A nice bit OF PERIL

My mother, at and with uncomfortable frequency, shrilled how did I end up in the middle of nowhere. Every time she said it she got a little closer to the door, I always knew she would leave and she did one night, my voice changed calling after her, I opened the door and sopranoed twice before I went forever baritone. When my father came down the hallway in the morning I told him she was gone and he stopped dead, he squinted at me and altoed happy birthday Danny.

We had a rule that you didn’t go to school on your birthday so I stayed in my striped pyjamas, I made coffee under his eye, I drank mine sweet and creamy standing at his side looking out the kitchen window, our fields sleek and frosty, we didn’t say it, there was no need, it was going to snow.

All my life the first snow landed on my birthday and this one, my 13th, was a blizzard, the theme that year was depth, there was a new bottom revealed and I don’t mean this in a bad way, it wasn’t only my voice or her absence that gave the year depth, there was a third thing. We would soon discover she had sold the house, we had to clear out that night, still in my stripes we took what we could and moved to the lake, that’s the other deep, my father’s childhood home.

The house is closer to the cliff now he said as if it had wilfully moved, corner by corner. The theme of my 14th year was erosion, again this was nothing negative – my father said it gave just a nice bit of peril – he believed tragedy and peril preceeded strength and courage, I got used to living on that edge, I don’t think I had been happy before the peril, before the wild water, my 15th year would be rage, not the bad kind, just the energy of it, I learned to roar.

I do not know if I ever dealt with the loss of her, I think I wore it down in my dreams that were like penny operas, my mother lamenting in the wilderness while I sang after her, my voice in reverse, from baritone it torqued into soprano night after night, I never thought of her in the daytime, my father never mentioned her.

Twice a year, Christmas and Thanksgiving, he said at the end of a long and sombre grace, God bless Bethany. All those years I didn’t know he meant my mother, everybody called her Betsy, I didn’t know until I was a grown man with a family of my own, it was my birthday and during the snowy visit there came a knock to the door, a gentlemen straight out of Dickens telling us Bethany Maryanne Gough had died.

So my 67th year was grace, I understood that my father had loved and grieved her and I was able that year to finally do the same.