A Peaceful, Easy Feeling

A PEACEFUL, EASY FEELING

Philip R. Sullivan

Published by Foremost Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Philip R. Sullivan

PROLOGUE

He was pretty young, and I really don’t remember him all that well; but what I do recall is almost like looking at him from the outside—like a TV camera on one of those mobile cranes, moving beside its subject, panning in and fading back, recording dribs and drabs of what’s going on, creating the illusion though that it’s taking in the real highlights. And every once in a while a thought will enter my mind of his private consciousness, superimposed on the TV picture like a soundtrack—or like the voice in a soliloquy coming through binaural earphones so I get the sense it’s right inside my head.

As I’m following the scenes along I get feelings, and sometimes the feelings are awfully vivid. Partly they’re feelings of empathy; but there’s something additional, a feeling of familiarity, a feeling that I’ve been there before in an earlier life—or as we usually put it, earlier in my life. Such feelings of familiarity are not absolutely trustworthy, and in exceptional cases where familiarity attaches itself to a new situation that our memory can’t locate, we describe the uncanny experience as dejá vu.

But there’s another source of error—as common as dejá vu is rare—in which the fingerprint of our own uniquely private experience ensconces a memory, albeit the experience represents a running together of early memories with others still earlier. Recall, for example, some important event in your own personal antiquity: no doubt, thoughts, feelings and analysis of sorts will have reworked that event on the following day, and the following month, and the following year. Yet if the event is far enough away from the present, all those reworkings will seem part of the event itself. Furthermore, older family members may say when we’re still very young: Remember the time such and such happened, and you did this and that? Looking back from the years of adulthood, memories of the childhood conversation and a still earlier event the conversation was about may be indistinguishable.

* * *

My name’s Patrick Sayer, by the way. The above considerations weigh on me at the moment because I want to tell you something that happened to me, yet I’m not sure how to do it. Should I relate the event in first person, the way I’m talking to you now? But the happening in question is so far back, so far off, that the person involved only partly seems to be me. Or should I tell you about what happened looking from the outside, piecing together some memories that may come directly from that time, though most of the memories probably come from a later time recalling that earlier time. As I’m reprocessing things right now, the data’s coming from a funny direction: not from outside and not from inside, but from a place I’ll call outinside. Here’s how it goes, close to forty years later:

* * *

Mom?

No answer.

Patrick let the screen door slam on its hinges. Mom? . . . Anyone home? No answer. He felt a bit uneasy; but being only eight years old, he never thought to think through his reasons. The back door led into a small hall that protruded from the white three-story house like a shed. In the warmth of Indian summer, the doors had been left open, so he went straight into the kitchen. Its most striking feature was a black and cream checkerboard floor made of thick linoleum squares six inches across, each one individually inlaid. Otherwise, the ancient sink with its plumbing visible underneath, the old gas stove with open grating, the unpainted copper hot water tank and stack of coiled tubes for heating its contents, the mustard-colored walls and graying ceiling made the room look old and old-fashioned, even for 1942.

Patrick pictured his mother at the kitchen sink, preparing vegetables for dinner, washing dishes, doing the laundry: rubbing mud-stained jeans against her corrugated washboard till soapsuds formed a thick cream along their surface. Sometimes he would sit at the old wooden table and watch her, the sun through the window highlighting her beautiful face. To him.

Mom, he yelled out again, more loudly now, but there was still no detectable anxiety in his voice.

No answer.

He looked on top of the wooden table where she occasionally left notes. Nothing to see, only the lingering aroma of yesterday’s bread. His uneasiness began to grow, revealing itself more in a restlessness than any conscious feeling of anxiety. He ran into the small back hall, set off by dark wood doors from the dining room and front hallway, and bumped his way through to the foyer just inside the main entrance.

Mom, he yelled, I’m home. Where are you? The front stairs circled up to the right and around to the second floor, and then once again to the third. Above the open stairwell and visible at the top was a skylight, streaming the afternoon brightness through. But there was no sound, only the silent reverberations of his own voice.

I’m home, he announced again, almost with anger now, I’m home from school, as if his mother might respond to an account of where he was coming from. He ran over the stairs, grabbing the brown balustrade railing, its sentinel line of white struts producing a tachistoscopic effect as they interrupted the view of his blue slacks churning upward to the second floor. He gave no thought to disturbing his mother if she’d been taking a nap. She was always home to greet him, and this habit had given him a sense of entitlement.

Her room was empty; the ornate mahogany bed was made. The only sign of her presence was the abiding aroma of her Blue Grass toilet water. Mom? he said, tentatively now, a quiet panic beginning to displace his anger. He had left for school that morning, knowing without knowing it, that something was not right. His mother had kissed him as she always did on his way out the door, but there was something not right about it. Maybe it was her expression, or the extra fraction of a second that she’d held her lips against the side of his face. Something was just not right. . . .

Patrick went carefully through the sitting room next to the master bedroom, and then its bath. Nothing. Back out to the corridor, he checked the hall bathroom and his own bedroom in back—the only bedroom he’d ever known, though it had an uncanny strangeness of search about it now. He walked slowly along the corridor, taking its right turn again by the front staircase. He was speaking in a whisper at this point, almost to himself: Mom? . . . Mom? . . . Mom? He looked in the tiny sewing room in front, and through its ceiling-to-floor windows he stared from the high hill of his own home across to the top of Buzzy Hill a half mile distant. Between lay the huge plant preserve of the Arnold Arboretum and a narrow stream of green belted parkway.

No mother. He started to run again, up the curved stairway to the third floor, its four rooms contoured into as many roof dormers and stacked with storage stuff like an attic. What would his mother be doing up there on a Wednesday afternoon? Nothing. He ran downstairs again, tripping at one of the turns, but catching himself by the railing so that he fell harmlessly against its shaped balusters, his blue plaid tie jumping away from the white shirt collar and slipping momentarily through the bars. He started to cry, not from pain but from frustration. He banged against the bars with the fleshy side of his fists, and he began to whinge: Mommy, where are you? Where are you . . . I’m home.

Aloneness within his uncertainty made him feel lonely, though the actual time elapsed since he and Tommy had separated on their way back from school was but minutes. He walked laggardly the rest of the way down . . . sad . . . disconsolate. Maybe, he thought, his mother was outside and hadn’t noticed him coming home. Still, he felt hurt; she should have noticed, she should have been there.

He stopped on the second floor, went back to his own bedroom and changed by habit into play clothes. He chose some old blue corduroy pants which he liked though they sometimes chafed him when it got cold, a lumberjack shirt of red plaid and his scuffed up, rubber-soled shoes—good clothes for fall, but too warm for this particular day.

Outside, his mother was nowhere to be found. He started over to Tommy’s—they got together every day after school—but he hesitated at the chain link gate which opened onto the alley. He went back instead, through the shed, into the kitchen. MOM, he hollered. Then, he started to cry again; not just quiet tears, he was sobbing out loud. Then he felt ashamed of himself, because he knew that big boys didn’t cry. He looked around to make sure no one was looking at him, licked the salty streaks off his upper lip and sat on one of the straight-backed wooden chairs, the one that creaked. He started rocking back and forth. The motion seemed to comfort him, as did the rhythmic sounds. Creak . . . creak . . . creeeak . . . creak.

There were two doors on the inside kitchen wall, one in the far corner which opened to the back stairway, and one in the middle which led down to the cellar. Maybe, because the rounded knob to that second door was shiny and chipped, his eyes held steady there, steady despite the continuous rocking of his body. Creak . . . creak . . . creeeak . . . creak. He got off the chair and walked around the old wooden table to the door. Opening it, he peered into the dark stairwell. Mom? he called gently. MOMMY? he hollered. He reached his hand around the corner, felt the old knob switch and twisted it. Standing at the top, he could see now in bare-bulb harshness the foundation wall at the foot of the stairs and an edge of cement floor. He started playing with the light knob: on and off, he controlled its destiny.

He knew it was too good a day to play inside, but he went downstairs anyway, clutching the rough wood handrail to steady himself against the steep slant of open stairwell. At the bottom was another knob; he twisted it and the cellar lights brightened the L-shaped space, casting tentacle shadows from the steam pipes as they reached out from the furnace to within a few inches of the unfinished ceiling. Once at the bottom of the stairs, Patrick sniffed a familiar, musty aroma. Though the cellar was dry, the stone foundation of houses built before World War I never kept the ground moisture fully at bay, and a modest growth of fungus made itself known by odor if not appearance.

He walked around the corner formed by the partition of a large work room. His father’s tools were there. Not too many, because his father was not very handy. But an assortment of hammers, screwdrivers, saws, and preserve bottles full of nails and other fasteners made for occasional rainy day fascination. He’d not been inside the room since his father had left for the war that spring, commissioned as a Captain in the Army Air Corps. That had made Patrick a hero among his friends.

Now, he noticed—strangely—there was a crack of light showing along the vertical edge of the work room door. He felt up and down against its unplaned wood and tinkered a while with the latch. Finally, he opened the door and looked inside. The old chair was tipped over, pointing in the direction of the shelves that had been set up along the wooden partition. The room was bright though glaringly lit. He focused to the side of what had been draped down from one of the heat pipes, over toward the shelves—which looked like stacks of toy chests opened on their sides to disclose the preserve jars with their nails, screws, hooks, latches, and other metal things that were fun to move around in his hands even if he didn’t know what they were used for, old coffee cans holding paint brushes in fluid that had usually dried up, other cans holding screwdrivers and pliers (his favorite tool), saws and hammers. None of these were dangling on hooks against the wall like the ones in Mr. Genevieve’s garage. Instead, they were laid flat along the stretches of shelf.

His eyes shifted to the dangling cloth and then immediately back again to the shelves. He walked inside the room, over to where the Maxwell House can full of pliers was set. He gave no thought to righting the chair on the floor, perhaps because as an only child, not much in the way of picking up had ever been required of him. He brushed against the cloth which was hanging down like a sack—the long peach-colored zippered robe of his mother, though his usually agile mind made no connection. It was only then that he noticed the Red Cross shoes dangling from the bottom. He looked up and saw only the cord, stretched taut from the pipe. Then the glare of the unfrosted bulb, also hanging from the ceiling, seemed to blind him. He left the room and ran upstairs where he sat on the kitchen chair again. He rocked back and forth, his mind blank. Creak . . . creak . . . creeeak . . . creak.

A short time later, he walked out the back door, along the narrow concrete walk—avoiding the cracks—through the chain linked gate, down the alley, and up the stairs to Mrs. Genevieve’s kitchen. One glance at him and she said, You look like you’ve seen a ghost.

"Something’s wrong," he answered. Patrick’s face had alerted her, but the terror in his voice alarmed her. She untied the apron from her middle-aged figure, instinctively took his hand, and followed. The only other words he said on the way back to his house were: In the cellar. He stayed in the kitchen while she went straight downstairs. He was conscious, he had impressions, but they did not get connected. He felt the smooth wood of the chair he was holding on to; he heard the sounds of her shoes on the stairs and her quick steps stumbling near the bottom, the silence of her feet on the cellar floor—and the gasp.

Mrs. Genevieve was as pale as he when she emerged from the stairwell. Her short hair looked more gray and less resilient. Where’s the telephone? she asked. He pointed toward the hall door. She came around to him, her blue eyes wet, her body trembling, and she held him—held him tight—and rocked him back and forth. Then, she walked unsteadily across the checkerboard floor and out to the front corridor, to the old black standup phone.

CHAPTER 1

1981

An awful lot of water’s gone through the sluice gates since then. The guy I call me lives in central Maine, in the sticks. Or since the nearest town, Milligansett, qualifies pretty well as the sticks, you could say I live outside the sticks. I stay to myself lots of the time. I like it that way, but every fall I go to Harbinger’s Pub on Monday nights. Used to. The place is old, with a wood floor, dark wood booths against the inside wall, some round wood tables in the middle, and a hand-carved wooden bar along the Washington Street wall. The hand-carved refers to some ornate patterns originally inscribed on the vertical sheath of the bar for decoration, plus some spontaneous stuff, initials and broken-up hearts jackknifed into the top surface by some of the boys who had trouble outgrowing ancient habits honed on grammar school desks.

Harbinger’s door opens on Main Street, with a little wooden wind shed extending out from the brick wall along the near part of the sidewalk. The lighting inside is pretty low, which gives the place a mysterious air when you’re in the right sort of mood, and a dismal one when you’re not. Despite rows of fancy bottles, most of the boys just drink beer. It’s cheaper, the drunk takes longer, plus it’s more manly—you can tell that from the malt ads during TV timeouts.

Myself, I don’t drink. The guy I refer to as dad sure did though, especially after the war. The original idea by the way was for Little Patrick to live with his uncle’s family until the end of the war, at which time his father was going to get his discharge from the Army Air Corps and make a home for him. Dad took a detour to New York City though to set himself up as a school system administrator, planning to take his son with him when he was ready. Only problem was: he was never ready. At first, there were some letters. Then there weren’t. Then no one heard anything anymore.

Since I don’t drink, I’m not sure why I’ve been in the habit of going to Harbinger’s Pub. If you asked me for an explanation, I might’ve said: I love to watch Monday Night Football, I don’t have a TV, and it’s fun to have someone to talk to about the last touchdown. That’s even if you’re a loner, which I sort of am. The other guys reacted differently to the games than I did. They all had favorite teams they rooted for and cussed out. I often didn’t know before a game which team I was going to pull for, though it was usually the loser, since I most often ended up with the underdog. And underdogs usually do lose. Naturally, I was rooting for myself.

Another thing was different. Most of the guys went wild because they were watching a football game. You know: A football game is a football game is a football game sort of thing. But with me, I was participating in a Religious Ritual, a Holy Rite, the conflict between Good and Evil, the pageantry of Heroic Struggle, Ultimate Victory and Defeat being the matters at issue. Always defeat in the long run, if you insist on thinking about things in human terms, which is why I think there’s lots to be said for thinking inhumanly. I don’t mean inhumanely.

I had other reasons to wander into Harbinger’s. Lots of my customers went there, so it was a good place to pick up orders. I’m in business for myself, so I guess you could call me an entrepreneur, though four syllables is probably excessive when you’re talking about my field of endeavor. I sell firewood to warm the winter nights. I cut the wood, split it, stack it, and deliver it. I used to make ends meet, which was fine with me because I’m not a high roller. The recent town turmoil had me on the ropes though, just as much as everyone else, which has taught me a lesson I’ll tell you about sometime.

Starting now.

I bumped into Slim Atkinson as we were maneuvering in opposite directions through the wind shed entrance to Harbinger’s the second Monday in September. Get the fuck out of my way, he said. We jostled each other a bit—there were no other words—and he kept going, while I headed inside to my usual seat seven down from the far end of the bar where the TV was set up. You might think that transaction was typical for a mill town bar, manners being deplorably deficient. But actually it was pretty unusual, especially for Slim, who was a good guy even if he wasn’t still slim. I figured he just had to vent his frustrations on someone, and I happened along at the right time.

Red Bancroft was sitting on my stool, but I didn’t say anything, just took the eighth one down. What did I care? Red was wearing a dark ALLIED trucker’s cap pushed down on his head, so some of his gray hair was sticking out underneath. His extra weight seemed to press him hard onto the barstool, and bent forward he looked like a half-hammered nail. Hi, Red, I said. Never knew him, by the way, when his hair really was red, so maybe it should’ve seemed strange to call him that. But it didn’t. Just think how often we still call an item by the same name after the thing’s changed so much we should really make up a new name to avoid confusion. Patrick Sayer, for instance.

Red looked around at me for a moment, then back at the