GOING HOME
By Jeff S. Martindale
 

In the land of cotton and okra, the sun glowed like a proud new father.  High in the air the spring winds drove eastward small clouds that looked like puffs of cannon smoke. Exiting the interstate at a town once unknown to Rand McNally, I crossed the demarcation line into my past.  A muddy river ran parallel to my left, a cotton field away across the flat fields of the flood plain. The sun’s rays ricocheted off the car hood and into my eyes, temporarily obscuring the images that I once yearned to forget.

I had returned home.  I stopped to fill my car with fuel then headed west into the blinding sunshine, toward the community center -- not my final destination.  It was a smothering Southern day, near the apex of August.  The region had experienced many consecutive days of interminable heat—the muggy blanket of summer and the penetrating sunshine of cloudless days—and this day it characteristically moved me to reconsider my venture.

I drove along Main Street.  Two lanes had been added to its breadth, which pulled the houses uncomfortably close to the action. New subdivisions had sprouted where pastures dominated years before.  Cookie-cutter starter homes, annexes of red brick and second story dormers that feigned an extra level, speckled the flats. 

No one played outside.  During my youth, children ventured inside only when beckoned by a shrill whistle.  Today the houses with their anchored saplings and sodded yards looked forlorn, spiritless.

An abrupt force of rendezvous struck me when I reached the community center. Children filled the small playground, since school was still out of session. The building looked just as I'd remembered it, though I hadn't seen it up close in what seemed like an eternity. Reflecting on the years, I couldn’t believe that two decades had actually passed since I last stepped foot inside its walls. I pulled up to the red brick building, easing my car into the closest parking space.

Through double glass doors I saw a large foyer and beyond it the windows of the large central office.  Although I recognized new glass, I smiled as I saw the little fingerprints in each pane.  The floors felt familiarly tacky, reassuringly so, and it momentarily appeased the anxiety welling up inside me.

In some ways, it appeared newer than I remembered it, more whitewashed and sanitized, with brighter lights and shinier floors, as though an army of servants had spent countless man-hours preserving everything for posterity’s sake.  But I surmised that decades of sneakered feet must have taken its toll.  Perhaps the janitors in my time didn’t do their job very well.

I disapproved of the hospital-like appearance of the hallways. I hate hospitals. Too many bad memories there. In the abstract, unspoken manner that one’s feelings mature from beliefs, I had always held onto my formative years as the last bastion of youthful exuberance prior to my father’s untimely death.  Fear was someone else’s problem then, and it was rudely introduced to me the day he died.

Long-forgotten memories fought to surface as I strolled down a corridor. Preserved in my memory banks were the crafts-making sessions in the arts room and the make out sessions under the gym bleachers.  Preserved along with it, like the embalming fluid in my father’s veins the last time I saw him, were the insecurities that lurked in the shadows.  I know now they always skulked beneath the surface – waiting for the moment my defenses relaxed. Having been shielded from life’s horrible moments, I never knew what they looked like.

Reflecting on the years that transpired since those innocent times, I sensed the cloud that loomed over me.  I’m still trying to deal with it, for I fear no measure of time will allow me to escape its grasp.  I felt its thunder, still reverberating in my marrow, and with that I felt the disjointed, stubborn anxiety which had been its partner.

There was much to take in. They, of course, were the same halls I had traversed regularly many afternoons after school. I, however, had changed a great deal.  I had aged two decades, added more pounds than I cared to admit, and had a receding hairline that had long since passed the cranial crest.  I felt secure in my life’s work but some emotions kept tugging at me, not letting me forget.  Not yet anyway.

I turned away and returned to the air-conditioned comfort of my car.  The surface streets were relatively empty, and I drove down wide asphalt roads past new commercial developments, where groves of elderly trees once dominated the landscape.

My birthplace wasn’t the most eclectic Southern town, and on this sultry afternoon its monotony was palpable. The lure of the once familiar—my mother’s home, a familiar store, a coterie of old friends—drew me back.  Some days the seduction would nudge me like a devil on my shoulder, prodding me to escape the self-imposed exile. I felt a return trip was at hand.  Everything at home had transformed and balanced with the modern era.  So I figured if the town had grown and developed without me, then I, perhaps, could grow and develop myself.

I would learn more about that when I reached my destination.  I arrived at a bottlenecked intersection, fighting impatience while automobiles queued for two blocks in every direction. During the incessant wait, I took in the sights around me. Strip centers teeming with SUV’s and mothers pushing children in carts. A Taco Bell. A school supply store, full of students and teachers stocking reserves for the upcoming school year. Traffic crawled forward and soon I emerged from the queue, arriving within minutes at the extensive breadth of cemetery flatland that I had shunned like a pariah.

The grounds were brooding and animate, alive with blooming flowers and, as one would expect here, awaiting new residents. Newly trimmed graves stood out to my left. A noisy mower plodded through tall grass to the right. Tall pines lined the narrow path at the rear.  It was such a blistering and irascible day that I could not clearly see the gravestones through the heat rising from the asphalt path, which wove a web through the sprawling grounds.

I parked in the shade of a wise elm and started the short march across the land. I had progressed only a few feet before I noticed the freshly-cut grass adhering to my loafers in clumps.  Near the center of the plots lay shallow piles of clippings I easily navigated, my shoes making crunching noises as I crossed the parched landscape.  With nothing to impede it the sun showered scorching rays on me. At any other time I would’ve considered myself unwise to expose my alabaster skin to such cruel punishment.

A slight breeze tussled the treetops. As I neared the marker I felt myself becoming detached from everything except it and the many trees surrounding me.  The breeze matured into a wind, and my skin felt relieved.  Many gravestones silently grew from the level ground. I was astonished that there were more now that looked like his.  It had dwelled in my memory as a lonely marble monument commanding the vacancies around it, foreboding as a bad dream, tall then as my waist.  Yet there were now a multitude of markers, none of any distinct splendor.

Moving across the dry, shaved lawn I analyzed each one closely, and soon identified the one I sought by means of a certain bronze military marker next to the plot, and by a small American flag extending over the grass as though carried in a parade.  This was the marker, and it seemed to me standing there to sufficiently honor the man, the idol of my youth, whose future was stolen from him.  In this cruel life, God’s will has become ubiquitous though I try to look the other way.

The marker appeared fatigued from years of spring rains.  I was glad that I had seen it. It had been too long since my last visit.  Despite the interval since my first, the pain persisted, as does a marker, a community center, and death by surprise.

Unchanged, I headed back through the grass.  I was burning up and drenched with sweat.  Carrying my jacket over a shoulder, I walked past a statue of the Blessed Virgin standing over a nearby grave, little unseen gnats nipping at my neck with every step I took.

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