Partings

My father is one of 10 children. That's his brother Martin up there in the box: Martin, who died before his first birthday of some routine sickness that went bad. They never got around to taking a photo of him when he was alive: the tenth-child syndrome. Which gives this photo additional poignancy. The bald man in the back, second from the right, is my grandfather, who brought the humanity into that family, though his was the less dominant adult voice. My father is the small boy in front of him, looking down at the box. I think the short woman is my grandmother; she had only two daughters, and there are three females here, so I assume. She looks a little wild to me, and alone, the way I think a mother would in those circumstances. I knew her only as a hard woman: stern and cold. I'm a little ashamed to admit that this is the only thing--this photo--that makes me feel compassion for her; her baby's coffin complicates a bit the simple, hard reality that she put a whole lot of fucked up kids out into the world, and the ones who didn't go mad up in the hills got as far away from her as ships and planes would take them. My father insists the old house, now abandoned, is haunted; he won't even step out of the car.

Dad was just confoundingly awful to Liam today--just hours before the two of them and my mother got on a plane and flew to Atlanta to visit my sister for a week. Too tired to recount it, but it was irrational and destructive--gratuitous nastiness to the kid just as he was at his most anxious about leaving home without me. Sitting beside Liam helping him talk it through and process his feelings about it, I thought of Martin and realized that when I get the lump in my throat looking at that photo, it's not for the baby in the box.