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The Mending of Lillian Cathleen

By Linda Brooks Davis

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Ma resisted a drunken beast as long as she lived.
I lower my head to the barren table and run my hands along its blackened surface, as nicked and pitted as my mother’s skin.
She fed her brood atop this slab. As best she could.
My fingers coax from the wood’s crannies a lifetime of embedded moments, photo cards in a parlor viewer.
Long extinguished firelight shimmers in the table’s gentle slopes, backlight for a promenade of memories.
Pressing my ear to the hardened plane, I capture a fleeting accompaniment, a dirge played on a broken heart. Tin plates clatter. Bean juice sizzles. One corner of the table rocks atop a nail keg. And hands etched with grime grip spoons as if they’re brooms.
My imagined viewer clicks, and a bitter Oklahoma winter arrives. A blowing rain. Work-roughened hands upend the table and slide it into a rectangular frame, our shanty’s one door, Ma’s feeble attempt to batten her family against storms.
The scene shifts, and a distant Christmas glows in the wood’s warp and woof. Ma sits alone, abandoned to die. I find her. Feed her. Dress her in decent nightclothes. And spread fine quilts over her skeletal frame.
But she disappears without a word, save a penciled note.
Go back to that fancy college, Lil’. Make somethin’ of yourself, somethin’ I weren’t able to do. Fly. For me.
I trace a fingertip along the board’s undulating lines. Love beyond measuring is ground into the wood grain.
Clenching my eyes shut, I glimpse my mother stumbling through a counterpane of snow. To the blacksmith’s shop. And parts unknown. One photo slide supplants another, and I’m returning to college on
rail tracks headed south. For Ma’s sake.
I blink, and the meager lights darken, stirring scraps of a lonely memoir created months ago. Ma and I enjoy a handful of hours in the deep of night, she on one bank of Rock Creek and I on the other. We whisper secrets across the water and hide from the monster she married.
The table’s wooden canvas darkens to black, save a lone, ghastly fig- ure. A feather pillow in his tobacco-stained hands. And Ma, spiritless in death.
I should have killed him.
Curling my fingers around the table edge, I wince. A rough-bored hole has nipped my fingernail, peeling it back. I staunch the scarlet bloom, but what’s to be done for the borehole cruelty carved in my heart?
Today’s announcement in downtown Needham will render the first stitch.
Lifting my head, I lean against the sycamore chair back. Hand-carved and rough as a cob in winter, its bumps and bulges poke at me, prod me to cast aside the haunting photo promenade and to stand.
“Ma would’ve judged this day hotter ́n a billy goat in a pepper patch, Lil’.” Donnie, my bowlegged brother, leans against the door frame and stares at his meager world outside. Stones encircle an abandoned campfire beneath a stubborn black walnut tree, witness to decades of thunderstorms and lightning, droughts and wildfires.
And tumults of a different sort under our tin roof.
He clumps onto the slanting porch. Rickets has stolen his mobility.
I join him. “It’s a hundred and six degrees.”
“You reckon that’s as hot as Ma’s billy goat?” He runs grubby fingers through the thatch he’s chopped neck length with rusted shears.
I grin and ruffle his coffee-black mop. “I reckon so. It’s out of the ordinary for sure.”
But this is no ordinary day.
The jury has reached a verdict.
“Gotta run, brother mine.”
He peers at me, telltale curiosity rimming his black-marble eyes.
“Where ya goin’, sis?”
How much do I reveal? Depravation has cast his mind in a limited
mold. “I’m going into town. But I’ll be back later on. With some news.” “What kinda news?”
I tweak the tip of his nose. “The good kind. The kind Ma would whoop over.”
He slaps a thigh and chortles. “I’ll be watchin’ for you then.”
Striding toward the meandering stream behind the shack I once called home, I halt in the tinder-dry brush. And turn for another glimpse of my brother’s gap-toothed grin.
Joy crests near my heart. Good tidings await my brother and me— and our departed ma—the other side of Rock Creek.

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