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Tess nagged me into visiting our father’s grave. She said it was the sort of thing that daughters should do. While she arranged a handmade wreath composed of daisies, bluebells, buttercups and dandelions on his tombstone, I stood there and felt stupid–thus more inclined to be a pain in the ass than acting the part of a dutiful daughter. Naturally, I had to get on her case about the inclusion of dandelions:

“Those are weeds, molecule.”

“So? People don’t grow the other stuff on purpose, either, Sar-duh.”

He died when I was two, shortly after Tess’s birth, thus destined to be just another smiling ghost in the family album and little more than the source of our surname. It never occurred to us to visit his grave, or even ask where it lay. But that changed on the first day of the 1971-72 school year, when at ages eleven and nine, we finally learned how he’d filled his grave. Suicide. One of Tess’s subnormal classmates had teased her about not having a dad. Said ours shot himself in the head in order to keep from knowing us–Tess especially.

“Tell me, fucker, or else,” I informed that kid, after school, in the playground, my arm locked around his neck, my knee in the small of his back, his face inexorably inching closer and closer to a mound of freshy squeezed dogshit. He told me he’d overheard his parents talking about it. I believed him because people are uncommonly truthful when faced with a high-end or else. Still, he got a bit anyway for making Tess cry–and for being stupid enough to think she wouldn’t tell me and that nothing bad would happen if she did.

Our mother was a word class liar, once in a lifetime. She capitalized on the specious notion that true sounding things are brief. “He had an accident” was her go to fiction about our father’s death on the very few occasions we brought it out. Nary a syllable more. Though characteristically terse, it depended more on a look in her eyes that told us not to fuck with it than brevity to get over. Quizzing our only other living relative, a pill head “aunt” from his side, would have been useless because Anna-Lou knew better than to cross Mom; and Mom’s best friend Nora would have just blown us off and reported our curiosity. Although it appeared to be common knowledge in some circles, Tess and I vowed to keep that we knew a secret. For me it was something I could use to fuck with it at leisure; my sister’s reasoning is harder to explain.

Tess had a secret word for the beauty she saw flashing in ugliness, like panning for gold in shit creek. I don’t recall the first time I heard her say Dreampurple, but it must have been around 1969 or ‘70–certainly no later than that time in ‘71. So, it made sense that she’d see the Dreampurple in self murder. Mom was big on labeling the things she didn’t understand about Tess us “phases.” If Mom had known about the wreath laying business she would have attributed it to yet another of Tess’s passing fancies with the same certainty she had that I’d wind up in Hell via the Washington State Women’s Corrections Center at Purdy.

At the time Tess was going through a Jesus phase. But it burned off like summer fog because you have to seek the Lord, whereas brutal reality never stops until it has killed you. It took me a long time before I realized that there was a difference between Tess’s phases and that which she held in Dreampurple esteem; Mom never got it, though sharp, for her it all added up the same. She didn’t know that the phases were temporary while the Dreampurple was for keeps. Naturally, I figured that Tess had nagged me into going to New Town Cemetery due to a newly found infatuation with Heaven. I went along because sometimes it was the only way to get her to shut up about a Big Idea.

I still wonder why flowers look natural on graves. You’d think that the two items are so far apart as concepts that they would clash in the mind. Conditioning, I suppose; the result of long term exposure to a tradition that’s formed a mental link in the species. Tess had arranged the wreath so it made a circle around the words etched on his small, rectangular cement tombstone:

DELROY DEAN SPAHR

1935 1962

I almost felt something when I looked at his shitty little poorman’s grave–a tiny cement square, not even made from natural stone, already cracking, certain to give away his name only after a few winters had leaned on it. It seemed to me that a life should add up to more than a name and two dates–all that time being a someone marked only by a small empty space between cold numbers. And the missing dash between the years you normally see on tombstones bothered me. It felt as though he’d been slighted in a way that I took personally.

This thinking didn’t go well with my baseless fear of the long shadows of late September afternoons. There’s something about September that’s death already; something that the shadows uncover rather than conceal. Ever since winter I’d been experiencing shocking, sudden mood drops; these had no triggers and are best described as an instantaneous switch from my familiar tone of thoughts to a cold, certainty that the universe and everything in it, like our parents and us, was already dead, and had been for a long time, if not always.

For the first few years of my Endless Now, I found that I could talk my way from it–even shake it off and pretend it hadn’t happened.

“I don’t want to be here,” I said. “If you’re gonna say a prayer, say it so we can go.”

“Don’t think so,” Tess said in a voice that weighed more than a nine-year-old kid should have to carry. She’d only say “Don’t think so” when something was over. Don’t think so items hadn’t passed the Dreampurple test.

Jesus might have walked on water, but he’d sunk for Tess. Christianity assayed fool’s Dreampurple. Nothing ever got a second chance at the test.

End Chapter One. Chapter Two on Monday