming sideways exclamation points, and walks out the front door, lights a cigarette, and takes off walking down the street.
#
Cousins to the owls, whippoorwills are most active at night. Slaves to the moon, they sleep in the day and are governed solely by lunar phases.
We weren’t always at odds, Brent and I. Before the couch, before the pills, Brent and I were good, but I guess that only existed at “Chuck and Mary’s Retreat”.
“Chuck and Mary’s Retreat” sits way behind the main house on a moon-shaped man-made lake surrounded by oak and beech trees. Built by my grandparents and my uncles, Brent and Kurt, and whoever had time to pitch in and help, the one-room cabin on my grandparents’ property in Brown County (forty-five minutes south of Indianapolis), Indiana offered solace, companionship, and celebration for our family.
We spent many a summer eating bluegill and catfish from the lake, cooking a squirrel over a campfire, harvesting wild mushrooms from the woods, and living off the land. We bathed in the pond. Watched the eagles fly. Listened to the warbles of the robins. Drank Pabst Blue Ribbon and shared cigarettes.
The sounds of nature, of whippoorwills singing or owls hooting, frogs croaking, and hawks screaming always brings me back to Chuck and Mary’s Retreat. Back to Brown County and Country Roads. Nature and memories intertwined. Back to singing and listening to guitar and watching the red-orange-brown of fall leaves. The drifts of winter snow blocking the front door and spring awakenings and the whispering secrets of the old oaks and howling at the crystal moon. Skinny-dipping in the lake and black-eyed susans and lilacs dotting the hills. Campfires all year round and Mimi and Brent playing late into the sweet honey of dawn. We all felt it. We all loved it. Mimi waxing poetic about the joys of the hummingbirds, Kurt imitating bird calls. Brent saying he’d be a poor man if he never saw an eagle fly. All of my aunts and uncles, Sissy, Ketty, Jimmy, Mimi, Brent, Kurt, Chuckie and my mom, Sally, and all the cousins, downing whiskey and sipping beer. All of us finding comfort draped around each other’s shoulders, arms, hands, inexplicably intertwined in grace and harmony forever. A family that drinks together… drinking made life fun, or so it seemed on those days.
And on those nights the magic kept us all warm, made us feel loved. We all slept in that little cabin in sleeping bags strewn everywhere, letting the cicadas and the frogs sing us to sleep, the lightning bugs beacon us to the outhouse. The woods were lush and ripe with lazy energy, the owls outside reminded us of the departed souls of the makers of us all: my grandparents.
#
Years later, after Brent-story after story of couch surfing, and mooching, and homelessness, I pick up the phone to hear my mother sobbing on the other end. My heart cracks, this time and every time I hear her cry. In my memory, my thoughts are intertwined with the conversation like braided strands of rope.
With my heart aching, I wonder: Can a cracked heart stay afloat in the blood of a chest?
I can tell from the pitch and cadence of her words today she isn’t drunk, just sad. I know it’s probably about Brent.
She tells me: “Brent took Mimi’s truck to go into town.”
I remember the fact that Brent has lived with my mom and Jim for the past two years and worked for my stepdad in his electrical contracting company.
She says “he started drinking.”
The Wanderer.
“He has never been able to just have one” palpably asking for my empathy.
Mom claims he helps her around the house. He does laundry.
And then she tells me, “he got in the truck to get more Coors Light.”
He vacuums.
“He then– ran a stop sign.” I hear her take a drag on her cigarette.
He cleans the kitchen after she cooks.
She is now sobbing as she spits out, “h-h-he hit a motorcycle that had two people on it.”
Mom’s judgment about Brent and his actions depends on her mood. Sometimes she defends him.
I can barely decipher her words as she continues the story. “One person, the passenger, landed in the bed of the truck and is in the hospital in critical condition.”
Sometimes she condemns him.
She continues with, “he tried to flee the scene—hit a gas pump.”
But still, and always, she feeds him.
“And then…you won’t believe this—he backed up with the hose stuck to flee again.”
But still, and always, she welcomes him into her home.
As I have been listening, my blood is boiling. When I finally respond the words come out in a scorching rush. “What an asshole! I hope he’s going to jail. He was probably looking back at the cops as he floored it singing ‘I’m not gonna let ‘em catch me!’”
“Not funny,” Mom says.
She might be mad at me but she won’t get off the phone. She tells me about how the police are questioning Mimi to see if Brent stole the truck or if she actually gave it to him. How Mimi is a nervous wreck and ready to crack up. “She’s having a hard time keeping a toe in her everyday world,” Mom says with a flourish that punctuates everything.
I lay down the phone and think. Think about all of it.
#
One legend says the whippoorwill can sense a soul departing. It goes on to say that it can capture that soul as it flees the body and carries it straight up to the heavens.
Are all souls, even the lost ones, worth capturing?
#
The family, Brent’s siblings, visit him weekly in the Brown County Jail, usually every Friday afternoon. When they visit, Brent sits behind a glass partition, like in the movies. They talk on the phone, one at a time, for hours. They only talk about the past.
Remember how Dad would call you a Butterball.
Remember Brown County?
Remember all the trees?
The lake?
The beavers?
They always say they love him.
And as they walk out the door to leave, they make whippoorwill sounds to remind him of better times.
Outside, they tell others, “At least he’s sober.” As if sobriety could make up for his transgressions. His years of drunk slurs and passes made at my friends. Years of making my mother worry about him. Years of neglecting his parenting responsibilities in the name of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Like that line, “Sweet dreams and fine machines in pieces on the ground.”
Each of them is secretly relieved that Brent is the one in jail. That they aren’t the ones behind the glass.
Getting fat.
Dreaming of Brown County.
Having others make whippoorwill sounds just to remind them of B.J; Before Jail.
That they don’t have to be sober.
They don’t talk about the relief that they must feel. Relieved because it was never one of them who maimed or killed someone.
Relieved because it was Brent and not Mimi who was driving.
That it was Brent and not Sally who was housing him.
Not Kurt who was working side-by-side with him.
It could have happened to any of them. Because they all drink.
In their own way, each of them has committed the crime that Brent committed. Because of Mimi giving her his truck. Because Sally gave him a place to live. Because Kurt gave him a job. None of them were innocent of drunk driving. All of them chose and consumed their own form of poison: Crown Royal, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Mary Jane, Bourbon, Tequila. In their own way, each of them has committed the crime that Brent committed.
Brent’s sentence is a collective penance for the sins of the family.
A broken and chilly hallelujah.
#
No one talks about his plans when he gets out.
He is sixty.
He will be on probation for one year.
He will need to attend Alcoholics Anonymous.
He has no place to call home so he will (likely) live with my mother.
She will drive him everywhere he needs to go.
He will work for my stepdad’s electrical contracting business, at least if he can stay sober. Or maybe he will work for Doc’s Electric drunk, walking around with a coke can filled with vodka.
Just like it has always been.
He owes his victims about half a million dollars.
He has no bank account. Nothing to lien.
His money, all his money, is stashed away with my mother, under the mattress in the guest bedroom, “Brent’s” room.
“Sally, can you send me 50 dollars?” is such a strange sentence to imagine coming out of the mouth of a sixty-year-old man.
An allowance.
A stash.
Complicity.
A haphazard type of life, a pinball bouncing off one kindness to the next, from whichever family member is closest.
And when the county releases him, I know, they will all be waiting for him with handfuls of bird song. Their own small cup of light, hope that he will stay sober this time.
But Brent will be:
A man without a guitar.
A man without a song.
A man without a future.
But I know someone will let loose a bit of talk of Brown County and someone else will return the call.
#
Governed by the moon, whippoorwills, wail incessantly in the night, singing their sorrowful song, as if lamenting the moon's tender whippings, slaves to their internal callings.
Sherri Harvey holds an MA in Fiction and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and Travel Writing. She has written a short documentary film that won awards at the S.O.F.A. International Film Festival and has had her photos and writing published in the Endangered Species Coalition, The Literary Traveler, Ragazine, Reed, Snapdragon: Journal of Art and Healing, and many others. She lives and works in Silicon Valley. For more information @sherricoyote and www.sherriharvey.com.
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