A Death in Duluth

Love is a mystery. How one loves. Who one loves. How it binds us together. Grandpop taught me that love never truly fades.

You and I,
We’re like fireworks and symphonies exploding in the sky.
With you, I’m alive
Like all the missing pieces of my heart, they finally collide.

So stop time right here in the moonlight,

Cause I don’t ever wanna close my eyes.”*

It was cold and gray again that afternoon even though the calendar said late May. Duluth always had a love/hate relationship with Spring. It tried so hard to fight it yet once it gave in, it surrendered in a hundred shades of green and soul-healing warmth. But not today. Today a cold wind swept in from the northwest and chilled what even the rain couldn’t reach. It scratched against the stained glass panes of the church, seeking entrance. But the old building did its best to stand against it, just as it did worldly sin.

Granddad never cared much for funerals. He always said you should show someone how you felt when they were alive, not once they were dead. That same practical way of thinking had guided his entire life. Work hard, play hard, love with your whole heart. It was the kind of simplistic mindset that wasn’t in vogue much these days, though it had stood him in good stead for eighty-six years. It gave him the fortitude to raise a family and a flourishing dairy farm in the often belligerent rolling hills of Minnesota. And to die peacefully in his sleep.

I didn’t want to look at his body lying in the casket. I’d seen more than my share of dead bodies, yet I blanched at the thought of him dressed in a new suit and surrounded by silk. It might as well have been a department store manikin. To me, Granddad was long gone.

I haven’t quite come to grips with what heaven will be like but it can’t be all angels dressed in white and reclining on clouds. Spotless and pure. There had to be room for earthier things. I figured in some corner of heaven Granddad was working in a garden, running his thick, callused fingers through the rich, dark soil and encouraging seedlings to grow.

He had a nearly magical gift in being able to bring almost anything to life. It was the reason our family farm had prospered even in the lean years. Together, he and my grandmother had been their own force of nature. Deeply bonded to each other, as much as to the land. When she died, a part of him died, too. But their love lived on like the flowers that bloomed each spring.

“Everything needs love to thrive, Kenny,” he’d say as we walked the dewy fields in the early light. He didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve but rather showed me how love reveals itself in countless ways. It flowed through his hands as they covered mine, showing me how to milk a cow or bait a hook. It shone in his eyes when I held up a fish I’d caught, slick and silvery and eager to be free. It even burst through his bark of a laugh as the fish escaped my grasp and flipped back into the lake, sending ripples skittering across the water’s surface.

I hadn’t wanted to come back to Duluth for his funeral. I wanted to remember him the way he’d been. But Starsky said I would regret if I didn’t. He talked about family and responsibility when all I could think about was flying across the country without him.

He said he’d come with me if I needed him to, but I didn’t want to put him through that. He’d been through enough lately as it was and still hadn’t fully recovered from Professor Jennings’ poison, to my satisfaction anyway. He’d come so close to dying that night that my own heart had nearly quite beating. Grandpop would have counted it a miracle that both our lives had been spared.

So I came alone. I figured that to show my respect in the traditional way would be my contribution to what little peace remained in our dwindling clan. It wasn’t that I was thumbing my nose at tradition, but I didn’t like to be held captive by it either. I guess that fish and I had a lot in common. Easily lured in then desperate to escape.

ooOoo

“Without you, I feel broke.
Like I’m half of a whole.

Without you, I’ve got no hand to hold.
Without you, I feel torn.
Like a sail in a storm.
Without you, I’m just a sad song.
With you I fall.
It’s like I’m leaving all my past in silhouettes up on the wall.”*

“I wish you could stay longer.” Mother was saying in her carefully modulated tone, as if she were commenting on the weather.

The air in the funeral car closed in around me, compressing my lungs and making it hard to breath. I longed to open a window but the rain continued to fall, making it impractical. So I just stared at my reflection in the darkened glass. The rain spatters looked like teardrops on my face. I closed my eyes against the image. I’d learned early that it was unmanly to cry.

“I wish I could too, but you know how it is . . . .” My words spiraled off. I hoped a vague reference to work would satisfy them. Incessant busyness was something they could identify with even if they never cared to know what I actually did on a daily basis. They seemed adept at filling in the blanks for themselves.

Actually, Captain Dobey had cut down our caseload to allow Starsky to ease back into the swing of things. He’d tried to do it as unobtrusively as possible. If my partner caught on to how he was being mother-henned, he’d tug at the leash and be even more exasperating than usual. Maddening as an itch, essential as a heartbeat.

I was anxious to get back to him, but how could I explain? It felt like a part of me was missing. A lost limb that kept aching.

In as little as half an hour my conversation with my parents invariably drifted away like mist on a lake. What could we possibly have to talk about for another few days that wouldn’t lead to arguments and misunderstandings?

As a young boy I’d spent more time with Granddad than with my father. Richard Hutchinson hadn’t felt a connection to the land – or to me – the way the old man had. To my father, the farm was just a big piece of ground that took up too much time. Stuck underneath one’s fingernails. Demanded too much of one’s soul. He’d sold most of it off last year to a retail developer, after Granddad had been moved to the nursing home and could no longer object.

I supposed Richard Hutchinson looked at me the same way. Time-consuming, messy, disappointing even. Other investments were undoubtedly more lucrative.

In the close proximity of the car’s interior, I couldn’t help notice how my father’s hair was thinner, my mother’s hands more translucent. How long would it be before I was confronted with having to make their final arrangements? How would I mourn their passing?

Starsky once said the loss of his father felt as if someone had pulled a rug out from underneath him. The collapse of his foundation left him seeing the world upside down. He ran wild for a time after that.

How could I grieve something I’d never had?

His parents’ love had helped to define him. I’d come to realize that it was my relationship with Starsky that defined who I was.

“Ah, a girlfriend I suppose.” My father pronounced, as if saying it would make it so.

Mother smiled and patted my hand. “I knew once Vanessa got out of your system, you’d find someone new.” She brushed my hair back like a child. “You’re still an attractive young man, you know.”

“It’s not a woman, Mother.”

“One day things will change.” She responded smoothly. The fact that she was always one step removed from reality was her undeniable charm and her greatest weakness. The cumulative effect of a pampered life.

“I don’t seem to have much luck with women.”

Just like when I was fifteen, I could sense my father’s impatience stirring a beneath the surface like a hot spring.

“Maybe if you moved up to lieutenant you’d have more to offer. It’s not like you’re not qualified. Isn’t it time you left the dirty work behind?”

His words pierced me like so many others before, it was a wonder I didn’t drip blood like a sieve. If you’re grades were better; if you’d cut that hair; if you’d put down that guitar and apply yourself.. . . Who I was was never enough. A glass half-empty and needing to be filled by what he had the power to provide.

“I could talk to Chris Porter in the prosecutor’s office. He might know of a position that would suit you.”

‘Suit me or you?’ I wondered for the hundredth time, but over the years I’d learned to pick and choose my battles. Especially at times like these, when I didn’t have anyone at my back. I felt uncomfortably defenseless. Starsky was a world away.

“They’re putting up the neatest little condominium units at Eaton Park.” Mother interjected. “You should take a look.”

“I appreciate your interest. But I’m happy where I am.” I stated as calmly yet as firmly as I could.

“What kind of life is that? Hanging around with hoods, junkies and whores? That’s all there are in that town.” My father’s words hissed, scorching me like steam.

“Please, Richard. Not now.” Mother glanced uneasily toward the casket the back of the limousine as if Granddad could rise from the dead.

I wondered again at my father’s relationship with Granddad. Did they walk the fields in the morning sharing dreams from the night before or lay in the cool grass waiting for the fish to bite, talking about nothing and everything? Even though there was a time they must have, somehow I couldn’t picture it. Was it his mother’s death that changed him, the way Starsky’s father’s had affected him? Had they each been too destroyed to help piece each other together?

Most of all I couldn’t picture my father admitting how the shiner he brought home from school wasn’t because he took a tumble in PE but because he’d gotten shoved into a locker. I remembered how Granddad had wrapped ice in a rag and held it to my eye as he quietly explained how bullies were ignorant attention seekers and nothing more.

I thought he was the finest man I knew. I wanted to be just like him, I thought, as the pain ebbed.

He never told my parents the truth about that day, or the others like it that followed. It wasn’t that he lied. But my parents only saw what they wanted to see.

The elegant car rumbled down the streets, sloshing through puddles with all the comfort money could buy, far removed from the exuberant jostling of the Torino. Granddad hadn’t ridden in a car until he was a young man, hadn’t owned one until he was nearly forty. I could imagine what he’d think of this final ride in the sleek limousine. The people behind its dark windows. I doubt he’d be impressed.

“You need to look into people, Kenny, to see who they really are. Their outsides are just a shell.” He once told me.

It took me a long time – too long – to learn that lesson. I’d been gullible, hungry for acceptance. Eager to please. A gangly teen with the nervous stutter. A romantic loner. The fair-haired boy happy to be shown around campus by a charismatic upper-classman.

The older boy had made me feel as if I could belong. Then he led me to the basement room of the frat house and pressed me up against a wall. I was terrified yet exhilarated. And I didn’t push him away. That was the first of the secrets I didn’t dare share, not even with Granddad.

So we began to drift apart, each of us drawn away by our own demons.

Granddad’s memories slowly withered like unharvested grain, the best parts scattering to the winds. There were times he couldn’t even remember who I was. And if he couldn’t, how could I?

I thought marriage to Vanessa might clean the slate and repair my soul. Restore my place in the family. But our dreams fell apart like a house of cards. Later Grandpop told me, over the course of a brief long-distance call, that he never much cared Vanessa. I thought he tried to tell me something else too, but it was too heavy for the phone lines to carry.

ooOoo

With you I’m a beautiful mess.
It’s like we’re standing hand in hand with all our fears up on the edge.

So stop time right here in the moonlight,
Cause I don’t ever wanna close my eyes.

Without you, I feel broke.
Like I’m half of a whole.
Without you.*

With the other pallbearers, I helped to ease the casket from the funeral car and lower it into the grave, a hole gaping like a giant wound in the earth. The rain had eased to a drizzle. Out of habit I flipped up the collar of my suit jacket to help keep the dampness from creeping down my neck. Beneath his umbrella father sent me a slight scowl.

We gathered in a circle, ghostly and somber as standing stones on a Scottish plain. And just as unknowable. My mother and father, my sister, Chris, and her husband. Little Richie who crouched down to pull at the wet grass. A few of Grandpop’s friends from the grange and local VFW post, fragile with age and dressed in faded uniforms from a different time. Each with their own memories. Each with their own secrets.

The minister murmured a few more words, then we stepped forward one by one to toss flowers into his grave like so many coins in a fountain. Wishing for – what? Safe passage to the afterlife? Or a more durable connection to this one.

I thought back to the night I’d told my parents I wouldn’t be staying in Duluth after the wedding. That I’d been accepted into the police academy in Los Angeles. After the fireworks had died down, I’d sought out the sanctuary of the front porch and evening air. Granddad was there, too, rocking and smoking his briar wood pipe. I remembered how the heady perique mingled with the scent of late spring lilacs.

“So what do you think?” I’d ventured to ask after a suitable amount of silence had passed. A man needs peace like a plant needs water, was one of his favorite sayings.

“Of course I’m disappointed that you won’t be following the land,” the old man had responded thoughtfully. “But that doesn’t mean I’m disappointed in you. You have to follow your heart.”

His words had helped to lift the board that had been crushing my chest.

“You have a need to set right things that have wrong. To help people who can’t help themselves. There’s nobility in that.”

“I’m glad you see it that way.”

I’d always marveled at how my grandfather was able to look at things in ways other people didn’t. Maybe it came with age and wisdom. Maybe it came with understanding the seasons and how they each have their order and serve their own purpose. From the introspection and challenge of fall and winter to the renewal and reward of spring and summer.

“It’s not my opinion that matters. What does Vanessa think?” Granddad pulled the pipe from his mouth and cradled the bowl almost lovingly in his hands.

“She wasn’t thrilled.” I admitted, then to sound more upbeat, added, “But she’ll come around once she gets used to things. It’ll be a big change for both of us. But it’s something we’re walking into together.” At the end I wondered which of us I was trying to convince.

“You need a good partner in life, son. Berta and I were married nearly forty years. Sure, we had our rough patches. Everyone does. But she always believed in me. Stood by me through the hard times.” He took another puff from the pipe and white curls of smoke drifted around him like memories.

“Truth be known, it was Berta who held me up. Don’t know how I would have made it without her.” His craggy face always seemed so much softer when he talked about the woman who had died years ago.

“Do you still miss her?” I often wondered but only then had gathered the courage to ask. As if standing up to my father had finally earned me the right to talk with Grandpop man to man.

“In a way. But in another way, she never left.”

Love is a mystery. How one loves. Who one loves. How it binds us together. Granddad taught me that love never truly fades.

Those who work the land know death isn’t the end, either. It’s merely a transition into a new form of life. Seeds fall from the tree only to re-emerge into something far grander if given a chance to mature. As enigmatic as love.

I hoped my grandparents were reunited now, I thought as I tossed my rose onto the wooden box. So he wouldn’t be alone any more. Missing the better part of himself. Separation erodes the soul. Love makes it bloom.

When the ritual was complete, the rain had all but stopped. Feeble sunlight began to seep through the gauze of gray clouds. The small group around the open grave broke up and moved away, slowly getting back to their cars and the rest of their lives. I dreaded being enclosed again in the limousine with my parents and their stifling expectations so much, I practically limped.

Until I noticed a solitary figure standing next to the line of cars, his hands jammed in the pockets of his dark blue windbreaker as he watched us. Instinctively, my heart quickened along with my pace.

“What’s he doing here?” My father asked.

I knew exactly. Starsky held out his arms when I reached him and drew me in. “I thought about it again and figured you needed me more than Dobey’s paperwork. When Doc gave me the okay, I got the soonest flight out here,” he murmured into my damp hair.

He felt solid as a tree, constant as a sunrise. We entwined like vines and at last I wept.

Somehow I knew Granddad would have approved.

FIN

*Sad Song

All The Kings