Death Comes for the Deconstructionist. Daniel Taylor
north, negotiating with my thoughts, when Judy suddenly sits up as tall as she can, lifting her eyes above the bottom of the window like a prairie dog looking out its burrow.
“That’s where my daddy of mine takes me for choc … choc … chocolate dips.”
I snap to attention, suddenly and inexplicably nervous. I see the entrance to the state fairgrounds. We have crossed the Rubicon, unawares, into our old neighborhood. In an instant I am taken back to my childhood. Our house was only a few blocks from the fairgrounds. Our parents took us to the fair every year and, as part of the ritual, Dad always bought Judy a vanilla cone dipped in chocolate.
“You’re right, Jude. We used to get ice cream there, didn’t we?”
“Yes … yes we did, Jon. That is where my very own daddy of mine takes me for choc … chocolate dips.”
We sit at a red light for a few seconds in silence.
“I … I … I miss my daddy very much.”
I don’t have anything to say. Our father has been dead for going on thirty years now. How can you miss something you hardly remember having? I was only nine when he died. Judy was thirteen. If it wasn’t for photographs, I couldn’t tell you what he looked like—though I have a feeling his photographs don’t do him justice. I mean, what are photographs anyway? Thousands of little dots of color—or shades of gray. Arrange the dots just so and you fool the eye into thinking it’s seeing something, something from the real world. But it’s just dots. We know this, but we agree to fool ourselves. We agree to play along, to pretend we’re seeing something real.
Come to think of it, the camera only does what the eye itself does first. Our brain sits in splendid isolation, taking in data from the field—from the eyes, the nose, the tongue, the ears, and other scattered parts. The eye receives photons of light bouncing off everything out there, which are converted into electrical impulses and sent along the optic nerve to the brain. Then the brain takes the impulses, throws most of them away, and sorts the rest, transmuting the agitated electrons into a “picture” of the world. And we all agree to participate in the illusion that this picture is Reality.
Yikes! Pratt isn’t dead. He’s alive and well in my overheated brain.
When I make a mistake, like allowing the car to take me here, I tend to make another to keep it company. Mistakes need friends, just as we all do. And so I glance over at Judy.
“How about it, Jude. Since we’re close to the old neighborhood, what say we drive by our house?”
Judy shoots me a baleful look, but doesn’t reply.
“Let’s just drive by and take a look. I haven’t seen the place in years.”
I turn right two blocks on and head into another haunted part of town, a place you can’t get to by roads alone.
The closer we get to our old street (named after a French philosopher no less, a fellow who knew a thing or two about the void) the less believable everything seems. The Mdewakanton Dakota used to pass through here on their way to collecting wild rice on lakes a bit north, but the present neighborhood was mostly built in the 1920s and ’30s. Tall shade trees once lined the streets, but Dutch elm disease has killed off most of them. The few left behind look skeletal and misplaced, like the odd rotten tooth in a mostly toothless mouth. We turn onto our old street and I start scanning for our house, pretending to be casual. Judy scrunches down in her seat, refusing to look.
“Well, there she is, Jude,” I say breezily as I pull the car up to the curb. I don’t feel breezy. Judy peeps over the bottom edge of the car window, like a soldier in a trench wary of snipers. It occurs to me that she likely hasn’t been here since shortly after Mom and Dad’s funeral. We walked out of the house a few weeks later, each carrying a suitcase, headed for Uncle Lester’s. And Judy has never been back, not until just now. No wonder she’s lying low.
The house looks strangely innocent, all whitish stucco, wrought iron, and one upstairs shuttered window by the chimney, but I know better. In my mind I walk myself up to the rounded front door—think ovens—and through the entryway into the living room on the right. Nothing has changed. Hardwood floors, gapped but shiny. A motley collection of furniture, not quite comfortable anymore, but too familiar to consider replacing. My father’s stuffed chair, the right arm darkened from years of buttered popcorn. In the corner by the window is the small, primitive television. It was old and outdated by the time I came along, but it had caused a stir when my parents got it, one of the first families in the church to get one. The pastor made it clear he didn’t think televisions belonged in a Christian home. My mother told him a lot of Christians she knew didn’t belong in a Christian home either. At least that’s what Aunt Wanda reported years later when I asked what my mother was like.
I see my parents and us watching reruns of The Honeymooners. “Bang, zoom, straight to the moon, Alice!” We don’t know enough to be offended. My dad laughs every time Norton comes into the room. Says he used to have a hat like that when he was a kid.
On the walls cheap prints compete with even cheaper studio photographs of the family. No one looks believable. Our skin sort of glows, like those plastic Santas with a light bulb screwed into their backs. And then there are the portraits of the dead. The faces are colored a kind of buttered-toast gold. You can’t imagine any of them ever telling a joke or sneaking a drink.
The snapshots are more compelling. Here’s Grandpa Nick as a young man among his co-workers in the oil fields of Southern California. He stands on the platform of a well, short and stocky, the collar of his shirt open and a confident look in his eyes. He’s just back from kicking the Kaiser’s butt in France and looks ready to do the same to life in general.
And yet, by the time I first saw that photograph, Grandpa Nick was already dead. Heart attack in his forties. I could never quite reconcile the living figure in the photograph, all breath and expectation, with the knowledge that he was dead and disintegrated long before I was even born. It seemed to me that this photograph somehow kept him alive—or at least in existence—and I worried that we were too casual with it, letting it just hang there by the entryway, liable to disasters of every kind.
In my mind I walk through the living room, turning left into the small dining room that joined it at right angles. We only sat at the dining room table on Sunday afternoons and when company was over. But all four of us are sitting there now. My mother is instructing Judy.
“If the butter is closer to someone else than it is to you, Judy, you should ask them to pass it, even if you think you can reach it yourself.”
My father is telling me he’s glad there’s a pro baseball team in Minnesota now because he gets to take me to games, like his father did with him when he was a kid.
I drift out of the dining room into the kitchen. The white refrigerator with the rounded corners sits, as it always will, next to the back door. Its long silver spike handle pulls forward like a slot machine. After one summer Bible camp where the speaker dragged us step by bloody step through the crucifixion, I couldn’t look at that handle without thinking of giant nails being driven through Jesus’ hands. It kept me from looking in the frig for a snack for weeks.
The kitchen table is red, with shiny silver edges and metal legs. The chairs match the table—curved metal with red vinyl seats, split after years of use, the white fibers sticking out like gauze on an open wound. I see oatmeal steaming in a bowl, vapors rising in twining spirals before disappearing in the air.
I lean over the sink and look out the kitchen window into the backyard. Huge. Bigger than it can possibly be. It is terraced, the lawn rolling up higher near the back fence, like old Crosley Field in Cincinnati. I imagine Vada Pinson gliding back to catch a long fly ball against the fence and throwing it back into me at shortstop. I see our dog, Blue, lying in the sun, her tongue hanging out as she pants, at ease, satisfied with her place, without thought for past or future.
I walk out of the kitchen through the second interior door and back into where the entryway meets the living room, facing the front of the house. I turn right down the hallway, and see the two bedroom doors, one