J.B. Mulligan
J.B. Mulligan has had poems and stories in dozens of magazines, including recently, Tattoo Highway, Doorknobs & Bodypaint, The Chimaera, Numbat, Poetry Midwest and Blue Unicorn, and two chapbooks: The Stations of the Cross and THIS WAY TO THE EGRESS, and has appeared in the anthology Inside Out: A Gathering of Poets (http://www.geocities.com/anneyohn2003/index.htm)
The following work is copyright © 2008. All rights reserved. No distribution or reprinting in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
Digging Holes
Ralph has never understood that when you’ve gotten yourself into a hole, the solution is not digging harder. He’s not a bright man (is there such a thing?), and he’s always been an unfaithful sonofabitch, but he’s a great father, a good provider, sweet even when he doesn’t need to be, and as funny a person as you could ever hope to meet. He’s also, forgive the cliche, my best friend. So all in all, add up his good and subtract his bad, and I think I’ll keep him. That way I can kick him when he needs it. And sometimes when I need to do that. But don’t ever let him near a hole with a shovel in his hand.
My sister told me once that I needed to be more feminine, then he wouldn’t wander off sniffing. I told her to go try a few decidedly non-feminine things, and she took the hint. It’s funny, in a way though – Sally is a classic Other Woman. As many men as have told her they’d leave home, hearth and honey for her, exactly that many have forgotten to do so. But she keeps trying and wrinkling. She’ll wake up when it’s too late.
She and Ralph never did anything behind my back though, credit them for that. And it wasn’t even fear, I think. They both love me as much as I love them.
What got me to realizing that Ralph was a natural born gopher was the first time I caught him cheating. (It was the second time he did that, but I didn’t find out about the first time for years.) He couldn’t deny it without making that a bigger confession than the last one. Damn fool actually bought me flowers and told me that he’d never done that for her – her being the woman he was insisting he hadn’t had anything to do with. I held my tongue and waited for him to realize what he’d said, and he went on for another five seconds before something in my face must have given it away and he trailed off speaking and looked to his shoes for advice (they had none) and looked up and me and smiled, and cleverly said, “Oh.”
Then he didn’t mean he hadn’t given her flowers, yes he did mean that, but weren’t these roses nice?
“Stop digging, Ralph, your grave’s deep enough,” I told him. But he kept on going so I punched him. He moved away and kept talking and that finally, for whatever reason, broke me and I sat down and cried. That shut him up. That’s the only thing that’s ever shut him up, and I’ve tried not to use that very often.
I’m not very dainty, fine – and never wanted to be. As a child, I was big-boned but agile, better than most boys at games, and smarter than quite a few too. I’ve had two years of college, which I got because my Daddy was an eccentric man for his time. So I have brains and some books – and sometimes neither of those will help you – and I was never anybody’s idiot. Not even Ralph’s. I’ve weighed him and found him worth hanging onto. Look around and tell me there’s a whole lot of men who are that.
Now we all dig deeper sometimes, when we’d be better off just stopping, I won’t deny that I’ve done that myself a few times. (Not that I’d ever admit that to Ralph, he’d just seize the excuse to keep doing what he does.)
The time he did it the most, and the worst thing he’s done in his life, to my mind – and he’s a man of mostly minor sins, when you think about it – was with the daughter of a friend of ours, who stayed with us one summer while she interned at a law firm in the city. A bright pretty girl, looked like fluff and glitter but had substance. But she was young. I knew Ralph was performing for her, flashing his feathers and making little warbling noises, but it wound up that he was performing on her. And if he couldn’t hide it, with his practice, that poor child didn’t stand a chance. I knew she’d done something she wasn’t happy about the next morning. But she’d been out drinking with coworkers the night before and had gotten home late, so I figured all her interning had lead to some work-related romancing, which I thought (idiot me) was kind of cute. I tried to draw her out, let her get it off her chest, but she shook and shivered, and I let it pass. So it took a few days to realize what that sonofabitch had done to her. And it was he dragged her out onto the dance floor, that much I knew. And that man told so many stories and made so many excuses (he was part of her education? – they don’t give degrees in dumbass) that by the end of it all his tales were just gathered around him kicking his butt, practically without my help. But I whacked him anyway. I don’t like his betrayals, not by any means, but damn it I’m his wife. And both times I strayed (and I’ve never told him and don’t start on me, conscience), it would have been on him to cope. But this was the daughter of a friend. Not a child, OK (nobody looks like that in a swimsuit is a child) but she was a friend’s not-a-child, and she was under our protection. And no, the wolf isn’t protecting the chicken by swallowing it whole. (That was another of his read good shovelfuls. I’m thrilled you used protection, Ralph. Why don’t we protect you by cutting that off and putting it in a mason jar and burying it?)
Anyway, I love him and I was never all that likely to shoot him. And Ralph has done some other typical male foolishness – men are smarter than women, but that’s not saying a lot. But most of a woman’s stupidity is planned: we know we’re doing something dumb, and too damn bad. Which is really stupid, but still it’s at least intentionally so. But men have this thing, they’re going to turn their brain off because they don’t need it for this, that simply amazes me. There’s not a thing in life you don’t need a brain for, or at least that using your brain can make it better. But tell that to a man. Then tell him twice. Then smack him, he still won’t get it.
Stupid in fact was what I did for Donnie, my high school sweetheart, and maybe the prettiest man I ever did know. As soulless as a rock though. (Pretty women sometimes get a reputation for having no soul, but it’s there – stunted sometimes, and kind of mean, but it’s there.) But Donnie’s world was Donnie and nothing else. When he made you laugh it was for Donnie. When he bought you pretties or did things for you, it was for Donnie. When he made you feel good, like I was swimming in an ecstasy of waves, it was for Donnie.
Of course, I know this now, decades later and a little bit wiser – but a whole lot more of the world seen, whether it’s galloping by, standing there gorgeous as the dawn, or trampling you down and stomping. I would have told the younger me to run like hell – and the younger me, idiot child that she was, would have laughed and gone prancing after Donnie.
Maybe we are as stupid as men.
I never told Ralph about Donnie, but I didn’t have to. We all knew each other’s business in high school. There wasn’t a person there wasn’t perfectly fluent in gossip. And it didn’t really matter, since Donnie moved out of town a year after graduation, and never came back. And nobody heard anything about him – he was an only child, and his parents died while he was in high school, and his only aunt, a widow, died shortly after he left. I like to imagine him staring into some pond forever, off in the woods somewhere, captive of his reflection. Die, you bastard.
So there I was, moth to Donnie’s cold bright flame, young and in what I thought was love. And there were other moths around, and there was always a struggle to be closest to the fire, so a lot of us got burned. And a few of us blistered, and I was one of those.
Now my parents, who put up with me and are surely resting with Jesus for it, would not have put up with that. And there was never going to be a Mrs. Donnie, even I understood that. Ralph is a desiccated reverend compared to Donnie. And even in those prehistoric days of wire hangers and magic herbs, I wasn’t about to do that. I didn’t care what happened (I thought), that was not an option.
So I dressed loose and layered, early in autumn and late into spring (I was pregnant at the right time, that was a welcome and minor blessing), and ate like a pig – and made myself vomit when nobody could see, and amazingly, I got away with it. My friends were worried about me, my parents thought it was a phase (well, yes, but...), and Donnie was miles away with himself, going after somebody else - and catching her, one more damn fool in what she thought was love. (And I wasn’t the only one to bear fruit from the sowing: I’ve seen two grown men with Donnie written all over their face, sons of girls who married young and sudden.) But I went through it and through with it, and pulled it off.
Sally I know has been scraped out twice, and I don’t disrespect her for that, but it wasn’t my way. I don’t know what I was going to do with my little one, not even what name. There was a Catholic church in the city, I figured if nothing else came up, I would leave the child on their doorstep, wrapped like Jesus and sweet and smiley, and they’d take the kid in, they’d have to, it’s their religion.
So I can’t say that I was really prepared, but I stupidly thought it would all work out (people were having children long before high schools came about) and I “ran away” when the moment came, and spent two days in a motel on money borrowed from friends, and my poor sweet son, nameless and squirmy, lived for two hours, then he died.
I held him those two hours, and fed him once (he didn’t drink well), and thought about how I couldn’t give him up and had to, and how he could have any name but Donnie (I’d leave a note with him about that). And I’ve had children since, and at least I know, thankfully, that it wasn’t any doing of mine that killed him directly. But I should have been in a hospital, with my shame and my child, and I was not. I couldn’t do that, and I couldn’t do that to my parents. And he drifted off to sleep while I sighed and smiled and sobbed, and in a little while I noticed he wasn’t breathing, and he was getting colder, and the whole damn room was cold, with the lights off and the TV on to some stupid show, and my baby couldn’t be dead but he was.
After he was gone, a week or so after, I named him in my mind after my Daddy’s brother John, who’d died riding a bike when he was only seven years old, run over by a car and that bastard didn’t even stop. I think I thought maybe John would make friends with my boy in heaven, maybe be a friend to him up there. I don’t know. It just fit.
Anyway, by morning he had started to stiffen and I had wrapped him in towels and tied him in the plastic bag from the garbage can in the motel room (Jesus, forgive me that, I still cry sometimes when I think of how he went out of this world), and I took my dead son in a satchel on a bus back to just outside of my home town, and wandered into the woods and dug a hole, a deep hole where nothing wild and hungry would ever get to him, and I put him inside and said a long crying prayer and covered him up and put a big flat rock on top of the grave to be sure, and went home. Still in loose clothing, which I got away from in stages, and my appetite went back to normal slowly, and my baby was out in that hole that I could never visit and I was in Hell for so long that I couldn’t.... do anything but leave there after a while. So I made it through, more on passing of time than my own strength. And I would like to say I made it on faith, but that was the one time of my life when I lived in what they call the long dark night of the soul, blaming God and then apologizing, for what had happened to my baby. And those were the two biggest holes I ever dug in my life: out in the woods, crying and scraping up dirt with a tree limb – and in my life after that, lie after lie in public and at home, and tears in private that spent more water than I thought I held.
Not too long after that (thought it seemed so long at the time), I started going out with Ralph. I hadn’t liked him much before then, though he did strike me as funny. He was attracted to me, he told me later, because I told him off, of all reasons – especially when he deserved it. Well, I guess that should have been a warning. But we’ve built something real and durable. And as we both get creakier and crankier, it’s not too likely anybody else would take us anyway.
I remember my long-lost boy every day, and pray for him. And for myself. But the pains of that time have mostly healed. The only thing that keeps coming back sometimes, is a dream I have where I’m in a deep hole, and I try scrambling up the sides, and that doesn’t work, and something’s down there in the hole that I don’t want to see, something terrible coming closer, waiting to eat me, and I know what it is and I know that it’s going to get me, it’s coming nearer in the thick dank suffocating black, and then I wake up, and Ralph sometimes wakes and asks me if I’m OK, and I tell him to shut up, then hug him and say yes I am. But the warm sweet first light of dawn seems like it will never get here. It always does, but I never believe it will.
