Weather
The weather report for today indicated that it will be mild and overcast with a chance of an event. Being early April, I felt confident that this boded well for my immediate intentions. I planned to run away (again) only this time they’ll realize I’m gone. My name is Caleb Seacomb Fury, called Sea for short. In school I get teased that my last name is Furry, everyone missing the more obvious reference, My given name, Caleb Fury doesn’t fit me but sometimes my nickname does: Sea Fury. This has remained my own little secret, at least until this telling. Our last name sure does fit my father who goes by the name of Frankly. He works for the Power Company or The Power, as he likes it to be known. Frankly is not known for his wit or his jokes, for he is a dead serious man whose only pride is working for The Power. It’s always The Power this and The Power that, as if The Power is the answer to everything, as if it’s the greatest source of mechanical and electrical energy, as if it’s more vital than bread and water which sustain life. I think he would like to change his name to Power but I still think Fury fits him like a glove. I know I go on, but I like to make myself perfectly clear. I also think it makes my point.
My father, Frankly, seems to be one-and-a-half men. The half-a-man part emerges when he comes home in an ok mood, when he comes to the kitchen to make supper for us. Then we’re not afraid of him.
Frankly Fury usually comes home from working The Power in a foul mood. Unlucky for me, he gets home mid-afternoon when I’ve finished my on-line classes. He goes to his room and if he slams the door shut, we get out of there. He’s usually in a Mood, meaning that he acts mean of word and hands. If he comes out, we smell craft beer breath. I’m not exactly sure where the twins scurry off to. I”m pretty sure they have a place in the dark and scary cellar near the heater which, having a life of its own, goes off and on by it’s own schedule or want. I can picture them curled up there with their pillows and baby blankets. They are just three, you see, but swift as the wind, fast as sound, as a diving hawk; well, you get the picture. I like to use words as pictures. I guess you can ascertain that fact. I also like to use words to show my shine.
The twins are never around much, except when they want me to make them the honey and butter sandwiches on white bread they love. They don’t even mind the crust, unlike most other kids because, I surmise, they are thankful for what they get. Sometimes for supper I’ll add fruit slices such as bananas or apples or even sliced purple or green grapes to their honey and butter sandwiches. Sometimes, some rare times, as I have said, our father will come down and make us supper. He cooks a real good smothered pork chop and can do a good job on frozen pizza, our favorite. He’ll even eat with us and ask me how things are going and my heart shines, like it feels like love, though my stomach stays tight, ready to revolt, with me ready to bolt away.
On good-weather days like today, the young twins are as likely to be in this place or that, outside somewhere in the woods surrounding our old farmhouse. Did I mention we live on a farm which is not farmed, where the woods and the weeds creep up more and more each year upon our house, like vandals getting ready to storm the castle. Even the dog is afraid to go out much, but he seems also to be afraid of the house, for he stays hidden from view as much as the twins; they were all likely together somewhere. In any case, they sure are independent for boys so young. I guess they have each other to take care of and be taken care of. Anyhow, I suspect the reason the twins and the dog are so hard to locate is that they are all so quiet, so soundless. Well actually the twins do make sounds with their mouths but not words I know. And they can be rambunctious when they want to.
Where’s my mother, you are likely to ask. Well, she’s surely in her room as she is and always will be, When I was little, much littler than the twelve years I am now, she was different, a real mother, warm and soft to touch, with a whole-face laugh and flighty hands which were always reaching out to do this and that, to touch your face, your hair, your heart. I first learned the twins were coming when it was cold outside, when the wind blew in swirls and howls. They told me I was going to have new brothers and that they were getting them just for me. At nine I kind of questioned that, for I didn’t know how to take care of babies and was scared they would expect me to quit school to stay home with the little brothers they got for me. In my nine-year-old naivety, I somehow foresaw, with cruel irony, my future. I’m not sure I actually thought these thoughts, but my memory is not so good and it could have been that way. In any event, Mother had to spend the last two months on bed rest and the twins were born at the hospital. Mother brought them home and retired with them to her room, to forever stay there, touching my face and my hair (and my heart) no more. That was when The Change occurred, when my parents got their own rooms, when the house seemed to become cold, even with mild weather and even hotful weather. When the furnace went off to be on its own.
Reading what I have just written, I suspect I could be accused of overdramatizing things, but I’m probably not. You will really see what kind of drama I can write about if you keep reading. The writing will get more grandiose but I swear it will be the way I lived it. You will see that I want to become a writer. You will also see why I have to.
When they were old enough, my mother moved the twins, who were named Jacob and Esau, to their own rooms. Gradually over that year she stopped coming out and caring for us at all, and I had to assume my role as the twin’s caretaker, parent, older brother, guide, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera; in other words, I had to accept the gift they gave me. I guess Mother thought my father would help me govern the twins and the house. Come to think of it, that was when my father, Frankly, morphed into The Power, The Mean, the one-and-a-half men, one to run away from. He put a refrigerator in his room he kept filled with craft beers. Each week he would bring home bags of new craft beers and lots of types of cheeses, most of which he hauled up to his room and some he gave to our mother to go along with her wines. Once he left us a wheel of brie cheese. His greatest gift.
One time when Frankly was at work, last year I recollect, I took one of his beers and poured it in a jelly glass in the kitchen, waiting a half hour for it to warm. It tasted like fire, like smoke, like inky creek water. I remember him telling me on one supper occasion when he was being our father, that when a man drank craft beers, he was drinking for the taste and the experience, that you cannot get hooked when drinking good craft beers. I pictured Frankly getting hooked on a strong line with a great big craft beer can bobbing on one end and a barbed hook on the other end, the barb caught up in his mouth as he thrusted back and forth, trying to escape. I present a horrible but sinfully satisfying word picture.
You might ask me to explain why I am running away at this point in time; ask me who will care for the twins, who will sheIter them from Frankly Fury and our ghost of a mother. I will answer that my mother is not the only ghost in our house. Sometimes I think I am one, that all the others are real, that I am only a figment of my imagination (a good use of a word picture I must point out, although a real cliche). Actually the answer is that I am running away for myself, to save me, to set a boundary, a standard, a stand to make my statement. Actually it’s my manhood drive asserting my need to grow up, although I sometimes feel like a young child, a growing-up little boy with peach fuzz on his face, with a lanky look in the mirror. A frantic look. Sometimes there is a dangerous longing in my heart.
Before I tell of the running away I think this is the place to describe myself better, who I am inside myself. First, there is The Commentator, the person in me who narrates my story and is always on call to describe, to point out, to clarify and put into words and images my thoughts, my feelings, my understandings. It it he who is mostly telling this story. The other part of my mind, of my self I describe as being The Analyst, the one who figures things out, gains understanding for me, puts things in context, works out the puzzles, the perspectives. I took these two aspects from listening to broadcasts of football games. There is always a commentator, telling of the action on the field, and there is always an analyst, telling of the action on the sidelines, in the coaches’ heads. Now that I have written this, I realize it is not too helpful in the telling of this story. Maybe it’s me showing off. Then again, maybe it’s critical. That’s the problem with saying things out loud. Sometimes things seem important and other times the same things seem mundane and so way off- base, as if you shot off a missile and it misses everything or hits the wrong thing. Nothing is always clear, always apparent, always real. I suspect I have added this part to illustrate my conviction that I am extraordinary. Not in the bragging way, but in the way that signifies something beyond the expected, someone who is not the same as most others. Well, I’ll get on with it before you get the conviction I’m too bizarre, some type of other, a boy who over values his gift. I guess I do brag a bit and I know I do go on. It’s my weakness, or is it my strength? I seek out conundrums.
I packed my backpack with two honey and butter sandwiches and some snacks, a water bottle, my facemask, and one of Frankly’s craft beers. I hadn’t used the backpack since they closed the schools because of the pandemic, and it was stiff from when I fell into a mud bank on the way home. I crept out of the house so the twins or the dog would not hear me, although there was little chance of that, for they were gone as usual. I walked out of the woods toward the road, noting that the weather report was on point. It was indeed calm and overcast. There was no event. I smiled to myself, realizing that my running away might signify as an event. I suddenly shivered down my spine and had the bizarre image in my mind of a weather report about the inside the farmhouse, inside my family, Calm and overcast with the chance of an event. Always a chance. I got to the road and kept walking along the embankment which ran parallel to the road, keeping a lookout for early spring snakes emerging. Actually, snakes were one of the few things I was not afraid of.
After walking for several hours, I was feeling kind of swifted, and thought I would take a sit down and have a snack. (I don’t know where “a sit down” came from. Maybe it’s just from me. I am going to stop this commenting or is it the Analyst talking, as it will surely ruin the rest of the story). Well, I began to become aware of a changing in the air, a crackling and whirling charge. The air was rushing, now, it was cooling, and the sky presented a darkening, and quite suddenly I jumped, had to jump, my heart pounding, as a huge thundering sound like a plane exploding filled the air and a great blast of light followed.
Then I was falling onto the embankment, my insides pounding and turning to jelly. The Analyst whispered in my ear that it couldn’t be lightning and thunder, for lightning surely comes first to be followed by the slower thunder. Then I felt it before I saw it, another bright explosion, as lightening reared up in a zig zag bolt from the ground and into the sky, as if pulled into the air, into the heavens, by Zeus himself. The earth bellowed in an explosion of thunder. The sky was completely dark in the midst of afternoon, besmirched by murky, dense clouds hiding the heavens, the clouds seeming to fall down upon the ground, as if scorching the earth. I smelled rain in the air as well as a smell of brimstone and imagined huge chunks of hail and ice would streak down, pounding down upon the earth’s crust in torrents of rage at any moment.
As if my brain morphed into a giant computer, a thousand thoughts raced through my mind in picture images of my house, my family, my life, all the good and bad, real and unreal parts, and realized I was going to be hit by the next lightning bolt and that I would die! And suddenly I wanted it, I craved it. I gave in to it, and I thought I could taste oblivion. It would serve them right, their throwing me away. Me throwing me away! I found myself crying out. “No!” I could not let them do that to me, discard me like I had died at birth, that they had long ago buried me in that forest of weeds and creeping decay. I would not do that to me. And then I feared it, and I wanted to escape back, to be saved, to save myself. It was as if I was the next lightning bolt, as I sprung up from the earth of that dark embankment, that edge of despair, and I bolted up before I was targeted.
Suddenly I was running back to the farm house, running in the middle of the road, running free of the back pack, of my fears and demons, my revenge on my parents who I once hoped would be sorry to lose me. I knew again that they would never come after me with their want of me, their need for me. I felt a whirlwind of thoughts and emotions, then an unexpected slowing down within my brain. I began to feel an unfamiliar stillness within me, an easing, as if the changing weather and the weakening wind around me, the dying fury, was entering my soul with a rebirth. I felt an exhuming of my damaged soul and I felt a dawning sense of peace, a new understanding, a finding myself, of my self, and I felt exalted. I felt my body glowing, no, radiating as my value was being lifted up unto me and I felt a mist of a new essence envelop me. That was when I realized I would live, that I wanted to live, that I would need to become my own parent. “I will rise up to become a man,” I said to myself, “I will search for her and I will find her, the one who will love me and who I will love. We will love ourselves as we love each other.” (I have to stop here for a minute, for in reading what I have written, what I have experienced, I feel overwhelmed, as I did then. I need a short pause before the conclusion).
I slowed down as I neared the forest of our house, bending over in panting and delay. I realized the weather had changed, that the calmness within me was coming over the world around me. It was like the heavens opening to light. The woods were taking on an aura, an almost beautiful aroma I could taste with my eyes as I could taste with my tongue. My chance of being hit by lightning, my perverse wanting of it, had passed and I felt an exaltation, a freedom, a victory over some evil force trying to claim me.
I approached the farmhouse, first looking for any sign of the twins or the dog. Then with clarity and acceptance, I remembered that the twins and the dog were not real, were never real after the twins died that first terrible week three years ago, the time of Mother’s change, of her leaving me, of my father’s embracing The Power, of my escape into myself, from myself, into my damaged self. I looked up at the farmhouse, at the top floor windows and saw lights in my mother’s window and my father’s window and there were two dark silhouettes in the windows, looking away from each other.
