This is another of
several stories I wrote that was very loosely based on my father. Although this
story is completely fictional, the characters are based on actual people. This
one was intended as the last chapter of a short story collection that would
work almost like an episodic novel. The first chapter would have been “My
Father’s Hands”.
Originally published in The Lascaux Prize Collection 2014.
My Father’s Ghost
By Lee
Wright
My father’s ghost sits next to me on the porch of the old
hunting cabin as the last day of summer seeps into the dry
ground. The muggy air is thick with mosquitoes and the sickly-sweet
stench of vegetable rot unique to Appalachia in summer.
Inside the cabin, it’s always the past, always a great time
to be a man. Out here however, I am forty years old, overweight, and
balding. My wedding ring lies beneath a pack of cigarettes in the
breast pocket of my sweat-soaked work shirt. I’m sure I can feel the
metal pressing against my chest with each beat of my heart, but that’s probably
just another of my bittersweet poetic delusions. Or maybe I’m just
drunk.
I fish the last bottle of beer out of the cardboard six-pack
beside my chair and open it using the rusty opener nailed to porch rail.
The yard is overgrown—waist high and brambly in places—and
stinks of wild onion. Even the wide gravel driveway is almost lost
to the forest. And then there’s the kudzu. It eats
everything. It swarms over the rusted shell of the old F-100, climbs
the rails of the porch, shrouds the roof of the cabin, and creeps in the
windows. The weed is relentless, tenacious, inexorable, and, in its own
perverse way, beautiful.
My father lights another cigarette. He’s maybe
forty-five, heavy around the middle, and not quite a decade from the heart
attack that will put him in his grave, but the hands are the same as they were
the first time they held me: hard, rough, and strong, the jagged nails yellowed
by nicotine.
“A man’s got to have his own place,” he says quietly, almost
as if talking to himself.
I stand and my back cracks just the way my father’s used
to. I toss my cigarette into the brown weeds at the end of the
porch. I can smell rain in the air and, somewhere beyond the valley,
thunder rumbles.
“Does it hurt?” I ask my father’s ghost.
He looks at me for a long time, his face all but lost in
shadow. Finally, he nods almost imperceptibly. “We don’t
talk about things like that—especially in a place like this.”
I smile. My dad, possibly fearing his own
restless potential, usually talked only sports and Louis L’Amour novels. They
were safe subjects and he knew them well.
In the darkness, I can’t see the smoke at the end of the
porch where the cigarette smolders in the dead grass, but I can smell it.
Holding onto the leaning, splintery rail, I ease my way to
the overgrown gravel driveway. You’d need a 4x4 to drive all the way
up to the cabin now so my little convertible—probably the only thing I’ll get
in the divorce—is parked up by the highway. It’s a long walk in the
dark, but, already, there is light behind me, flickering, dancing, lighting my
way.
© 2014 Lee
Wright
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