Finding Tom Read online

  I found my way home, but Father was not waiting for me with a loving embrace. Instead, I came home to lonely silence and, leaving my shoes at the door, I went to find him.

  I remember waking my father as I stepped through the door frame. He sprung up in bed, fully awake. “What is it?” he asked.

  In that moment, I did not know what to say. I had no words to express everything welling up inside, so I spoke hollow words that echoed into the night.

  “Mother is dead.” I hung my head and felt the urge to cry again, but this time I refused myself that childish delight. This time I was a man. I looked up at Father, wanting desperately for him to hug me and hold me. I needed the warmth of his embrace and the strength of his arms, but that was beyond him. Mother had always been the affectionate one.

  He bounded down the hall where Mother’s cold corpse lay, growing more and more stiff with each passing minute. A sharp cry pierced the air, pulling me from my own dark thoughts. My father’s crazed cry shattered the silence. The anguished howl of pain sounded like his soul was breaking, leaving behind shards of what he used to be. The cry drifted into the night sky, gradually fading into nothing, and then again, there was silence. I dared not enter the room, feeling as if somehow I would be trespassing. I imagined my father kneeling on the floor, holding my mother’s hands, willing life back into her body. But death merely laughed at his pain and his feeble efforts. Death had no time for the love of a husband or a son. I waited a long time for Father to emerge, but he remained hidden away with my mother’s lifeless form. Unsure of what to do, I finally went over to his bed and curled up underneath the warm blankets. Overcome by weariness, I fell into a fitful sleep. I awoke in the morning and was still alone.

  Filled with his own hurt and unable to express his emotions, Father did not know how to handle me. His cold exterior simply became chillier, and he withdrew further into himself. He tore into his work at our family-owned general store, leaving long before I awoke and coming home late at night. We avoided each other as much as possible. It was easier that way. When we were together, mother’s absence was too powerful. We had no words to convey our separate heartaches, no language to share our feelings, so silence became our companion. Solitude became my dearest friend. He alone traveled with me day and night. When I needed my father most, he did not come to rescue me. In some ways, I lost my father that year as well. He was never the same again. I lived with a stranger wearing my father’s face, but he was not my father. Of that, I was sure. When at home, he seemed not to care about anything. There were no more rules or discipline, no comments about my poor marks at school that previously would have been the cause for a beating. Nothing was said about the shabby state of my clothing or my unpolished shoes or my shaggy hair. The world might have been falling apart, but as long as his shop was neat and tidy, nothing else mattered. I see now that the shop was the one area of life he felt he could still control in the midst of everything else, so he held onto it with ferocity for fear that he might lose himself otherwise. The store became his beloved child. Prim and proper, he carefully cultivated it while it robbed him of his own son, who waited night after night to hear his father’s footsteps on the front porch, hoping beyond hope that he would come in and kiss me good night. Instead, I heard him trudge wearily down the hall into the study. He would uncork a bottle of whisky and pour himself a large glass. Dry and warm, he would sip it slowly while looking blankly out the dark window, his once-piercing eyes now filled with sadness. After two or three glasses, he would drag himself out of the chair, flounder his way to his bedroom, throw himself across the bed, and sleep in his clothes. The next morning, he’d wake up and do it all over again, silently sleepwalking through the days—awake but not alive.

  Grief piled upon grief and remained bottled up inside my bitter soul. I did not have language to express the sorrow I buried deep, deep down where no one could find it, but its poison seeped into my soul, threatening to destroy me. It was a battle to get out of bed every morning.

  We continued to attend church week in and week out, but it had become a meaningless ritual to me. Though we never mentioned it, we endured for mother’s sake. I counted the minutes while we were there, antsy and irritated, as the services seemed to drag on for eternity. My mother was everywhere in that church. Wherever I looked, I sensed her presence, from the dusty choir loft to the fresh flower arrangements. Sometimes I thought I saw her coming out of the Sunday school classrooms or cooking in the small kitchen. She was inescapable. Her ghost haunted me. I wanted to run, but I was chained to that miserable pew listening to the reverend drone on and on about Jesus. If Jesus was so wonderful, my thirteen-year-old mind thought, why did he take my mother from me? He was not my God. He was not my savior. He was not my king. I took all the flowery church language that I knew and spat upon it. I wanted nothing to do with this weak God who could not heal my mother. I was done with religion.

  My peers were wise enough to leave me to myself. I wanted nothing to do with their silly games and chatter. While the boys flirted with the girls and played catch and kickball, I disappeared behind the school building and sat silently staring into nowhere. Most teachers tried to coddle me, but I did not want their pity. I did not want their sympathy. I just wanted to be left alone to grieve in my own way. I think it is because I was born with an acute sense of delight and appreciation for beauty that my mother’s death struck me so strongly, and I was sent reeling in a worse way than most children who lose a parent. This gift of delight that had once brought me so much happiness as I explored the natural world around me became my solemn curse. It opened the door for depression long before people talked about such things. I was merely a melancholy child. My natural tendency was to draw within myself, and that is what I did.

  CHAPTER 3

  Moving On

  ONE TEACHER AT SCHOOL CHOSE not to treat me differently. Mr. Livingston was a thick fellow who taught English literature. Barrel-chested with stocky legs, he looked more the part of a farmer or day laborer than a professor of literature. In spite of his size, he moved with the grace of a dancer under his white button-down shirt and striped ties. He always kept a handkerchief in his back pocket to dab at his forehead, and somehow his bright red suspenders managed to keep up his oversized khaki pants. Mr. Livingston had a real wittiness about him, often drawing out the most interesting and peculiar observations from our readings. His class provided the only source of comfort for me because his reading assignments gave me opportunities to shed my own skin and just for a while lose myself in the world of others. The characters of those countless books became my steadfast friends. I realize this was very unusual behavior for a boy of thirteen, and it was not long before Mr. Livingston noticed me devouring the reading materials. In spite of my ravenous hunger for new stories, I never spoke in class. Though he would call on me, I would sit in silence. My thoughts were private. I had no interest in sharing them with my shallow classmates who still lived in blissful ignorance, thinking that the world was good and beautiful. I had lost all such notions. Mr. Livingston never pushed me to speak. I could sense that he wanted me to know I was an important member of the community, and if the day ever came when I was ready to share, my words would be welcome.

  Near the end of the school year, Mr. Livingston asked me to stay after class briefly. I obliged, expecting to be lectured for my poor class work. Once the class had emptied, he looked up from his desk full of papers and smiled with stained yellow teeth. “Come on, boy,” he called out. “You can’t sit in the back and expect me to shout at you when we are the only two people in the room.”

  I crossed the room cautiously, ready to tune him out if he tried to scold me. He pushed a small notebook toward me with fingers the size of sausages. “I was reading your last homework assignment and decided that this might do you some good. Your spelling is atrocious enough to make most English teachers cringe, but good writing has nothing to do with penmanship and spelling. Just don’t go telling anyone one I said that. Good writing is
about one’s ability to question and explore. Good writing is about finding your own voice; what others think about it is irrelevant. Sometimes in your writing, I catch glimpses of that voice—only for a sentence here or there, but it’s still there, nonetheless. I want you to take this notebook and write. Don’t write for me. Don’t write for anyone but yourself. Be selfish. Thumb your nose at the world. Explore wherever your pen leads you. That’s all. You may go now.” With that, he leaned back in his chair and cracked his knuckles in a loud, obtrusive manner and began to hum to himself while his feet tapped and danced under his desk as if waiting to break out into a waltz or a sweaty samba.

  My fingers curled carefully around the notebook, and I slipped it into my bag. “Thank you, Mr. Livingston,” I mumbled quietly. I looked at him, but he was already looking at the papers in front of him, conducting an invisible brass band in full swing with his pen. There were no strings attached to his gift. No need for further dialogue. He had opened a door for me, and now his job was done. It was up to me to walk through.

  I wish I could say I opened up the notebook and began to write that very night and, like a cleansing salve, it restored my soul to its former state of innocent wonder at the world. Actually, I threw it under a pile of papers on my desk at home and completely forgot about it for a number of weeks. I didn’t really have any desire to write. Writing had always been a frustrating exercise, a tiresome chore forced upon me by teachers who told me exactly what to write and how. I had never really written. I regurgitated words onto a page and formed thoughtless sentences to appease the expectations set upon me. But that was not writing as Mr. Livingston described it. I’d never explored, never dared to ask the questions that swarmed through my mind. There was no space for such questions in prim and proper public life. The sorts of questions I had were messy, and people did their best avoid such things. I wanted to muddy the water.

  My inner pain had to find some other way to rise to the surface, and with the coming of my teenage years and their youthful hormones, it crept out in the form of rebellion. I was the quiet, sullen kid who never took part in the activities of the other kids my age. I played my part as the outsider well. I began smoking behind the school building with hand-rolled cigarettes filled with tobacco I had stolen from local farms. I was caught smoking numerous times, and the school would immediately call my father. He would begrudgingly close the store and come down to get me from the principal’s office. My father was a completely different person in public than the man I saw at home. Outside in the real world, he was well dressed and in complete control. He always said the right things and acted concerned for his woebegone son, but as soon as we left and got into the car, his shoulders would droop, and he became tired again. He never disciplined me. He knew why I was doing it. It was the same reason he drank every night before going to bed. We were both rebels running away from reality.

  After the principal caught me the third time, he threatened to expel me, and I decided that, for my mother’s sake, I would not get expelled. My father couldn’t have cared less what happened to me. I stopped smoking at school and limited my smoking to my walks to and from school and in the evenings on the back porch when my father was gone. It was on one such evening that I remembered the small notebook hiding upstairs. I dug it out and tossed it on the table, staring at it by the light of a small Coleman lantern. It was a warm night with a handful of brightly burning stars tossed across the sky. The smell of smoke was still strong on my breath as I dropped my cigarette butt through a crack in the porch and into the black abyss below. It lay with the rest of its kind, like withered bodies in a small, makeshift graveyard. The notebook lay motionless. Dead. There was no glorious connection. No flash of inspiration. I rummaged in my bag and pulled out a pale yellow pencil. Opening the book, I peered inside. A small note was written on the inside cover:

  Dear Tom, Don’t worry about grammar or penmanship. Just write. – Mr. Livingston

  I smiled, a rare expression for me during those years. Rolling up my sleeves, I took a cautious step through the door. Putting pencil to paper, I wasn’t really sure where to start, so I started with describing what I saw around me. It was a humble beginning, nothing fancy or poetic. Brilliance would have been the last word used to describe my simple style. I wrote like a fourteen-year-old boy, choppy and short. But everyone has to start somewhere. It soon became part of my nightly ritual to sit out on the porch and write by the dim light of the lantern. I looked forward to that time suspended between the stars and the cigarette burial ground. After a few months, I finished my first journal. I glanced back over the spew of words scrawled awkwardly across once-blank pages. There, in the midst of the fanatical and the nonsensical, my soul began to breathe again. It wheezed to life like an old smoker exposed to fresh air. I told Mr. Livingston of my accomplishment, and he provided me with another book. Again, there was a short note inside:

  Keep writing. You are on your way. – Mr. Livingston

  I had no idea where I was on my way to. I didn’t see myself on a journey. I was just writing, filling pages with ideas until I grew bored and pulled out another cigarette as I drifted off into my own thoughts. Around this time, I began to binge read. I pillaged our narrow family library, and after finding its contents to be lacking, I began to borrow books from the public library. With a voracious appetite, I traded in my former, childish adventures for the adventures of others within the pages of innumerable books. I quickly realized it was easier to follow someone else’s journey than live my own.

  I did not have a desire to venture out into nature any more. I felt as if somehow such an action would violate my mother’s memory. I thought that letting go of my sorrow would dishonor her. Joy was a mockery of her absence. It was impossible to be happy again. So while I barely scraped by at school, much to the frustration of my teachers, I read book after book. My father seemed oblivious to what was going on in my life, and we grew further and further apart. Our drives to church were always silent and awkward. There was a terrifying ocean of unspoken words separating us, and neither of us was ready to take the first bold stroke to try to cross its vast expanse.

  It was the next summer that I began to grow. Fifteen brought with it the external coming of manhood that had already begun inside. I looked in the mirror and was a stranger even to myself. My long gangly limbs were foreign to me. My face was covered with patchy brown scruff over dry skin. I was tall for my age, but walked with hunched shoulders to avoid being so noticeable. Though I rarely smiled, I had strong white teeth in two straight rows, courtesy of my mother. My eyebrows perched thick and brooding over my eyes (light brown with peculiar yellow flecks like splatters from a painter’s brush), and I had firm features and a strong chin like my father. None of this really mattered to me as I lived my life in social isolation from my classmates.

  As an outsider, I took in the world as a silent observer, noticing everything. Without the pressure of wanting to impress my peers and no desire to fight for attention, I was left to observe their shenanigans unfurling before me. I let them play their games and stuck to my reading and writing. I stopped telling Mr. Livingston when I had finished more notebooks. I began to buy my own with money from my pittance of an allowance. Father’s stinginess was one of the few things that hadn’t changed. I had no motivation to get a job, and though this bothered my father, who got his first real job at thirteen, he remained silent.

  I continued to drift in this manner, indulging in my smoking and reading and writing, not really caring about anything. I was still finding my voice. Shortly after my sixteenth birthday, which passed without any recognition or celebration, things took an unexpected turn. By the middle of my final year of school, it dawned on me that I’d been plodding along miserably for nearly three years, caught up in the drudgery of my life. I had to admit to myself that I was living without a sense of purpose or meaning. It was while I was in this dreary state, like a ship long stuck in the doldrums, that the winds of fate began to blow ever so softly. Unbeknowns
t to me, a storm was just over the horizon. Though I didn’t believe, God still moved on my behalf.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Contest

  MR. LIVINGSTON APPROACHED ME UNEXPECTEDLY one winter day to tell me about a statewide writing contest sponsored by Locklear University. He handed me a flyer with the competition’s essay topic and encouraged me to take part. The winner of the contest would receive 100 dollars and a paid trip to visit the university. Leaving the flyer in my grasp, he walked away without further explanation. I tucked the paper away for further reading.

  At home that evening, I read the contest topic: “Please write a one-page essay on the coming of spring and the rebirth of life after winter.” I could just imagine all of the pathetic, flowery language describing the beauty of nature emerging from its long slumber that the contestants would submit. There would be essay after essay of ridiculously ignorant words written from those trying to impress their unknown judges. I knew people would write sappily about the joy of new beginnings and the re-emergence of hope, but I would not be among them. I’d given up trying to impress and be flowery a long time ago. I guess that is one of the privileges of not believing there is any ultimate meaning to life: you don’t have to play by the rules. So in my own voice, I explored the darker side of the coming of spring just for the heck of it. It was my way of thumbing my nose at those in authority. I didn’t care about the prize money. I certainly didn’t want to go to their ritzy school. I just wanted to write about what was real. I was tired of the façade and the superficial that constantly swirled around me. I purposefully wrote with horrific spelling in an awkward script. This was the first time I used writing as an act of rebellion, and it was truly a delicious feeling. It was empowering. The following was my final manuscript.