Weathering the Storms Box Set

Chapter 1-2

He thought he was scaring me. He wasn’t. I wasn’t afraid of what I couldn’t see. I’d spent too long fearing what was right out in the open. Even thunder didn’t bother me at work. If a storm came up while I was there, I just jacked up the volume on my iPod.

Rip didn’t get me anymore, but it wasn’t his fault. I kept a lot hidden. I made believe I was okay, but then exhibited signs that I wasn’t by not showing up to Thanksgiving, summer barbecues, or birthday parties thrown in my honor.

I’d shown up for this because I loved Rip, which was why I also tried to put on a brave face out under the awning, despite the storm. The lightning wasn’t really my issue. It was the thunder I didn’t like. “I can go back in, if you really are angry.”

“I’m not angry. I just thought you might enjoy yourself and might even learn something, Goose. The hope was fresh air would improve your mood.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Is it the war part?” Rip asked.

“No. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Just tell me, if it is.”

“It’s more the people thing, right now,” I said. “I’ll get over it.”

Truthfully, I was a part-time hermit. Once home from work, other than an early morning trip to the grocery store once a week, I was a devoted homebody. That was fine with me. The only thing I missed was occasional s*x.

“Most of the people here you want to avoid are men.” Rip might have sensed that, because he offered one last bit of incentive. “Some of them could be into dudes. Patrick said bond. If you impress the right one, maybe you’ll get some.”

My fingers and thumb had been taking care of that part of my life, too, lately, with a little help from the Internet. “You think I’m that shallow?” I asked.

“Yup.”

Rip was one hundred percent correct. I’d gone all the way from New York to Tennessee for d**k. When I looked back to scour the room, out of the thirty-some men I saw, I was willing to hook up with about eight, maybe ten if I got drunk. That wasn’t a bad average.

“Hello. You going to shut the door?” Rip asked from the other side.

“Oh.” I chuckled. “I hadn’t realized I was holding it open.”

Rip lit a cigar and passed one to me. The next loud crack from the sky made me drop it to the wet pavement.

“Oops.”

Rip shook his head. “I get three of these a year. I only brought four with me. You’re not getting another one.”

“Maybe it’ll light.” I picked it up, stuck it in my mouth—“Eww!”—spit out some grit, and then struck a match from the book in my pocket. No matter how hard I sucked and puffed, the limp, damp thing wouldn’t ignite. “It’s junior prom with Barry Mitchell all over again,” I said.

“At least you were making an effort back then.” Rip scowled.

“Yeah, I’m a fuckup. Who’d want me?” I kept trying to light the stogie.

“It fell into two inches of water. Things a goner, Bro-ford. You’re not, though. One failed relationship shouldn’t make you feel hopeless. You learn. You change. Back in high school, you were the s**t, man. Always positive, funny, outgoing…what happened to that guy?”

I shrugged, then opened my mouth and let the cigar fall back to the flooded pavement. “I should probably quit smoking anyway.” I had the same three cigar per year habit as him. “Speaking of things I should and shouldn’t be doing, standing in water during a thunderstorm doesn’t sound like a great idea.”

“You’re shorter than me. You’ll be fine.”

“‘You’re shorter than I.’ Wait. I think that’s right. Yeah.”

“Kiss I’s ass.”

One thing was certain, Rip could still crack me up.

The storm calmed, and so did I. There was enough secondhand smoke to satiate my tobacco urgings and a little conversation and goofing around that made the adventure fun again, at least for a few minutes. Rip decided to try to take a nap once we went inside. I teased him about getting old.

“It’s going to be a long night,” he shot back. “These after dark battles aren’t for sissies.”

I wasn’t much of a sleeper, at least not at night. “I’m pretty sure I can handle it,” I said, with no idea whether or not that was true. “Now that it’s quiet, I think I’ll walk the grounds, like…Pablo suggested.”

“Patrick.”

“That’s what I said. Good night, Rip.”

“Have fun.” He rolled over.

The air outside was waging its own battle, between icky humidity and crisp, fall splendor. When the breeze came at me from one direction, it felt like July. When it turned, I was reminded we were near the end of October, which had me missing home. New York in October was my idea of heaven. If I ever got there, I wanted it to be October twelve months out of the year. Things like that were possible in heaven, I assumed.

I wandered around the yard with my medium-size sketchpad, comparable to a notebook a kid would use in school. I did a lot of drawing when not playing video games and had several pads in different sizes, everything from one that fit in my pocket, to one as big as a canvas for an oil painting, about one and a half by two feet.

I walked a few minutes, taking in the night, watching the spray of water from the wet grass fly off my shoe like a mist of glitter in the glow that came when the clouds began to part. A low-hanging oak leaf illuminated by moonlight that shone on its wetness from the rain caught my eye. The way it shimmered in the slight breeze, the way it danced, I wished I could capture its joy with just a pencil. I found a blank page, but when all was said and done, I hadn’t even come close.

With a flip to another, I decided to draw something not living, something stationary and stoic. The house was beautiful, for sure, but it didn’t have a soul. Some would argue neither did the leaf. I thought everything alive had something special to show. Maybe the problem wasn’t the subject, but rather the artist. Sometimes, I wondered if my soul was dead.

I sketched the columns, the wrought iron, the black shutters, and the clay roof. I penciled in the arches over the windows and their muntins, and then the door, four panel black with a half-moon lite on top.

The door.

One minute I was drawing it. The next I was trying the handle.

Click.

It was unlocked. I wondered if that meant we were allowed inside.

“I think it does,” I said to a moth at the porchlight.

I never talked to myself—ever. I talked to everything else, though, spiders, plants, clouds, animals, gnats, family pictures, moths…

“We were told we couldn’t sleep here. No one said we couldn’t look around. There are probably all sorts of things to draw in there. I say we enter. Well, I enter, Mrs. Moth, not you.”

When I opened the door, the moth went inside, too.

“s**t. Well, I guess you had other ideas. I admire your boldness.” I decided to call her Charlotte, after the spider in my favorite book as a child. “Enjoy yourself, Charlotte.”

The thing that caught my senses right off was the smell. Wood. I smelled a lot of wood. I touched one piece, a roll top desk, certainly an antique. The couch reminded me of the one on Mama’s Family, the Vicki Lawrence sitcom I loved to watch in reruns. I wanted to call it a davenport, even though that might not have been right. I pulled my phone out to check.

“Davenport…” Nope. A davenport was more modern. I was still learning.

This sofa had shiny, golden brown wood all around the back and down the front of the arms. Its fabric was bluish gray and surprisingly soft to the touch.

“I guess the couch didn’t want to take sides—not quite Union blue, not quite Confederate gray.”

Charlotte’s laugh was barely audible, but I was sure she found me funny.

There was a bookcase on the wall behind the sofa with a ton of books I knew and had read. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein…

“Damn,” I muttered. There were some good ones in there. I wondered if they were original to the time, or if someone had beaten them up to look it.

Little Women, Sense and Sensibility, Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights…

“Had they all been written by the 1800s?” I asked.

Charlotte didn’t know, and there was no one else in the room.

“Maybe the whole place isn’t accurate to the time.” I pulled down Bram Stoker’s Dracula and began to flip through the pages. “That Patrick dude might know.” Halloween wasn’t far off. A good monster story might be just the thing for an unsettled October night when I was about to play dress up. Another book caught my eye, though.

“The Diary of Jefferson Eaves. Who’s Jefferson Eaves? Why am I asking a moth?” She flitted around the wall sconce as if it was helping her warm up. “You just keep doing what you’re doing, Charlotte. Be you, boo. I’m gonna read.”

I grew up in the north, in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where winters are brutal, but summer brings abundance and joy. My family owns a farm there, amongst rolling green hills and far off mountains I dreamt of climbing when I was grown. I wanted, then, to touch the sky. I wanted to touch it in the morning, aglow in orange, and then at night when it was pink, to sense the difference upon my fingertips. I wanted to touch it in the dark of night, to know if its velvety blackness felt the same as it looked, and also to know if the stars that glittered were warm or cool.

Those boyhood wishes seem unattainable now. As I enter manhood in my eighteenth year, 1861, and find myself going into battle, I’ll be forced to leave my mountains, the ones I knew and wanted to get to know better. Have I put that wish off too long? Will it never happen now? Will I ever come home to Massachusetts, or will I die in an unfamiliar land farther south to be buried in dirt I’ve never touched with bare feet, never tasted, while rolling in it with my kin or the man who touched my heart and body in a way the books I’ve read only describe happening between a man and a woman?

“Well, this is taking a turn,” I said to the moth at the light.

The couch was more comfortable than it looked. I kicked off my Nikes and curled my socked feet up under me. Then, because my mama raised me right, I decided to keep my feet on the floor.

“Okay, Jefferson. Then what happened?” I continued reading.

It was the summer of 1858 when I first felt myself falling in love with Thomas. His flaxen hair, the opposite of mine, that fell into his eyes, those sapphire orbs of sparkling wonder, his precious nose, and luscious mouth, the beauty of him transfixed me of mind and tempted me of body.

“You go, Jeff!”

Boyish games and picking buttercups dotting the greens, like little rays of sunshine yellow, became something altogether different that summer, when the chicory that touched bare flesh as we tumbled over the knoll wrapped together was not the only stiff probe I felt at my back. I could dream of Thomas forever, now, as we’re separated and forced apart before we even came to be together. This war, I know what is right and what must be defended, but I damn it, too, and wish I didn’t have to go. If I return to him, to Thomas, will he be bearded and round at the belly, or will his youthful firmness and smooth face remain? Will I have changed? War, they say, can affect a man as nothing else can. Who will I be? What will the world be? My small part of it, a mere speck in what is out there beyond my imagination, let alone my access, what will I leave when I’m gone?