Porch lights

My father always said that our mother did not want to be out on the farm, six miles from Comfrey, six miles from nowhere. Perhaps that was the reason she stood by the east windows in the living room looking down the road as if someone might appear on that dusty horizon and take her away. The few cars that did traverse that road were predictable: old Juney driving home drunk (interchange Juney with Henry or Sparks and it sums up the three regular drunks my father had to sometimes pull out of our ditch), the insurance man who would in time piss off my father to rage, and the mailman speeding over red rock ridge on his way to our mailbox.

Whomever Mother might have been waiting for never came. I conjured up a used car salesman from the Cities, that glossy-domed man who had long commercials enticing you with used but good cars. She had a boy friend before my father that no one knew about except for me. My sister was surprised years later when told her about Cecil. What precipitated our mother's telling the story to me about her first true love happened the night before she told me her story. My sister was long gone to the Cities by then, and I was left in charge, on Sunday card club nights, of my two brothers, nine and four.

With the two boys safely in bed and the front porch light on signifying all is clear, a car full of friends from Sleepy Eye came down the road on their way to no where in particular and s opped for a few hours. There was some drinking going on. Probably backseat almost but not quite sex, neither of which I had learned to partake in. Yet.

After a few hours, they departed, just before my parent's came home from a night of 500 and ham sandwiches.

The conversation about Cecil ocurred the next day after my parent's had discovered various sundry items on the front lawn: beer cans, a whiskey bottle, and a not used condoms still packaged. My father frowned at the thought of confronting me, which was usually the case, and went out to the hog barns, leaving my mother and I at the kitchen counter.

In her rarely used motherly manner, she stumbled upon the blocks of informing a daughter what was right and wrong at the age of fifteen. Everything she told me I had heard before, in much less flattering manners and cruder words. Giving up on the lecture, she lit a cigarette and poured herself a drink: Seagrams Seven with Seven-Up. Didn't most parent's drink that? She had another stash of booze in her bedroom closet, stuffed far back and under her winter coats. I would sometimes partake in the awful cheap port she hid on Sunday night babysitting stints with my brothers. Bored to death, I'd pour Dixie cups full of the cheap port, throw my head back and drink it down. I'd be passed out on the couch until I heard the garage door open and then I'd fly up the stairs to bed.

Your father wasn't my first love, my mother said. I was startled. Never had we approached a conversation anywhere near like the one that was going to ensue. In fact, my mother and I had little to say to each other most of our days. The only time we ever opened up to each other before was four years earlier when the local doctor put us both on diet pills, aka speed, to lose forty pounds. We lost forty pounds and our minds: we sat at the kitchen counter and laughed about everything: tomatoes, the mailman, telephones.

That particular afternoon of revelation however turned to Cecil. Cecil was my first love, my mother said. I was in my early twenties. We spent many days courting and going to the movies. I remember kissing him for the first time under a street lamp. I thought he was the one. I thought I was the one for him.

He went away one summer, she continued. His father owned a lumber yard up north or in the Dakotas. Somewhere. I didn't see him until Christmas. By then he had a bar maid pregnant and was getting married. I got a dear Agnes letter. I kept it for a number of years. I don't know where it went.

I suppose Cecil might have been the one my mother was waiting for all those years, standing by the ugly Sears curtains in the living room waiting for a car to come barreling down the road, screech to a stop, and take her away.

When that didn't happen, she found other ways to leave while still being there. There were two of us by then, my sister and I, when she started having illnesses, real and imagined. There would be two sons born as well, intermingled with three miscarriages and a still birth. My sister, five years older than I, remembered two miscarriages lost on the living room floor.  It was probably why we got cheap living room carpeting to hide the red stains on hardwood.

I was too young to remember. On one of these occasions our mother sent Pat, then five, out to the fields to find our father. Sick with the flu, Pat was garbed in pajamas and a bathrobe. She remembers bare feet in winter because there had been no time for shoes. She remembers plowing, how the white bathrobe flew around her in the wind. You looked like an angel standing there on the edge of the plowing, our father told her.

That was only the beginning. I remember more illnesses and tumors and disorders than one person should carry themselves.  There was a tumor she grew on her knee that required surgery. There was a faulty gall bladder, kidney stones. We were coming home one Thursday night from Perpetual Help Devotions when the kidney stones flared up and she lost control of the car. I remember the plowing out my backseat window, how close we came to a telephone pole.

Often, Pat and I would come home from school to find an empty house. I don't know where our brothers were. Probably carted away to family or friends. We had aunts who pitched in, a housekeeper from Leavenworth one year who only let me put one teaspoon of sugar on my Corn Flakes.

When the school bus rounded the corner a quarter of mile from our farm house and the back porch light was on, we knew we were coming home to an empty house. We sat together, my sister and I, because we got on at the parochial school and found comfort in each other's presence. That was not a common occurrence. I was more a thorn in her side, five years younger, and more than a little precocious.  But on the school bus we teamed up because we knew what we might find when we got home.

Slow down, she would say as I tried to hurry our departure off the bus. That small space from school bus door to the door of the house always seemed a mile long and threatening to me when I knew we were going to be alone. In reality, our house was nearly on the road, making morning rituals easy: get up with only fifteen minutes to spare, down a cup of cocoa and a piece of toast just as the school bus rounded the corner, and then fall out the door, race up the ditch and walk up bus stairs.

When the porch light was on, we knew what to expect. We never told anyone, not friends, not other bus riders, that the house was empty. Instead, we descended the stairs, ran down the ditch and into the house. Always there was a note. Took your mother to the hospital, written in my father's learned cursive handwriting....Comfrey, New Ulm, Minneapolis, Rochester....were all interchangeable depending on the circumstance. Will stop in Sleepy Eye and get those applesauce donuts you like, stop in New Ulm and get hamburgers, won't stop, there's dinner in the fridge.

Our coats and book bags were dumped in the corner for awhile. Eventually we would tidy up, but the first ritual was locking all the doors, pulling all the shades, and locking every door.


Years and years later, when our parents died and Pat and I perused through those guest books funeral homes set out by the front door and give you as a gift, we discovered something very interesting. Cecil, the old boy friend, had been at our father's funeral. Three years later, almost to the day, he was a viewer at the funeral home when our mother died.

I never knew the man. Didn't know what he looked like. But perhaps our mother meant more to him than she ever knew.