THE
PERFECT MOTHER
an
in-depth study of forgiveness
by D. Patrick Miller
Published by D. Patrick Miller at Smashwords
© 2011 by D. Patrick Miller
Smashwords Edition
All Rights Reserved
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COVER:
The cover photograph is a multiple exposure taken by an unknown photographer sometime in the early 1940s, and has been slightly enhanced and framed in Photoshop. My mother, Janie Magdalene Fry, appears to the right, along with two sisters and a friend. At this time she was probably not yet married to my father, Lester Eugene Miller. -- D. Patrick Miller
I awoke groggily on a Saturday morning in my sister Karen’s former bedroom, having bicycled five miles from my dormitory the evening before to spend an uneasy weekend with my parents. My own childhood room, now full of stored junk, was next to this one, and from it came a strange sound of grunting and scuffling. As I sat up in bed, my mother and father burst in from the short, narrow hallway connecting the two rooms, stumbling in a peculiar clinch that ended in a bruising crash against the closed bedroom door. As I blinked fully awake I suddenly recognized that they were struggling over a shotgun that was waving crazily in my general direction. Without thinking I dove off the side of the bed and rolled into a defensive crouch that seemed kind of silly and melodramatic even as I did it; how had I suddenly ended up in the middle of a bad television melodrama?
Watching my folks warily from around the corner of the bed, the weirdness of the scene intensified even as the apparent danger deflated. It was clear they were not bickering over who would get to shoot me. Instead, they were in the middle of some other power struggle that they had somehow jointly decided I should witness. As I stood, no longer afraid of being a target, I began to feel my habitual exasperation with my mom. This was obviously the latest dramatization of her periodic threats to commit suicide, and my patient, usually passive father had intervened. It was strange that a habitual pill-popper would resort to a firearm – and I couldn’t figure out where she got it – but I didn’t have time to think this through before striding over and adding another hand to the gun and saying, “Let go, Mother. This is just silly.”
With a cold, flat voice that I knew all too well from her depressive episodes, my mother said, with just a hint of gloating, “It’s not me. It’s your father.”
As my blood ran cold I looked to my dad’s face, contorted with tension and streaming with tears. His tears were something I couldn’t ever remember seeing. He couldn’t look me in the eye, and obviously felt ashamed about losing control.
“Dad?” I said quizzically, to which he replied through gritted teeth:
“Take the shells. Take the shells away.”
I then noticed that one of his shaking hands held a box of shotgun shells, a couple of which had spilled on the floor. I bent down, picked up the strays and put them back in the box, then took the box away from my dad as he had directed. Then I said to both my parents, “Give me the gun too. I’m going to put it away.”
“It doesn’t matter,” my mother objected. “You can’t really hide it. He’ll find it if he wants to.”
“We’ll just see about that,” I replied testily. “Let go.” As they both complied, I suddenly remembered the gun’s history. It was my granddad’s gun, practically an antique. In an episode that was completely out of character for both of us, my dad had tried to teach me to shoot with it when I was about nine years old. God only knows why, but one afternoon after school he brought it out and showed it to me, then crouched beside me and helped me aim it at a tiny blackbird flying overhead. I was excited and full of dread. My dad must have sensed this because he said, as we aimed together, “Don’t worry. I don’t think we could hit a dad-blamed thing.” The gun went off as he pulled the trigger with his finger over mine. I would have been knocked to the ground if I’d not been in my father’s embrace, and I saw a soft pink spray in the air before the bird cartwheeled crazily to earth. We slowly walked over and looked at the bloody mess on the ground. I felt sick to my stomach. My father said sternly, “I’ll put this gun away now, and we’ll leave it be. I don’t want you messing with it.”
I had not seen the gun since that afternoon, nine or ten years before; it had been out of sight and out of mind. Unlike many Southern men of his age, my dad was neither a hunter nor a stock-car racing fan; he was an electrician, compulsive lawn-mower, and woodshop tinkerer. He had probably not taken the gun in hand since the day of the bird murder, so I knew that he had to be under extreme duress. As I went down to the basement and searched anxiously for a perfect hiding place for the weapon – my mother was right; there was no place I could keep it from him – I imagined the scenario that had likely led him to this extreme: My mother, who had probably not had more than two hours of successive sleep in one night for the last twenty years, had harangued my dad with her manic, hostile chatter all night long until he simply couldn’t take it anymore. He went for the gun to get some long-term, quality silence. My mother had gotten in his way.
It would not occur to me for quite a while that she had placed herself in danger to save his life. It was also impossible to imagine that he intended anything but suicide.
At any rate, when I returned from the basement my parents had separated from their bizarre clinch. My mother had gone to bed, and my father was sitting in his office den, staring out the windows at the hundred-year-old oak and hickory trees that inhabited the flood plain down the hill from our large house. I entered the den and firmly said, “Dad…,” not knowing what would follow. Without turning his head he said, “I don’t want you calling your sisters. Nobody else has to know about this. Let’s just let it ride.”
Unable to help myself, I answered with a rueful chuckle. “No, Dad, that ain’t gonna happen. I’m going to call Judy and Karen now and make sure one of them gets over here. Then I’m going to bike to Will’s house.”
Will was my college roommate, a religious studies major who enjoyed, in my view, the perfect family life. His mom was a high school Home Economics teacher who baked multiple pies every weekend (at least when I was visiting), and his dad was a Massey-Ferguson tractor salesman who was a dead ringer for Ben Cartwright on “Bonanza.” True, their family life had its own stresses: their eldest son, almost thirty, was developmentally disabled, showing little interest in anything besides eating pies and amassing a vast LP collection about which he held a savant-like knowledge. The middle son was a somewhat uptight young minister whom Will admired beyond all reason. But the parents’ support of their boys was beyond reproach.
For instance: Both Will and I had been in the last year of the draft lottery as the Vietnam War was winding down. In my last year of high school I remember looking at my draft notice with a sickening dread and wondering how I could possibly survive basic training. I was a hopeless four-eyes so I wouldn’t end up in combat, but I was inclined toward seeking conscientious objector status. However, I’d heard that you had to have exemplary community support, not to mention the backing of your family, to overcome the conservative bias of a North Carolina draft board. I didn’t have any community to speak of; we’d quit going to church years ago, and we didn’t socialize with neighbors or community groups. Also, my mother was a rabid Richard Nixon fan. So pursuing CO status was out of the question, and Canada might as well have been Mars in terms of the courage or practical capacity I would need to escape there.
By contrast, not long after I’d met Will at college, he’d proudly shown me his certificate of Conscientious Objector status, won with the unified support of his small-town Presbyterian church and his folks. Obviously, he had the perfect mom and dad. (Me, I just got lucky with a high lottery number.)
So after calling my sisters and telling them what had gone down on that precipitous morning, I loaded my panniers and set out for the fifteen-mile ride to Will’s house. I’d called ahead and given him a brief digest of what was going on, but asked him not to tell his parents, as I didn’t want to be over-indulged with sympathy. Will’s mother BettyJo (whom he insisted on calling “BJ” with a mischievous leer, much to her undying embarrassment) was naturally solicitous to the point of being syrupy, and I didn’t want to trigger too much of her attention. I also didn’t want to air out my family’s ongoing, near-gothic soap opera within the idyllic atmosphere of Will’s home.
The bike ride to his house from my own helped use up the adrenaline rush of the morning’s bizarre standoff, and I marveled as I rode up the long gravel driveway that my morning had begun with a brush with death. More or less, anyway, depending on the quotient of melodrama I assigned to the whole ordeal. As I unpacked my bike, Will came out and gave me a kind smile which I answered with a quizzical expression. He reassured me: “It’s okay, I didn’t tell them anything. My mom always loves when you come here anyway.”