The Last Roman
When I was six, my father ran away from home. He was
forty-nine. He was looking for something he had left behind,
I think. Something I was only beginning to explore. His
journey took him down old roads. To places he had been.
As though he were searching for a lost set of keys. My
journey began in the orchard and took me to places I had
never been. And in the end, I learned to fly.
He was gone a week. I don’t remember it. My mother
told me one evening several years ago. We have these long
confessional conversations from time to time. She told
me he had just disappeared. There was no message. She
didn’t know where he’d gone. She said she
never trusted him again in quite the same way. She said
she loved him though, till the day he died, twenty years
later. And twenty years after that she dreams of being
with him. In her dreams, he beckons.
In our backyard in Arroyo Grande, there were fruit trees.
Apples and walnuts. Apricots. When they were ripe, my
grandmother would split the apricots, remove the pits
and lay them out on the concrete patio to dry in the sun.
As they shriveled up, they came to resemble ears. Hundreds
of wrinkled old ears. Laid out and listening to us as
we lived around them.
They could hear my little sister and I. Our war whoops
as we ran around in our underwear. My older sister, off
to college the next year, painted us from head to toe
with streaks and squiggles. Like a canvas. Something for
posterity. Something to leave behind. In reds and yellows.
Like cave paintings or the designs on the woven baskets
that held buttons in my grandmother’s room. Connections.
Later I was a cowboy, but in that back yard we were only
Indians, running. Our bare feet slapping the earth, like
applause.
Sometimes we were Cleveland Indians. Or Pirates, in those
days before Roberto Clemente died. My big brother and
my father taught me to play baseball in that back yard.
My father would stand, his back to the fence, and pitch
to me. Slow shallow arcs that invited a swing. My brother
would field. He was ten, needed the practice for little
league. Pick up the grounders. Snag the pop flies. I was
six. Everybody got something.
For Dad, it was memories. Almost thirty years before,
he had played semi-pro ball out of LA. In the early 30's,
he was on a team called Harold Lloyd’s Romans, sponsored
by the old silent film star. There was no pro ball out
west until the Dodgers moved to California in 1958, the
bums. The Romans would barnstorm up and down the coast
during the summers. Portland, Seattle. Sweep into town,
play the best team around. Make a few bucks. He played
college ball too. He had been scouted by St. Louis. He
could have played in the big leagues, but he separated
his knee, one day toward the end of the season, sliding
into third base. For years it used to pop out unexpectedly.
Mom said he would sit on the sidewalk, push it back into
place and they would go on.
Dad never made it out of college. His mother became ill
and his father was laid off. It was the depression. With
just six months to go, he left to take care of them. He
wanted to teach PE. Instead, he drove an oil truck, grew
watermelons, built houses; a trade he learned from his
father, a trade he taught my brother and me. He never
went back, never played organized ball again but he did
play catch with us.
He got married, had four kids. Then he met my mother.
In a tavern in downtown Bakersfield, on a hot summer afternoon.
It was a hundred and ten on the street, and she had stepped
in to get out of the heat. She had a stack of books that
she put on the bar. He was intrigued by that. It took
them four years to finally get married, but that’s
another story. She had a family too. A daughter and a
mother. He moved from one family into another. It wasn’t
until thirty years later, when they retired to the Gulf
Islands, that they actually lived together alone in the
same house.
In Arroyo Grande, there was Mom and Dad, my brother
and sister and I, my half sister from my mother’s
first marriage, my mother’s mother and my father’s
father. There were the kids from his first marriage, grown
up, and some married themselves now. They dropped in from
time to time to stay, usually when they were having difficulty.
There was a dog and a cat and the duck that lived across
the street and all our friends. It was a full house. In
the orchard, I was alone. The horizons that should have
seemed so close under the canopy, expanded into the unilluminated
and limitless silence and pulled me after them.
In the back yard, Dad pitched, I hit, and my brother fielded.
Until I got good enough to hit them over the fence into
the orchard. In my memory, they sailed over every time.
My brother got tired of chasing them and quit in disgust.
Then I’d have to chase them myself. I would climb
the fence, swing a leg over, and drop to the ground. With
my back to it, I could see down the rows. The branches
arching over; green and cool. The grass in clumps about
the slim trunks, as they slid, sensuous, into the earth.
It was a living place. A maze. Amazing to a small child
stepping just beyond the boundaries of safety.
In 55, Dad had a construction company in Eureka. Among
other things, they sold and erected steel buildings for
a national company. That year, he won a sales competition
for the western US. The prize was tickets for two to the
World Series. The Dodgers and the Yankees. They flew out
to New York. After the first two games, the series moved
out to Brooklyn, and Mom stayed behind to go shopping
one day. The next travel day she talked Dad into shopping
too. They bought two suits. Their New York suits. Back
home in Eureka, there wasn’t much call for New York
suits, but they’d take them along to San Francisco
every now and then when they were escaping from the family.
It’s hard to have a love affair in a busy home.
Sometimes they would wear them for dinner on the wharf
and drinks in the jazz club afterwards. They would drink
whiskey and listen to Tony Bennett.
I think about that slide that ended his ball playing days.
I always wondered whether he was safe. I forgot to ask before
he died. Those memories must have hung on him the way that
suit hung in the closet.
With my back to the fence, the ball invited me like
a rabbit. At first, I would just run to it and back: one
or two trees in. The orchard was warm and enveloping.
The young almonds hung about in their fleshy jackets.
It was a verdant womb, and soon I was exploring deeper.
The sap whispered through the wood, the branches overhead,
the roots underfoot. A soft sibilance for certain ears.
The blood of another mother. I began to perceive the paths
under the almonds and then, every other step was my own.
As I slipped away into all the possible shadows, I imagine
my father standing just inside the fence. His arms are crossed
on top of it, and he is watching me. He is wearing his old
glove. The kind you see in newsreels worn by guys in baggy
pants running just a little too fast toward the wall. They
catch one over the right shoulder, wheel and throw to second.
Get that runner who tagged up and went. It is the small
kind with individual fingers before gloves became the size
of wheelbarrows, and you had to crawl inside to find the
ball. In my vision, he stands bound by the heat and bright
sun of afternoon. The house and the yard are etched in sharp,
shadowless relief.
The shriveling apricot ears capture the shuffling of ants.
They capture the rasp of his dry breath. The liquid pulse
of his heart. The sliding of the glove from the flesh of
his hand. The scuffing of dirt under his heels as he turns.
The brush of his pant legs together as he strides to the
patio. The dry swallow as he enters the darkness. Eighteen
steps to the front door. Opening. Closing. They hear the
truck pull away, receding into the audible geography. A
49 Chevy.
Then there is only the whispering orchard, the drying
eviscerated fruit, and a young boy in a new land.
In the mornings I would cut through the almonds to go
to school. It seemed like forever, but it was probably
only a hundred yards. My mother worked at the school as
a secretary. In the back was the kindergarten. My teacher’s
name was Goodnight.
These were my first journeys into the possibilities of independence.
It wasn’t far, and I guess, in those days, we didn’t
worry much about being abducted. Milk still came in bottles,
and those pictures of missing kids didn’t yet haunt
our refrigerators. Lost again and again into the darkness
with every closing.
That day, my mother left early for work, and Nana got
me ready for school. I climbed the fence, dropped into
the orchard, and slipped into its waiting arms. Secrets
I was too young to hear passed over me, leaf to leaf.
I emerged from the trees to the light, the parallel lines
of the crosswalk. In the schoolyard across the street,
Miss Goodnight stood, watching the kids play. To my right,
as I began to cross, was a slight rise in the road.
I imagine my father sitting alone in a bar near Fisherman’s
Wharf. The music and the whiskey are full of smoke. Obscure.
The ice in his empty glass clinks as he slides it back
and forth on the table. The only keys are in his pocket,
for the truck he’d driven here from home. His brown
New York suit still hung in the closet next to Mom’s
green one, three hundred and fifty miles away. He had
seen his little boy in the orchard, moving away alone,
feet not quite touching the ground, and he had remembered
the air under his own heels as he had rounded second.
Elmer Fanning came over that rise and locked the brakes
of his pickup thirty-one feet from the crosswalk. He slid
through it, and his tires screamed as the rubber was torn
from them. I saw the truck coming and turned to run back.
The left front bumper struck me, and I was lifted from
the ground like a bird. I closed my eyes, spread my wings,
and flew into the darkness. The orchard reached for me,
but I was borne in other arms. The lace of Miss Goodnight’s
blouse brushed my face like leaves as she carried me into
the school. My mother’s fingers were feathers in
my hair. The white bed was a cloud floating down the hospital
hallway. My dreams were new and bright and possible and,
sleeping still, I couldn’t yet feel the pain.
I was thrown across the road and struck the curb with my
head. A soft concussion that blew among the almonds like
a sigh. At forty-five, I still have a small scar over my
right eye.
My father had been gone almost a week. My mother told
me he called the next day. From San Francisco. “Can
I come home, baby?’ he said. “Can I come home
now?”
She held her breath for a moment.
I sat in a chair in the livingroom, stitches in my forehead
and bruised severely on the
thigh and chest. She looked at my little sister, at my
brother, and at my big sister about to go away to college.
In the kitchen she could hear her mother making dinner.
From the shop came the sound of the table saw. His father
was making cabinets, pushing plywood through the blade
with his three remaining fingers. One of Dad’s other
kids had called two days ago wanting money and a place
to stay. The cat was curled up on my lap. The dog was
outside barking at the duck that lived across the street.
She had taken a day off work, but she couldn’t afford
it. She held her breath and thought about all these things.
She thought about her love for him that still abides.
Outside, a hundred ears listened at the patio door and
the orchard whispered forgiveness.
She let it go.
“Yes,” she said. “Come home.”
It was 1961. Mom and Dad got a little heavier. The suits
didn’t fit anymore but they hung beside each other
in the closet for years. And there was a baseball. My
brother has it now. Dad kept it in his sock drawer as
long as I can remember. It was very old. Written all over
it were dates and places. Most are so faded now, they
can’t be read; and those that can, seem meaningless.
They meant something to him, but he didn’t talk
about it. And no one thought to ask before he died.
