“But without our frailties, we couldn’t traverse this veil,” Dad said the second to last time I saw him. We sat on the crumbling stairs of the cottage that he claimed a distant and obviously poor cousin willed to him. Half the porch had surrendered to nature. The unsteady uncollapsed portion we sat on was not far behind.
“Our family suffers from four maladies: alcoholism, philandering, prevarication and hope,” he said. “And let me tell you, baby girl, hope’s the worst. It woos you with smiles and sweet nothings that come to nothing. Hope is a magician; one second the coin is in your hand and the next, it is gone,” he spoke quietly as if he was revealing a secret he had only just learned. “Most people get one or two of these maladies; my problem is I got all four bad. Especially hope.”
He wasn’t looking at me, but at Patterson’s wheat field that, too, had seen better times. As he grew older, he found it hard to look you in the eye. His gaze was always trained on the horizon as if salvation was no more than a half-of-a-day’s walk away. I also suspected he had disappointed too many people to make eye contact. Especially his youngest daughter; the only one in the family still speaking to him.
The last time I saw him, he was in a “borrowed” suit in the charity coffin at Penn’s funeral home. Clearly, the mortician was not a fan of Dad and sent him into oblivion with mussed-up hair and his eyes half-open and askew.
There wasn’t much in Dad’s estate: three pairs of pants, four shirts and six pairs of boxer shorts and socks, a Bible with Proverbs and half of Ecclesiastes torn out, a bank account with $237.14, 15 shares of a company that had gone bankrupt years ago, a gold pocket watch missing the hour hand and the title to a 1972 Pontiac Bonneville that I did not know existed. Knowing Dad, it was probably rusting in some pasture.
His will was obsolete. It named his second wife, who left years ago and contained no mention of his third wife, Natasha, also gone. His last girlfriend, Katie-Ann forged his signature, cleaned out his bank account and disappeared last year. My brother Jem died in 2013, meeting as his end as most drunk drivers do, losing an argument with an oak tree. My sister Eveline, who is God knows where, made a final appearance in his testament. She fought with Dad last Christmas Eve, slammed the front door and ran off with the latest in string of men who were both bad for her and married to someone else. Wherever she is, she isn’t coming back. That was probably a good thing because Eveline was fond of drama and who knew what she would do at the funeral.
I buried the bible with Dad and burned his clothes in a barrel out back. The bank account was split between the undertaker and the lawyer (both of whom said they were cutting me a great deal), the watch was pawned for less than twenty bucks and the Bonneville would be mine if I could ever find it. There was no title to the cottage, so the gift and the distant cousin may have been one of his prevarications.
With Dad gone, I was alone in a landscape full of history but no present nor future. Dad said there had been Osbells in Burnt Corn, Alabama for as long as anyone could remember. Now, I was the last one to remember and, when I am gone, we would be gone; lost to the early morning mists that haunt the pine groves.
Not that Burnt Corn was worth remembering. There was debate about the name. Either it was the corn that the Indians laid out in the sun to dry or it was the corn that the white settlers burned during the Creek War. There was even a Battle of Burnt Corn, our only source of civic pride. But it was more of a 19th century version of a fender bender than an actual skirmish. The whites surprised the Creeks and drove them off, but then got so interested in plundering the Indian’s ponies that they were surprised by the Creeks and themselves were driven off. Technically, it was an Indian victory, but it was more the inattentive being vanquished by the incompetent. Not much to hang your hat on, but it was all Burnt Corn had.
Beside the battle, our only claim to fame was that we were not the road to Monroeville of To Kill a Mockingbird and Harper Lee fame. People would roll down their windows and get annoyed that they had to go back to interstate to start over.
As few people had read and ever fewer liked the novel, there was a lot of good riddance as we wondered why someone would ever would want to drive 26 miles out of their way to see an old courthouse. Of course, Burnt Corn didn’t have one and the town office was a desk in the back of the one filling station. Not much to build a bright future on. But it was home and Dad insisted there was nobility to it.
“You are not just any Osbell” Dad said, when there was no important drinking or philandering to be done, “you are descended from Colonel Zachary Patterson, killed in the Revolutionary War.” He puffed out his chest as if there was something to be said about getting in the way of a musket ball. When his blood was up—usually before he learned a sure-bet investment was something far less—Dad would pack us kids into the back of the car and drive us into the country. Usually at the end of dirt road that, judging by the startled scurrying of the rabbits, raccoons and possums, had not hosted a car for decades.
He pointed with pride at a house more kudzu than brick with columns straining like an exhausted Atlas to hold the remnants of the sky. “This is your ancestral home,” trying to expand his chest over his gut. “As soon as my ship comes in, it is where we end up. Not just our family, but your children and their children, too. Generations as far as the eye can see and then some.”
There were only two problems with Dad’s conjuring. One, we were nowhere near a waterway with sufficient draft for a ship large enough to rescue the crumbling edifice. And two, he claimed at least three different relics as our ancestral home. It would take a fleet to make our history and progeny whole.
Now that he is gone and I have just enough money to take me about twenty miles from Burnt Corn, I envy his maladies. I have never taken to alcohol. Half a can of beer and I can’t keep the halves of my brain on speaking terms. I’ve had my share of lovers but I always seem more sinned against than sinning—left behind like a dumb dog on a dirt road. Although the truth never did me any favors, I cling to it like driftwood in a roiling river. It will not protect me from the rapids, but it is all I have to keep me afloat.
And hope, well hope doesn’t even know my name. Today makes no promises that tomorrow will fulfill. While my Dad could fervently and faithfully look to the glorious past or the golden future, I am stuck in the gloom of perpetual gloom of right now. Whatever was the root cause of Dad’s maladies, I remain steadfastly immune.