But I was talking about Mom. She hummed or sang when she was cooking and doing housework. Some were hymns and some were standards and there was one, a tune that she made up for Psalm 137 that she used to sing almost under her breath; sometimes she just hummed it: ‘“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion …”’ I don’t recall that she ever got all the way through it. We were not a religious family but Mom sometimes turned to the Bible in the same way that Dad turned to Jack Daniel’s.
‘What’s Zion?’ I asked her. Dad was down in his workshop and we were alone.
She was ironing at the time, and she paused and blew out a little breath. ‘Sonny,’ she said — she always called me that when she was about to impart maternal wisdom. ‘Sonny, Zion is where it was a whole lot better than it is now and you never get back there.’
‘What are we supposed to do then?’ I asked her.
She tilted her head to one side and looked at me across a few thousand miles of prairie. ‘“The ants are a people not strong,’” she said, ‘“yet they prepare their meat in the summer.” Proverbs, that is; I forget the chapter and verse.’
‘What does that mean, Mom?’
‘It means that winter is always coming, and don’t you forget it,’ and she went back to the ironing.
Dad patented several things: in his notebook there were sketches and notes for a new kind of safety razor, magnetic buttonholes, and a self-cleaning comb. Mom told me that the razor had actually been made and sold but hadn’t brought in much and was quickly superseded by a better one. Dad never got to develop all the ideas in the notebook. One rainy night in November after I was in bed but still awake I heard him go out and start the car. When everything was all right Dad was careless about the noise he made shutting the front door, but this time he left the house without a sound so I knew that he and Mom must have had an argument. Later I woke up when the police came to the door. They told Mom that Dad was dead: he’d wrapped his car around a tree while driving under the influence. He was forty-two years old.
Next morning I took his notebook off the work-bench, and when Mom asked me if I’d seen it I said no. I could read most of the words but I couldn’t understand very much and there were numbers and symbols I couldn’t make head or tail of. I hid the notebook in a cigar box in my sock drawer for when I got older.
Right after Dad’s death my mother was on the phone a lot. A big man in a dark-blue suit came to the house, his aftershave was like a kick in the head; his eyes looked as if they’d been shot in with a rivet gun; you could tell from his smile that he enjoyed his work. He looked around at the furniture and the carpet and the wallpaper. He had a briefcase and he took some papers out of it, then Mom sent me out of the room while she talked to him. I listened at the door but they were too quiet for me to hear anything; I looked through the keyhole and saw Mom signing the papers.
After he left she just stood there looking out of the window. I asked her if that man was going to take away the furniture and she said no. Then I asked if he was the undertaker and she said no, there wasn’t going to be a funeral. She told me that some people left their brains to science and Dad was doing that with his whole body. ‘His brain too?’ I said. I was thinking of all the ideas he had in his head, like perpetual motion; I was thinking of the words he hadn’t said.
‘Well, yes,’ she answered, ‘they’re taking all of him.’
‘What are they going to do with him?’ I wanted to know. I wondered what kind of experiments they had in mind. I could see him high up on a platform in a thunderstorm where lightning would strike him.
‘They’ll do whatever scientists do,’ she said, ‘and he’s bringing home more money this way than he did when he was alive, so be proud of your father. He finally achieved perpetual motion.’
‘Is he in Heaven now?’
‘I don’t know where he is but it’s just you and me from now on. He’ll be missed at the liquor store but they’ll have to stagger on without him.’
‘I’ll miss him too, won’t you?’
‘Oh yes, but, like they say, there is a Balm in Gilead.’
‘Where’s Gilead?’
‘I’ll let you know when I find it.’
The first I heard of what was really happening was that afternoon. I was out on our front walk killing ants with a hammer and Herbie Johnson came by. ‘Are they going to let you watch when they crash-test your dad?’ he asked me.
‘What are you talking about?’ I said.
‘Don’t you know? They’re going to strap him into the driver’s seat of a car and crash the car into a wall — they must figure he’s got the experience for the job.’
‘Don’t come around here with that crazy kind of talk,’ I said. ‘I’ll crash you into a wall.’
‘My father works at Novatek,’ said Herbie, ‘and he’s the one who told your mother they pay good money for dead bodies and they use them for dummies to test how safe a car is.’
That’s when I punched him in the face and he went home. And then I was left with Dad in my head singing ‘From This Moment On’ and smiling at me. Years later I bought a Frank Sinatra tape with that song on it but I always fast-forwarded past it. Psalm 137, though, that my mother used to sing to her own tune — I’ve got that on a CD with Boney M: ‘Rivers of Babylon’. ‘By the reevers of Bobby-lahn …’ they sing, and they don’t sound as if they’re sitting down by the water — they’re on a long dusty road and they’re moving right along, going somewhere. I’ve got recordings of Psalm 137 by the choirs of King’s College and Trinity College, Cambridge, Westminster Abbey, and Wells Cathedral, and they all sound like choirs in a church.
It was the summer of the last year of his life when Dad took me out to Cranbrook to see the Orpheus fountain by Carl Milles. We drove out there one afternoon, just the two of us. The heat waves were shimmering over Woodward Avenue and the smell of the upholstery in the car almost made me sick; when we got on to Lone Pine it was cooler because of the trees. We parked the car, walked through gates and an archway, went past a sculpture that I don’t remember, then down some steps, along a promenade, up some steps and through some columns, and there it was: eight naked bronze figures, male and female, all in a circle around the spray that was coming up in the centre. The figures were realistic but smoother and simpler than real people and very athletic-looking. Some of them had their arms uplifted and some didn’t; all of them seemed to be listening for something, listening so hard that their bodies stretched out and their arms and legs grew longer. All of them had one foot touching some foliage but that was only a support for the bronze; the figures were suspended in mid-air, suspended by their listening. One of the men was holding a bird in his right hand and with his left he motioned it to be quiet. The girl to his right had turned her face away and raised her hands, almost touching either side of her head as if she was saying, ‘No, it’s too much!’ The listening seemed to go all the way up above the green of the trees to the blue sky and white clouds over us. There were mallard ducklings swimming in the fountain. The bronze looked cool; the water sparkled in the sun and a breeze was blowing the spray towards us. There was a smell of fresh-cut grass and flowers, purple ones that I didn’t know the name of and yellow daisies. I heard birds in the trees. ‘Remember,’ said their voices, ‘remember the listening of the bronze people.’