THE HAVEN KEEPER

If I could know what there is to let go.
                                                —Christian Wiman, “Ars Poetica”

Paul sits in his father’s wide, upholstered armchair in the family room, trying to grade class papers under the side standing lamp while every few minutes he calls to his mother not to wash the dishes again. No answer. Marking papers, he hears the kitchen faucet run and cut, the soft bump of plates in water.

“Mother. Stop,” he raises his voice—though not as loud as his father would have. He lets papers and pen drop to the floor, rises, and goes into the kitchen.

His mother stands at the sink in her ice blue slippers and white, terrycloth bathrobe; her dark, dyed hair held in a simple beige wrap for bed. She turns her thin, wrinkled face to him with a startled look behind her silver cat eye lenses, her bare hands dripping over the suds and dishes.

Paul sighs. He takes the dish towel off the counter, turns her to him and wipes her hands. “Time for bed,” he says, more gently, placing the towel on the counter. He puts an arm around her shoulders and they walk down the hallway toward his parents’ bedroom,

In the hall, his mother drags a step, stops and peers up at him.

“Please tell your father,” she confides in a whisper, “the steak is a little tough tonight.” She blinks. “And where is he?” she whines.

“He’s gone, Mom.”

“Herman? Gone?” she echoes. Her thin lips part to cloudy teeth and Paul notes the fine, white hairline under her dyed hair. He remembers a time she would not have allowed it.

“Come on,” he says.

Mother complies. They walk down the hall.

In his parents’ bathroom, he helps Mother remove her bathrobe, pull up her thin, white gown and sit on the toilet. He helps her wipe and rise, change her Depend pull-up. She peers askance at him from the lavatory sink as she brushes her teeth. She removes her glasses, sets them on the lavatory, scrubs her face and dries it on a hanging towel.

“Ah,” she sighs into the mirror, replacing her glasses with a thin grin, as if she has a secret.

He walks her to the bed and pulls back the covers, helps her in and covers her up, her wrapped head on the pillow. He takes off her glasses, places them on the dresser with the monitor camera. His mother makes a soft sigh. Paul pulls out the thick rubber floor mats from under either side of the bed. He straightens up and smiles.

“I love you, Mom.”

“Oh …I love you, too,” she trills. She makes a closed smile. “Good night.”

He kisses her on the cheek, checks the monitor camera and flips the light wall switch off as he goes out of the room, closes the door.

She’s going to fall and break her hip one day, his wife, Jackie, keeps warning him. She’s going to burn the house down or worse, she scolds. You need to submit her here with us. Now. Either the Providence Home or the National Health Center . . . Just—just do it!

Every time they have a conversation, Paul pauses, and hedges. He slows his voice to sound calm and confident. Jackie watches him and sighs. He reminds her how his father left Mother set up and comfortable in the house they had lived in for all of Paul’s life. Dad lined up the attentive yard care, the cleaners and the Help Angels. And Paul doesn’t mind driving down, dismissing the assigned Help Angel for a weekend—to look in on things, buy groceries, cook and pay the bills.

On the back porch, Paul FaceTimes Jackie on his phone. “Hey. How is she?” Jackie comes on the screen.

He looks at Jackie’s expectant face, her large, steady brown eyes behind their darker brown framed lenses; her set mouth; her short, red hair.

“Fair,” he offers.

“She still knows you?”

Paul nods. “Most of the time. Other times, not so much.” He watches her sigh, and make a thin smile.

“I know. It’s your mother,” Jackie concedes. I know it’s hard. You’ve got Power of Attorney and she can’t very well live with us . . . I know. But I must tell you, love, you’re holding on.”

You’re holding on, just like ole Buster. Blind with two strokes until you waited to put the poor dog down, nursing him everyday, giving him pain meds. I caught you holding him up while he did his business in the yard and you were whisper singing “It’s no Sacrifice”. God, Paul.

Bring her here. We’ll sell the house, put her in a facility near us and we’ll visit her.

“It’s—it’s not time just yet,” Paul says. Jackie pauses. “It’s not time just yet?”

“Not just yet,” he says. “She’s still—she’s still there.”

Paul changes the subject, and asks about her research. They make small talk before he tells Jackie goodnight, that he loves her.

Jackie sighs. “I love you, Paul.” They disconnect.

What Paul doesn’t tell her—though he suspects she knows—is that he wants to hold on, live in whatever moments, recognitions are left. And it’s selfish, in duty, in memory and in being a good son. This Friday, he left Jackie alone to work on her Lacanian Psychology thesis and he again took the two-hour, solitary drive to the same, old and comfortable place of his familiar: the small college town of Springs, the house, in the beauty of surrounding Appalachian foothills. In his childhood home, the furniture is the same, his bedroom, the kitchen with its mahogany table, the cherry wood paneling and beams, the Belgium rugs over the hart pine floorboards, the antique clock ticking on the family room mantel. He can walk into the house, and dismiss the Help Angel for the weekend. “I’ll keep her,” he announces before his mother’s thin smile on her pale, familiar face; the dry smell of her skin as he hugs her, the faint smell of stale perfume from her bathroom. And he can still feel his father’s presence in the empty armchair, imagine the wavy white locks, his dark, laughing eyes. His father’s books are still in the bookshelves, the faint smell of his pipe is still in the study; the battered weather jacket still hangs in the hall closet.

Each time, to Paul, the house is a brief stasis of relief, where he does not have to count days and can still believe in more. There’s comfort in the pause of memory, of merely being in the house again. Mother is alive. The view out of the family room’s sliding glass doors to the woods and hills is the same. It is not yet goodbye.

Paul checks that the doors to the house are locked, drains the sink in the kitchen, wipes the dishes dry with the dish towel and stacks them in the side sink rack, the way Mother does it now, as it was done decades ago. In the quiet of the house, he returns to his father’s chair in the family room and resumes grading class papers under the side standing lamp. Paul grades five or six papers when slow steps come down the hall and his mother appears before him without her glasses, in a dark blue wrap dress with black pumps. Her mouth is mis-lined in candy red lipstick and she has a white gold, strand necklace on her neck.

“Well, hello!” she greets him brightly, smiling with her small, cloudy teeth; her dark, dyed hair with the white underline brushed back. “How are you?”

She has rubbed some shiny lotion over her face. Paul notices her white gold earrings are mis-matched, one is longer than the other.

“Oh … I’m fine,” Paul replies, watching her with alarm. His mother comes eager, her head raised with calm dignity in her disheveled appearance. None of the Help Angels have warned him of this: the familiar face and words of his mother, courteous, no longer recognizing him.

He is abruptly removed, disowned. She is a hostess again from years past of tea parties, dinner parties, Faculty Wives Club meetings, receptions, and public appearances when she and Dad were in the administration at the college. Paul watches as she steps around the sofa and seats herself slowly, facing him as she holds an inclusive smile. He recognizes the former primness, the way she sits, shoulders squared, crosses her hands in her lap, a closed smile, the eyes eager and kind.

“And what is is your name?” she asks.

“My name? Mom, it’s me,” he scoffs, staring at her.

The calm face and look go blank. “You?’ she says. A blink of her eyes, the gaze on him lacks registration. A frown. “Who are you?” she grows alarmed.

He bites his tongue and plays along, makes his voice calm, to calm her. “Oh … I’m, I’m Dave,” he offers.

“Oh, Dave?” she considers with a frown and a nod, but returns to the smile again. “Not Dick? Where are you from?”

“Huntsville.”

“Oh, Huntsville?” she frowns. “Not Sylacauga? “No, ma’am.”

“I have a son in Huntsville,” she offers, nonplussed. “Do you know him?”

“I don’t think so,” he says.

“Are you married?” his mother adds. “Yes.”

“Oh, how wonderful,” she keeps smiling. “You are awfully young to be married.” She laughs.

Paul watches her, nods and plays along, a stranger to his mother now, the familiar face and words.

His mother suddenly pauses and frowns.

“I want to go home,” she says.

“You are home, Mom.” He bites his tongue at the slip. “No,” she sighs, with a tearful gaze. “Home."

“Where is home?” he asks. “Where is it?”

“Oh … to go home,” she says.

Before Paul’s father dropped dead of a stroke in the local Walmart parking lot, he fought the good fight. “Your mother is the plug to my life,” he told Paul more than once, each time, with a slow and resigned smile. “She’s most I’ve lived and the most I remember,” he said. “She’s everything that I am,” he insisted. “We’re going to hold on to what we are with everything we’ve got. I’m going to keep her,’ he said. His dad kept up their walks together, holding hands around the block. He took over the driving when Mother could no longer comprehend North from South on I-20. More and more, he stayed home, stopped raising his voice at her in frustration, ordered out or did the cooking and shopping, himself, paid the bills, hired cleaners, took her to doctor appointments and made sure she got her hair dyed every three weeks.

He cut up her credit cards, hired the Help Angels, firing one who was lazy, firing another who fooled Mother into signing a check. And finally—the bitter last—he sold Mother’s beloved blue Brougham Cadillac when she began walking outside some mornings in gloves, hat, Sunday dress and shoes, the gold Cadillac key in her gloved hand. “I’m going home!” she declared aloud while Dad put an arm around her and patiently coaxed her back into the house. “I’m gong home!” she gave him fervent stares. Now and then, she would utter it in the house. His father began bolt locking the front and back doors after that, placing the door keys on a nail above the back door. He instructed the Help Angels to do the same. The last thing he took from Mother were her car keys.

“She didn’t know me tonight,” Paul FaceTimes Jackie on his phone after he pleaded and coaxed his mother back into her room—though not as calm as his father would have—undressed her and helped her into bed.

Thank you, his mother said, as though to a stranger.

On the phone screen, Jackie frowns with sympathy, watching him through her glasses. “Like Sun Down Disease,” she tells him. Paul watches her. “My grandmother had it,” she says. “We would bake cookies all day and then come night, she forgot who I was. It’s heart-rending. I know. Like a light has gone out.”

“And she wants to go home,” he tells her.

“Again?” Jackie pauses, shakes her head. “We took her home, remember? After your dad’s funeral.”

“Yeah. I remember.”

“I sat with her and we pored over the family photo albums,” Jackie recalls. “She smiled at baby pictures, stared at the ones with her family and brother, early pictures of you and Herman. I sat with her in the back seat of your Mazda and we shared chicken nuggets and a strawberry milkshake. I wiped her mouth and hands with a napkin while you bypassed I-20 and drove down old Highway Seventy-Eight, through Pell City and Leeds—just so she might still recognize something—the way she told us she went back and forth from Tuscaloosa when she took her first job at Springs College and was twenty-something . . . I remember her gazing out the window with that calm grin, not talking much.”

Jackie makes a soft laugh. “I dressed her in that bright, dated dress and sun hat, like for church,” she adds, “and you and I were only wearing jeans and tee shirts.”

“Yeah. I remember.” Paul watches her.

“And you kept pulling over to the side of the road, now and then, saying, ‘Mom, you know where we are? Do you know where we are?’ Your face so serious. God, Paul, I think it was more important to you than her. Each time, she looked out the window with that grin and nodded, as if enjoying the scene.” Jackie sighs. “I don’t know what she remembered. But I don’t think it was what we saw. The only thing she said was “Hm-mm” though once she said, “I remember them!” in a shrill voice when you stopped at what was a deceased friend’s horse farm. She tapped her knuckles on the window then.” Jackie shakes her head.

Paul nods. He remembers catching Jackie’s face in the rearview mirror at the time, how she watched him and bit her lip.

“Why does she always want to go home?” Paul says.

Jackie pauses, looks at him. “We all live by references, honey. References for love, safety, comfort, grief…everything. When we can’t find them, we look back for the old ones.” She pauses. “Your mother knows something’s not there. Unlike you,” she adds.

“Easy for you to say,” Paul responds, irritated. “What does one do in the meantime? In the limbo? I’m in the now.”

“I know you’re in the now, Paul,” Jackie says, her eyes calm. “Just please, do the right thing when you’re not.”

Paul hears Jackie’s words, watches her face. Something in him revolts. He can’t answer but feels a fierce loyalty. Mother. Dad, Paul thinks. Home.

“Not there yet,” he says. “Not there yet.”

After his father’s funeral, he and Jackie took Mother “home”. “To see where she is,” he reminded Jackie. “To see where she is.” Paul remembered the rural countryside between the towns, the covered bridge and railroad tracks, the same way his mother told him she came to Springs, Alabama, with “a bow” in her “poodle cut hair,” “bobby socks and saddle shoes.” She’d declare that on Highway 78 every time Dad drove them in their Oldsmobile to see her parents.

Mother sat in the front passenger’s seat with Dad and Paul sat in the back seat by the rattan picnic basket of fried chicken, potato salad and cornbread in glass-covered CorningWare dishes, smelling the warm food, while Easy Listening music came over the car radio and he heard his mother’s bright, clear voice from a younger, smoother face, deep lipstick and bright teeth; and now and then, caught the side glances from his father behind the wheel, his smiles of amusement.

Along the two-lane highway were sporadic borders of Queen Anne’s Lace and Black-Eyed Susans, pine thickets, fields of pasture, new corn or vegetables, two painted concrete silos —Got Jesus? and See Rock City Soon; occasional small houses with small, cluttered yards, a large, abandoned farmhouse draped in Wisteria vines, cattle egrets rising in the distance behind trails of tractors; sometimes a lone, droning crop dusting plane; and once, out of nowhere, a blue and yellow, hot air ballon in large Vector image hanging still over a field, as though a visitor from the sky.

Paul counted grazing horses, Mother counted Holsteins, Dad smiled, made small talk as he drove to soft radio music. Excited to be going to her parents, Mother pointed out every place that had a story— as she knew it, heard it, or was there—and the reason they went down old Highway 78. She pointed out two homes of girlfriends, grand old farmhouses, one where there was a wedding and a dance with moss lights in the trees and “they” danced all night and into the dawn to Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra records; a field where companies of soldiers from Fort McClellan bivouacked and trained around a flag post—Paul imagined pitched, olive grab tents, trucks, a flag pole and soldiers marching in parade formation with rifles— a bootlegger’s shack, a bark-shingled covered bridge and mill where she and Dad had picnics before he proposed to her, swinging upside down from a tree limb in the nearby cemetery, a railway crossing where a boyfriend died when his car ran into a freight train, the small cafe where Elvis stopped late one night, she said, ate a hamburger and gave the cook a kiss; the lake where they rented a cabin every summer and he and his father fished—Paul remembers the aluminum Jon boat, the stillness of water and sun, tugs on his fishing line, his mother picking buttercups, cooking fish in a cast iron skillet with hush puppies, her hair tied up in red bandana. “I’ve lived here more than once,” his mother would say, gazing out her passenger window. “I’ve lived here more than once.”

Entering Birmingham, past Eastwood Mall and the Howard Johnson’s restaurant, the many buildings and thick traffic, they passed the lone, rusted Studebaker sign where Mother reminded them her father took a photo of her sitting on the hood of a new car and she was in an purple dress with white, poker dots. They drove on past the Fairfield Fairgrounds his parents took him to in the fall to ride the Bumper Cars, the Merry Go Round and the Ferris Wheel—Paul remembers Phil Shaw tunes, cotton candy and night lights—before they turned off on Highway 11 South, out of Birmingham and Bessemer on the Blue Star Highway and into rural countryside again—until the large, sky blue fish sign for Northport appeared before they came into Tuscaloosa. “And why is the hospital called Druid City?” Mother asked. “Spirits in the water oaks!” he and Dad answered aloud. Mother laughed, happy. They drove past the hospital and down University Boulevard among the high, old oaks.

“You know where we are?” he said, The Escape Channel playing softly on his car radio, Paul turned the Mazda off on the side of the road before a vacant shell of a farmhouse and also at the covered bridge that had a small shop and house trailer but no mill now, no color of wild flowers. He slowed the car as they went over the same railroad tracks. “Do you know where we are?”

“Hm mm,” his mother nodded, thin grinning out her window. The grin didn’t change. In Pell City and Leeds, there were more houses, apartments and mini malls, and in Birmingham, there were more fast food joints, high rises, and the rusted Studebaker sign was gone. They rode in quiet through the city and thick traffic, past the Fairfield Grounds and out on the Blue Star highway. It took longer to be in the rural countryside now and coming into Tuscaloosa, the old blue fish sign for Northport was no longer there. They drove toward the hospital. “Hey, Mom. Why is the hospital called Druid City?” Paul tried over his shoulder. “Water,” his mother answered. “The Quad,” Jackie suggested in a whisper, leaning towards him from the back seat. “The Capstone.” So, he drove into the campus on University Boulevard, passing fraternity houses, grounds and bricked buildings, slowing the car at the Quad and line of old oaks under the high, towering obelisk Capstone of the University. “Look, mother, look!” Jackie said and pointed. Mother turned, peered up and out of her window.

“That’s where I’m from,” she said.

He turned off behind the stadium and down Bryant Drive, passed new apartments, shops, the old Presbyterian church and cemetery with the steel spiked fence, and turned down the old back alley street towards what was his grandparents’ house. A small, rental house was roped off as a crime scene and a tipped over grocery cart full of trash lay on the curb. The once massive oaks were gone and the one time, white painted house was dark brown with frayed lawn chairs on the porch and a sparse gravel driveway with a rusted car. At the end of the block was a new apartment complex. The only thing familiar was the motley stone sidewalk, where he, Dad and Grandpa took long walks and he had peddled a bike; and where his mother told him she had learned to roller-skate.

Paul parked before the house at the curb and he and Jackie helped Mother out of the car, leaving the car doors open and holding her hands. They stood on the sidewalk.

“Here’s home, Mother.” Paul said.

His mother looked up at the sky, peered up and down the street.. “Where’s the bus?” she said.

He and Jackie laughed.

“Okay,” Jackie cheerfully suggested, after a pause. “Why don’t we find a Starbucks?”

Paul looked at Jackie and had to smile. He looked to the house and thought of his grandparents standing on the porch to welcome them; inside, the quick talk, his grandmother making tea, his father seated at the kitchen table with a bowl of noonday soup. It struck Paul that he would soon be the only one remembering anything of this. He felt an eery sensation come over him, as if everything was lifting and leaving.

He wakes up in the bed of his old room in the Sunday morning quiet of his parents’ house: his high school desk and chair, books in the bookshelves with CDs and framed photos of his younger self and younger friends; the Colonial Soldiers wallpaper, the blue closet doors. The monitor screen on the bedside table shows his Mother asleep, curled up like a fetal leaf in the sheets: her pale, aged face; her mouth gaped opened to breathe. Paul rises, pulls on his jeans off the floor, goes quietly down the hall in bare feet to the kitchen. The morning light meets him through the sliding glass doors and the kitchen windows, as it used to. Paul sees his mother sleeping on the counter monitor screen. He makes coffee and remembers the Sunday New York Times is still on delivery subscription. He goes, takes the keys off the nail above the back door, unlocks the door and steps out through the screened door. The air is cool. He walks gingerly in his bare feet onto the drive, picks up the rolled newspaper and goes back into the house.

At the kitchen table, he sets the keys down, sits, opens and spreads the Sunday Times over the kitchen table, like Mother, Dad and he used to do when everyone was younger, in pajamas and mussed hair, drinking coffee and reading together in silence, maybe now and then sharing an article or a line—his mother in her white, terrycloth bathrobe; Dad in his red silk, paisley one; Paul in just boxers and tee shirt—before Mother would make pancakes or eggs. At the kitchen table, Paul sips coffee, scans and reads the headline pages. He looks up, glances at the monitor. No Mother.

The door.

He jumps up, fast walks down the hall. Mother’s door is open. She’s not in the room or the bathroom. “Mom?”

He goes into his own room and bathroom, goes into the study. He fast walks back down the hall. The back door is open.

“Mom!”

Out the door and into the drive in his bare feet, he doesn’t see her,. He stops and scans the yard, the street, his Mazda on the curb. “Mom? Mom!”

Paul sprints around the house, doesn’t see her. Circling to the back door, he hurries into the house for his I-phone to call the neighbors, maybe the police. But the old kitchen wall phone is ringing.

“Yes-Yes?” he answers.

“Is this the Abrams house?” a woman says. “Yes,” he pants.

This is Katie Tobias. I’m your neighbor… about three doors down? Mrs. Abrams is at our mailbox,” she informs him. “I tried to bring her inside but she won’t come with me. My husband’s standing with her now.”

“Oh. Oh, thank you,” Paul lets his breath out. “Thank you, Mrs. Tobias. I’ll be right there.”

He runs out the back door, onto the drive and begins sprinting down the street, past his parked Mazda, a kid’s Woom Bike on the curb, thinking of his father then, who hung on, too, but for a different reason. Three houses ahead, there’s a man behind a mailbox at the street corner with what looks like his mother’s form on the blind side of the mailbox, in a beige hat, draped in white, looking away at the upper street. As Paul gets nearer, the man is large with a closed- shaved head and mustache, in dark dress slacks and a blue dress shirt. He turns, raises a hand to signal Paul.

His mother has no glasses, is in an old beige Cloche hat from the closet, her white bathrobe opened to her thin gown, and she’s wearing dark burgundy dance boots; her terry-clothed arms extended behind her, hands interlocked around the mailbox post while she leans forward, eyes focused ahead, her lips pressed small and tight.

Paul thinks of Jackie. He wants to call Jackie. “Mother?” he pants. Mother?”

The man waves to him, smiles. But his mother holds her eyes on the street ahead, mouth small and set, leaning forward from the mailbox, like some dated figurehead, waiting for her ride to come.

Theron Montgomery is the author of The Procession (short stories), Driving Truman Capote (memoir), The End of the Legend of Jared Snead (novel) and Was There (AWC Award Winning Short Drama). HIs latest novel, The Street of Yearning is due out late summer 2024. He resides in Winter Garden, Florida.