Lucky So Long

I returned home in autumn. I do not like to talk badly about my neighbors and I have little to say against the men and women of western Michigan. They are as attentive and full-faced as all Midwesterners and if their proximity to the lakes and to the wide canopies of the sugar maples has bred in them a certain entitlement, their land is beautiful and I can hardly fault them.

The first thing I did when I returned home was visit my father. My father is a man who trusts his luck like it is a fact, like it is a thick jawline, his most redeeming feature. He has not seen a doctor in twenty years and he never locks his door. I let myself into the house without knocking.

He was sitting exactly where I left him on the back porch when I left five years before and it was like no time at all had passed. Right away, he began telling me a story of a flight he took to Denver. The plane shook and the woman beside him gripped his wrist. It was more than he could endure. It is moments like this, he told me, that we love whatever is most remote. While he told me the story of his troubled flight, I watched the long gentle curve of his shoulders pressed against the back of his chair.

I brought him a drink on the porch and while he drank, I cut away the branches of the trees in the yard where the branches had grown long and threatened to snap. When I was very young, the branch of a maple tree beside our house broke in a storm and shattered the window of my childhood bedroom. This was evidence, I thought at the time, and I felt accused by the shattered glass and by the branch that pointed through the window at my bed. 

A woman came to visit my father while I was cutting the branches. She brought a cherry tart wrapped in foil and set it on the counter and the whole kitchen smelled like cherry tart. Her name was Ellen and she was the woman who was sitting beside my father on his flight to Denver. She was tall and slender and she refused to stand to her full height. Her nails were round and her nail beds were smooth and flat and pink. It was incredible watching her squat beside my father and touch his face. I had thought my father was ruined, but he was only biding time. 

The story of their romance was brought out in due course. They were proud of what they had accomplished and how everything aligned. She is like a rabbit’s foot, my father said. And he told me again how the plane shook and how she took his wrist and how everything then righted again.

Ellen brought him a ceramic bowl filled with a slice of cherry tart and the bowl was the same bowl my father used when I was a child and he cut my hair with kitchen scissors. I’ve seen it done before, he said, and he cut my hair with kitchen scissors and caught the scraps in the bowl.

He ate the tart one bite at a time and after each bite he wiped the corners of his lips with his thumb and looked at Ellen as if to reassure her.

My father has a sorrowful, almost hollow look. In his eyes a brutal fact of life is always imminent. Sometimes I think that I hardly knew him when I was a child and that now it would be impossible to know him. When I think about him and he is not near, the features of his face are yellow in my mind and flat and I see the outline of his shoulders against a backdrop as yellow and flat. It is as if he is seated in front of a yellow piece of cloth.

I left my father and returned to the city where I live. The trees beside my house were dry and their leaves were falling and the leaves were pressed each morning against my door. Two weeks after I left, I called him and he told me that he was alone again. No man can be lucky so long, he said, and he told me once more about the plane and how it shook in the sky and how it shook again as it touched the ground.

Every man who is as lucky as my father knows that there is a cost to his luck and that it makes him unclean. His hands are dirty with his luck. My father does not mind the cost, but I will have nothing to do with it. I want to be clean.

_____
Thomas Kessel lives in St. Louis.