Helicopter Seeds

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Wally,” I say.

“I hope you’re right,” he calls out from the next room; shuffling into the doorway. He reads and re-reads the laminated piece of paper he had just picked up off the kitchen counter: Your dog’s name is Lady. The commands she knows are Sit, Lie Down, Stay, and Come. He turns the paper over and holds it out for me to see then says in a voice that is equal parts explanatory and apologetic, “I forget things sometimes…”

I nod knowingly. “You do alright Wally.”

“Let me show you something,” he says, and before I can respond he shuffles through the parlor and into his office, beckoning with his hand that I should follow. Lady, an extremely well-fed Black Labrador, creeps out of the kitchen and then under the enormous solid oak desk that sits in the center of the office.

“This dog will not bite you,” he says, as if the thought had just occurred to him. He then smiles warmly saying, “She’s a honey-pot… she’s a real sweetheart.”

His office walls are completely lined with books. The shelves extend from the floor to the ceiling and completely envelop the room, disrupted only by a window and a set of French doors opposite it. There are Bibles, countless Bibles. The Torah, the Septuagint, the Vulgate, giant leather-bound concordances and vast arrays of commentaries; their spines worn and pages yellowed. There are Greek and Hebrew dictionaries alongside an impossibly old Merriam-Webster that threatens to buckle the shelf it sits upon. Histories and biographies intermingle with memoirs and novels. On one shelf, Jack London’s Sea Wolf sits beside Robert Frost’s New Hampshire; above them is C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce. The more recent additions sit horizontally atop the vertically arrayed older ones. Every shelf has been filled save one, which is empty but for a single framed photograph. He shuffles up to it and stands there silently. I can see his eyes come alive with pride. It is a picture of him from many years prior and next to him is a woman. They are laughing; they squint into the evening sun as the ocean rolls behind them.

“Elizabeth,” he says by way of explanation after prolonged silence- “My wife.”

My hip finds the edge of the immense desk and I lean against it. Sprawling across its top is a tattered but intact map of the Atlantic Ocean. There is a picture of a Navy ship; a young and familiar looking man stands at its helm. Next to it is a brass ship’s throttle, at its base is an engraved plaque- For our Captain- From the crew of the USS Augusta, July 1946. Just behind that is a framed diploma dated 1952 from the Wake Forest University School of Divinity. As I stand there, Lady crawls out from beneath the desk and lies down at my feet. She rolls onto her back as I kneel down to scratch her belly. Wally looks down as Lady’s contented tail thumps against his shoe.

“She’s a honey-pot,” he says. His eyes turn again to the picture.

“I would have loved to have met her,” I say for the lack of anything else. His eyes meet mine but seem confused and questioning. I gesture toward the photo, “Your wife…” I say; feeling awkward for the need to clarify and the uneasiness of the moment. He nods and gives a partial smile. His gaze is distant and he has the look of a man trying to find the elusive words to give voice to profound thought. At last he raises his hand as if about to give a recitation and says matter-of-factly, “Where there is the hope of Heaven, death is the most glorious part of life.” He turns and walks abruptly out of the room. I stand there for a moment, not sure what he is referencing, if anything at all.

The tinny peal of the grandfather clock in an adjacent room indicates it is 5:00. Lady lopes out of the office and returns to the kitchen. Wally shuffles across the living room to the bench of a very old and pristine grand piano. An ornate wooden cross hangs on the wall just behind him, next to it is a picture of him wearing a minister’s gown and holding a Bible. Just below them hangs a picture of a white country church; the lettered frame reads Hope Presbyterian Church, 1976. On a near wall is another framed photo: Wally sits at the piano- just as he is now but much younger, Elizabeth stands just behind him looking down into a songbook.

I sit in a small parlor chair in the corner of the living room as Wally begins to play Brahms’ Variation and Fugue on a Theme by Handel. On an end table next to me sits a worn King James Bible, the pages are curled from being thumbed through countless times. It is laid open to the 34th Psalm and there is a crisply folded sheet of paper standing up from the crease between the pages. I see him watching me as he begins playing the familiar melody of Greensleeves. Unfolding the paper, I begin reading-

Elizabeth-
I’m all too often at a loss
When I set down my compass and picked up my cross
I never imagined the changing tide
Would leave me without you by my side
I cannot for the life of me tell
Of the duality of love and of the spiritual realm
Where there is hope that causes so much pain
There is hope that keeps us alive
So death will never sway my faith
Even though it has taken my wife
Where there is the hope of Heaven
Death is the most glorious part of life.

Greensleeves becomes a lilting Amazing Grace. The grandfather clock chimes and it’s quarter past the hour. Lady walks out of the kitchen and to Wally’s side.

“She’s a honey-pot,” he says as they both watch me walk through the foyer toward the front door.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Wally,” I say.

“I hope you’re right,” he says.

“I saw Virgil Hill fight when he was 15 years old.”

The old man spoke matter-of-factly as his worn fingers deftly maneuvered a cigarette from a hard pack to his lips.  He struck a match, briefly closed his eyes and inhaled deeply; soon the smoke wisped and curled around his thick white beard.

“You know, Virgil Hill went to high school about an hour north of here and he came down to Barnesville to fight a local kid named Sam Andvik.  I never forgot his name because he was the only colored kid I had ever seen fight in Barnesville.”

With a practiced and perfunctory motion he subtly tapped the first of the ashes from the end of his cigarette.  They scattered grey across the stark black of the wrought iron café table at which he sat.  His cigarettes and his matchbook lay atop a folded newspaper.  He went on,

“That Andvik kid got cut above his eye and had to quit; back in those days if you got cut, you were done.  He was a hell of a boxer, Sam Andvik.”

The cigarette glowed a hot orange as he took a long drag.  His eyes followed some passersby up the street then quickly came back to meet my own.

“I saw him again in ’93.  It was right before I closed my shop… right around the time that Muhammad Ali’s hands went bad and he couldn’t sign any more autographs, Virgil Hill fought in Fargo.  I waited in line after the fight with a glove for him to sign.  When I finally got up to him I asked him, ‘So, do you remember fighting in Barnesville?’  He got this big grin on his face and said, ‘No one ever asks about those days… no one ever remembers you when you’re a kid.’  He said he tried to track down that Sam Andvik to be his sparring partner right before the Olympics; he was a hell of a boxer.  I told him I thought Sam joined a biker gang out in California.  He said that made sense.  We must have talked for twenty minutes while a whole line of people had to wait behind me.”

He let out a resigned sigh and stared through the thin line of tobacco smoke that rose and pirouetted in the breeze.

“I was there with my wife,” he continued, “She was a good looking gal… I’m not kidding, you should have seen her; she really looked sharp.”

There was a long pause as he tapped the ashes from his cigarette.  He winced noticeably then shook his head and smiled to himself as an obnoxiously loud pickup truck drove up the street.  A gust of wind threatened to unfold his newspaper but he paid it little mind.  He suddenly sat up straight in his chair and leaned slightly towards me,

“There was a pitcher who used to pitch for Boston in the 70’s, he was a Minnesota boy originally, and I came to find out that he had moved back to Minnesota and was living just outside of Little Falls.  For some reason I can’t think of his name right now… I know the sheriff down in Little Falls so it wasn’t hard to get the guy’s address.  I sent him a couple of baseball cards to sign and a stamped envelope to send them back in… I’ve got a lot of autographs, you know.  About two weeks later that envelope came back with a letter from that guy’s wife.  It turned out that in the time between when I had first mailed it and when it got there, he had died.  I felt real bad about it because I didn’t know… I didn’t know he was sick or anything and I’m sure they thought I was just trying to get him to sign a card at the last minute before he was gone.  She sent back those cards and wrote a really nice letter saying that her husband would have been thrilled to sign them for me.  She also sent along the program from his funeral…”

His voice trailed off and he sat looking down as he inhaled deeply from what was left of the cigarette.  The last of the tobacco brightly glowed before being reduced to fragile smoke and cold ash.

“It’s funny, you know… all them guys want is to be remembered.”

He flicked the cigarette with his middle finger.  It arched high into the air before landing soundlessly in a nearby trashcan. 

“His name will come to me eventually,” the old man said.

“William Jason Rollefson- Fargo, ND; Died Thursday, December 11, 2008 in his home at age 52.”

It had been twenty years since I had seen or even thought about him but there was no mistaking the photograph above his name.  He looked skinnier than I had remembered, but of course, I wasn’t much older than 8 and he was in his 30’s the last time I saw him.  In the photo, his face was weathered; unshaved and unkempt, but he was smiling.  It was the smile that I recognized.  On a page that was filled with loving and carefully worded obituaries, his was the lone death announcement- a tactless thirteen words, no doubt written by an intern or someone equally detached. It was all there was to chronicle his life and to announce the end thereof.  And yet, there was his unmistakable grin, affirming his existence.

I had never known him as William Rollefson.  To myself and all the other neighborhood kids he was simply Jason.  On summer evenings, as we’d ride our bikes home from the M&H convenience store or the Jefferson Elementary playground, there he would be; waiting on the sidewalk with a beer can in hand and that grin on his face.  Everyday, all summer long, he’d be out there; splitting the difference between his house and the street where he would be sure to intercept any passersby.  When it rained he would stand on his porch.  I don’t know what he would do in the winter.

It’s funny how we never remember the winters.

On summer Saturday mornings, our group would convene in the street.  We were still too young to be confined by our various gender roles so the girls would happily share in the high-stakes adventures and the boys would ungrudgingly play house in return.  We would carefully sneak to the side of Jason’s house when we were sure he was still asleep so we could peek into his trash cans.  We would quietly pull the lid off the galvanized steel trashcans and stand up on our toes to view their contents.  Budweiser cans.  At the end of every week, his garbage can was always entirely filled with partially crushed Budweiser cans.  We admired it as we would a vast baseball card collection and crept in for closer inspection.  The moist, acrid smell of stale beer would plume out of the garbage can, causing someone to gag and cough at which point we would scatter; running in all directions for fear that our cover was blown. 

Several hours later there would be Jason, waiting on the sidewalk.  We would glide up on our bicycles; nonchalantly, as if we hadn’t been rummaging through his garbage just that morning.  He’d ask us if we wanted a beer, just as he had the day before.  “No!” we would abruptly reply, the pungent stale beer smell still heavy on our minds.  He would rock slowly side to side as he laughed, and we’d proceed to relay the minutiae of that day’s bike ride: “There was a gardener snake at the park and Tootsie Rolls are on sale at the M&H!”  He would stand there, happy for the company, taking it all in and laughing.  We would talk, happy for the audience.  It was a daily exchange that would become as much a part of childhood summer as bike rides and kite flying and hot evening air.

But in stark and vivid contrast to those endless summer days were the infrequent summer nights that would find me lying awake and pondering the terrible injustice of a bedtime while it was still light outside; and interrupting that dusk light, a wan alternating red and blue would be projected across the walls of the bedroom.  Silently rising from my bed and separating the slats of the venetian blinds with two tentative fingers would reveal the pair of patrol cars in front of Jason’s house and the flurry of silhouetted activity around them.  The next morning we would overhear our parent’s murmuring; their voices mixed with equal parts dread and disdain, “Jason got drunk again last night.”  We kids knew the truth: Jason was only mean when he was sober. 

We knew because there was a day when we arrived in front of Jason’s house to find him waiting, but not as we knew him; he wasn’t carrying his customary Budweiser.  His hair was combed, he was clean-shaven, his shirt was tucked in.  He didn’t smile as we approached.  He just looked away, irritated.  We silently shuffled past and then crossed the street.  Discontent with this deviation from routine, we spied on him from the bushes until a taxi pulled up.  With a cold passing glance in our direction, he climbed inside and closed the door. 

It’s funny how much more we remember the indifference.

I think back now at how betrayed we felt.  His sobriety and somber timbre rendered him a disingenuous stranger, an enemy, an adult.  The gentle drunk who we accepted as one of our own was replaced with someone we did not know and did not care to.  He could have been going to a funeral, a court appointment, a wedding, a job interview; children are slow to grant such benefits of doubt.  We had judged him as quickly as our parents had.  Our childish reciprocation of detachment was something we would not grow out of.  Somehow Jason had, and there in the obituary section of the newspaper, was the grainy black and white photo of our disheveled childhood friend to prove it.