Bourbon and Tears Rag

Into woods, down an overgrown lane, following the line of an ancient river. Next to us hillside, shimmering in sunlight, barbed wire separating cultivated from fallow. The whistle of a shepherd instructing his dog. And above, Colme Hill, sedate in its cloak of conifers, silent witness to a gaggle of mourners in the valley below.

This is the spot. The perfect place.

The final place.

~~~~~

"Your father died at six forty-five this morning. I thought you'd want to know."

I thought you'd want to know. How cold that sounded. How distant, unfeeling. But the question was: did I? I held the telephone, staring blindly into the distance, my mind searching for the answer. But, surprisingly, I already knew.

Bourbon and tears.

~~~~~

"Get that snarl out of your voice, girl."

It's not a snarl, dad. I've never snarled. Not at you, nor anyone. It's anger, frustration, annoyance. Already I start to walk away; already your voice is distant, lost to me.

"Don't know what the hell you're in such a bloody mood for."

Because I'm being taken for granted. Because the only time you talk to me is to criticise. Because you never consider my feelings. Because I'm treated like shit by a shit like you.

Take me with you, I used to plead, mostly in my head because I was frightened to articulate the thought, fearing the rejection I knew would follow. Please let me join in, teach me what you know, include me in your dreams. But no, you never could: your family wasn't important enough, was it, father? I used to love you so much, sitting on your knee, listening to you talk. You would come home, smelling of animals and woodsmoke, and it was so exciting. Oh, such dramatic things you would tell me about the day you'd had, and I would pray for the summer holidays when you could take me with you. Do you remember? I'd make you promise to take me, and you would agree, with a little laugh. I grew to know what that laugh meant; and I grew to know disappointment.

Even small disappointments, when visited so often, scar the soul. And from such a diet grows resentment; and resentment turns to anger; and anger, when prolonged, is the breeding ground of hatred. So no, I'm not snarling and I'm not in a mood.

"You see? No answer. Nothing, nothing at all."

No, dad. No answer. Because I was no longer there.

~~~~~

My father died last Friday at six forty-five am. Stage four non-small cell lung cancer. Added to which his kidneys packed in and he started expelling waste through his skin. Until it started to fall off. I stopped listening after that. I didn't want to know. I don't want to know that sort of thing. Not about my father. Fathers are indestructible. Even mine, the old bastard.

~~~~~

Bourbon and tears. The Bourbon and Tears Rag. The saddest tune, the backdrop to mourning. When Jamie died, I played it night and day, my lament for lost love, B minor filling my heart with joy and despair. Jamie was my fiancé, and someone more different from me it would be impossible to find. I had thought it was his tune: love, death, Jamie, the Bourbon and Tears Rag. I loved it more than I could say, and yet I never wanted to hear it again.

And so it was with mixed feelings I sensed, in the distance of my mind, those opening bars unfold once more as I heard the news of my father's death. 'Your father died at six forty-five this morning.' And on it came, unstoppable, unwanted. The Bourbon and Tears Rag, a hymn to death.

~~~~~

One year ago, the last time I saw him. First time in fifteen years.

"Hello dad."

"Hello. You're putting on weight."

"I think it's called ageing, dad."

"Rubbish, look at me. Not an inch of fat."

"Well, that's because your diet's cigarettes and alcohol."

"And how would you know what my diet is? Are you the bloody expert now, after all these years?"

I tried to tell myself there was a twinkle in his eye, levity in his voice, although my father's was not a voice given to levity. I made myself smile. "Yeah, I guess you're right. How are you?"

"Me? I'm fine."

"Yeah, you look it." He looked old. He looked like his own father. He was small, the skin round his neck loose and scrawny, his voice growing reedy and weak. The barrel chest was still there, and the swagger, the 'look-at-me' arrogance, but it was diminished, the lingering product of habit, a mere echo of expired hauteur. I couldn't believe I had ever been scared of him, nor that my thoughts had been filled with hate for so many years.

The room was dark. Very clean, nothing out of place, yet there was no life in it. No soul. Time hung self-consciously, as though aware of how slowly it was moving, pauses so long that even awkwardness dissipated. A single picture was displayed on the wall, of a rabbit, a reminder of his previous occupation - the man who killed animals. In the window some seedlings were stretching from the soil in three mushroom trays, their budding leaves tiny, yet out of proportion to the slivers of stalks on which they stood. His face was mahogony, etched deep with the lines of experience, eyes dulled, his mouth fixed in a rueful smile. I wanted to like him, wanted to care: but I couldn't. The voices kept on at me. It's his own bloody fault. He burned his bridges. Made his bed, now he can lie in it. The deepest emotions seldom need the most articulate expression.

"Nice place you've got here."

"Ach, it suits me fine. Nice and private anyway." He hated it. I knew he hated it. It was small, like a cage, while he wanted to roam free. He stared at me and his expression told me more than he intended. It always had: only it took me too many years to realise. It was weary, but by no means resigned. Not him, he would never resign, never change - dissatisfaction led to rebellion, and rebellion kept him fighting.

"Don't suppose you've paid your Council Tax?"

"Don't talk to me about bloody Council Tax. They can put me in the jail before I pay that damned thing."

"Yes well, they probably will." And wouldn't it do us all a favour? But no, stop it, think charitably. He was a sad old man, alone in a dark flat, alone with nothing but memories. There is nothing more harrowing than the sight of a man who hates company but is riven by loneliness.

"What do I care? My time of life? They can do what they want. Bastards - it wouldn't bother me." He looked away, unable to meet my eye. Always the same, dad: just when I begin to feel empathy, you open your mouth and blow it away. 'What do I care? It wouldn't bother me?' But there's more than you to think about, for christ's sake. Don't you think it would bother my mother? Our family? He had always been selfish in a self-destructive way, heedless of the disappointment heaped on us in the process. But I smiled. I didn't want to argue. That would be too easy: each of us could slip into familiar garb and begin to bait one another - just as we had, too many years before.

"Nice picture." He looked blank. I nodded at the wall. "The rabbit. Still shooting?"

My father was a gamekeeper. I asked him once how many animals he had killed in his life. I've never forgotten the tone of his reply: it displayed neither pride nor satisfaction, nor shock nor disgust. The banality of his response - dry, disinterested - haunted me for years. 'Thirty a day for thirty-odd years. Conservative estimate.' I didn't want to calculate it, but I did - and it amounted to around fifty thousand animals.

He looked up and screwed his eyes, sucking his cigarette and inhaling deeply. I got the feeling he was weighing me up. A spasm crossed his face, creasing it with a look of sudden pain, and I thought he was about to cough, but instead he spoke, his voice quiet and slow. "I've killed too many things in my life."

Not for the first time, I had no answer for my father.

~~~~~

We were estranged sixteen years ago. "Get that snarl out of your voice, girl," was the last thing he said to me. There was no snarl and I walked out of the house and out of his life that afternoon, determined that if I next saw him the day he died it would be one day too soon. The young can be dogmatic; the old can be proud. It's a difficult combination. Years passed, the feud continued, and neither of us could fathom a way out of it.

How did it come to this? After all, it went far beyond the usual teenage rebellion: disowning a parent is a serious gesture; and keeping it up for fifteen years takes persistence. Well, I could talk of the adultery, the abandonment of his family, the tart he shacked up with, but that would be too easy. No, I could forgive him that: thousands of kids face that every year. And anyway, most of that came afterwards. So no, there's more to it than that.

I was a teenager and full of dreams, my life a wish-list stretching into the future. I had nothing as firm as ambitions, only ideas. My mind craved experience, the adrenalin of adventure. I dreamed of many things - of writing, travelling, being famous - but lacked the confidence to take the first steps. I would prepare a detailed synopsis of a story but never get round to writing it, afraid it wouldn't be good enough; I would travel the world through books alone, fearing the disappointment of reality.

And what do teenagers need? Especially timid ones? How I craved a kind word, a supportive hug, an interested enquiry. The chance to share was all I wanted. My father was a dreamer, too. Not only that, he was the worst kind of dreamer. Most never achieve anything - we are happy to remain in the morass of our imaginings. Some, though, get bowled along by their enthusiasm and launch themselves repeatedly into new endeavours: my father was such.

He invented contraptions which nearly worked, but gave up before he could master them. He converted the greenhouse into a pigeon loft and tried to breed racing pigeons, until the tragi-comic day when he released them for their maiden flight and not a single one returned. Annoyed by our teasing, he stormed out of the house and didn't come back for two days. My brother asked him whether, like his pigeons, he hadn't been able to find his way home, and he disappeared for another two days. Later, he bred turkeys until he lost interest and they began to die from neglect; and then he grew show potatoes which showed nothing but the signs of disease. On and on, dreams and plans, a thousand projects started and never one seen to fruition.

I didn't mind the failure: his failures had nothing to do with inability, only inconstancy; but I so wanted to be allowed into his dreams and to include him in mine. Just share, was all I asked, but he couldn't comply. 'Yes, you can help,' he'd say impatiently - 'when it's working properly, when it's ready.' But nothing ever was, the inconstant dreamer saw to that. In the gap, anger festered, hatred settled where love should have blossomed.

~~~~~

'Your father died at six forty-five this morning.' I stood alone in his room, amid the detritus of a life unfulfilled, and felt - what exactly? There were pitifully few belongings, such slender evidence of existence. Some photographs, a pair of binoculars, a bundle of letters. That solitary picture remained on the wall, the rabbit staring blankly into the distance, hunched and contented. Some cans of beer, an overflowing ashtray, an unmade bed in the corner. There was no sign here of the pain of death, and yet I felt it strongly.

~~~~~

"How did I get like this?" he asked my sister.

He had stared incredulously at his broken body, at the weeping sores, the ravaged skin, the massive swellings. He had known what was coming, but its suddenness was an affront to decency, and he struggled to comprehend. Later, my sister wept as she told me and I wept as I listened.

"They'll carry me out of here in a box." My sister knew that to be true but, even then, she couldn't say whether or not my father believed it.

"I've killed too many things in my life." His words echoed, unexpected and unexplained. Regret: the most painful emotion of them all. The sinking knowledge of what is done and cannot be undone.

I've killed some things in my life, too.

~~~~~

The eve of the funeral, a family gathering, and for the first time in sixteen years I found myself thinking of my father as a person, not the creation I had fashioned as a hook for my hatred. It is easier to hate a concept than a human being, which is why we demonise those we don't understand. I know that now.

I know many things now.

I look in the mirror and see that I am becoming my father, as he became his. The brow is the same, the eyes, the nose. I find myself sitting the way he did, legs crossed, arms folded, hunched into myself. I fashion moments of solitude and realise that the gamekeeper too, alone on the hills for much of his life, relished his. And yet, even in my solitude, I have a germ of loneliness budding in my soul. I dream my dreams still, and try to overcome my fear of failure by sharing with others - with you - yet I know how hard I find it and how terrified I am of rejection. How I would have hated all my pigeons to fly away.

Sometimes I would rather work and work and work at something until it was perfect. Sometimes I would prefer to be left alone until I got it right, rather than face humiliation. Sometimes I would prefer to give up rather than fail to reach my aspiration.

Where, I wonder, tears coursing down my cheek, have I come across such an attitude before?

~~~~~

I didn't think to hear it again so soon, the Bourbon and Tears Rag; and least of all for him. The notes well up in my mind: B and D, E , F# and A, a pentatonic masterpiece, mirror of unhappiness. Unbidden, it begins, slow and ponderous, offering no glimpse of the emotion to follow, waiting for a modest half beat before settling into the first phase. Then it opens, that aching, hopeful, mournful passage, the first four bars rising, the next four falling, then repeating as though to emphasise the point: hope and loss, hope and loss, hope and loss in 2/4 time. It's the natural rhythm of the end of a life.

And on to the second phase - wistful, elegant - the notes calling to me: 'Your father died at si-ix forty-five, at six forty-fi-ive he died.' The words were different once, on another day, for a different death: 'Oh my darling, darling Jamie, I love you and everything that you do.' Never did doggerel sound so sweet, nor reflect so accurately. Now the words merge into one another, different deaths, different laments, the same emotion. I hear both, simultaneously and alone. This is the moment when it hits, and the words spear my soul.

The third phase slows to a drawl, gentle arpeggios in 4/4 time lulling me into repose before the anguish of the final quarter. It is the catch of your breath before the next sob, the moment when you suspend belief and pretend it hasn't happened, when you try to stop the tracks of time.

It doesn't last - it cannot - and the end draws near, full of B minor pain and despair. Bourbon and tears, bourbon and tears, tears upon tears, rising, rising; rising until it hits that glorious F#, the saddest, most soulful sound on earth, the release, that moment when tears begin to fall. And it calls: it calls why, it calls how, it calls no - no - no. Not me. Not him. Not today.

The soundtrack of loss, the Bourbon and Tears Rag. I stand in his room and the tune jolts through me. I stand in his room, bare of belongings, dark and unloved, and I want not to care, but I know that I do. My father died here. My father died here. The thought echoes in my mind as the music flies by. My father died here.

Bourbon and tears, hopes and fears. A man's hopes may not be strong enough to counter his fears. His insecurities may be too private to share, his self-containment mistaken for pride. Sometimes dreams are too precious to lose.

Finally, too late, I come to understand my father. He was a silly old fool, but a fine enough man, in his way.

~~~~~

And on, finally, to the Creggan estate, a box of ashes in our possession, the sun our kind companion. Through the trees and down the lane, past the gate and into the field. He used to work this field. That rabbit run there, that would have been perfect for his snare. How many blades of grass have been brushed by his leg, how many stones crushed by his boot? Overlooking us, watching respectfully, the Colme Hill, whose miles he tramped as the decades turned by. This was where he was happy - in his own head, in his own dreams, unhindered by people, by trite reality. And this, now, is where he will stay.

by Harriet Scott | Prose Home