The Rattlesnake

The wind blew by in soft gusts, carrying the gentle smell of freshly cut grass to Micah’s nose. The sun was out in full force, and he had taken refuge in the wooden structure that used to house him on days just like this so many years ago. The old treehouse had actually held up rather beautifully. He looked around at the beams and felt a smile spread across his lips as memories came flooding back to him. 

He was too tall to stand in the treehouse. At 6 foot 4, he was a grown man, and he considered briefly what it had been like to have once been so tiny in such a big world -- given how small he still felt most days now. He felt that somehow he was both exactly like the child he had once been and nothing like him at all. His life had worn on him greatly, and though his face was rough with stubble and his voice bellowing and deep, he felt on this particular summer day that he knew even less about life than he had two decades ago. 

He almost couldn’t believe when that thought crossed his mind that it had really been twenty years since he stepped foot in this treehouse. When he was twelve years old, he and his father built it together in the June heat. His father was a ruggedly masculine and generally unfeeling man, but Micah admired him deeply. A diligent assistant, Micah had carried nails and stabilized the wooden beams for him with his tiny hands while his father wordlessly pounded away with his hammer. Micah watched as he effortlessly glided the birch across the saw that was planted on the cement walk-out. He remembered thinking it was incredible how something so complicated could look so fluid, like water folding out of the sea in perfect crests. 

Micah bent down and poked his head through the doorway on the East side of the treehouse. His knees popped as he pushed himself out of the interior and let his feet dangle off the side, hitting the ladder with his heels as he swung his feet back and forth. He pressed his hands on either side of him, propping him up and letting his head hang back. The sun felt warm and nostalgic on his skin. Beads of sweat began to form on his forehead, and he moved his left hand up to loosen his necktie. 

The sweltering August sun was hot enough, but his attire certainly didn’t help. He had many suits in his closet back in Chicago, but he only had one for funerals. He hadn’t had many run-ins with the occasion yet - unlike business meetings or lunches with the important client of the week - so he had much less variety in his bereavement garb. Only one suit, the one he wore, was appropriate for the occasion, and it was profoundly uncomfortable in the Georgia humidity. 

He looked out at his old family home and beyond it at a forest of green. He could see the top of his old school from here. Athens was small - his colleagues in Chicago might condescendingly call it quaint - and he felt dreadfully out of place. It wasn’t really the suit, or the expensive watch he heard ticking away on his wrist,  although they certainly played their own role. Deeper than that, it was the man he had become that felt wrong here. His head fell and he gazed down at his left hand, toying with the gold band on his ring finger. 

“Got room for one more?”

Micah jumped. He had been too focused on his ring to notice his mother approaching the treehouse. She traversed the backyard gracefully, as she’d done a thousand times to retrieve him for dinner. She was twenty years older, but at this moment, he thought she looked just as he did when she raised him. 

“Honestly, probably not,” Micah said with a small chuckle that was more like a huff. “But you sure can try.”

He moved to the side and let his mother climb the ladder. He held out his hand for her as she reached the top and she gave a grunt as she took her place next to him. Her feet only reached the top rung, and she looked to actually be the proper size for the structure. Meanwhile, Micah’s head barely cleared the doorway, and that was sitting down. Seated together, the pair looked like they could have been different species’. 

“You look very handsome,” His mother said, gazing at him with loving eyes. “You grew out your beard since I saw you last. It looks nice. You look older with it, though.”

“I am older,” Micah said. He refocused his attention on the horizon.  He didn’t want to think about how much older exactly he was than the last time he had seen his mother. It was bad enough that she now looked so different, up close instead of across the field of grass. Wrinkles and lines had taken over her face, and while she still looked like his mom, each crease reminded him of the time that had passed by while he was away. 

“What are you doing out here all alone? Allison is inside. She’s playing cards with the kids. So much better than all that junk they do on their phones, don’t you think?” Micah nodded absently. “She’s great with them, you know. Reminds me of me. Being around them just lights her up like a Christmas tree.”

Micah felt a pang in his chest. He suddenly had the urge to lean over the edge of the treehouse and vomit. He didn’t, but his heart was still jostling around like a pinball machine in his body. He looked straight ahead. She didn’t mean any harm, and she was right, Allison really was wonderful with kids. What she didn’t know is that Allison wasn’t so good with him. Not anymore. 

“Yeah, she is,” He said as he regained a semblance of composure. “She is. I gotta tell you, ma, Allison and I - we’re getting a divorce. She decided to leave me. I could say it came out of nowhere, but I guess that’s not totally true. The reality is I’ve been nowhere. Any idiot could have seen it coming. But not me. I wasn’t there, I guess. Even when I was.” 

There was a long pause as he and his mother sat together, both looking at the home where they had spent so many years. Simpler times, or at least they sure seemed that way. Days where he would meet his friends, good old Tommy Decker and John Nichols from down the street either direction, and they would sit in this same treehouse and fill their afternoons with stupid jokes and silly games. And even more often, days where he would get up before anyone in his family, come out here all alone, and draw until his hand cramped up. His mother had found him curled up in a ball with sheets of used paper and sketches strewn all around him as he slept on the floor more often than either of them could count. 

“Your father was a good man,” His mother finally said. He winced at the sentence. It was the first time he had actually heard was.. Even when they buried him earlier that day, he hadn’t heard anybody use the past tense. Or maybe he hadn’t been listening. “But he was wrong about a lot of things, Micah. Do you know that?”

He suddenly had the urge to cry. He had not cried at the funeral, or the burial. Come to think of it, he wasn’t sure he’d cried at his wedding. The last time he remembered crying was when he was eleven and skinned his knee playing baseball. But that couldn’t really be the last time, could it? Anyway, he didn’t now. He felt his chest convulse but his eyes remained dry, and he looked over at his mother. 

“What do you mean?” He asked her.

His mother’s eyes started to look glossy with wetness, and now she turned to look ahead at the house. “When you were born, your father was the happiest man I had ever met in my entire life. He just couldn’t believe how lucky we were. We were poor back then, even poorer than we were when you were growing up. But he felt so rich when he held you in his arms. We used to say to each other that it didn’t matter what we had to do to get by, we would, and as long as we all had each other, we would be happy.” 

Micah stared intently at his mother. It had been a long time since he’d seen her at all, but much longer still since he’d seen her cry. 

“Things changed when his brother - your uncle - lost his job. When he saw what that did to him and Wynnie, it destroyed him. He thought it was their circumstance that ruined that family. When he and Dennis would talk, he would tell your father all sorts of awful things. Dennis was a miserable man. You’re plenty old enough now to know that. He hurt his wife plenty before he lost his job and after he lost it he had nothing but time to make it even worse. Your father knew that, honey, that’s why he and Dennis didn’t speak for a long time. But when he came to us needing money your dad just couldn’t say no to him, no matter how little we had.”

Micah held back from showing shock at hearing this. He had not known about Dennis. He always thought he was a decent guy. Bit of a showboat after he went off to New York and got his hotshot job at some marketing firm, but other than that. Always gave good gifts at the holidays, never got into politics at the dinner table. Apparently Micah had misjudged him. This didn’t surprise him as much. 

“Your Uncle Dennis got it into your daddy’s mind that no matter how sure he was that I was okay living our simple, beautiful life…” Tears fell stronger down her cheeks and she sniffled. “Well, your dad told me that he knew I was lying about being happy. He wouldn’t let me argue with him about it, there was no convincing him. This was when you were about three. He became obsessed with money, getting us more, how we should use it. He was a different man.”

There was a pause. They locked eyes and he saw his mother look down at the silver watch on his wrist. She folded her lips together and wiped more tears from her eyes. She wasn’t crying anymore, which somehow made Micah feel worse. 

“What I mean to tell you, son, is that you never really knew the man I fell in love with. Your dad tried to do right by you, and he kept food on the table, and I know you loved him and he loved you. But you need to know that no matter how good of an example you think he was, the man got stung by a rattlesnake, and that snake’s name was Dennis Mulligan. And until the day he died he never got that poison out of his system. No matter how hard he tried, he didn’t strike it rich like Dennis did, and it turned him to stone. Even if he had gotten lucky and moved us all out to New York City, he’d’ve been just as miserable out there.”

“Are you sure about that?” Micah questioned. He wasn’t.

“Yes,” his mother said with no hesitation. Then she shot her eyes back at him, clear and as intense a stare as he’d ever seen from her. “Yes. You can’t cure poison with more poison, Micah. You cure it with an antidote. And when your mind is poisoned, there ain’t no job in New York City, or a silver plated watch that can save you. You need medicine.”

Micah felt his heart sink to his stomach. The watch on his wrist felt like it was burning him. They held their locked eyes for a long time. Finally, his mother broke it and looked ahead, starting to rustle around, getting ready to get down from the treehouse. 

“I love you, kid,” She said, squeezing his hand before she descended. “I love you more than anything in this world. But you should sit out here awhile. I know it’s hot, and I know you’re sweatin’, but you should sit out here and think.”

“About what?” He choked out. He felt like the world was coming down on him on all sides. His head was spinning. “About dad?”

“About your poison.”

She left the same way she had come, gracefully and beautifully, towards his childhood home. When she disappeared into the house, he began to cry.