All the Craters of the Moon

Arthur Church wasn’t really sure what he thought about death as he sat next to his mother’s deathbed, clenching and unclenching his hands.

“Arthur?” his sister touched his shoulder. “Are you okay?”

He jerked and then looked up at her. “I’m fine.”

She looked down at his hands, fumbling about as if the fingers had decided to wrestle themselves. She mistook it for fretting over their dying mother rather than his dread of being in a situation that required conversation and a display of empathy. He folded his arms giving his nervous hands a place to be.

Her grip on his shoulder grew more firm and he knew it was a sign of her decision to perform some matronly display, likely an assuring embrace. He pushed himself further down onto the chair understanding that standing at this point would surrender to her tight hug.

“Can I get you something? A glass of water?”

He shook his head and giving no indication of standing, his sister relented and settled for patting him on the shoulder before moving away. He turned his face back toward his mother. Or rather, what was still considered his mother. The cancer and treatments had taken most of what he could recognize as the woman that birthed and nurtured him. The hearty woman with warm skin, thick dark hair, and eyes that shone brightly with life, had left some time ago. The gaunt body that lay in the bed was half her weight with cool skin the consistency of tissue. Thin wispy hairs crowned her bald head and when she opened her eyes they were milky and unfocused. No, this was no longer his mother, it was a memorial for the woman they had lost.

But she was still alive, lying still as a stone waiting for something to take her away. To snip the tiny thread that held her fast, bound to this earthly plane. More maudlin thoughts he could just as soon do without.

He looked back at his mother and wondered how much longer.

“Can I bum one?” His cousin’s voice pulled him away from his shelter and returned him to reality. He slipped his hand inside his coat and produced a pack of cigarettes. He shook one out and offered it to her. “Thanks.” She held the cigarette limply in her hand, eyeing him with expectation. He produced his lighter and gave it a flick. After a starting drag she nodded a thank-you and then looked up into the sky. The Moon was waning. In the sliver Arthur could still make out the vague edge of a crater, Riccioli. It gave him some small comfort.

“You think there is a heaven up there somewhere?”

He turned his head to recognize her nagging pain of not knowing what lay ahead for all of them. He toyed with the idea of not answering but he knew the silence would be even more uncomfortable.

“I have no idea,” he offered, a statement neither committing to a choice nor offering insight into his own private supposition. It was better than a shrug.

“You must believe something. Your poor mother is dying in there and where do you think she will go next?”

He stifled his impulse to say, “In the ground” and instead offered the shrug he had avoided the moment before. It made no difference, he mused. She won’t be here so why wonder about what you cannot know. Take solace in the fact that you are still alive.

“Really?” Her voice carried a sudden harshness. “It’s your mother and you don’t even care what happens to her?” 

“There is nothing I can do, Denise. I’m not a doctor, minister, or grave digger. I have no influence on what happens next.” She stared at him, eyes wet with eventual tears, eyebrows raised in surprise at his frankness. She dropped the cigarette and left him, returning to the house and the settled gloom therein.

He watched her go, only feeling relief. Turning his attention to the Moon high in the night sky he looked at the sharp edge of Riccioli’s dimming crater and sighed.

“What did you say to Denise, Arthur?” Sitting on the steps leading to the front door he ignored her question and drew another toke from his cigarette. 

“She came into the house and started crying to Aunt Barbara. She said something about you being cruel.” Arthur remained silent. Nothing he could say would stem her righteous anger. Best to just let it run its course. He’d learned this over years of adolescence. Katherine was always trying to take over as the matron of the family - watchful, protective, stern, parental even. When their mother became seriously ill two years ago she immediately stepped in to fill the shallow void. She was more the mother than the one who owned that title. There was no vote, no choice, simply Kath working as the bonding glue of the family despite the fact that they neither wanted or needed it.

“Arthur! Answer me.”

“No thanks.”

Still looking into the darkness above the house he could sense her blossoming anger. Ignoring her would cause her anger to triple in intensity but like most revving engines, it would quickly burn through its fuel. “Arthur. I am talking to you! Do not ignore me!”

Do not ignore me was the first cough of the stalling engine. He need only wait for the final choke of I’m your sister for the engine to quit.

“Don’t play games. I am trying to help you despite your stubborn disregard. Our mother is dying and you can’t even acknowledge your own family? Listen to me! I’m your sister, goddammit.” He waited for her to sit down next to him.

She sat next to him silently for a couple minutes. He pulled one last breath from the cigarette. Katherine gave him a shoulder bump. “I know this is hard on you.” Her voice had returned to its normal octave and volume. “We’re all going through it. Even Denise.” 

“I guess I was too blunt,” he allowed. 

“I could have guessed. What did you say?”

“I said I have no control over what happens to mom and therefore it just doesn’t make any difference.”

“But it does. You need a way to remember her and a way to make peace with the fact that she is gone.”

“I do remember her and I am at peace with it.”

“She’s not dead yet, Arthur.”

He stubbed out the smoke on the step and turned to look at her. “But she is, Kath. She’s already gone. You just don’t realize it yet.”

He stood up and walked to his car. He didn’t look back.

His mother was pronounced dead twenty-three minutes later.

The next morning was his mother’s funeral and he welcomed it with all the exuberance of a dentist appointment. Everyone would be there. The amount of interaction would be unbearable. Familiar strangers making uncomfortable inroads and offering to listen if he needed an ear. Social boundaries collapsing under the weight of good intentions and tribal needs of community.

He sat on the edge of his bed. Closing his eyes he took himself away for a few minutes. He was there, tucked away in a crater on the moon. Plinius, one of his favorites. The western side of Plinius was scattered with hummocks while he resided on the smoother eastern plain hidden by the shadow of the rim. He let out a long breath and felt his body uncoil, his mind locating that silence he craved. 

He opened his eyes and looked at his watch. The funeral had already started. 

“Where the hell have you been?” Katherine hissed at him as he slid by her to take his seat. 

“Don’t start, Kath.”

“Can you ever just…” He gave her a look of warning that she knew better than to breach. Arthur knew she would be mulling his tardy arrival over in her mind. He didn’t care. He was fulfilling his required presence. His painful penance for being a member of the family. At the end of each speaker he nodded and waited, ticking off the participants one by one until the final speaker took the stand. His brother.

“We had a tough go of it when we were kids,” Alan started. Arthur cocked his head not expecting this lead-in to his brother’s eulogy. Was Alan really going to go there? He didn’t think his siblings would touch on any unpleasantness veiled in dark recesses of their families history. Especially at this event. Especially not Katherine. But Alan..? Would he take this unsuspecting crowd there? Shine a light into the spaces beneath the stairs? For the first time during the service Arthur was paying attention. 

“The three of us had each other but sometimes it wasn’t enough. We had to find ways of dealing with…bad times.” Arthur felt a pressure on his leg and found Katherine's hand gripping his knee with desperation. He looked at her profile, her eyes focused on Alan as her head gave a tiny, pleading shake. “We were the only ones that knew about it, knew about the horrors we sometimes had to face together or alone.” He turned toward the ornate coffin resting on its simple dais. “For years I dreamed of the day I would escape and on my 17th birthday I joined the military. And that was my escape from my father. But during those earlier years I also harbored a deep resentment of my mother. An unspoken betrayal. She was there. She knew. She…KNEW.” The last word caught in his throat and Katherine’s grip threatened to break Arthur’s skin. Alan took a moment to collect himself. The hall was tightly packed with silence.

“And then, ten years ago, I came home because the demon that was my father had finally died. At last I was completely free of his presence. But why bring this up now?” He stopped and Arthur could see him struggle to continue. Alan stared at the coffin as tears welled and in his eyes.

“After his funeral my mother approached me. We had not spoken since I left. My attitude was cold, bordering on cruel. But she would not let me leave. I argued that she had no need to explain herself. But at her insistence I listened. 

“She told me about her life with my father. The secret hell she lived all those years. How he had done things to her, threatened her with killing all of us if she ever intervened or sought help. She confessed she was not a strong woman and her ever present fear consumed her.” He looked at Arthur and Katherine. “We had each other sometimes but she had no one.”

Alan let out a small sound that unexpectedly tore at Arthur’s heart. “I want all of you to know the beautiful soul of this woman that was…is my mother” He bowed his head, said thank you, left the podium, walked past them all, and out the door. 

Arthur did not see him again that day.

Katherine, appalled that their dirty laundry was hanging on the line, scurried from the hall as if the building was on fire. Arthur chased after her through throngs of people wanting to offer condolences but still too stunned to know exactly what to say. He reached her just as she made it to her car. He slipped into the passenger seat as soon as he heard the door locks disengage. 

“Get out of my car,” she said, tears already dragging make-up down her face.

“No.”

She turned to him, rage compromising her beauty, and lifted a hand toward him. “Get the fuck out, Arthur!” He shook his head. She started to strike out at him, her small, fists a furry of anger and desperation. Arthur did not defend himself as a blow to the mouth produced blood and a heavier blow may have blackened his eye. Still he remained motionless.

Finally, as the tantrum eased, she slowed and then stopped. She looked at Arthur and said, “You’re bleeding.” She fell against him and cried. Through the windshield he could see her husband holding back two of their grown children, he and the children turned and walked back toward the funeral home.

“Let me put some ice on that eye.” 

Arthur’s eye was beginning to swell and he flinched from the ice pack. “I am sorry about hitting you.”

“Sure.”

“I am,” she said loudly enough to startle him.

He raised his hands in surrender and let her apply the pack. “Okay. Just don’t hit me anymore.” 

She pulled the ice away. “Why are you such an ass?”

“I think Alan pretty much laid it out don’t you think?”

“Are you incapable of being sensitive?”

“Pretty much. I’m at my best when I’m alone. You know this.”

Katherine thought for a moment. “I guess I did.” She looked at him as if seeing him much more clearly. “You always were.”

Katherine continued to regard him sitting there with a plastic bag of ice on his face. She could see him as he was, a child, hurt and broken, desperate for some indication that love and care existed. He was so small and frail and afraid. Often he would become so withdrawn that he was basically absent. “Do you still do that Moon stuff?”

“Moon stuff? Turn into a werewolf?” he said incredulously. 

Katherine let the remark pass. “You know, go off somewhere in your mind.”

Arthur felt suddenly under an incriminating spotlight. After all these years he regarded his trips as something deeply personal and not for public discussion. Embarrassment caused his neck and cheeks to tingle and redden.

“I’d rather not talk about it, Kath. Seriously.”

“You are,” she announced. “You are still doing it.” He shook his head and decided he needed to leave. She pushed him back into the chair. “Why? He’s dead, Arthur.”

“Makes no difference.”

“It does. He can’t hurt us any longer.”

“But, but I…” Emotions started straining within Arthur, long dormant and carefully and thoroughly restrained. He had to leave and not just to go home but to go far away. To escape to somewhere he could not be seen, heard. Touched. A place where he was utterly alone. “I’m broken,” he finally sputtered as he pushed past her for the doorway.

“Please wait,” she pleaded and the words held him captive for a moment. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her. He stepped out of the kitchen and into the front room, the front door escape just feet from him. “I love you, Arthur!” she cried out.

The weight of those words broke through his resolve and it all exploded within him. Memories of him crying while his sister held him, softly telling him he was loved, that this would all end one day. Doing everything she could to comfort him from his nightmarish life. He crumbled to the floor and wept. Great torrents of captive feelings ravaged him as sobs and groans escaped unbridled. In the tidal release he lost his place in the world and all he knew was that Katherine was holding him, keeping him safe. Just like when he was a young boy.

He stood on the porch looking wistfully at the Moon. It was fuller and he could see Theophilus calling. Over two miles deep with a mile high triple peaked mountain at its center. The relatively smooth floor swept clean by over two billion years of solitude. He wanted to be there, shielded from everything he knew by sheer walls of the carter’s rim. 

“You’re doing it now, aren’t you?” He turned to see Katherine walk out onto the rear porch. “And thanks for not smoking in my house.” 

“You’re welcome and no, I’m not. I’m here. Just enjoying the view.”

“But you want to be there don’t you?” He nodded. “You know, I kind of envied your ability to just go away. Just tune out the world and be somewhere else. There were a lot of times that I wanted to be in some empty place where there were no people or things.”

“The Moon.”

“Maybe not the Moon. It’s a bit too remote.”

He pulled on his cigarette and looked back at the Moon glowing in the heavens. “The Moon is as perfect of a place to escape to as there will ever be. No one can get to you there. Complete solitude.” He drew another hit from the cigarette and crunched it against the railing before flicking it out into the yard. “When we…when I was going through something really bad I just wanted to run away. But where could a kid go? I didn’t know enough to think police. I was too embarrassed to go to a neighbor. I watched the Moon Landing and was struck by the fact that those astronauts were completely alone there. A whole tiny planet that had just two people on it. Then there were the craters. Deep, dark, the perfect hiding place.” He looked at Katherine. “For a little kid it was the answer to the hell he lived in. If he could sit in a Moon crater no one would ever hurt him again. So that’s where I’d go when things got bad.” She stepped closer and smiled wistfully at him. “I would have taken you and Alan there if I could have.”

“I know. I’m sorry you had to think that.”

“It was never your fault.”

“I was the oldest, you the youngest. I felt kind of responsible for you.”

“You are my sister. You did what you could.” She moved timidly closer and, not challenged, she moved next to him and hugged him. Arthur reflexively pulled back at her touch but relaxed and let her expression ease the tension of his existence. “I’ve spent far too much of my life on the Moon, Kath.”

“I think we all have, Arthur.”

END