Terry Engel
Maps
My mother waited for me as I pushed her wheelchair into the bedroom. I helped her up from the bed, but she refused to sit, and she motioned me away as she gripped the handles and used the chair as a walker. I followed her through the house as she shuffled toward the car, ready to catch her if she fell. My father went ahead to hold doors that didn’t need to be held. I supported her across the doorsill and into the garage and then helped her into the back seat of the car. I leaned across to buckle her in and caught the smell of her powder and lotions and perfume, She’d made herself up like we were going to church. I set her oxygen tank on the seat beside her, but she wasn’t using it and she had waved off her pain meds earlier, saying she wanted to be alert and enjoy the drive.
My mother was having a good day, one of the last good days given the fact that she was dying. She had commented earlier on the birds at the feeder outside her bedroom window and the clear blue sky after three days of rain, but I had trouble seeing my mother in her wasted face, her skin almost transparent. My father had also worn to a brittle leaf of a man, and when I looked at him, or worse, when I helped him into the car and leaned across to fasten the seatbelt because his hands couldn’t manage the buckle, it made me wonder what had happened to the man who’d seemed able to build any type of structure or solve any mechanical or ethical problem.
Two weeks earlier he had called me down to Tampa, where he and my mother spent winters in a small apartment in a retirement community. She’d gone into the hospital a couple of weeks after her last round of chemo, and just in the few weeks since I’d last been to check on them, she’d lost another twenty pounds and looked like a hard word would break her bones. The doctors had been direct. There was nothing else to be done. My mother handled it better than my father or me. My parents had long ago purchased burial plots in Memphis, side by side, and they’d prepaid for the funeral. But even more important to her, she wanted to die in Tennessee, not in Tampa where she and my father had outlived all their retired friends. They had outlived everyone they knew in Tennessee too, but at least she knew the names of the streets, she’d said. She wanted to see winter again, and smell—since she couldn’t eat—bar-b-que. I’d read dozens of hospice blogs preparing for this day, enough to know that the last few choices to be made were the only choices—the only control—she would have as her body stopped. The flight from Tampa to Memphis nearly killed her, but she had always been and was still a tough woman.
My father gave me directions, but he was confused and overwrought and I wasn’t at my best either. The hospice center was way out east in what I remembered as soybean fields and pastures, woods and junkyards, real country, but apparently it was impossible to get to there from where we were. The interstate was shut down for major bridge renovations and traffic had been detoured through decaying neighborhoods. The north circle bypass was closed due to a chemical spill and traffic on the south was gridlocked, courtesy of the major crack in the steel support beams of the I-40 bridge across the Mississippi. The University of Memphis—I still thought of it as Memphis State—had grown out as well, bisecting the city by buying up whole neighborhoods and razing houses to build dormitories, classrooms, laboratories, and sports and cultural complexes. I was lost in my hometown. I hadn’t lived in Memphis since before college, and the times I’d visited my parents since then, I’d flown in from L.A., so the only part of Memphis I ever saw was between the airport and Midtown. After it became clear my father’s directions weren’t going to get us anywhere, I pulled into a Walgreens and typed the address for Avalon into my phone.
He dismissed me with a bony hand. “I’ve been driving here my whole life.”
“We’ve been driving thirty minutes and haven’t made two miles as the crow flies.”
“I’m not a crow.”
I looked over my shoulder at my mother. She gave me a weak smile and a thumbs up.
“It’s nice to be out,” she said.
The app plotted a torturous route and estimated that we were still an hour away. I turned right out of the Walgreens, following the blue path on the app. My father peered at the phone.
“You’re going the wrong direction.”
“The map will get us there. It’s using satellites and somehow it gets updates on construction and traffic jams.”
“I know where the place is. I used to fish out that way.”
“It’s all built up now. I don’t recognize anything.”
He humphed at me and stared out the window. He and my mother had been married almost seventy years. I wondered how much he’d thought about what it would be like for him after she was gone, and again, I wondered if he saw this drive as a preview of his future. Ever since Tampa I had tried not to think and had just focused on our immediate needs. It was all I could handle in the moment.
My father muttered whenever the voice on the app ordered a turn. I had selected a female British accent because I liked the sound of the BBC. I thought about my father at age sixty, the age I had just turned, and how he’d seemed so old to me then. At sixty I still felt like the same person I’d been my whole life. I’d put off knee surgery to deal with my parents, but I still liked the same music I’d liked as a teenager, still liked driving fast on the winding canyon roads above Malibu, still went on dates, even though I felt a pang of surprise whenever I looked at my face or body in the mirror and noted the sags and wrinkles and graying and receding hairline. I still felt like getting in shape was possible: a couple extra trips to the gym every week, a better diet and sleep, longer walks, and my body would snap back into the thirty-year-old in my mind. I knew I had active years to look forward to, but when I looked at my parents, I felt like I’d missed something. The British voice reminded to me that I had spent my life wanting to be somewhere else, and when I got there, I always found something missing. Soon it would be my mother I missed, and not long after that, my father, and it wrenched me to imagine a world without those cardinal points.
We drove along a two-lane street lined with massive oaks and small houses built in the thirties and forties. Tree roots buckled the sidewalks, weeds overgrew the yards, and paint flaked off wood siding. I thought about ignoring the map and following my gut, but we were in a neighborhood dictated by the winding Wolf River, running all the way across the city and emptying into the Mississippi. The river didn’t care about the engineer’s world of right angles, and seeing it again reminded me of the summer I was seventeen. I had a job building trails along the Wolf River Greenway for Shelby County Parks, out east before the city spread out that far. Twenty of us—guys and girls—cut brush and trees and built footbridges across creeks and ferried wheelbarrows of gravel to line the paths we carved out of the woods. It was hot and sooner or later most of us caught poison ivy and almost every evening in the shower I pulled ticks. We wore hardhats and work gloves and boots and sweated through the heat, though we were young enough it didn’t really bother us. We played jokes on one another, climbing trees above the path and surprise-attacking each other, whooping like the Indians on television as we dropped from the trees. When work was over and we waited for the school bus to take us back to the headquarters, we’d splash into the Wolf to cool off. No one ever swam in the Wolf River, a large stream, really, that snaked through the city, tracing industrial lots and neighborhoods where the poor had settled in the floodplain during Reconstruction. It was the kind of place where trash and bodies could be dumped, for the kinds of people who dumped trash and bodies. But the river was clean and wild along the Greenway, east of town, near where my teenage self would have never imagined my mother would spend her final days.
My mother’s voice surprised me. “Turn up here on Parham Street.”
I slowed and looked back at her, but she pointed me forward and I watched the street signs.
“Do you remember, Gene?” she asked my father.
My father jerked out of his funk and stared out the window. He smiled for the first time in days.
“I told you that thing didn’t know what it was doing. Your phone is lost.”
“It doesn’t matter, Gene.”
“This is where you grew up.” I remembered Sunday afternoon drives after church and lunch—Tops Bar-b-que for my parents and Jackie’s Drive-in and foot-long hot dogs with chili and cheese for me—followed by the long drive to digest, as my father called it, and to see the leaves turning or the azaleas blooming, according to the season, to please my mother.
“Yes,” my father said. His voice softened and he stared at the neighborhood with renewed sharpness. “Here’s Parham,” he said, pointing.
I took a right. My mother looked like a little girl on her way to a birthday party. She leaned forward with anticipation, a way I hadn’t seen her move in forever.
I knew the place when I saw it and I dodged massive potholes as I pulled into the parking lot. It was the old ice-cream and burger joint. I had seen it in pictures and it had cropped up in my parents’ stories. I had vague memories of going there for ice cream as a child. It was a small metal and glass building with a giant, battered-looking ice cream cone on the roof and a little window on the front for orders and take-out. The sign below the cone was faded but still read “Swenson’s Frozen Cone.” A heavy chain locked the door and the windows had been boarded over with plywood. There were a few buckled picnic tables along the front, also chained to the ground.
“Remember, Gene?”
He nodded and pointed toward the picnic table and I pulled over and parked. My father fumbled with his seat belt and I helped him release it. He opened the door and slowly unfolded out of the car. I glanced back at my mother. She stared out the window toward the front of the drive-in.
“You doing okay?”
She didn’t answer, but she seemed okay, so I got out to help my father.
He walked slowly to the picnic table and leaned over it on both hands and read the surface like a newspaper, running his fingers over the initials carved into the tabletop. Graffiti covered the table as well, lots of profanity, but my father found what he was looking for, his and my mother’s worn initials, EW + EP—Eugene Walker loves Elaine Pitt—that had weathered the nearly seventy years since they had sat there and shared root beer floats and stared into each other’s eyes and did whatever people did on dates in the 1950s.
“I want your mother to see this.”
I dreaded the effort it would take to pull her out of the car and wheel her over to the table. I took a picture of the initials with my phone, as well as a couple of shots of Swenson’s, but my father had already shuffled over and talked into the back seat through the open door, and by the time I got there he was fumbling with my mother’s seat belt. I pulled the wheelchair from the trunk and unfolded it, helped pull her in, then pushed her over to the table. My father pointed to his declaration of love carved with a pocketknife to celebrate the fact that he’d come out of the war in one piece and looked forward to a well-deserved life with this serious young woman.
My mother leaned from her chair and traced the initials with her finger just as my father had. Tears ran down her cheeks.
“I was so mad at your father,” she said. “I just knew that Mr. Swenson would see this and tell my father, and then he wouldn’t have let me see him again.”
“They didn’t like Dad?”
“I was still in high school and he had been to Korea already.” She smiled at my father and he looked away like my grandparents’ judgement still bothered him, though they had been dead for years. “We waited to marry until I graduated. I’d never spent a night apart from my parents until my honeymoon.”
I couldn’t imagine being married at eighteen, nor twenty-eight for that matter. I wouldn’t have made a good husband that young, not that I did a better job by waiting till my thirties.
“Plus, I was Catholic,” my father said.
I did know that that had been an early sticking point, especially when my father took me to mass.
My mother and father wondered aloud about what had ever happened to some of the other couples they’d known during their time at the picnic tables, all this in the short-hand that comes from living three-quarters of your life with another person. White-flight had transformed the neighborhood forty years earlier, and people walking the sidewalks stared at us as I posed my father and mother together at the table with the ice cream cone and the sign above them and took pictures. As I worked my parents back into the car I wished I was driving my Camry with California plates and the Black Lives Matter bumper sticker.
The map took over again. I expected my father to protest, but he didn’t mention it. He seemed content to watch his youth unfold outside the windows, and he wiped his eyes with his sleeve. Every few blocks something would jar a memory and he’d sit up straight and raise his hand, his index finger halfway between a point and a question. We drove past old school buildings where one or the other of my parents had attended. We sat in a Top’s parking lot and breathed in the sweet smoke of Memphis pulled-pork bar-b-que. We followed the map again.
“Remember that?” my father said, tapping the window.
My mother didn’t answer. Her eyes were closed and she grimaced through a wave of pain.
I followed the circle on the blue route on the screen.
I thought about my parents and their life-long love affair. They always treated each other with kindness and respect, and I’d never known, growing up, when they were fighting or angry or feeling the doubts that plagued my two marriages, one that ended in divorce after my first wife fell in love with a co-worker, and the second, which ended in a draw, despite two years of couples counseling. Gretchen and I liked one another, most of the time, but we also made each other unhappy. We had finally agreed that we married out of loneliness, and at the time we gave up we were young enough that it seemed easier to spend our days looking for someone else to fill our days. I wondered about what my parents had that I didn’t have. And I wondered what to do about my father, if he could be persuaded to come with me to Malibu once she was gone, though I knew the answer would be no.
I didn’t notice the church until I’d driven past and my father told me to go back. I turned around. It was St. Andrews, where my father was baptized and where he attended when I was a child.
My father was a lapsed Catholic when he met my mother. My mother’s church read the Bible literally and believed that everyone else in the world needed to be converted, or else suffer for eternity. Catholics, with their miracles and saints, the infallibility of the Pope, and their garish cathedrals, had strayed far away from the church described in the New Testament. My mother preferred simple worship with acapella singing and the intimacy and relationships of her own small congregations where the preacher spoke English and had studied the Bible at a two-year Christian college in Tennessee. Grandma Walker once told me that my father was a good Catholic boy, but Korea changed him and he stopped going to mass.
He didn’t go to worship with my mother at her church, either.
Until I was born.
I have hazy memories from those Sundays at St. Andrews: The thump of oak prayer benches as they dropped to the floor and the kneeling and standing and kneeling; the priest chanting in Latin, which I thought must be the language of God; the statues inset into alcoves in the wall that both frightened and intrigued me; the stained glass and the incense and the idea that God was there in the building. My father would wake me and dress me in suit and tie, and we would go to Mass very early in the morning, and then we’d go to breakfast at a diner that looked like a streetcar and sit at the counter on swivel stools. He drank coffee and I ate pancakes. Then we’d go to my mother’s church—Real Church, the only church that guaranteed salvation—where there were no statues or organ music or Latin. At some point my mother must have put her foot down—I can only imagine the conversation—because my father stopped taking me to Mass, even though he never missed a Sunday. Six a.m. Mass and then he’d come home to fix biscuits and sausage gravy and eggs fried over-easy, and then we’d all go to Real Church.
Real Church was every Sunday morning and evening, and again on Wednesday night, for Bible study. My family sat on the same pew with Grandma and Grandpa Pitt. Other than the heavy oak pews and communion table and pulpit, the auditorium was unadorned and functional. Even the stained-glass windows were bland, swirled colors. Real Church forbid alcohol, dancing, and even mixed-gender swimming, which we just called “mixed swimming.” Our whole social life revolved around Real Church. We had meals with our Fellowship group and most of my friends were in the youth group. It was all I knew and we were happy, but the preacher threatened hellfire and eternal damnation in a West-Tennessee twang, and as a child I was afraid to let my hands or feet dangle over my mattress, convinced the Devil hiding under my bed would yank me down to Hell. My Sunday school teachers warned us against the desire to “see how close we could get to the fire without getting burned.”
My father never led singing or prayer or read a scripture in service, never taught a Bible class or preached a sermon. I don’t think that most people who went to our church realized that he had never been baptized into Real Church. For years he arrived early to open the building and turn on lights and adjust the thermostats, and he stayed late to empty trash, sweep and vacuum, clean restrooms, and lock the building. He helped the widows of the congregation with their home maintenance. He was a good man. He was a Christian, even though I think my mother believed he was going to Hell. A drop of holy water on the forehead was nothing.
What kind of a God would punish a good man like my father, I wondered over the years.
I parked the car and looked over St. Andrews. It was small compared to other Catholic churches I’d seen, with clean lines leading the eye up to the steeple, and the grounds were neatly landscaped, standing out against the decay of the neighborhood. Behind the church was the graveyard where my grandparents were buried. My father stared at the church and the grounds.
“Would you like to go in?” I asked. “Or else go see Grandma and Grandpa?
He wrestled with it a moment, looking at his lap, but he shook his head. “I don’t want to leave your mother.”
“Are you okay if I go in for a minute?” I asked. I looked back at my mother and she looked drawn, but she nodded weakly. My father didn’t answer, so I left the motor running and told my father to lock the doors when I got out.
The heavy wooden doors swung open onto a vestibule with gold-framed pictures of bishops and priests. I went through a second set of doors into the sanctuary, which was lighted by banks of votive candles and the tall stained-glass windows catching the afternoon light. The sanctuary was empty, and quiet, and it smelled of incense and furniture polish and candle smoke, and under the eyes of the statues of saints lining the walls, and the agonized face of Jesus nailed to the cross at the front of the building and his mother Mary looking on him with love, the sanctuary felt like a holy place and I was glad that the church left it open for anyone in distress. I walked around the sanctuary, trailing my fingers along the sides of oak pews and flashing back to the kneeling-standing-kneeling Masses of my earliest memories. The robes of the priests and altar boys added a sense of mystery and made worship feel exotic compared to the black suit and tie and white shirt of the Real Church preacher. One night my parents let me watch a movie called The War of the Worlds. Near the end of the movie a priest had stood before the alien spacecraft and held the Bible above his head, only to be eradicated by the red laser. After the movie I told my parents that the best place to be at the end of the world was inside a church, where God would protect us. My mother had bristled at that, since she had no faith in buildings. For her the church was the body of Christian people, not a gothic structure, and I think that was when she put her foot down about my father’s lingering Catholicism.
I stared up at the high vaulted ceiling and noted the murals and gilded tiles and the intricately carved woodwork. The eyes of the saints looked down on me, and Jesus on the cross writhed. The light through the windows bathed me in glowing colors. The old building creaked, as if alive with spirits moving. As I stared up, a wave of nausea and dizziness swept over me, and my head felt like a balloon tied to a stick. I tried to swallow but my throat closed and pain burned in my chest. I focused on the light from a stained-glass window, but the window receded and shrunk to a bright speck in a field of black. Sweat drenched my forehead and back and torso. I could feel my shirt soak, and I knew that if I didn’t sit down, I would faint. I thought about my mother and father, waiting out in the car with the doors locked and the motor running, physically unable to help themselves or me. I stumbled into a pew and sat there with my head between my knees and worked on staying conscious.
Slowly the burgundy and gold fabric of the prayer bench came into focus and my head cleared, and I felt I could sit up straight, though walking seemed too much. I slouched against the pew and spread my arms along the back. I focused on each saint, moving my gaze from one to the next, holding each set of eyes with my own until my vision sharpened and my breathing felt regular and my body began to chill as the sweat evaporated from my drenched shirt.
I tried to bring back specific memories from inside the church, but I had been too young. I tried to remember my father in this church. My mind went a hundred different directions.
I was finishing out the trail-building job before my junior year of high school started. One day I drove home after work, my clothes damp from swimming in the Wolf. The wind cooled me through my wet clothes and I played Lynyrd Skynyrd and drove fast because the air conditioner on my car was broken. My father’s truck was in the driveway and he was standing in the shade of the carport, though it was way too early for him to be home. I parked and got out and he walked to me and gave me a long, increasingly uncomfortable hug. He put both arms around me and squeezed until I almost lost my breath. I looked over his shoulder, up and down the street, hoping none of my friends or neighbors was watching. My father was not a hugger. As he held me, I could feel him shaking, and I slowly became aware that he smelled of dirt, that rich, freshly turned, damp earth smell that only comes from breaking the surface with a shovel and digging down and moving the dirt with your hands. It’s a dirty where the soil and skin blend into living tissue, a second skin. There was dirt in his hair, dirt in his ears, dirt in his eyebrows, dirt infused into the fabric of his shirt and pants and boots. We stood there on the driveway in the hot sun and he held me a long time before he finally pulled back.
“I was buried alive today,” he said, his voice steady. “I thought my time had come. All I could think about was you and your mother and how much I love you both.”
He sat on the driveway. He moved gingerly, and his color was pale. I had never seen my father rattled. Not in the tornado that took shingles off the roof and knocked down trees in the back yard. Not in the wreck where we’d been T-boned and spun a three-sixty by a man who ran a stop sign. I can still see the red pickup bearing down on my side of the truck like it was slow motion. Not when the water moccasin flopped into the floor of our boat. But he was shaken. He told me what happened, slowly and deliberately, as if trying to recall the plot of a half-remembered movie.
He had been connecting a sewer line for a new business to the city sewer. The water department had a backhoe and they’d excavated ten feet deep to connect to the sewer, but the operator hadn’t banked the excavated dirt very well. My father had been in the hole over the sewer connection when the side of the hole caved, burying him. The workers figured he would suffocate before they could dig him out, but my father was saved because he had fallen over the sewer, pressed into the pipe by earth. All that weight pressing against him. They dug him out with shovels, afraid the backhoe would tear him apart or crush him even worse. My father told me that at first it was deathly quiet. Then, he heard water trickling through the sewer. Finally, he heard the men digging, though he had no sense of time. He said he thought about his life, about his family. After the first blows of the earth caving in on him, he didn’t feel anything except the pressure. Breathing was difficult, shallow. He longed to fill his lungs with a deep breath. He didn’t feel it when they scraped the earth from his numbed body and pulled him out. His whole body was bruised black and blue and yellow, except for his face, and he walked with pain for weeks, though nothing was broken. A reporter from the Commercial Appeal came out and took a picture. I still have the clipping, my father sitting on the dirt above the hole, looking off into the distance.
We sat in the driveway a long time, waiting for my mother. She was running errands and there was no way to call her. He hadn’t gone inside the house because he was too dirty, because he wanted to see us.
“Were you scared,” I asked.
That was when he told me.
Lawnmowers sounded somewhere down the street, cars drove past, the mail carrier came and went. Life carried on like nothing out of the ordinary had happened that day.
“Not scared,” he said. “It was more a sad feeling, thinking I wouldn’t ever see you again. Never see your mother again. That kept me breathing.”
“Did you pray?”
He looked down the street with the same expression that I would recognize the next day in the newspaper. It was the way I often pictured him in the years after I left home, when we didn’t see each other as often.
“Not a prayer the way you would think. Not a ‘please forgive me of my sins’ or a ‘please save me.’ I just really wanted to see you and your mom.”
“I would have been scared.”
He laughed, which surprised me. At the time he would have been in his late-forties, a tough man who worked hard and who liked people and whom people liked.
“The only time I was ever really scared, other than the war, was when you were born. Your mother doesn’t know this, but I was so afraid for you. I was baptized when I was a baby. My parents before me. My grandparents the same. I worried that you would die before you were old enough to make the decision for yourself, so that first night we brought you home from the hospital, I waited for your mother to fall asleep. She was worn to a nub. When she did, I got up and took you from the bassinet and into the kitchen. I turned on the water, just barely trickling, and I put your head under the faucet and said the words I knew to say.”
I nodded like I understood.
My mother believed in full immersion, where a preacher dipped you under the water, the way John the Baptist baptized Jesus in the river Jordan. When I was young my friends and I wondered aloud in Bible classes what would happen if a preacher made a mistake and a fingernail or a strand of hair didn’t get wet. We were convinced that that unlucky person would go to Hell anyway, victim of a technicality. It was a child’s understanding of faith, but I also knew my mother worried after my father’s soul. She wanted him to go through the full baptism again. As far as I know, that was the only thing that ever came between them.
I looked down the street and saw my mother’s car coming.
“Your mother doesn’t need to know I did that.”
I looked at my father and smiled. “She’d kick your ass.” It felt like the moment I could try grown-up language with my father, the day he almost died.
“Mind your mouth,” he said, watching my mother pull into the driveway. He struggled to stand up, then limped toward my mother getting out of the car, her looking at him with a puzzled expression.
I had been thinking about baptism for a year. Most of my friends had taken the plunge, which in our church required a person to step out of the pew during the invitation song at the end of the sermon and walk to the front of the auditorium. There, he confessed his sins, and then the whole congregation would sing while the preacher slipped into chest waders and the person to be baptized put on a set of old clothes kept in the baptistry changing room. Then, they would step into the cold water and wait for the curtain behind the pulpit to open, so the two people in the water were framed for the audience like puppets on a stage. The sinner would hold his nose, and the preacher would dip him under the water, washing away all sin and protecting the baptized in the constant Grace of Jesus’s sacrifice. It was all very simple. A symbolic act of faith and dedication, but a life-long ticket to Heaven as long as the person continued to walk in faith. It would have made my mother so happy for my father and me to take that first step out of the pew. But something about it struck me the wrong way. Even as a child I had been a private person, and proud. The idea of confessing to an audience kept me in my seat, and after my father told me that I was already baptized, I never felt the need for anything more.
I got to my feet and leaned on the pew until the last wave of dizziness went away, took one last look at Jesus and Mary on either side of the pulpit, then went to the candle stand and slipped a twenty-dollar bill into the Blessing slot and lit candles for my father, my mother, my grandparents, my ex-wives, and myself.
The wait had taken something out of my mother. My father wondered aloud why I’d taken so long. I apologized and pulled up the map again. My mother leaned against the door with her eyes closed. My father stared out the window, thinking whatever it was he was thinking about, until the map guided us onto Coleman Avenue. He gestured to the right as we came up on an old yellow brick church building, aged with the rest of the neighborhood. A lettered sign trailer—a couple of letters missing, chained to a light pole in the parking lot—announced the Sunday sermon. I turned in.
“Elaine,” he said. He tried to turn in his seat to look at my mother, but he couldn’t twist that far. She opened her eyes.
“It’s Coleman Avenue.”
She struggled to sit up and looked out the window.
Coleman Avenue was her church when she was a girl. It was where she attended when she met my father, whose sister went to high school with my mother and introduced them when he came back from Korea and started plumbing. It was where they had been married. There were a couple of cars in the parking lot. My mother asked to be taken inside.
I went inside and saw a couple of black women who were working at a folding table in the lobby. An old man with tools pushed into his back pockets stood on a stepladder, working on a light in the ceiling. They watched me cross the lobby.
“Can I help you?” the man asked.
I tried to keep it simple. I explained that my parents had been married in the church and they were out in the car. They would like to see the building again, but that didn’t feel like enough. The man and the two women kept looking at me.
“I’m not from here,” I said. “I was from here, but I live in California now. I came home to see about my mother. She’s dying.”
“Lord have mercy,” one of the women said.
“They’re out in the car?” the old man asked.
I nodded, and then the dam broke, and I poured out how we were on our way to a long-term hospice facility. My father was old and I didn’t know what would happen when my mother died and he was alone for the first time in seventy years. I didn’t know what I would do when they both were gone. I couldn’t stop, and the old man listened from his ladder, nodding his head. He came down and placed his hand on my shoulder. The women smiled at me, and the man said, “Let’s get them inside, then.”
I helped my mother into the wheelchair and the old man held the door for us. His name was Samuel; “Brother Sam” he said, shaking my father’s hand, and he told us he was the retired preacher. He didn’t remember the names my father mentioned. My parents had joined another congregation in Midtown after they married, and all those old people were long gone. Sam had been preaching when the white congregation moved out of the city and into the suburbs and sold the property to a Black congregation. Now his son was the preacher and Coleman Avenue focused their ministry on after-school education and drug and alcohol recovery. “We’re always open for business,” Brother Sam said, chuckling.
The old preacher led us into the heavily shadowed auditorium. Most of the light came from narrow, yellow-stained windows. The dark wood ceiling with laminated beams and trusses made me think of being inside Noah’s Ark. I pushed my mother toward the pulpit, Brother Sam and my father behind me. In front of the pulpit stood the table used to hold the Communion during the services, with the words “This Do in Remembrance of Me” carved into the front. I swiveled my mother’s chair in front of the Communion table and turned her to face the pews, what she would have seen after she was escorted down the aisle by my grandfather. My father sat on the front pew and stared up at the podium. Brother Sam sat on the pew beside my father and put his hand on my father’s knee. My mother took in the auditorium, but then she leaned forward and stared at her hands folded in her lap. Her shoulders shook. I felt like a child lost, suddenly looking up and seeing no one or nothing I recognized. I leaned on the handles of the wheelchair because I thought I might fall.
Sam cleared his throat. “Your son told me what you all are going through. I’d like to pray for you, pray that the good Lord will guide you on the path ahead.”
My mother lifted her head and looked at him. Her hands trembled and her face was wet. Her voice shook, but she managed something between a smile and a grimace.
“I thank you for that. I’m not afraid to die. I know the Lord is waiting on me, and I’m going to be welcomed into Heaven.” She moved her hands to the wheels and tried to roll herself forward, but the chair went no more than a couple of inches. “It’s these two that need your prayers. They need more than that. They need to take Jesus into their hearts and be cleansed in baptism.”
Brother Sam smiled at her, a sad smile. He bowed his head and folded his hands and I suppose he prayed, though I didn’t hear anything.
My mother looked back at me, that look that had burned me with guilt for nearly sixty years, everything from childhood white lies and talking back to coming home from a high school party with beer on my breath. The worst was our regular Sunday evening phone calls that still made me feel like a teenager summoned to the kitchen table to talk whenever I got in trouble. Every Sunday, still, she asked, “Did you go to church today?” The answer was always no.
I couldn’t meet her eyes.
She looked at my father. He stared at the floor, his eyes streaming.
“Gene,” she said. “The only thing that makes me sad to die, afraid to die, is thinking that I might not ever see you again. You know I’ve carried that fear since I met you.”
He nodded. He closed his eyes. His face was wet. His hands shook. He put his hands on his knees and pushed himself up. “Brother Sam? It’s a lot to ask.”
“I never get tired of doing the Lord’s work,” Sam said. He started my father toward the door that led to the baptistry, then stopped and looked at me. My mother looked at me. My father turned and looked at me. I looked at all three of them, and then I stared back at the floor.
My mother rode with her eyes closed, the pain, both physical and emotional, too much, I supposed. We checked into the facility and got my mother into her room. She collapsed into the hospital bed while my father put away the few things she brought. A nurse came by to see her and he started an IV and got her pain meds going to make up for the long day. My father sat in a chair that converted to a bed. I would be back in the morning. I planned to stay in a hotel, not wanting to face my parents’ empty house. I kissed my mother on the forehead and my father as well. I held her hand and told her that I loved her, and I left.
I drove west toward the city, following the map on my phone toward the hotel. The sun was sinking and it lit up high clouds and the whole western skyline in orange and purple and blue. It felt good to mechanically follow the directions on the phone, not thinking. Traffic was heavy with people going home from work. The phone directed me off the main avenue and down a two lane and finally into a wooded section that I recognized as part of the Wolf River Greenway. I wondered what Google was doing to me, but I kept following the directions because it was easier than not to. The map bid me turn onto a gravel road, and then I rolled through the open gate made from welded pipes that would lock the road at ten p.m., according to the sign. It led me to a parking lot and I stopped and got out of the car. The place had changed since I last saw it as a teenager. I locked the doors and walked down the trail toward the river. I went off the trail and clambered down a steep muddy bank to a gravel shoal. The water flowed slowly, its usual dark brown lit by the sunset into a golden glow.
I stared at the water for a long time. The sun dipped lower, painting me and the gravel bar and the water in orange light. I thought about my mother and how much I loved her and how much I would miss her. I wondered why I couldn’t do something so simple as step into a pool of tepid water and let the preacher dip me under, even if it didn’t mean anything to me.
I was glad, at least, that my father had made her happy. My mother had her beliefs, and my father believed in her. It occurred to me that my mother was my father’s religion, and he’d spent his life dedicated to her, his happiness wrapped up in hers. I wondered why I had never been able to feel that way about the women I loved, or thought I loved. I thought about the last time I had walked beside this river, when I was an idealistic teenager and the opportunities of life were wide open to me.
There was a light current and the water made a trickling sound as it flowed over a shoal farther downstream. A great blue heron stood on the far bank, one foot raised and staring at me, alert to any danger I posed. I stepped into the water, which was cold, taking my breath as I went deeper, feeling my way across the slippery mud bottom to my knees, and then my waist. I tried to remember some of the Bible verses I’d memorized as a child, but I only pulled up scattered phrases. They reminded me of the kid I had once been, full of hope and looking forward to leaving Memphis and doing great things with my life. I missed that person.
I put my hand over my nose and closed my mouth and eyes and slowly lowered my body into the water.
A Mississippi native, Terry Engel has worked in particleboard mills and wood preservative treatment plants and as a lineman building high voltage powerlines. He earned a Ph.D. in writing from the University of Southern Mississippi and his work has appeared in The Sun, Mississippi Review, Georgetown Review, Open City, Buffalo Spree, Cream City Review, Dreamers Literary Magazine, Cave Region Review, prosel.onl, and River River Journal. Engel’s first novel, Natchez at Sunset, was published in 2021. His second novel, Artifacts, won the Wolfson Press Prose Prize and will be published in 2026. Engel teaches creative writing at Harding University in Arkansas.