Do you remember the good times

Her father hadn’t related any of this when he’d returned back from Africa. Rather, she’d found it in his journals after he’d passed away at an old folks home in Missouri. She had gone out to sign the papers, her mother long gone, and discovered that her father had kept copious journals, and she’d spent the next few months sifting through the remains of his life as captured on the pages. A life that had remained largely obscure to her during her childhood, her father had just been gone one day, off on his mission trip, and he’d not returned again until she was seventeen, eleven years after he’d left, and no one in the family had talked about where he’d been or what had happened. Rather, it seemed as though any conversation of the sort would have been deemed indecent.

On this particular day her father had a long journal entry recalling the afternoon where he taught the boy about the Holy Trinity, three divine figures made manifest in one. The school room had been small and square, lined by mud, and capped by a collection of large leaves, though the structure itself was made from the wood from the banyan trees, and was really quite sturdy. And her father recalled, with something approaching reverence, the upturned face of the boy, the quick and intelligent look in his eyes as he repeated after his father the Greek words of the Septuagint, and she could picture, his daughter, or perhaps she’d read it, the dizzying flights of flies in the room, spiraling down from the ceiling to alight on the desk, or the arms of the child, dodging a loose attempt at a swat, and circling back to bang against the corner of the wall. She could feel the oppressive heat in the room as her father stood over his son, beaming at the fine work that he was doing.

The nurses in the hospital all thought that her father was a foreigner. He spent a good deal of his time there wandering the gravel paths lined by box elders offering discourses to himself in the African dialect of his middle years, sandals crunching down, but his mind thousands of miles away and living years in the past. They didn’t know where he was from, the insane old man with the beard who spoke some strange African dialect. He would often arise early and sneak out into the yard to watch the sunrise from a lonely wrought iron bench beneath an oak, on a circular path. And it was there that the orderlies would collect him in the misty green light of the morning, taking his elbow and guiding him gently back towards the main hall where he was supposed to be eating breakfast.

Naturally the girl had asked if anyone had known just what her aged father had been doing out in the damp morning admiring the sun, or the scrim of clouds hiding that same son. One of the nurses, Helga, said that she thought that he’d been praying, that she’d heard one of the orderlies mention that he was mumbling something under her breath, and she’d wondered if Mr. Dan might not have been a religious person, and, upon hearing this confirmed, she told his daughter that he’d been praying most mornings. And yet another nurse said that she thought he’d been well past his prime in terms of mental health because she’d had it that he spent those same mornings muttering curse words under his breath, and that the orderlies would often come in from outside with Mr. Dan trailing between them, having a good laugh over the things he said about the “sun being a no good damn dirty whore, or pieces of gravel being no more than little sons of bitches concocted by an insane God to torture his poor feet.  

And the nurse, poor Edna, was very sorry, but she saw all sorts of people come through the hospital, she said, gesturing to the white walls and white rooms, in that sort of condition, and that it wasn’t really the sort of thing that was possible to make sense of. It just was a thing to live with, or live through. That, in fact, even if she did know what he’d been thinking about all those mornings, it wouldn’t bring her any more comfort or closure, that death was closure enough, life was just a myriad of emotions and instants, a brief stop-over. Her language didn’t entirely mimic myriad of emotions, but the equation could easily be drawn.