Life After Death

The tall handsome man in the photograph had sun-warmed bronze skin. Tall though not slender, his statuesque build made him look strong and mighty. On that particular day he must’ve missed the last button of his white short-sleeved shirt and a wind blew that flapped it open revealing the bottom of his staunch belly. The narrow brim of his sporty Stetson framed his square face and directed my focus to his soft brown eyes.

With a massive arm laid across my mother’s right shoulder, he towered over her although at five-nine she was some tall herself for a woman. I looked to be about three years old standing out front betwixt the two of them.  Under the weight of the man’s large left hand resting on my left shoulder, my tiny body tilted left. I was twenty-one seeing this photo for the first time. I had no memory of the man captured in this tableau with me and my mother, whose blue and white checkered dress stopped just above her knees. Her straight legs held only a slight curvature at her calves and reminded me of my own. There was no denying I was her daughter although we were different in so many ways.

In the photo her arms hung limply at her sides not touching me or the man. Her face was a blank stare. There was no indication that she claimed either of us, she was just there. My gaze scanned the man’s face again looking for clues to his identity.  His tender eyes, subtle smile and the way he touched both me and my mother made me believe he must have been a kind and gentle man. I flipped the photograph over. Penciled in scratchy cursive writing was the inscription “Lillian, I will always love you and Bean.”

Bean had been my nickname all my life but who was this man? He was certainly not my father. My father was only five-ten and when I was a very young child, he had not been a kind or gentle man. In fact he would drank excessively and beat my mother. He once even held a knife to her throat threatening to kill her. I witnessed and remembered many of these beatings, but the trauma must have been deep enough to wipe that particular episode from my memory. I only know because my daddy blubbered out a drunken, teary apology to me about the incident one day when I was around twelve. Not sure how to respond to his confession I had asked him innocently, “Why’d you want to kill mama, daddy?” His sorrowful demeanor was suddenly replaced with rage as though my question had made him remember something he wanted to forget. “Get out of here, Bean!” He yelled. “Just get out of here!” I ran to my room listening to my daddy’s deep sobs muffled by the walls. His sudden anger had frightened me since I had not seen that side of him in a long time.

By the time I was twelve although he still drank occasionally he had stopped beating Ma and went out of his way to compliment her on her cooking or how good she looked. Ma remained grim-faced and as hard as a piece of stone refusing to crack. She did not smile or say something like “Thank you, Honey.” She moved about the house from one task to another and kept us fed and the house mostly clean. But she hardly spoke to daddy and paid only minimal attention to me. Just like in the photo, she was “just there” in our lives too.

When I went away to college, my weekly calls home consisted of Ma griping about not having the time or energy to keep the house up and take care of dad who had smoked as much as he drank, until he got sick two years ago. I was home on Spring Break upstairs cleaning and organizing the attic when I found the photo.  I took the stairs with quick bouncy steps coming down, anxious to ask Ma about the man in the photograph. The top of dad’s balding head was visible as I passed quickly behind the lounger he slept it. Noise from the un-watched television program intermingled with the low hum of his oxygen machine.

I found Ma in the kitchen busy making biscuits. 

“Hey Ma, what’s the deal with this photograph?” I beckoned from behind her. 

Kneading the floured dough with her fist, “What picture?” she asked without turning to look at me in that dismissive way I knew well.

“The one with you and me and this… this, guy?” I answered.

She plunked her doughy hands down on the edges of the mixing bowl and sighed heavily with agitation as she turned to face me holding the large 8x10 photo for her to see. Instantly her face hardened and that impenetrable shade came down over her eyes. 

“Why have you been going through my things, Yolanda?” she demanded. “That’s just someone I knew when you were a little girl, that’s all. Where’s Ernest?”

"Dad’s in the living room asleep in the lounger. Why?”  

"Just go put it back and don’t let him see it!”

“But Ma, who is this and why is he saying he will always love you, Lillian and me, Bean?”

“Just put it back and mind your own business!” she seethed.

“Fine! I was only trying to help out around here!" I shouted back. 

I stomped out of the kitchen, breezing pass the back of the lounger again where dad was supposedly napping, and back up the stairs heading to the attic. Out of the corner of my eye as I passed I had noticed dad’s shaky hand reach out and turn the nozzle up on the oxygen tank beside the chair. His breathing must have suddenly gotten harder.

I left to go back to college the following week and life went on as usual. I’d call home weekly. Ma never had much to say beyond complaints about having to take care of my father “24-7”. When I’d offer to come help her on the weekend she’d say, “No thanks. It’s my burden to bear.” She would pass the phone to dad and between spurts of speech he’d draw in a labored breath. He’d always say he was doing fine and raise his voice as much as he could to say how lucky he was to have such a good woman taking care of him.

I went home again for Christmas. Dad had taken a turn for the worse and wasn’t expected to live very much longer according to the lady who came every day from Hospice. I cried and cried but Ma made beds, did laundry and carried on as though nothing was different. I knew I’d get “the wall” but I'd finally had enough.

“Ma, I know he wasn’t always the best but that’s my daddy and your husband in there who may be dying soon. Don’t you even care!”

She was washing dishes at the sink her back to me again like the day I showed her the photograph. She spun around abruptly to face me.

“I’ve been nothing but good to that man in there so don’t start with me, Bean,” she said forcibly.

I turned in resignation and frustration and went into the living room where dad’s lounger had been replaced with a hospital bed. He was lying there with his eyes closed but he actually seemed to be breathing pretty good. I sat in the straight back chair besides his bed where Ma usually sat to feed him or wash him up. Dad stirred when I sat down and opened his eyes. He looked at me intensely as though he wanted to say something. 

“Are you OK, Dad?” I asked. 

He raised his bony hand up and moved his index finger slowly in a beckoning motion for me to come close. I bent at the waist from where I was sitting in the chair and leaned so that my ear was closer to his mouth. He began to speak slowly and deliberately.

“Bean, I wanna tell you something”, he began. "Lillian, your mother, is a good woman. She don’t show her feelings but I learned her. Those biscuits she makes when you come home that means I love you. What she does for me she does out of sense of duty and obligation, but you she loves. When I met her she was the sweetest person there ever was. I changed her Bean.”

He was gasping between words and I didn’t want him to get too tired.

“Daddy, it’s OK, you need to rest,” I told him.

“No Bean, let me finish, now", he insisted.

I had heard that people often get a surge of energy before they die. I thought maybe this was what was happening with dad. He continued talking.

“My demons caused me to mistreat her, Bean. She was like an exotic flower and I crushed her so bad she closed up. One day after I had put my hands on her one time too many, she got so angry she yelled at me, “Bean ain’t yours and I don’t love you I love her real daddy!” That’s the day I threatened to kill her mainly because she wouldn’t tell me who he was. You were about six years old then and it was your screams that stopped me.”

“Daddy, no! Please stop,” I pleaded.

"You have a right to know, Bean. I drove your sweet Mama into the arms of another man. That man in that photo you found last spring is your birth daddy."

I was so stunned I couldn't move, think or speak as daddy continued. My breath became intertwined with his as his pauses to breath reminded me to breath too.

"In the end your mama chose to keep her vows and stay with me. I accepted you as mine and promised never to hit her again. After that incident where I came so close to doing an awful thing I never laid another hand on her. Then one day not long after, while I was looking for a bottle I stashed in the attic I came across that picture you found. I felt that old rage and wanted to hurt somebody when I looked at his eyes and saw yours.  I cried a good while then accepted finally that it was all my fault. I turned the picture over and wrote on the back of it ‘Lillian, I will always love you and Bean’ and put it back. Then I went downstairs and apologized to you for what you had seen me do to your Mama. I just wanted you know if you ever found out the truth that it was all my fault.”

I stared at daddy through pools of sadness that overflowed and spilled down my cheeks. I was sad for him, ma, and for myself. But I was angry too that they had hidden the truth from me.  I’d always known I got my legs from my mother. Now I knew where I got my eyes.

A few days later the man I’d known as “daddy” closed his eyes and gave in to death. But before he died, he had opened mine to life.