DEATH OF A MAYFLY - Chapter 1

Click the above voiceover to hear this chapter read by Walter Rhein of I’d Rather Be Writing.

Sweat dripped lazily down my neck, stopping only where my blue polyester blouse pressed up against the pews of the First Baptist Church. Somewhere behind the pulpit an old light bulb buzzed, pointless against the heat of the July sun pouring through the stained glass—graphic depictions of the crucifixion of Christ, the stoning of Stephen, and some sort of haphazard battle of good and evil. I choked silently at the gumminess in my throat, without water for hours and clamped virtuously tight by a row of buttons that ended at my chin. From up in the pulpit Daddy raged, paced, sweated, and turned darker and darker shades of puce, then purple, then almost mauve, highlighted by the fractured summer sun. He knew the stories, every single one--the four horsemen, seven plagues, seven angels with their seven trumpets, fighting battle, after battle, after battle. He talked about hell like he’d seen it, walked in and amongst the wicked, met the devil head-on, and won.

I stared at the wilted Bible in my lap, slumping slightly into Mom’s shadow to avoid the heat. She stared at her Bible, too, silently following along with her long fingers. She couldn’t hear anything, the roller coaster of highs and lows, weeping, grunting, screaming, the Sunday morning revue worthy of a blinking Broadway marquee. Mom had never heard a word of Daddy’s sermons, the lucky dog. Born deaf and mute somewhere east of here, she’d been mercifully lifted from a destitute life of factory work on one of Daddy’s mission trips along the Missouri River basin.

But despite her inabilities Mom seemed to understand everything Daddy preached, nodding and praying in her little awkward way, mumbling sometimes louder than she knew. A quick nudge and a grateful smile, and she’d go back to her nonsensical whispering, every parable and psalm already memorized.

I could hear just fine. It wasn’t my ears that were broken, but likely my brain. I didn’t understand any of it, right down to the simplest verses Daddy said were meant for children. I was hardly a child anymore, finishing my last year of high school and nearly as tall as Mom, but worthless as a preacher’s daughter. Anyway, that’s what Daddy thought. He’d called me dense and useless more times than I could count, swearing under his breath from the back of the house, blaming Mom for burdening him with such a “retarded kid.” I didn’t deny it; I knew he was right. It didn’t last long anyway--a couple ice cubes and three fingers of something strong, and he’d fall asleep in his tattered brown easy chair and leave us alone for a little while.

With a gruff “amen” Daddy brought us out of our trance and all around me pews creaked as sweaty backsides shifted to find a square inch of coolness for a few seconds of relief. He opened his Bible and looked over the pince-nez frames nearly hidden behind his nose—swollen from a late Saturday night—and out into the sea of heathens that filled his church each week. He knew them for what they were, dressed in their finest, but filled with hatred and sins of the flesh. I wondered if he looked at me like that as well, buttoned so tight I could hardly breathe in this heat, the tips of my fingers raw from endless hours of studying the onion-skin pages of the Book of John, Proverbs, Psalms, Acts, and Revelation. Daddy loved the Book of Revelation best of all, something about the fantasy of it, graphic and quite violent, but more like a fairy tale than all the others. From the pulpit his voice washed up and down in screams and whispers like a boat on the waves of a great storm, sweat pouring down his cheeks and dripping onto the lectern. He shook his fists; he wiped his brow. His feet pounded a path back and forth like a caged animal, staring at every guilty parishioner, who in turn avoided his gaze with feigned interest in their page, a dropped pencil, a quick moment of prayer. There wasn’t a breath of air left in the room as we each held our own, waiting for him to announce our transgressions in front of everyone. But when he closed the Bible and bowed his head, rows of tense shoulders relaxed, the oxygen returning with a collective sigh. We’d made it through another week.

I played a few hymns on the old upright at the end of the sermon each Sunday, the congregation following tunelessly along. “Nothing but the blood of Jesus.” “There is power in the blood.” “Are you washed in the blood?” Daddy enjoyed the bloodiest hymns most of all and sang over top everyone with his roaring baritone. I’d memorized all the songs long ago, but my fumbling, sweaty fingers always managed to hit a wrong note or two and I’d see him twitch out of the corner of my eye. It meant more time in front of the piano practicing from the hymnal, but nothing modern, no rock and roll, no jazz. Maybe a little Beethoven, some Chopin, a slow one-handed attempt at Rachmaninoff, music written for an impossibly-wide reach, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

The crowd filed out of the church, a low rumble of, “My, what a sermon. He’s so right about what he said in such-and-such. I’m going to have to read that verse over again when I get home.” I rolled my eyes and reached for the dustpan, knowing full well no one was going to read any verses when they got home. They’d get just out of earshot and it would be back to gossiping about the neighbor’s wife, you know the one, unbuttoning her blouse a little lower when her husband was gone on business. Or the men who stepped in for a Sunday drink after church, just a quick pint of beer with the “boys” downtown while their wives basted pork roasts in their perfect kitchens. Six hours later they’d crawl home, missing dinner all together, a snoring puddle in front of an unwatched football game. Sunday, after Sunday, after Sunday. No one was reading any verses.

Mom and Daddy left me to sweep under the pews, gather up errant bulletins and plastic communion cups, and wipe up grape juice drips solidified by the heat. I didn’t love church, but sometimes I loved the church, being there all alone and letting the less-stifling outside air pour through the sanctuary and out a small back window propped open with a wire hanger. I didn’t get much unsupervised time, even at my age, and being there felt like just a minute of freedom to call my own, to lay back in the pews and stare up at those stories I didn’t understand, the caricatures glaring down at me in vibrant blues, reds, and greens that changed depending on the time of day. But home life didn’t wait; certainly Daddy didn’t wait. I tossed the damp rag in a bucket, pulled the window shut, and locked the heavy church doors behind me.

At home Mom was already cubing potatoes for the salad we ate every Sunday afternoon, tossing them in a pot of boiling water and pulling a cookie tray of bloody beef livers from the fridge. Liver and onions, it never failed. I hated liver and onions. Mom hated liver and onions. But Daddy insisted that we eat it every week with leftovers on Mondays. If we complained he’d whip out a ready-made verse from his back pocket, pointing out God’s clear will that we as women submit to the husband, to the father. Lucky for him, he gets to be all those things. Always liver and onions. So no spaghetti, no cold cuts, no cob salad. Only tasteless beef livers cooked to leather, slathered with a brown slop of what used to be onions, and always, always potato salad. I choked it down, the pasty blackened meat that collapsed and squeaked in my teeth, begging not to be eaten as much as I didn’t want to eat it.

After dinner I cleared the table and Daddy poured himself his usual three fingers of gin, which he said soothed his edema. I don’t know if it did or not, but it made him nice and sleepy and Mom and I could sneak away for a bit to the little back room behind the kitchen.

Daddy’s in fine form today, Fe, she’d write, always on a yellow legal pad, I don’t think he’d notice if we took the car.

“No, probably not,” I whispered, Mom reading my lips. “Where should we go?”

Ice cream. A glass of wine at the Grand Union. We snickered.

“Shall we order a steak and stay the night? I’ll go put on some makeup and do my hair.”

I’ll grab a roll of cash from the safe, all hundreds so we have enough to tip the bellhop. She grinned. We both knew we weren’t going anywhere. Daddy, drunk as he was, watched his gauge like a hawk. In a town this small a tank of gas could last weeks, and I knew he counted the days just to be sure.

“I wish,” I said, watching Mom’s smile fade.

Me too. But with a twitch of an eyebrow she scribbled a deliciously obscene joke she’d read in one of her contraband magazines that I knew she hid under the mattress. For a preacher’s wife she had the mouth of a sailor and plenty of non-churchy opinions, for which I loved her dearly, and we’d laugh in as close to silence as we could while Daddy sank deeper into his chair.

At night I could hear them “arguing” from their bedroom below mine, Daddy’s spitting and cursing wafting up through the furnace grate under my bed. I say “arguing” because of course it was only him. But Mom’s silence, stoic and unrelenting, played louder in my head than all “fuck-yous” Daddy flung at her like slow-motion projectiles. And when she’d shut her eyes he’d grip her chin hard until she opened them again, more wet obscenities launched into her eyelashes and running down her cheeks. I tried to imagine how she endured all this in absolute silence, but then again maybe it might be nice to just turn down the volume once in a while.

“You burned dinner,” he growled up through the grate. Silence. “The food you cook is shit. It’s embarrassing. The neighbors can smell this garbage. Look at me. Look at my legs. It’s actually making me sick.” Of course it wasn’t Mom’s cooking making Daddy sick. He drank like a fish and spent all non-raging hours on his backside deflating like an asthmatic weather balloon. But I digress.

“Tomorrow’s dinner had better taste like fucking food or...” A static pause. “What was that?” Mom must have slipped, the slightest flicker of her lips, maybe an eyebrow. I heard a loud slap and then nothing else. Daddy’s heavy footsteps headed back to the chair, unmuting the football game, or basketball, whatever it was, the jumbled commentary coming quietly up the stairs just outside my bedroom door. Up went the footrest and I could hear the tiny tinkling of ice cubes spinning slowly round and round an etched tumbler, something Daddy always did when he was coming down from a rage. Spinning, spinning, a long sip, a sigh. Mom’s soft footsteps headed to her little bathroom where she’d sit facing the mirror, another at her back, creating an endless reflection, smaller and smaller, the ashen strength in her eyes never giving anything away. I knew she was washing her face in cold water to stop the tears, touching up her powder over the fading red marks, and straightening up anything else Daddy had grabbed, or twisted, or torn.

As early as I can remember my mother taught me to write. And not just write, but write from the soul, and with complete honesty. Write as if no one will ever read a word, she’d said. And though I’d never seen them, I knew she kept journals and diaries of a sort somewhere, filled with years of secrets and heartache, drama and dreams. I wondered where they were, if I’d ever get to read them. But I knew she, too, wrote for no one but herself and would likely take every secret with her one day.

And I struggled.

I wanted to know why she didn’t stand up to Daddy. Her silence felt like weakness, and I spent a lot of time writing feverish manifestos of “if it were me,” as if I somehow held the key to the perfect family, or at least some kind of supreme feminist ideology.

June 13

Stand up. Walk out. Take me with you.

But with the changing of the tides I, too, backed down to Daddy over studies, music, food, friends, whatever he spat and fussed about before slinking down into his chair. I had no greater strength than my mother, my only role model for womanhood, and would inevitably fold under any kind of confrontation. All we had was confrontation, so fold I did.

But Mom stood in the way, a ray of heavily-powdered sunshine, leaving little notes under my pillow, dreams for us to chat about later.

Hey Sis, something for you under the mattress. Shall we start packing? I reached under to find a postcard of some faraway place, probably something Mom had picked up at the drugstore back by the mail counter. Sometimes it was Fiji--fictionally-blue waters filled with angelfish, the white sands littered with tourists whose only worry was when to reapply the suntan lotion. Once she had brought home a picture of a beautiful chalet somewhere in the Swiss Alps, the front-room lights glowing outside on the fresh snow, and I imagined the perfect family inside with their hand-knit sweaters and little peaked caps. I had no idea what traditional Swiss people wore, but probably little peaked caps.

And always with the dreams, the pictures, I’d find a crisp little notebook and pencil, small enough to fit into the secret stash that she knew I kept hidden away. She never looked for it, and more importantly Daddy never knew.

But we could only dream. And when she caught me looking anxious she’d crinkle her eyes as if to say, “We’re fine. Stop worrying.”

I lay back on my bed, twisting the faded orange knots of yarn between my toes like I’d done ever since I could remember. I thought about college, leaving Fort Benton and throwing myself out into the world with real people, dancing late on a Saturday night with friends, maybe drinking myself silly a few times between classes, nursing a headache through midterms. I wanted all of it. I shut my eyes, imagining the music I’d play after all those years in a conservatory somewhere far away. No hymns this time, just losing myself in the symphonies of some fantastically dead composer who understood me better than most living people.

I lay there waiting for the creaking of his footrest, the spinning of the ice, Mom’s retreat to the bathroom, reaching my fingers under the mattress and brushing at the corners of what was now a pretty big collection of postcards, magazine clippings, and other-worldly contraband that Mom and I had collected over the years. I slid out the notebook and rested it on my chest, thinking about all the little houses on our block, all the blocks from one end of town to the other, the happy porch lights always on, the hedges like cartoons. I wondered if they had secrets, if they wrote things down that no one would ever read. Probably so—hard not to in a small town like Fort Benton. Cities didn’t have secrets. City kids didn’t need to write. The lust, the crime, the greed, they hung it proudly on every street corner next to a neon sign: “open 24 hours.”

Outside my window the street light clicked on, 5:00. Everything downtown would be closed now, the quiet little secrets tucked away. I tapped the nearly flattened eraser against my chin, smelling the graphite, scribbling down a thought for another day.

June 8

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CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

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Ellie is an author, editor, and owner of Red Pencil Transcripts, and works with filmmakers, podcasts, and journalists all over the world. She lives with her family just outside of New York City.