03/10/2021
They say that a grown man isn’t supposed to cry. That crying is a sign of weakness. But today I felt like doing just that, realising my probable fall from grace was imminent. I felt sad and depressed like the dying Earth around me, and it would be foolish to ascribe my predicament to any one event or set of circumstances. But I think it all began when I was born some thirty-four years ago. No, not dying, which in a particular sense must be true, anyway; that we all begin to die the moment we’re born, that ours is a preconceived plot, a trek we must all undertake. The year 2032 was a new age, and to even put it this way, I think, is laughable, seeing that it was the end of times in which we now lived. Our final hour was drawing nigh. I needed air; I needed to breathe. I needed to go outside and feel the bitter cold biting against my skin and deep into my bones. Perhaps things will seem clearer and I’d rid myself of this sadness and guilt that was eating away at my soul.
Lest I get ahead of myself, perhaps you should know me a little. I am Silas. Silas Bloom. I was born in the year in which Titanic became a blockbuster and France trounced Brazil to win the world cup three to nothing. It was also the year Pfizer Inc. got the FDA to approve the drug Vi**ra as a treatment for erectile dysfunction. But I seem to be getting ahead of myself here, since none of these three events have anything to do with my story. I was born in ’98 as Silas Wilder Bellamy in the small town of Milbridge, Maine, out on the East Coast. I was born during the bitter ice storm of January 8th that year, the one that killed my grandfather at the back of his marina overlooking Narraguagus Bay. But it wasn’t the storm that got the better of the old chap. When I was younger, though, Mama always said that it was I who killed grandpa. Then, on my sixteenth birthday, she confessed it wasn’t.
‘Your grandfather couldn’t stand my screams whilst you were fighting your way into the world,’ she’d said. ‘Of all the blooming times, he had to go outside for a smoke. Slipped and fell on a rock that led down to the pier and bashed in his skull.’ One year after my grandfather’s mishap my grandmother died. And before the probate ink could dry on the paper, Mama sold out at a handsome price and we moved West to live with Frank’s parents in Idaho. Frank was my father. It’s what Mama told him, anyway, and it was because of this one day after I turned eighteen, I went to the County Court in Boise and changed my surname. I remember that day well, the day I filed the papers to change my name.
Hustling across the busy road to a diner for a soda, I was hustled a buck by a greasy-faced middle-aged bum. As I turned to make my way back to the packed courthouse, where everyone was suing someone else it seemed, I remember asking him, ‘Hey mister, what’s your name?’ He owed me that much for my dollar, I suppose.
‘Jack… like in Jack Daniels the whiskey, only it’s Bloom,’ he smiled, his three teeth fully exposed to the elements. Remembering Mama’s conversation two years ago, I thought to myself it had to be an omen. It must be. So, Bloom, it was. Silas Wilder Bloom.
There was a time when the women in town used to say I was handsome. I soon realised the more singles you threw at them, the more they’d repeat it. Hell, if the denominations were larger their voices would turn huskier and their accents endearing as they whispered it. Their perceptible personality morph, as I called it was always entertaining, nonetheless. But any other woman might say I was easy on the eye, and if I had a few drinks myself, I’d incline to agree with them. At six feet two, lean and lanky, the times had made me tough. Like most of the others where we lived, I rarely bothered to shave, and I hadn’t trimmed my thick black hair in over eight months, so now it reached a little above my broad shoulders. Mama said I have curious eyes. I don’t know what she meant by that, but they were brown and I saw well with them. I even have two, like most people, I suppose.
Thin eyelashes under an equally thin pair of brows intersected neatly by a somewhat peculiar nose that I must say right away, I inherited from my grandfather back in Maine. Was it not for my nose, you would have passed me anywhere without noticing me. Long and slightly crooked, it was. ‘Aristocrat,’ Mama would say. But I suspected she only wanted me to feel better after all the taunts I endured at school.
‘I’m going to get some fresh air,’ Mama, I said looking towards the circular steps built against the wall on the far side of the room. It led up to a wide landing and the five bedrooms on the second floor. From one of those, I could hear my eighty-five-year-old grandmother calling me. Grandmama Lorraine, or Grams as I called her wasn’t always from here. She was born and grew up in a large house along 10th Ave South in Birmingham Alabama. Oh, the stories I’d hear ever so often, at least twice a week, of the places she’d been to and the people she’d seen.
Grams was Frank’s mother, and she was the only person I knew of whom he was scared. Whenever he was home, he avoided the second floor, especially the darkened corridor that led to her bedroom like the plague. To put it bluntly, Grams hated him, and Frank took it out on us. ‘That child is evil,’ she’d whisper to me about Frank whenever the topic came up.
‘I’ll go and see what she wants,’ Rylee offered, ‘I should take her a cup of tea.’
‘Don’t sweeten it, honey. Grams will ask but tell her our sweeteners done.’ Turning her attention to me she said, ‘be careful your ass doesn’t freeze out in that blizzard,’ Eliana, my mother, wheezed, struggling to breathe with the effort. It was getting harder with each passing day, and the coldness wasn’t helping any. We had no doctors around. There were no drug stores, just the empty shells of the buildings that remained after the looting was over.
Mama, like Grams, was dying and my world was falling apart, yet Mama was able to wear a brave face and smile, and it pained me to see her like this. Grams howled and cursed the living daylights “out of this nonsense we call life,” she’d say. Mama watched as I twisted my frame off the sofa in front of her and head toward the front door. The small square glass panes on the double French doors that led out onto the verandah were frosted white, taming the sharp bursts of light that entered the room. And it was easy to believe that it was much later in the day than it actually was. A few minutes past noon. Not that we had boardroom meetings to attend or urgent appointments to keep; time itself, that linear concept of man’s self-worth, of man’s banal existence, was no longer important.
Pulling my sock hat lower down over my ears, and strapping my mukluks tighter around my shin, as tight as I could, I pushed open the doors and stepped out onto the porch. I grimaced as it slammed shut with the force of the wind. Not because of the noise it made, but because of the not-so-pleasant language, my mother hurled after me. At once, I was greeted by a blinding sea of white in front of me that distorted my vision, taking away my perception of both depth and distance, making me feel disoriented and as though I was suspended in mid-air. The bitter cold that whipped at the woollen scarf around my neck stabbed at my eyes and made them water.
We lived in a large seven-bedroom colonial-style house with thick security pane dormer windows, an oak wood floor, and a fire-resistant brick facade built to reflect the times and the world we now lived in. It had been remodelled, but that was over a decade ago, and the paint had since chipped and it had peeled off most of the exterior walls. With the thin strips of boards exposed, the house had an ugly, weather-beaten, weary look. Where it sat on the low rise overlooking the small town almost two miles away to our south, it looked like a battle-weary soldier returning home from the war. Our house was nestled in a thick grove of dying gigantic Douglas fir and Mountain Hemlock. A few lodgepole pines were scattered in-between. The dead branches that fell to the ground, or those that were hewn off their gigantic trunks were our main source of heat and fuel in the house.
Off to my right, about two miles away, buried under a foot of snow lay our small town of Cottonwood. Located in Idaho County, North Central Idaho out on the Camas Prairie, we were almost three thousand five hundred feet above sea level. The month of April should’ve been spring and I should’ve already been hearing the shrill whistles and songs of Robins and finches and the countless species of other birds as they re-entered the area. Usually, there would’ve been a couple of Crows out on the porch or I would’ve heard the woodpeckers drumming in the grove behind our house. All I heard today was the blizzard howling around me. The open fields in front of the house and the centennial marshy wetlands in the distance would have begun to stir with life, as the blue camas lilies budded and got ready to bloom.
Instead, it was bitterly cold outside. It had been snowing for the last few months and everything had turned into an iced wasteland that reminded me of the frozen Arctic tundra. Our intensely unpredictable and freezing weather came from Canada in the North, but recently because of the severe cyclonic activity over the Northern Pacific, it would whip off Cottonwood Butte about eight miles to West behind our house. Today, it must be at least twenty under zero, but with the wind chill factor, it felt much colder. Arctic cold. The wind, I felt against my cheeks could be around thirty miles per hour. In sub-zero temperatures, I was told that for every ten miles per hour it would drop by almost eight degrees. Even the three layers of thick woolen merinos under the Omni-heat, winter jacket, and three pairs of socks in my mukluks were ineffective after a measly ten minutes outside. Once again, I had to stumble back inside to suffocate with Mama.
Mama said I have a tendency to overthink things, and that sometimes when she listens to me ramble, she thinks I should have been a poet. I remember her saying that on more than one occasion and it could be true. Sometimes, if I looked with care, I understood the infinity and eternity Blake penned in his Auguries of Innocence. I could see it in everything and in all of nature that surrounded me. Well, I used to, anyway. Now, like today, all I saw from the porch was Dante’s Inferno. An inferno of white blizzard. Life had indeed become a paradox I tell you.
My father held the extreme view, and during these discourses simply said, and he said it bluntly and without apology, ‘you’re a lunatic.’ He had the nerve to look me straight in the eye when he said this, and I returned his stare, thinking all the time of the proverbial apple and the tree as a quick retort. But looking at Mama’s face I held my tongue, no longer certain that this apple fell from his tree, so to speak. The thought, despite its implications, comforted me like an invisible robe and warmed my chest, so I let him continue with his tirade. ‘You should have been locked away in a mental institution, Silas. Somewhere deep underground. And then, they should have buried the key where even they couldn’t remember.’ When Mama growled at him, he had added, ‘well, it would be nice if they threw in a pencil and some other writing material.’ This seemed to please Mama, and I was horrified she agreed with this so easily.
It was his words that led me to believe that my father, Professor Frank Bellamy, a molecular scientist, didn’t like me. Maybe even hated me. Well, that and his reactions when he found out I wasted the tuition fees he paid for me to do my LL.M. at Harvard a few years ago. Fourteen years ago, to be exact, but who’s counting except for him. Talk about holding a grudge! And then there were the few times I slept with Gracie, his mistress from over in Lewiston. A small town a little over forty miles to our North West. But somehow, I think it was when I went with Liza from Ferdinand, another young mistress of his who lived in a small town, much smaller than ours, a few miles away. This is what I believed inflamed his ire since I like everyone else, including Mama, knew that he’d been making plans to leave the state with her. Like I said, my father wasn’t one willing to let bygones be bygones. But I was glad I had chased after Liza. Had I not I wouldn’t have met Lyn, a volunteer nurse in a mental health care centre out on Liza’s Main Street. I called it for what it was; a nut-house, filled with broken souls that had cracked and fallen through what remained of the social sieve. Lyn was my elder brother’s girlfriend.
Lyn lived in an old farmhouse with her aged grandmother and two siblings about a mile outside of Ferdinand along Meadow Creek Road. And it was whilst chasing after Liza one evening almost eight years ago that I met her. Back in ’24, Lyn was 22, and the lass was on fire. Was it any other day she wouldn’t have run and jumped into my arms as she did on that particular evening. Wouldn’t have hugged me as though her life depended on it. But I suspect it could have been because of the frightful sight of the meteors that were raining down a couple of clicks away to the North West. Or it could’ve been their impact that shook the ground under her feet like gelatin that got her scared and caused her to jump into the mustang with me. And maybe it was the unnerving, ear-splitting shrieks as it whooshed downward through the thin mesosphere that remained over the earth that caused her to throw herself into my arms. I don’t think it had much to do with my good looks that evening, but whatever it was I’ll forever be grateful.
I remember that evening well. The first of many pleasurable, guilt-ridden evenings. And if I remember correctly, I think I could’ve been a little more scared than her. Just a tad, perhaps. And it was why I latched on to her so tightly that it scared her even more and had her wondering if she had chosen the right vehicle to jump into. When it was over, she stared at me curiously before she buttoned her blouse and pulled up her skirt, then she opened the car door and left without saying a word. As far as my fuzzy mind could recall, mine was the only vehicle out on that lonely stretch of road that night. ‘Close the damn door, you’re letting out the warmth,’ I heard Mama hollering, as I fought to push it shut.
‘I’m trying here, woman, I’m trying,’ I croaked, attempting to sound like Frank. My sad effort at this, to sound like my father, drew a broad smile from her wrinkled face. It was difficult to replicate Frank’s deep, sardonic monotone, often broken by violent bursts of phlegmy cough. ‘I’m smoking too many ci******es, Martha,’ I wheezed, causing her to break out in loud peals of laughter. One of the things I loved about Mama; how she understood me and how she laughed, even though it pained us all.
‘Guess she ain’t coming?’ Mama’s throaty voice rasped, pausing to catch her breath. I knew she was referring to Lyn who should’ve been here an hour ago.
‘She’ll be here soon enough,’ Rylee, my youngest sister said. ‘Piper left with the Humvee for her. They should be back anytime now.’ Rylee, eighteen years old, was one of those young girls who never seemed to feel the coldness around her, and somehow I thought she rather enjoyed when it was bloody freezing like today. “It’s like she has ice in her veins,” grams would often say. “Thinking about the child makes me cold,” she’d add and pretend a shudder, flashing me one of her normally toothless affectionate grins. Today Rylee was sitting on a sofa next to Mama in a thin flowery cotton dress with her legs curled up under her. Blowing at a cup in her hands and looking at Mama and me.
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