Still Smoking

My father bought an old house way out in the country roughly two weeks ago. It's rudimentary architecture and shotgun framing, made it an ideal fixer upper. There was always something to be done. Replace the baseboards, re-wire the electrical outlets, shingles, shingles, shingles, paint, drywall, finish, re-finish, install central air ducts, etc, the list goes on and on. So for the past two weekends, Dad would have me drop him off in the earliest part of the morning. He would work in solitude for hours on end, and around mid-day, after yard sales were over, I would meet him out there with a couple of sandwhiches. We would eat on the back porch, looking out over the natural beauty of a yard studded with oak, pecan, and plum trees. "What an odd mix." he'd later say about those trees. And they were odd. There was no rythym or rhyme to suggest someone took time to plant them, however they are trees that don't normally grow in the same yard.

We would sit there, idley talking, me smoking a cigarette, him smoking out of the same pipe my grandfather used to use, a memento I will one day inherit. Our smoke would catch on the wind and go sailing through the plum trees, around the mighty oaks, and then scatter through the branches of the pretty pecan. After watching this, we would continue to work in a comfortable silence.



It was late one night several months ago, when a friend and I were drunk and making peanut butter and jelly sandwhiches to sober up before turning in. The only light in the house that worked was a dim stove light that made navigating especially difficult. We sat in silence, each of us with a peice of newspaper, and ate and read in complete silence. "You know", I whispered, "we must really be friends if the two of us can sit here and not say a thing and still feel comfortable."
"Shut-up", she hissed back, "I'm trying to read the paper."
Dad and I have reached that plateau where it's not uncomfortable teenage/adult parent silence, but an adult to adult level of understanding. While working, we sometimes sing old church hymns, which sort of makes me feel like a slave, and there is a lot of humming on his part. He hums and mummbles lyrics. It is either this, or full scale acapela concerto. I take my pick. We harmonize well together, and when my brother is in town and the three of us get in a car or sit on the same church pew-people stop and listen. We're good. Real good. Like a barbershop trio or something.


As we work and the sun wanes on the horizon hinting that it's time to go. We climb in the cab of the truck, both light our favored tobacco vices, then make our slow and steady way out of the dirt driveway. When I drive out of there it makes me think of the relationship between fathers and their sons-slow and steady. It's a growing understanding, one that takes years to figure out; to realize that you're just like each other, and how hard it can be to get along with yourself. I hate it that not all men have been able to get there. Not all have these weekends with their fathers.

My mom called me this morning and told me that the rental house burned to the ground last night. Vandals, electrical wiring, no one knows yet. She told me that my dad went out there and before it collapsed he saved our tools and some spare lumber. He glanced at the house one last time and noticed that the back door was open. Then it caved in on itself. Two weeks of work hung in the air around him, then it caught the wind, and went sailing through the plum trees, around the mighty oaks, and then scattered through the branches of the pretty pecan. I can see him standing there in the cloud of dancing smoke, his efforts dashed around him, and then, if I listen real hard, I can can hear my old man begin to hum.


Waiting on the Fire Marshall,


Andrew Greene

The Web We Weave...then run screaming from.

Keith had just left the house, and Mama remarked at how much weight he had lost, although she said it in the way one would remark on the quantity of puss leaking from a ghangrenous wound. This is when dad chimmed in, his words trailing off into a gutteral whisper of disgust, "Yeah, but he's still got that...baaack." He then outlined what he considered to be Moody's back in the air with his hands, as if he was caressing a large fleshy shell.

"It's kinda like Liz Gray" Mama continued, again with the voice inflection reserved for a coroner, "lost all that weight but has that big hulk back" Her face then matched her tone of voice, which somehow prompted Daddy to respond.

Daddy's face looked like he had just seen Schindler's List and was stiffling a chuckle, "I HAAAAATE backs. I just haaaaaaaate them. They're so grosss! I'll bet if Keith Moody and Liz Gray had a kid, it'd just be a baaack." he hissed.

Mind you that this is less than fifteen seconds after Keith crossed the threshold from our house. He had been helping Abbey and I work on Abbey's term paper, which meant he had spent the night writing while Abbey and I bounced around the room, tapping everything with sticks.

I gazed out the window and saw him sauntering towards his car. His thinning waist and the large insultable bulk that swaggered like an old man carrying a bundle of lumber. Dad came and stood behind me and we watched perhaps the nicest guy in the world leave our darkened house. "You know, he's worked really hard to lose all that weight. It's taken him two years." I mentioned casually.
"Huh, ....that's soooome discipline." he said.

As the lumbering figure made it's way through our yard, we reflected a minute on Keith. With each step across the grass we were reminded of his genteel nature, a kindness beyond his means, a heart of gold, and the spider webs that criss-crossed our yard from tree to tree. Dad and I watched as he flailed and slapped himself trying to get free of the webbing matting his hair. Soon Abbey and Mama would join us at the window sill. Keith flounders around the yard for a few more seconds and we can hear him swear as he makes an awkward, ducking wind-sprint to his truck. He glanced back at the trampled webs, then got in his car and sped away.

Later that night, as I was lying in bed, I remembered hearing him swear. His frantic run from yard to car caused him to cuss in front of all of us. Then it occurred to me. Just before he got in his car he looked up. For a split second he looked back at those webs. He gazed with unsure disbelief in his eyes, as if he was trying to look through a cloudy night and into the stars. It was only for a split second but it made me wonder. 'Was he looking back at the spider webs he had just stampeded through, or was he looking at something else?' 'Was he looking past the webs to the house?' 'Or was he looking through the window?' The clarity of his swearing came back to me. Was it the webs that asked him to look back? Or, was it the cackle of four indigent Greenes as they watched their only friend stummble from their home.

The irony of watching others flail,

Your Brother,
NutHorse