My Mother's Ashes

Chapter 1

What do you think of when you think of a writer’s muse?

Most folks think of some ephemeral winged fairy, appearing from on high to anoint the writer with inspiration, through the touch of her magic wand. With that touch, the blessed words flow, the plot ideas congeal and the characters emerge, fully formed, as if from Zeus’s forehead.

My writer’s muse isn’t like that. My muse is more like the bad ex-boyfriend or the louse ex-husband, the one with the drinking problem, or the coke problem, who was so fabulous in bed you can’t ever say no when he shows up, yet again, at your door. You know him—the one you should have let go long ago. We’ve all got one. If you say you don’t, you’re lying.

When my muse shows up, his jeans are tight and his shirt is missing and he smells just enough of sweat and aftershave—with a tinge of illicit cannabis—to make my legs go weak. He leans against the doorframe, cocks his head and smiles just the way he knows will make any excuse I have to not let him in disappear.

Then it’s weeks and months of pouring out my guts to him, sleeping with him, waking with him, grinding my body against his and listening as he tells me tales that can’t slip through my fingers fast enough, through the keyboard and onto the screen in front of me till the thrill of it grew into orgasmic proportions.

And it was orgasmic. I’d write until the the words shook my body and our sweat mingled together—because it was our bodies who brought this wonder of creation into the world, this literary baby—and we’d keep going until we couldn’t create any more.

And it would be good. It would be really, really good. So good, I believe whatever was wrong the last time was gone, that he’ll stay. What made me hate him was no more—by the time the rush of writing was locked in on me, I let the past slip away. He didn’t mean it this time, baby, he really didn’t. He’ll be faithful, he’ll be sober, he won’t hit me.

Then he’s gone, slapping me on the ass as he leaves to go fuck some other writer, whoever caught his eye next, making her toes curl, making her scream and drag her nails up his naked back as they make their literary baby.

And I’m left alone again, waiting for his phone call, waiting for that knock on the door, that smile, those tight, tight jeans. And I cry, I drink, and I hate him once again for what he’s done to me and how empty I feel without him. When he’s gone, my bad-boy muse, the words don’t come, the stories dry up and the characters are dry and flat and stupid as hell. Like me, he’s gotten grayer as the years have gone on, but our affair never stops. He’s more like Sam Elliot these days than George Clooney and God knows I’ve only just come to terms with not dyeing my own hair. Still, I can’t ever let him go.

That’s where I found myself that summer day. The words wouldn’t come—hadn’t for at least six weeks. My bad boy muse was gone and, with the deadline looming for my next book, he wasn’t coming back this time.

To top it off, air conditioning at the farmhouse had died again and so had the old orange Allis Chalmers tractor. I could open the windows and put in a box fan to stay cool in the house, but the south fields wouldn’t get plowed if the Allis Chalmers didn’t work. And when the royalty checks got thin, I’d need the money from the soybeans.

I’d sat up late the night before, crying and begging for my bad boy muse to come back and make love to me again. He wasn’t coming back this time—I just needed to accept it. My head hurt from the booze and the hard crying, but right now, I was underneath Allis, trying to figure out where the latest leak had sprung when Jeff, my farm help, saw him.

Somebody’s coming up the lane.

I stood up and brushed my stringy hair from my eyes, fastening my gaze on the dust spiraling in twin brown contrails behind the big black Caddy barreling up the lane.

Four people had the code that opened the gates at the other end of the lane. Jeff, my farm laborer, was one of them; his wife Etta was another. Etta cleaned my house, and cooked when I couldn’t, which, when I was writing—copulating with my muse—was often.

The third person with the code was Janis, who worked as my personal assistant. Janis was in the house, answering the email, managing my social media presence (whatever the hell that was), and arranging my appearance schedule: which lately meant declining everything. If I had any copy to edit, Janis did that too. She was in the house, going through my mail, when I came out to work on the tractor.

The fourth was my agent, Joel.

It was never good news when Joel came.

I watched him as he came up the drive, trying to decide if I should wipe the tractor grease from my hands before I greeted him. The Caddy stopped and Joel stepped out, sweat streaming down his fat cheeks into the collar of his white golf shirt. He clutched an envelope in one hand and huffed his way through a hole in the rickety fence that circled the yard and into the wide gravel space next to the barn where the Allis Chalmers was enduring her exploratory surgery.

You bastard, you’re going to bill me for the cost of that fucking Caddy rental, aren’t you? I said, wiping my hands on the ass of my jeans before I hugged him. I hope he smelled like the farm when he left. I hoped I left handprints on the back of his white golf shirt that he wouldn’t see until he got back to New York.

I got a letter from a lawyer. I thought it best that you see it.

I do have a fax machine. I took the envelope from his thick fingers. It was from a legal office in Columbus, an hour up the road. I’d been in seclusion for the better part of the last decade and a half, as far as the press was concerned. No one contacted me except through Joel in New York. They’d shit if they knew I was so close.

I tore open the envelope and gasped.

We have your mother’s ashes.

I NEVER THOUGHT I'D get that letter, but here I was, sitting in the lawyer’s office, waiting to be called back into the darkly paneled office. I knew what I thought it would be like: surrounded by black-suited men and women best described as Dickensian, looking down their over-educated noses at me as they handed off a marble urn circled by flora and fauna carved into a brass band circling the neck.

You'd think in my mid-fifties other people's opinions wouldn't trouble me as they did, but I wasn't blessed with self-confidence when it came to family matters. The joys of childhood with the woman whose fired-kissed remains I was now the sole owner of led to that.

Maybe if it hadn't been so damned public. Maybe if I'd been a little less known this would have been easier. This would have been less painful.

The secretary looked up at me and smiled.

I read your last book, she gushed. I've read them all.

Shit.

Thanks, I said, smiling wanly.

I just love your characters...You have another one coming out, right?

I’m, um, still in the process of writing it, I demurred. The other clients in the office turned and stared at me. I wanted to sink deeper into the waiting room chair.

I wished I were back on the farm right now. I should have sent Janis up here. She could have done this. I didn’t need to.

Miss Londonderry? A tall woman in a tight khaki skirt and a gauzy peach blouse stood in the doorway. She was wearing neutral heels of a reasonable height and coddling a large pink urn in her arms. I felt out of place in my jeans and black cowboy boots.

Yes? I pulled my cowboy hat further over my eyes and stood.

Here’s the ashes.

That’s it? I wasn’t going to be subjected to snide comments? Judgment calls on my life? My fashion choices?

Is there a reason why these ashes came to me?

They were left at the funeral home following her death a couple months ago. Someone paid for the cremation, but can’t be located now. You were the only known survivor, but we had some trouble finding you. We finally made contact, as you know, through your agent.

Oh. Did she have a will that you know of?

The young woman shook her head. I’m not certain. If there is one, we will let you know. She shifted the urn in her arms. This is kind of heavy. Do you need someone to carry it out to your rental car?

No thanks. She didn’t need to know I came in the farm truck. I took the urn from her like I was receiving a sack of potatoes.

I rode down the elevator alone, thank God. I didn’t want to explain what the hell I was doing or who the hell I was. In the basement parking garage, I buckled the urn into the passenger seat.

C’mon Mom. We’re going home. You and I are going to talk.

Chapter 2

My first memory in life is one of being pulled up a snowy street on the back of a sled. I remember seeing only Dad’s back, his hand clutching the rope. He was tall and broad-shouldered and his hair was cut in a crew cut, so popular in 1960. I don't remember what he was wearing, because it was a gray Ohio winter and he pulled me down a suburban street that hadn't been plowed, mixing the white snow with the gray sky and the identical little suburban box houses. I remember only black pants and black gloves and a short black jacket and laughing as I felt the snowflakes on my three-year-old cheeks.

My daddy was special to me, like any other little girl, but what I didn't know then would color all of my memories. What I didn't know was the extent of his mental illness, the voices he heard and the Illusions he lived with. As a child, they were my truths, until I knew better.

But to learn the truth took time. It took reflection.

As I grew, I learned of his obsession with organized crime, how Jack Anderson of the Washington Post would call him and tell him who really killed Kennedy—at least in his own mind–and how he was convinced some mafia capo would snatch the only child of a central Ohio English teacher. He was convinced mobsters lurked behind every tree and around every corner.

I’ve come to know it was his deluded way of telling me how precious I was to him, born of a fear that came from hearing, during his own childhood, about the disappearance and death of Charles Lindbergh’s baby boy. He didn’t want me, his only child, to meet that same fate.

Combine his delusions with my mother’s need to preserve a perfect façade and memory, true memory, becomes very difficult indeed. What my dad told me was not real–but what was real, what was ugly, and embarrassing—and worse, what made her look bad—my mother denied.

So excuse me if I spin my own tales, and find my own truth.

I put the farm truck in gear and backed out of the parking space, throwing my arm across the bench seat to see behind me. My gaze swept across the urn buckled into the seat beside me.

It was as if she was finally unable to escape me, this daughter who was such an embarrassment, for the tales we both told and for the truths I uncovered.

So what was real? And what was fake? As the rattletrap old Ford bumped down High Street and then on to State Route 23 South, I had to admit just about everything I knew about my life was covered in some kind of veneer, polished so as to hide the splinters, the knots, and the rough, ugly bark of truth, if it was true at all. Sadly, I couldn’t pinpoint any truth with certainty.

So, mom, there's a lot we have to talk about, isn't there? I threw the urn a sardonic smile as I drove.

It wasn't until I was in my 40s that I realized most teachers take a job with a school district and stay there for the rest of their lives.

My father was not that teacher. But then again, trying to keep one's family safe from imminent mafia assassination required a great deal of relocation.

What I didn't know as my daddy pulled me down that snow-covered street was that he had already had one psychotic break, during his enlistment during the Korean War. He had been assigned to RAF Lakenheath in Britain when it occurred. He went AWOL, hitchhiking to Scotland where he met a woman named Rachel, whom he later called the love of his life.

If my life had worked out the way I wanted it to, he often told me. You'd be speaking with a Scottish accent.

As a young woman, flush with tales of the moors and the heath, I imagined my handsome young father turning to wave at a tearful young woman in the door of her thatched-roof cottage, to return to his country and his patriotic obligations.

I envisioned Rachel as a Judy Garland-esque young woman in tears, alternately standing with her broken-hearted parents behind her, their hands on her shoulder as their daughter’s one true love leaves—or the image of an angry old Scottish father, with white beard and long rifle, glad to run this worthless Yankee off his land. My daddy and Rachel would be re-united with suitable drama several years later, my young heart imagined, maybe even with a full-cast dance number, a la Finnegan’s Wake.

As an adult, disabused of the fictions of Rochester and Heathcliff and alert now to the realities of mental illness, I perceived Dad’s romantic tale then as too much booze in seedy Glasgow hotels, dirty sheets and opportunistic bar flies with dirty, drooping bra straps and smeared lipstick, who were looking for a quick marriage and the subsequent express ticket to U.S. citizenship. In the more adult version of his past, I saw two military policemen grabbing and handcuffing a young man who was either deep in the throes of psychosis or an epic drinking binge, and throwing him in the back of a paddy wagon. My thoughts ran the scenario out further, to a small-town farm boy would find himself abandoned and alone and, once again, hearing what a disappointment he was to his family and friends.

The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

For all I know, Rachel may not really exist.

The Air Force gave him a dishonorable discharge when they found him—he may have served some time as well. We never talked about it. But it was his ‘good’ discharge from the army following World War II that would allow him to attend school on the G.I. Bill and purchase, with no down payment, each of the houses we rotated into and then out of, sometimes in the middle of the night, as he perceived another death threat was imminent.

But my father wasn't the only one who suffered from his own brand of delusions. My mother called me once, very angry, after hearing an interview I gave on a radio program.

I never told you writing wasn't a real job. How could you say that on national radio?

Mom, you did.

No, I didn't.

Then all those days, examining all of those college brochures are just a figment of my imagination? When you told me I couldn't major in English literature or creative writing? That I had to major in something which would ‘give me a real job’ like accounting or banking?

She hung up.

I hit another nerve in another interview.

You lied to that reporter. I never told you ‘My secretary makes more money then you'll ever make at that newspaper.’

Mother– We'd progressed from my calling her ‘mom’ or ‘mommy’ and our relationship was decidedly more brittle by this time. You said it in front of your secretary. Do you want me to bring her into it?

Mother harrumphed at her end of the phone, knowing this time she had me beat. You couldn't if you wanted to. Geneva died last spring.

I'm not going to debate this with you mother. My memories are my memories.

Your memories are wrong.

So many of my memories were wrong, according to her.

Like the incident with the mentally retarded man my father paid to mow our yard. He had come to the front door and, when no one answered, walked around to the side door and let himself in. I remember seeing him on the landing that led from the side door down to the basement and up three steps to the kitchen. My mother was screaming. Cops were called and my father rushed home from school.

The man tried to explain that he wanted to know if he could mow our yard a day early and didn't mean to scare anyone. He could see my mother through the front window as she walked into the kitchen and just went to find her. My dad patted him on the shoulder and put five dollars in the breast pocket of his dirty white T-shirt and said: Go ahead, Timmy. It will be fine.

That never happened.

Her words were terse and short. Did she deny it occurred because he had truly frightened her? Or, and this is what I really think happened, did she deny the event because she hadn't wanted anyone to know she suddenly lost control?

I slowed the truck down as we came into Circleville—even as ashes, she was as much presence as a real passenger would have been in the farm truck. The sound of the traffic pulling up at the light beside me made me realize I was reliving these conversations out loud once more. The glass squeaked in its frame as I tried to roll up the window. Nobody needed to hear the crazy author talk. Nobody but Mother.

You can't avoid me now, Can you? I had to smile at the urn.

It would be the lies that she told and stuck to, not the truths she denied, that would be so damaging.

The light turned green. The gears of the old Ford ground beneath the bench seat as I put it into first and lurched into the intersection.

I suppose this is not the way to treat someone you haven't seen in twenty years, I said to the urn. But what are we going to do with you now?

In another thirty minutes, I was south of Chillicothe, pulling up the same dusty farm lane Joel had pulled up just a day ago. His rented Cadillac SUV was still in the driveway, beneath a coat of dust. He was probably in the office with Janis, trying to decide how the whole story would be spun if and when someone recognized me between here and Columbus. Maybe he was also thinking about how he could comfort me—or paint a story of how he comforted me—when a reporter asked, How did she take the news of her mother's death?

The driver’s side door gave a metallic groan as I opened it. So did the passenger door. I leaned in and unfastened the seat belt holding my mother's ashes in the raggedly upholstered truck seat.

Jeff looked up from the guts of the Allis Chalmers. He wiped his hands on an old red rag and walked toward me, his arms open to receive the urn. I passed the pink burden to him.

Where do you want me to put it?

I shrugged. In the bottom of the well, for all I care.

We can’t do that.

Why not?

And poison your own water?

Like she hasn’t already poisoned my life. I looked up to see my cowboy muse leaning against the side of the barn, smirking. Oh baby—you bastard! You left so suddenly after we argued—are you coming back to me? He liked it when I got pithy, when I spoke in dirty metaphors and my allusions dug into his flesh like my nails—he wouldn’t come back to me until I could. Even I knew that. Put her on the work bench in the shed while I decide what to do with her.

Jeff nodded and walked back to the barn.

Mother, my dad and Rachel still filled my thoughts as I walked back into the old farmhouse and into what my grandparents called the Sunday parlor. It had long ago been converted to my office, with one desk against the wall for Janis and a Morris chair that had held generations of visitors. My grandfather’s wide mahogany desk, a beast with deep, side drawers and inlaid intricate woodwork across the top, sat in front of the wide window. When I was a child, that desk was covered with the accouterments of the insurance business he ran on the side—pen, papers, spreadsheets and his notary stamp. Today, that gorgeous wood was covered with the electronic accouterments of mine–my laptop my printer, the microphone I used for dictation when the words were flowing, and when I consented, Skype interviews.

Hey sunshine! Joel hoisted himself from the Morris chair. So, how did it go?

You're still here? How long are you going to eat my food, sleep in my guest room then bill me for the privilege? It went fine. I shuffled through some of the papers Janis had left on my desk while she worked at hers. Janis, this says we need to pay the bill at the feed mill soon? Go ahead and write the check.

So, where is she? Joel asked.

I kept shuffling papers. Janis, be sure to pay my memberships in all these professional organizations before the end of the week. And tell the Iowa Writer’s Workshop I'm still not interested in teaching.

The money would get you through the next two years planting and harvest with no problems, Janis warned.

I shrugged. We’ll get by.

You're ignoring me Audrey, Joel said. What did you do with your mother's ashes? I want to know in case I have to run interference.

Interference? Is that what you call it? Jeff put her in the shed. I don't know what I'm going to do yet. I signed a couple letters Janis had written, politely declining appearances.

So, if I say that you are planning a memorial service to be held later at the convenience of the family, I won't be lying?

Sure. That works. At that point I had no idea whether there would be a memorial or not–or whether it would be held at a church or around my toilet. Whatever I decided, I sure as hell wasn't going to tell Joel. I didn't even know if anyone would say anything following my appearance at the lawyer’s office. Joel probably didn't either, but it was best to be prepared.

My time in the literary spotlight may have come and gone, and like Salinger, I was content to live out my days, ferociously guarding my privacy, raising my crops, and writing when my cowboy came home.

Chapter 3

E verybody reinvents themselves in college. My sister told me that last week while I was packing my stuff. And why not? Nobody knows us here. We can be anything we want.

The girl beside me had curly blonde hair pulled back from her face with a wide headband. She was dressed in a tight A-line skirt in Tartan plaid and a deep green polyester turtleneck sweater. Her nylons showed through her open-toed, chunky heeled shoes and her cheap, but shiny necklace had odd-shaped glass beads between the elongated links. Our stack of textbooks between us on the college cafeteria table was identical: Survey of English Literature, Exploring Education, Western Civilization.

It was September 1975, the first week of classes, and I was fresh from a couple negotiated victories with Mother. Peace with honor was the political catchphrase of the day and it seemed to fit my relationship with Mother as well. If I took an education course, promised to become an English teacher, I could study the authors that I’d been introduced to as a child and bury myself in their stories. Another battle won: I wasn’t attending the liberal arts college in my hometown, living at home. I was in a dorm, at a college in southwestern Ohio—it was a church college, but it was a compromise I was willing to make.

After the shootings at Kent State just a couple years before, along with the anti-Vietnam war protests that seemed to be occurring at state colleges all across the country, Mother’s fear that I would somehow get injured accidentally seemed valid, so I gave in. I wasn’t plugged in enough to know that the war was over, ending most reasons for campus protests.

I wasn’t politically active, so the chances of me getting involved in a campus protest were slim to none. But I knew pot could be found just for the asking, just about anywhere—even here, at Jesus Freak U.

But the battle wasn’t over. I wanted to write—nothing more. But to spend my life with a bunch of snot-nosed high school shits, teaching them how to use an Oxford comma just to pay my rent? To have only three months out of the year to devote to crafting the novels I wanted to write? The thought made me grind my teeth. Still, I had four years to figure out how to wiggle out of my promise.

Tammy Wycliffe was my roommate and, as I found out, in all of my classes. She didn’t come from the same kind of background that I did: she had parents who loved each other, a dad who held the same job in the same town all his life and she never, ever worried about having to come up with an answer when your friends at school ask why you’d moved yet again.

Look, as far as anyone knows, I’m just what I look like, the high school prom queen, Tammy said. You do too—but I can tell from just talking to you over these last few days, you’re a lot like me. She leaned across the table and whispered conspiratorially, Have you ever smoked marijuana? She drew the word out slowly, pronouncing every syllable, her eyes sparkling with mischief. I’m gonna try it before this first term is out!

My eyes widened and I pulled my lips over my teeth to keep from laughing out loud. My own wardrobe choices were