©2021 by Larry F. Sommers

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MOM WAS A SCURLOCK, once a respected name, but folks in town just called her Annie Screwloose. I knew this from an early age, and I knew what it implied. 

She must have been aware what people called her, but we never spoke of it until one day, in battle, I shot it as a bolt to her heart.

She puckered her mouth and carried on. “People speak ill of others thinking it will make them feel good about themselves. You picked up their mocking name because you’re mad and want to hurt me.” She shoved a cat off a kitchen chair and sat down. “I understand your anger more than I understand their meanness. I wish you could partake of the joy all around you.”

I groaned. “Not this again. About the particles.”

She smiled. “Yes, the particles. Particles of joy in the air about us. I can feel them, see them, hear them, even taste them—and they transform my life.” Her face was radiant. “Why can’t you do the same?”

“Get my life transformed by particles? Mom, that’s crazy talk. There are no particles!”

“You needn’t shout.”

I glanced around the room at the gas stove she had had installed right next to the disused woodstove, never discarding the woodstove, which had loomed there for as long as I could remember—after all, there was “oodles of space in this kitchen.” My glance took in the stacks of newspapers and magazines on top of that old woodstove, mingled with cookbooks of the world’s great cuisines, and a line of motley dishes on the floor holding several kinds of pet food, which spilled onto the patchy linoleum. 

I capped my survey with a loud sniff of the air around us, which held an odor I never smelled in anyone else’s house. “You’re not some solitary saint protecting her only son. You’re a loony-tunes who drove her husband away and keeps all knowledge of him from me. What was he like? I don’t know. I never met him.”

“The less you know of that man, the better.”

 “I’ll be eighteen soon, Mom. I’ll find him.”

#

“Hello, Dad.” 

“Don’t give me that bullshit.” He spat out the words, then launched into a fit of coughing that made me wonder whether he would live out his latest sentence.

“You ought to get that looked at.” 

He gained control of his breathing and glared at me across the amored glass barrier. “Don’t be a wiseass with me. I didn’t have to come out here and see you at all.” He rose from the straight-backed chair on his side of the glass.

“Wait,” I said. “I’m sorry I offended you. I just need—”

“Yeah, what do you need, sonny?” He sank into the chair again, more slowly than he had risen. “Nothin’ I can give you.” His eyes were dead.

“When you said ‘sonny’ just now, was that ‘sonny’ as in ‘son’? It took me years to find you. Can you at least acknowledge I’m your issue?” 

He made a sour face. It puckered the wrinkles around his mouth. I was still in my twenties, so there’s no way he could have been the age his wrinkles testified.

“Look,” he said. “I got no issues. You wanna be my son, what’s in it for me?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Forget it.” I got up to go.

“That’s right, just cut me loose. Forget I ever existed.” His eyes suddenly sparked with fire. “You tell Miss Annie Scurlock: Thanks for nothing.” 

“Tell her yourself, you son of a bitch.” 

I went to the secure door and tapped on the glass. The deputy on the other side saw me and buzzed me through. “Get what you came for?” he asked, his face impassive.

“Got what I could get.”

#

I didn’t want to come home. I’ve been doing just fine on my own—learning a trade, paying my way, traveling light. I have no attachments and want none. I do better as a solo. But she was my mother. 

Her neighbor, Mister Johnson, got in touch with me. I drove overnight to get here, took my stuff into the empty house. It still had the old smell. I sat in the kitchen, depressed, for a few minutes, then got up and went to the hospital.

She had shrunk to a mere wisp. Her eyes were bright when I came into the room, and she looked at me with recognition.

“Hello, Mom.”

She smiled and blinked. They had said at the nurses’ station that she no longer had the power of speech.

“I found the old bastard a few years ago. In jail, naturally.”

The light went out of her eyes.

“You were right about him.”

She closed her eyes and that was that.

The funeral director asked whether I wanted to specify a charity for memorial gifts. I thought of all the cats and dogs that used to be around our house, and I said the humane society.

“That’s very fitting,” he said. He looked down at the blotter on his desk, then raised his eyes again. “I suppose you know they took her cats away a few months ago.”

I gulped. “No, I didn’t.” That explained why I found no animals in the house. “I suppose it was for the best.”

“Frankly, they were getting to be a problem. After they took them away, a few volunteers from the church came by and helped clean up her house. Did the best they could, anyway, to put it right.”

“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know that, either. Keep the humane society for the memorial gifts, but I’ll send a donation to the church.” 

“I’m sure it will be appreciated.”

So I came home. Now I sit here staring at the old woodstove. There are only a few magazines and newspapers on it. There are large patches of rust on the cast iron, but it’s a real antique. I’ll bet it could be restored and sold to somebody for real bucks.

It occurs to me to wonder what it would take to fix up this old house. It’s a large Victorian, in the family since the glory days of the Scurlocks. Now it’s mine. It might be worth the investment.

Now I notice a dish on the floor in the corner by the pantry door. Something’s in it that looks like dog food. 

A scratch and a whimper at the back door. I get up, open the back door, and there stands a scrawny-looking mutt, some kind of a terrier I guess. He backs up and gives a half-growl, because he doesn’t recognize me. But his tail wags. I’ll bet this is where he comes to get fed.

I open the door. He scurries in, still half-suspicious, yet hungry. 

He makes a beeline for the dish with the dog food and gobbles it down. 

I watch him. “Hello, Mutt. My name is Frank.” 

He finishes the last morsel, looks up at me, and gives a sudden, whole-body shake. A beam of sunshine slants down through the window, and the dog’s shake sends up a thousand motes of dust, dander, and debris. They rise and swirl, tiny specks in the golden light. 

Something makes me think of Mom, and I realize for the first time in my life I’m seeing particles of joy.

The End

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Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)