Issue 10.2 Spring 2015

10.2 cover image

 

About the Author

Jeron Jennings hails from Saint Regis, MT. He is a second-year English Teaching student at the University of Montana, but has an unofficial passion for Creative Writing. When he is not smashing ungraceful words together and deeming it literature, he is likely listening to music, enjoying a few libations, and pondering the meaning of existence. 

 

With Worn Out Tools

 

Jeron Jennings

 


{Overture}

 

Sounds of discord echo through the house at midnight.

 

My father has just plugged his new, magnificent Gibson Les Paul for the first time. He has nearly no idea how to play it; all I hear are distorted, unharmonious chords that stumble clumsily along, to no great resolve.

 

My parents recently sold a twenty acre parcel of land and split the profits. My mother would put her half toward an apartment in the city; my father paid off loans, got caught up on bills, and then went to a local pawn shop and purchased himself a three-thousand-dollar guitar.

 

I imagine the moment on Saturday, Dad modestly appraising each guitar on display. His final choice would have been the third candidate he considered; the first two being polar extremes, one too much of something, the next not enough. And when he finally laid eyes on the worn and restored, golden Les Paul, it must have been a moment of absolute reconciliation in a life otherwise deprived. It must not have been a far cry from the first time he saw the house.

 

I imagine when he stood before that frame, that skeletal version of what would grow into our home, it appeared to him as a thing that had eluded him his entire life. Here his pride would not be misplaced – these were his best laid plans, here was sublimity.
           

The first years only served to validate that optimism. We had limited electricity, and had to haul water manually from the well. But Mom grew fresh vegetables in the garden and almost every night we built a roaring fire. I would watch in awe as Dad seemed to conjure dancing flames from nothing and when he began to teach my older brother James how to use the matches I looked forward to the day he would show me as well.

 

Our lab, Chopper, was only a puppy and at night my parents would watch The X-Files on VHS tapes. I’d settle into the couch with Mom, Dad, and Chopper even though it was late and often frightening, maybe just to feel closer to them.
           

{Verse}

 

I wake at about 6 a.m.


I roll off the couch in my parent’s living room and feel cold without blankets. Stumbling towards the kitchen, I throw open the fridge. I crack open a beer and take my first swig of the day.

 

After I finish that drink, I pour myself a cup of coffee and get ready for class. It’s over an hour’s commute into Missoula from out here, but it doesn’t bother me all days. I pull on some torn up jeans and a wrinkled sweatshirt. My hair is getting pretty long but I tend not to care. I take a few extra beers with me and head out. I’m still drinking coffee from my open mug as I traverse the potholes of our dirt road. I’m dexterous when it comes to keeping it in the mug while driving, even on rocky terrain.

 

About fifteen miles in I’ve finished off the coffee and have gotten about three beers deep. I take the frontage road, roll the windows down and blast Brand New upon the unsuspecting riverside.
           

I’ve poured my drinks into opaque bottles so no one in the passing cars can tell I’m drinking. I like knowing I have it at my side, that little secret I keep to myself. This kid of deviancy I used to demonize – but every night I would come home to Mom’s accusations that I had driven home drunk despite her knowing my opposition to such a thing. So I figure I’d just lean into it; though I won’t have to deal with the berating anymore. Besides, I’m usually anxious when I drive and, if anything, the alcohol takes the edge off.
           

I make it to my British Literature class just a few minutes late. The professor is playing Jeff Buckley’s rendition of “Hallelujah” and upholding that the fundamental theory of all romantic literature can be illustrated by what he calls “The Broken Hallelujah.”
           

On the way back, I stop by the river, where I sit on the trunk of my parked car and read “Ode To A Nightingale” aloud to myself. When I finally do get back home, I can hear the lawn mower running.
           

These days, Dad finds solace in cutting the grass more frequently than it can grow to an objectionable length. But at night, when he’s drunk he will come out to the front of the house and perform grand, hour-long soliloquys that start anywhere and end here, unable to leave.
           

Most of what he says upsets me, and in my younger years I may have interjected but instead I heed Jensen’s advice, who - when I asked him how he kept his marriage alive for decades even while sharing a home and a workplace - told me that every day the two of them would take a long walk, and he simply allowed his wife to talk while he listened. No rebuttals, no discussion, he wouldn’t say a word. So, I let my father reminisce loudly upon me; no defense and no reply. And as he gets louder and more incoherent I slip into reflections of my own.  

            {Refrain}

 

 

At the turn of the millennium, our family had a few new members. Tawny was born in my parents’ bedroom in ‘98 and we welcomed in our new beloved puppy, the golden-coated Chester. Mom still grew vegetables and planted in her garden, and we were able to install running water in the house.

 

Dad was never able to sleep in silence, shapes and noises always seemed to haunt him from the dark; and so he sleeps with the TV on. Mom could not tolerate that, so she slept in the bedroom with the new baby while Dad crashed on the living room couch. James and I didn’t yet have a bedroom so we slept on the floor in front of Dad’s couch. On the carpet, there was only room for one of us, and with James being the older brother I was usually relegated to sleeping on the plywood. It was closer to the fireplace, but I would often wake up sore, smelling of wood smoke, covered with large black ants that had slipped into the house with our fire wood.
           

It was miserable, but it made me thankful for mornings, when I’d rise to the scent of percolated coffee, which I had begun to drink casually by the time I was three or four, albeit it was then served to me in a bottle, nipple and all. I’d watch Fox X-Press with my Dad in the mornings and The O’Reilly Factor at night. To me it seemed endless bickering about some funny-looking, goofy-sounding man in a suit, who always seemed to be talking to a large audience; not that I understood any of what was said, but I thought I would soon, when I started pre-school in the fall.

 

            {Verse}

 

 

“It kinda feels like you’re leaving me,” were the words I woke up to this morning as my father admitted them to my mother. No doubt she had just told him her plans to sign the lease to a new Missoula apartment on Tuesday. She weakly assures him this is not the case; this has always been her move – silent changes, tiptoeing out the door.

 

Not to fear though, because right now I’m surrounded by great music and I’m just starting to get a good buzz going.

 

“You made a promise to a boy you couldn’t keep – you broke it like your windshield…” this band sings at a west end music festival. “These three and I are just along for the ride, we’ll have fun, we’ll go fast, we’ll be fine.”

 

Of course, I am constantly worried for my father. I don’t know if I can leave the house in good conscience; not when every day I’m witness to his depression - not when he could make good on his morbid threat of years ago. I sit down against a hill and consider a precious piece of desperately solicited advice: You shouldn’t spend your life trying to save people who have the power to save themselves.

 

I shrug it off and start to look for my car, growing sick of the relevance in the bands’ songs. I find it parked in front of the bar and consider the symmetry with which I am here and drunk again.

 

            {Refrain}

 

 

I ease into the driver’s seat and shrug back into the years, to a point in time when I had just begun first grade - to a Tuesday on which I remember awaking to discover I didn’t have to go to school. Mom was watching TV, which she never did, but she seemed concerned as she scrutinized the long plumes of smoke rising from the buildings on screen. Dad shared in her worry; but nevertheless packed his lunchbox and went to work, Mom’s eyes not moving from the screen.

 

By then, the goofy man on the TV had been replaced by a smaller, frailer man - who was funny but not in the same way. He always appeared to me scared or confused; but in place of criticism, his speeches to large audiences always seemed met with endless praise, at least from the people on Dad’s TV programs.

 

            {Verse}

 

 

Dad and I hike up to the rockslide beyond Little Joe, where an ancient glacier ironed out the side of a nearby peak and carried with it hundreds of colossal rocks to deposit them at the base of the valley. Above the wastage of stone and earth is an exposed faced of rock, the peak of the water table cutting cleanly across it and secreting a rust-orange water stain visible from hundreds of feet below.
Dad moves across the massive rocks with thinly-veiled fascination, leaning down to examine the countless ripples and layers of deposition. As though trying to dismantle them, he kicks them as he would test the balance of a dining room chair or the pressure of a truck tire. It seems he is looking for something among the rocks, reflections of that quality they had that always appealed to him. He wanted proof of their immobility – proof that they, as he suspiciously hoped, existed outside of time.


He finally takes a seat at the top of a forty-foot boulder with an exposed sheet of quartz at his feet, sipping at his beer as he eyes the rock face overlooking the ravine.
           

“This is a cool spot,” he says.
           

Beneath us, I hear the humming of the creek, forced to diverge beneath the rocks before merging once again downstream. Whispering up from beneath our feet – like a river running underground.
           

We take Dad’s truck to the top of the pass, where we sit atop a plateau covered in wild daisies that overlooks thirty miles of the mountain range, killing off the hours.

 

{Refrain}

 

By the time the first decade in the house was coming to a close, Mom stopped growing vegetables and I adopted a vegetarian diet. Tawny and James were both in school and I was not - Mom worked as a substitute teacher at their school while I was at home, alone. As a result, for a great deal of my primary education I was left up to my own devices. I spent most of my time watching movies and reading books, and, in the months leading up to Election Day, paid special attention to a Voter’s Guide that sat untouched on our kitchen counter. By the time I stepped into the voting booth with my father in November of 2004, I was opinionated enough to verbally oppose his decision to cast a vote for the scared, confused darling of his news programs.
           

It wasn’t until the next year that the house had a foundation. It was set atop posts around its perimeter, nailed to these wood pillars with a total of twenty-seven nails – one could grasp everything that held us to the ground in a fist.

 

Dad dug out the earth underneath the floor and added the cement for the basement - over ten years after the original framework of the house was erected.

 

My father had succeeded in what felt impossible; he had taken this existing structure, and established an entirely new foundation. It was as if the house was not becoming his - it always had been.
           
{Verse}

 

At what is now the top of the staircase used to be the front door. Dad replaced it with a window, leaving the other entrance to serve as the main portal. I stare pensively out as Dad prepares a sandwich, venting his frustrations with the mortgage payments as he has a thousand nights before. Frustrated by his recitation and repetition, I break my silence to cut him short.

 

“You don’t, like, owe it to me or Tawny or anyone to stay here you know.”

 

A flustered look wipes vertically down his face and I realize this is the first time anyone has said this to him.

 

“… I know. But it would still be nice for you kids to have…”

 

“Yeah. Except,” I interject, “This isn’t where any of us want to live, it’s only you. And you don’t seem particularly happy here.”

 

“Well, Jeron, what am I gonna do with this place then? I don’t have money for another place.”

 

“Well,” I suggest precariously. “If you don’t like it here, why not put it on the market?”

 

“… Ugh,” he gasps, as if cornered, looking around. “Who’s gonna want this place? The floors aren’t all finished, neither is the bedroom or the bathroom…” He continues his list and begins to trail off.

 

“I know,” I resolve. “But why not just put it on the market and see what happens? I mean, it was even further from finished when you bought it.”

 

He remains silent.

 

“It’s just a thought.”

 

“I have to go wait for your Mom to call,” he says, biting into his finished sandwich and excusing himself. “She said she’d call me.”

 

Hours later, I sit silently at the bottom of the stairs in our darkened basement and hear the dreaded sound of bombastic footsteps followed by shattering glass. I run to the top of the stairs to see our cordless phone scattered in discreet buttons and circuits across the floor, along with shards of blue-edged glass.
Dad approaches me mercilessly, cracking a can open as he points and shouts at the wall behind me.
“Your mom didn’t even call me!” he yells. “I waited all night until three in the morning and she didn’t even goddamn call me.”

 

I stay silent as he creeps closer and speaks for the first time to me and not through me.

 

“But you know what you made me realize?” he interrogates. “I hate this fucking house.”

 

He marches off back into his bedroom and proclaims his announcement:

 

“This house is going up on the market tomorrow.”

 

I pick up the pieces of the broken phone and sweep up the bits of glass fallen from the vaguely eye-shaped hole in the window.  

 

{Interlude}

 

A day later, while Dad is still at work, the phone rings with its familiar, shrill tone. I move to receive it but - realizing it’s in pieces in a trash can - race downstairs to answer the ancient corded telephone.

 

“Hello?” I answer.

 

A breathy static follows, then, as if startled, the frail voice of my mother’s mother, Lillian.

 

“…Hi… Todd?”

 

“No, Grandma, it’s Jeron.”
           

“Oh… hi. How are you?” She speaks with a fading panic, calmly hysterical. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen you.”
           

It had been a long time – almost two years. But I shamefully recall the February prior, when Mom and I had driven through Livingston – where Lillian resided – and not visited her. Mom assured me there was simply not enough time to visit the ninety-three-year-old woman.
           

After a few moments of meandering pleasantries, Lillian asks, “Can I talk with your Mom?”
           

And I don’t know what to say. It’s been over a month since Mom left.
           

“She’s not here,” I say, “But I can have her call you.”
           

“Oh… that’s fine.” She says. “The reason why I called, why I wanted to talk to her is because just a moment ago I felt like I was going to die…”
           

I slide to the floor and my mind slips back to “Nightingale.”
             

“… but I don't feel like that now, because I've talked to you.”

 

Her voice cracks over the phone, unreal, and I pull the speaker away from my face.
           

She tells me she loves me - I reciprocate the sentiment to hang up the phone, unable to understand why I feel guilty.
           

I have been half in love with easeful Death.

 

… And now I’m driving drunk as hell tonight over the hill where Morgan was killed by an oncoming car. I love the scent of coffee coming from the upholstery of my seat and the way the side of the road is framed by one headlight. I am sliding as smoothly across the galaxies of this road as the liquid is down my tongue. I am screaming out of the window and letting it be known I am alive and deliberately so. I could do this absolutely forever, I believe, as I speed across land into a spectacular and prevailing future.

 

Finally, for a moment I can believe that there is a release here and not a loss. I want to believe, anyway. I look back on the years and how they distort then into now and try to understand what led us here and what might let us leave.

 

{Verse}

 

By the time I returned to public school, my father had adopted my vegetarian diet for himself, and replaced his daily intake of Fox News with MSNBC.

 

Dad’s Mother, Phyllis, came to visit that summer. It was the last time I saw her in good health; and for an eighty-five-year-old that would never be an eighty-eight-year-old, she was incredibly full of life.

 

For her, I imagine, it was a great joy, to see her son, once-dropout, once-junkie, and once-prisoner, now lead what appeared such a wholesome life. While among her siblings, Mom lived the life-less luxurious, Dad was a success story among his own. His past had been tainted by struggle, crime, a coke addiction and a prison stint; but he was the brother who had the life his own brothers strived to; he had his children, their mother, and his home.

 

When Phyllis passed, we made a trip down to Salt Lake City, where my father grew up. It was the only time I’d ever been to the house where he used to live. Small and suburban, it was a far cry from the home he built for himself; everything was carpeted and colored with sickly perversions of earth tones, and there was very little evidence the year was any later than 1979. But in the backyard was a thriving garden, an oasis filled with plants that didn’t belong, and I thought about all the years in which Mom tended to her many gardens. What a comfort it must have been to Dad, to once more look out the window and see newly blooming, hand-planted flowers, just as he had when he was a boy, only this time in front of the house that he himself built…

 

Mom did not come with us to Utah. Her temporary position at school was too important to relieve herself of for the weekend we spent at Phyllis’ deathbed.

 

But what a great relief, a circumstance of such mercy to the history of our family that things stayed just intact enough, for just long enough, that by the time Phyllis was on her death bed, our world could still exude such a semblance of togetherness that to her it may have appeared it would be that way forever.
She, after all, had been the omniscient binding to our family. Each of the five of us were only units that seemed glued to the other four by some interpersonal web only Phyllis could see or understand. I imagine she could resolve any dispute, was an effective matchmaker, and put on excellent dinner parties.
The last summer that she came to visit we went to the cinema to see The X-Files film, Dad, Phyllis, Tawny, and I. Going to cinema was always extraordinary to me – no one questions your desire to shut out reality or ignore your responsibilities in that dark room lit by a projector’s light. There, we could escape.

 

But sitting there, I felt a stark juxtaposition between now and curling up on the couch ten years before with my parents - the chill that follows realizing a moment can never exist as it once did again. But I couldn’t have known then, as the familiar theme played, as the screen lit our faces in that dark room and the actors repeated that one banality endlessly: “Don’t give up.”

 

Fade to black. Roll credits.

 

The lights come back on and I am nineteen again.

 

{Refrain}

 

There are houses now at the edge of the property where I used to wander. The President is now some third man and little that he does strikes me as particularly funny. Chester is dead and Chopper is dead; neither of my siblings are in school and I am. I can’t get Tawny to throw away her cigarettes or move back in and I haven’t seen James for almost two years. Phyllis is dead and Mom is gone.   

 

Out here in the woods, things can seem to happen so distantly; looking through the windows can be as watching the flickering scenes of a moving picture, unreal and inconsequential. But a few, sobering moments have crept in through the cracks over the years and leave things utterly disrupted.

 

“I decided not to sell the house.” Dad tells me. “I thought about it and I don’t want to be anywhere else.”
           

I nod, and as he begins to walk away he adds, as if defeated, “I don’t know anything else.”

 

Now I need to be somewhere where my thoughts can breathe without bumping up against the narrow walls of the house or endless clusters of trees. I steal a few drinks from the fridge and climb up the mountain behind my parents’ – behind Dad’s – house. I reach a favored spot on the mountainside just as the last light of the June day slips up and over the mountains on every end of the valley, carrying with it the serene clouds of peach and purple that are now receding back from the valley in all directions, to anywhere.

 

I’m aware now of the finite amount of space the valley occupies in the vast countryside. What had always seemed a limitless expanse of forest and hills to my father, I could see now, possessed clear boundaries and any demons released to the valley would eventually wander back to our front porch.

 

The valley remembers everything, and the way the branches of trees hang over you down there is enough to make anyone feel small, like a child looking up at the faces of disapproving adults. He had always been told that there was room at the top, but upon arrival found only a share of deluded space. It’s the bitter reality to that pioneered American Dream of property ownership: He came ready to populate what was an empty space with all his hopes and ambitions, only to find it was already occupied - it belongs, ultimately, to no one. No, he was not after something that could be reproduced or conjured from thin air – but a limited substance that had been dealt out in unequal parcels at the beginning of time, the start of his life; an element that could not be duplicated or manufactured. Alas, happiness is a finite resource, and between the two of them, my mother and my father, was enough for only one.

 

But if he could be here now, if his age would allow him to climb just this one last steep slope and breathe in the sweet, free air, this limitless ecstasy reserved only for the lightest of heart and yet plenty enough for everyone to share in; if he could just know this, would he still be able to say he had lost everything – or anything?

 

The valley remembers everything. And tomorrow, we will rise, unrestricted by an earlier notion.

 

I turn her advice over in my head again: “You shouldn’t spend your life trying to save people who have the power to save themselves.” But do they? I question. Do we?

 

Hope consoles me with thoughts of the one we’ve lost or not quite lost. I can hear her, sometimes – and I believe he can too, though it often seems she is gone.

 

All the pieces – the words and lullabies: Drunk in a west-end parking lot, “Godspeed”… The Oregon coast… Dad’s threat and his confession: “… I have to fight the urge not to just shove a fucking gun in my mouth and end it all”… and oh, Moon River…  They all flow together now, ancient waters meandering around a young beach. I count the grains of sand collected at the point bar and try to hear everything. I want to believe that if I listen to what’s speaking I can save myself – and they can too.  

                                                                                            {Denouement}

 

 

As I head downhill, losing that wide view of the area, I know that if the valley changes shape I will not know, and I will traverse its jagged terrain with the belief that it is just the same as it was the moment I surveyed it. As in trying to find your way to bed after turning off the light switch; one can memorize the blueprint of a room, but of course ghosts rearrange furniture in the dark.

 

I imagine back to that moment in ’96, when he first stood before our house.

 

I imagine all his life seemed only a procession toward and recession from that moment, that whatever eluded him for decades before was finally within reach. For thirty-seven years it was waiting for him: As a boy when the terrors of the night came to haunt him; growing up, the crime and the drugs that lead to his prison sentence. And in the last week before he returned to freedom, my mother bought the house on Cooley Street; so that upon release, a whole new life waited for him in Missoula. There were problems, even then, but in those first years he had made massive strides toward sobriety and taken on the responsibilities of a long-term relationship, steady work, and raising two sons. It was the validation of a faith he had held so long – a glorious payoff. So when he finally laid eyes on that ramshackle skeleton of a home and the hundred-acre sprawl of trees and wilderness, it was clear. It was axiom.

 

This is home.

 

And he would love here. He had to take this place and make it his own, make it ours. He would work on it and work toward it, as often as he could, as hard as he could; as he had every other thing in his life, but this time with everything. It all had to flow into here and he had to hold onto this forever. He held out that final note for as long as he could, but the decades of composition and perseverance were leading to one final, long-lasting syllable that was as all is: The triumph and then the disillusion of what is ultimately fading – a slowly built and slowly deconstructed moment and the breaking of a hallelujah.
But even after all the nights of bailing out water from the basement, nights I was too cold to sleep, nights spent on the floor, covered in loathsome black ants, or nights of violent screaming in the long fallout of a relationship; I love this house.

 

I love it because I love my father. It is flawed because he is flawed. I recognize him in every rock laid, in every shade of paint, and in every hardwood floorboard. He has laid his hands on every surface of this house, and every inch of it has at one point been subject to his most deliberate thoughts. Yet, it was subject to his nerves as well. At one point, he put up a wall of sheetrock and later, in a fit of rage, kicked a massive hole through it, subsequently patching it up only to decide he didn’t like a wall there after all. It is by design the quintessential portrait of him – his hopes, his fears, and his joys; the perfect reconciliation of his imagination and the materials at hand. At once, a magnum opus and a work in progress.

 

Ultimately, my inheritance is that lesson it took him his entire life to learn: That to love something is not a simple sacrifice across many years, but a devotion of all time allotted to you. For him, to love was to give everything, to become anything, to save for yourself nothing. And even when what you love escapes you, all that you can do is thank the world, thank everyone for every act of forgiveness, kindness, or malice you’d ever known that you’d found love to begin with or that you’d been given a second chance. Then to never let that grace falter, not in old age or tough times - never, until the end of your days. Such a lesson was the plight of a lifetime, and a father’s gift to his son.

 

 

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