windows, on the gallery steps over coffee, beers, whatever he was drinking at the time, my iced tea. He’d been a stranger to me for most of my life. Only in those last years did I come, as much as I ever will, to know him. Not an easy time for either of us. When, overwhelmed and confused, waking each morning with terrors I think he knew all too well, I fled, he risked everything he had to find me. There at the end it was Don who came. Following up with Greevy, the forensic entomologist, he learned where the body they’d first thought mine had come from. Don stepped up to me one day outside a Circle K across the river in Algiers to tell me my father was dying.
Finally it doesn’t much matter what’s true here, what imagined. In trying to re-create my father, I’ve used whatever sleights and subterfuges seemed to work. The life he lived in the mind was every bit as important to him and as real as, often more so than, the one he lived externally. He loved old blues, the flatness and predictability and emotional charge of them, things like “Po’ Boy, Long Way from Home,” “Going Back to Florida,” “Death Letter Blues.” And he loved improvisation, Sidney Bechet, Eric Dolphy, Charlie Parker, Monk, Lester Young, those unexpected backflips, selfcrossings and contradictions. There at the end oddly enough, Alouette tells me, it wasn’t these he listened to, but Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” playing it over and over.
Please take these chains off of me, I can’t use them anymore.
Deborah found him on the floor in the hall. She’d called back to see if they could have dinner before the play and, getting no answer, not even the machine, grew worried. Five tries later, she had Willie drive her over. Still had her key. Almost immediately after speaking to her and hanging up the phone my father had suffered another stroke, not a small one this time. He’d been unconscious, how long he had no idea, and, since, had been trying to drag himself back to the phone, but the right side of his body had seceded. Whole damn thing (he said weeks later, laughing) went south.
God, how I remember his laugh.
Here’s what else Alouette tells me:
He wasn’t able to do much there towards the end. I’d help him down to the park, or he’d sit on the porch for hours with a blanket, watching people come and go. Once every week or so he’d try to make dinner and I’d pretend to eat it. Most nights, I’d read to him.
He’d adopted a pigeon. Marvin. First took to Marvin because he was apart from the rest. Something was wrong with the bird-its beak was misshapen, it hobbled when it walked, dipped when it flew. Lew’d go clambering out into the backyard whenever Marvin showed up, to put out food. He’d run off all the others; after a while Marvin learned it was okay, he could stay. One afternoon Lew found Marvin in the bag of feed. He’d got in there and it was so cramped he couldn’t get back out. Lew tipped the bag over and he walked on out. I don’t know how many times your father told me that story.
He always knew Marvin wasn’t long for this world. And over a space of weeks he watched him go down, feeding him, putting out water, talking to him the whole time. Last few days, Marvin couldn’t even get to the dish. Lew’d take it out to him and stand there while he ate, keeping the others away.
Then one morning Marvin didn’t come. Lew spent most of two days out there in the yard waiting, watching. And when he finally gave up and came in, it was as though it was all over for him, nothing else was left.
Your father went to bed. The next morning I took his coffee in and couldn’t rouse him. He wouldn’t speak to me. I’m not sure he could even see anymore. He turned his face to the wall. You know the rest.
There’s precious little. Though in a sense at least my father’s life goes on in these books, just as did all those lives he lived in his mind.
Midnight as I write this final page. I just walked out on the porch. Clouds are coming in fast over the lake, butting their blunt, dumb heads at dark sky. Soon it will be raining. He always loved storms, I remember.
I miss you, Lew.
