Teaberry Gum

Caitlin popped a piece of Teaberry gum into her mouth. Cool wintergreen mint, a note of clove, and a slightly fruity sweetness coated her tongue. The taste reminded her of Grandpa Karl, her father’s father. She felt a tear run down the right side of her face and drip into the corner of her mouth.

She’d made her son stop at the gas station before they drove to her father’s funeral so she could buy a pack of gum or mints. She didn’t tell Ethan that she was stalling. She didn’t want to go to her father’s funeral or see her extended family, or her mean brothers and their cold wives. 

When she’d gone into the little store to get gum, she’d been surprised to see the old brand. The last time she’d had Teaberry Gum was when her Grandpa Karl gave her a piece, many years ago, before he died. She’d only known him until she was six-years-old, but in those few short years together, he’d protected and loved her, like no one else.

She took it as an omen that he was protecting her. So, she felt a little better. She knew it was foolish, but she still wished it were true. She remembered going to her grandfather’s funeral with her father and she, just barely six, comforting her father because her mother refused to attend. For some reason, probably jealousy, Loretta refused to go. It would mean she respected him, and Loretta was never merciful to anyone who might have some control of her life. 

Later, she seemed to have forgotten how hate-filled she’d been and talked about her husband’s father as if she thought him a good man, commenting on what an adventurer he’d been.

And he had been an adventurer, running away from home after his mother suddenly died and getting a job among the Irish newspaper boys, selling papers on the street corners of Cleveland and winning a contest for selling the most papers. He wasn’t afraid to take on the world, to leave the past behind and make a place for himself. His son, Jack, her father, was nothing like him, however. He took after his untrusting mother. He’d left home, but only to join the Army because there was really nothing else for him to do. Or maybe he wanted to connect to his father somehow.  But he was afraid of everything, and he didn’t like people, unlike his father.

Caitlin turned to Ethan, who was driving them the 50 miles southwest of Indianapolis to the little town where she’d grown up nearby. “I don’t want to go.”

“I know, Mom. We don’t have to stay long. We can just attend the funeral and then leave afterwards. We don’t have to go to your cousin’s house.”

“And how would that look? You know how they love to hate me.”

“Who cares what they think? You have no obligation to them. They’ve never done a kind thing for you your entire life.”

He was right. Unwanted memories unspooled before her eyes, blurred by tears. She didn’t know how to mourn her father. She’d really had no relationship with him except a bad one with a very few scattered times when he’d been kind or did the right thing. But the bad memories had been really bad. He had loved her mother, a woman who had come to hate her for no apparent reason, or at least it wasn’t apparent for a long time.

When Caitlin was 16, she’d figured out that Loretta had gotten pregnant by her father when Loretta had been the same age and her 25-year-old father had just been back a few months from Occupied Germany. She suspected she’d gotten pregnant on purpose because Loretta was a pathological liar who only knew how to manipulate people. She never befriended anyone unless they showered her with adulation – which could come easy because Loretta was a beautiful, petite blonde with blue eyes, a pert nose, perfect skin, and a tiny waistline.

Her mother had wanted her then, so she could move out of the house of the mother that abandoned her after her father died in an accident at his sawmill. Evelyn had remarried an alcoholic con man who liked to touch her teenage daughter a little too much until Loretta pushed him down the stairs one night and the police came and put him in jail. Then, she’d wanted her so badly, that she couldn’t wait to get pregnant until after they’d married.

And the con man stepfather had threatened her husband-to-be with a call to the police about her father’s age. Jack, always quick to lose his temper, threatened the old drunk and the old wino knew the tenuous limits of the Army vet. He was brooding and handsome and could be bullying, so few people had ever said no to him either. So, the stepfather had backed off. Besides, all he really wanted was a payoff. He would try again later, several times.

Her father had loved her then and showed it until she was around five, when they’d moved to a farm in the southern part of the county. The only line tying them to her grandfather now was the Big Walnut River, which flowed right next to her grandfather’s farm in the northern part of the county all the way to about a mile from their farm, paralleling the road in front of their house. She sometimes rode her bike to the river, especially when her cousins came over. She saw it every day on her way to the elementary school where all the teachers were old and cold and liked to spank the children. Her father had found his place, and it was beautiful and peopled with desolation. 

The people were brutal and unforgiving, just like her mother and just like who he was becoming.

Caitlin turned to Ethan. “I don’t know how to mourn him. I feel empty inside. Devoid… of everything.”

Ethan smiled. “That’s okay, Mom. Grief is a strange thing. It takes it’s own path.”

“But I don’t think I feel any grief. I mean, he really died 14 years ago, when he stopped taking his blood pressure medicine after Mom died and he began having all those strokes. He hasn’t known who I was for years. Or not intellectually. He still acted like the same SOB he always was to me, though. So, some part of him remembered me.”

Caitlin spit out the gum because it had lost it’s flavor and popped another piece into her mouth. Once again, there was a little bomb of cool wintergreen, combined with a slightly warm sugary flavor. Her grandfather bought the gum at the Y-Palace Diner, where they kept his coffee cup in a special place because they loved him. She remembered the starchy smell of navy bean soup with bits of ham, and cornbread on the side, that they would serve.  Good, simple country food. And the sweet, aromatic smell of the Homemade Brand Cigar that he always bought on his way out the door. To this day, she loved the smell of cigars. In college, when she’d been lonely, she’d bought Tiparellos to remind herself of her grandfather.

Unlike her father, her grandfather had loved her unconditionally. The others hadn’t really loved her at all. Her father had tried to love her, and he had, until shortly after they’d moved to the farm. He used to bring her candy from the general store where he parked his car when he commuted to work in Indianapolis. After work, he would stop in the store with the ceiling fans and the diner attached to it and buy her a Tootsie Pop, usually red or orange – “girlie colors,” he would say, and her brother would get green or blue.

Finally, they were in town and her son pulled into the parking lot behind the funeral home. They walked inside and her son took her sweater and hung it on a coat hanger.

Suddenly, she felt a vigorous tapping on her shoulder. She jumped and laughed.

“Hey, Cait. Dad’s over there.”

  “Sean. You scared me.” 

She could feel her heart beating hard. She had an exaggerated startle reflex from PTSD. Her brother didn’t know what it was from because he’d never bothered to get therapy for his trauma. He’d drink and go to church. Despite his pretense, she made small talk with him. She heard a slight quiver in his voice, even though he smelled like beer. She felt startled that he was sad. At every family gathering, even their mother’s funeral, she’d never seen him cry. Of course, it wasn’t allowed in their household when they were growing up. If you cried, you just made Jack and Loretta that much angrier and you got a harder whooping. Sometimes, her father would pull off his belt and make her drop her pants while he slashed her against the legs and buttocks. She had spent years in a psychiatrist’s office, trying to reconcile the man who dominated every conversation with strangers to get them to like him with the man who was quietly and constantly furious at home. 

She walked over to the casket.   He was thinner than she remembered and lay in a beautiful golden oak casket. His white hair was combed carefully, and a tiny bit longer than he’d worn it while alive. He looked elegant and still handsome, even at 88 years old. She wasn’t surprised. He could have been a movie star. When he was young, his hair was just a half-shade lighter than black, and he had ruddy skin, high cheekbones, and large brown eyes. He looked like he had Spanish blood, she had always thought, even though, his last name was Scots Irish. Women had thrown themselves at him his whole life. Even though they knew he was married, many of them didn’t care.

An overwhelming wave of sorrow washed over her, like the smell of gladiola sprays, the favorite flowers of dead people everywhere. Or so all the mourners thought. She felt sorry for her father. She felt sorry for the relationship they could have had but didn’t because of the jealous interference of a mother who’d been a child all her life because of the abandonment she’d suffered when her father died, and her mother ran off with a drunk. She felt angry at her two brothers, who’d never defended her from her parents – but it was okay, because at least she wasn’t them. She overcame the trauma. Despite her many mistakes along the way, she’d birthed two good, intelligent children who loved her. And she’d done it without beating and haranguing them, trusting in the knowledge that human beings want to be good, will gravitate to the good, because that is where love is found.

She realized that her brothers had failed in ways they couldn’t see. Mostly, they pretended to everyone that everything in their lives was fine, just like all their cousins and aunts and uncles. They took everything at face value –like most Midwesterners. Her brother Sean never met a wolf dressed as a lamb that he wouldn’t invite into his home. He’d defy people to argue with him that taking a belt or spanking his young boys had altered them. People from the city and people of color were all alike to him – untrustworthy, criminals, and violent. He never thought of himself as violent. 

He drank every day. Yet, he was a good guy and sensible and she had been stupid and wild because she’d dared to challenge the way her parents acted and treated her.

Caitlin realized she’d been crying. Her father’s face came back into focus as she stood over the casket. She felt a gentle tap on her shoulder. Again, she jumped.

“Hey Mom.” She turned to face Ethan. He threw his arms around her and whispered. “It’s going to be all right.”

“I know. I just don’t want to be here and deal with all their judgments.”

“They’re being nice.”

“Are they? Only one person has come up to me and told me they were sorry and asked me how I was doing. I told Sean that I loved him, and he just stared at me.”

“Aww. I’m sorry.”

Ethan was naïve in some ways. He was only 26 and he paid more attention to what people said and less to what they did. Caitlin blamed herself because she’d taught him that there was good in all people, or he’d interpreted it that way. What she’d thought at the time was true for most people but during her years of seeing a psychiatrist, she’d cautioned her that there were exceptions to the rule, that there were people who felt nothing for other people – no empathy, no sympathy, no compassion whatsoever and she was often prey for those sorts of people. They seemed to smell her many vulnerabilities.

It didn’t help that she’d been beautiful and petite like her mother. It only made violent men emboldened to try and brutalize her. She’d had no confidence, so when they told her it was her fault, she believed them, because everyone during her childhood had told her the same thing. It had never occurred to her that her father had taken them to an impoverished place full of angry people like him. 

This was America, he had said, the majority is always right. It didn’t occur to her that what he’d said wasn’t true, that it was the majority ruled – and that ruling wasn’t the same as being right. 

Caitlin’s cousin Carrie walked over, put her arms around her and hugged her. Her youngest brother Patrick and his wife walked over and hovered on the edge of their conversation, not saying a word. He had been this way the last few times she’d seen him. He loved to eavesdrop on her. When she told Carrie that her daughter was living in England, he’d given his wife a pointed look. They wanted to believe her daughter didn’t like her. She wanted to tell them that she talked to her almost every day and that her daughter worshipped her, just as she adored her daughter, but she’d decided a long time ago that it wouldn’t matter. He’d always seen what he wanted to see. 

Caitlin had never been like her brothers. She’d been the child chosen to tell the truth. Or, she’d chosen to do it, despite them. When her mother had one of her breakdowns, she had been the one who would tell her father, usually. Her brothers pretended as if they didn’t see. Or would accuse her of lying about what was going on. Sometimes her father would. But she never did. She’d been the child who had seen everything – the ugliness of her mother’s hate and insecurity, the seething rage of her father and the depressions they both blamed on each other. 

They would eventually blame their anger on her, until when she was 16 – the same age her mother had gotten pregnant with her, her mother had picked up a baseball bat and tried to beat her to death with it.

She had managed one good swing at her head – and missed by about 2 inches. She’d known better than to turn her back and run. She’d leaped forward, jerked the bat out of her hands and ran out of the house with it and slung it into a field of six-foot-tall corn where it would take her hours to find it. 

When her father had come home from work, her mother lied and told him that Caitlin had “raised her hand” to her and he told her to get out of the house. She’d pleaded with him and told him the truth, but her mother kept telling him that he had to choose between them and that if he didn’t choose her, she would leave him. So, naturally, like he’d done ever since he’d met her, he chose her mother.

She’d hitchhiked to her best friend’s house where she stayed for the next 2 weeks until it was clear she couldn’t stay any longer and she called and begged her father to let her come home. He’d pretended that she’d done something terrible to her mother and she’d had to apologize. At 18, she went away to college, despite her mother trying to talk her father out of sending her and she didn’t come back home until she was 25. Her mother was in the midst of another breakdown, which spiraled from days spent in bed to sleepless nights with flights of fancy so ridiculous, she thought she could perform ballet at the age of 42. 

She had another breakdown around five years later, and then another seven years later and then another, until at 60, she finally started taking lithium and some other medications and her mood started to stabilize. All those years Jack had told her that her problems were “all in her head” and that “therapists were crazy” and that she shouldn’t listen to any of them. But she finally overcame his nagging and bullying and did what she wanted and tried to stay sane.

The minister announced the service was beginning and they all seated themselves. “Today, we are gathered here to mourn the death of John Joseph “Jack” MacKenzie…” He droned like the bumblebees in Caitlins butterfly garden. She knew she should pay attention, but she couldn’t. 

Caitlin popped another piece of Teaberry gum into her mouth and savored the complex flavors. She realized she was like her grandfather. Slowly, she felt herself rise to the ceiling until she was above them all, flying, rolling, tumbling, and sweeping over their heads. She felt a tingling from her toes to her fingertips to her scalp. She could see herself sitting below, nodding her head. She flew across the room to watch them all. She had never felt anything so magnificent! She was flying. She was free.