Flahertys
A short story you can read, but only after yet another personal essay on why and how I write fiction
I always tell myself that writing is not about “literary success,” magazine reviews, or even gaining a legitimate following of regular readers, all the more because many of my favorite writers (MacKinley Cantor, Wright Morris, and Frederick Busch principal among them) are long out of print and seldom discussed, their brief moment in the sun long passed. The publishing industry has changed, and the odds of having a Max Perkins or Gordon Lish help you with your voice are slim to none.
I write because if I don’t, I begin to slowly go crazy, and I write as well as I can both for my own morale and the pursuit of craft for its own sake. Unlike other personal websites where I posted work in the past, this Substack newsletter is not dependent on me making regular monthly payments to keep it alive and is thus a fairly trustworthy place for my work to reside. Some of the online journals where my work as appeared may not stay up either—I have sometimes tried to re-read something that won a contest, only to find that it was gone.
As publishing continues in what seems to be a super-slo-mo death spiral, the self-publishing model makes more sense. The biggest problem is this approach deprives the writer of that oh-so-necessary outside perspective. Even the smallest press yields a better degree of vetting and preparation than going it alone, and as a guy who has pushed out entire novels that could have used at least one more big rewrite, I can say I wish somebody had been there to tell me that Penn Station doesn’t empty onto 42nd St.
Typos are one thing, but a story that doesn’t make sense, drops characters or changes their names, or retroactively contradicts things in a way that breaks the narrative are another. I know this happens in a lot of books published by giant houses, but man is it embarrassing.
So to boost my morale by having somewhere between 35 and 50 of you read yet another story of mine, here’s one that has been submitted and rejected by contests, publications, journals, and newsletters.
This is the first in my cycle of stories about alcoholism, and is based on things I heard over the years in AA meetings. This is a “bad art friend” no-no, but I changed so much that I doubt even the guy who told about the incident at the end of this story would recognize anything other than a few details.
Flahertys
1.
I hang up the phone. “The old man is dying.”
My wife Rose drags her cigarette, crushes it into the ashtray.
“Again?”
“Roy says for real this time.”
“What’s the doctor say?”
“Hell if I know. I don’t even know if they called him.”
I looked at the whiskey bottle on the table, my half-empty glass.
“I should go, I guess.”
The snow rattles across the roof. Rose lights another.
“I should be there,” I say. “I mean if it’s really happening this time.”
“What about the storm? You make it all the way up there in this?”
I walk to the window, wipe the steam off with my palm. “April blizzards don’t last long. Be gone by tomorrow. You want to come with?”
“He’s your father.”
She goes to the stove, flips the knob on the burner beneath the percolator. “But let me fill a thermos. Only be a minute.”
The wipers clatter across the ice edging my windshield. A fierce wind tears miles of snow from open fields and ghosts it across the highway. In my headlights I seem to float sideways.
I unscrew the thermos and pour into the cup. The steam wafts odors of coffee and whiskey into the still air of the cab, the combination reminding me of a fishing trip when I was nine, the old man’s pickup idling in the dark morning, exhaust plumes white as milk in the blue air. Ma pressed a wax-wrapped egg sandwich into my hand as I shrugged into my Pendleton and out the door toward the glowing smear of the old man’s cigarette. For a long time after I thought all coffee smelled that way.
I sip the cup, half bourbon at least.
2.
The old man rarely went to mass, but he was still a Catholic. Five sons and three daughters with a dozen years between the first and the last, except for Chuck. He was the surprise, coming five years after Bonnie. I think Bonnie might have resented no longer being the baby of the family, but that was just a guess. Flahertys never confided our feelings to one another.
The old man worked fifteen hours a day in his hardware store six days a week. Most Sundays he would take one of his sons into the woods. He only took one of us at a time. I never cared for hunting or trapping like my brothers, so he took me fishing. Springs and summers were my time with him.
As I trundle through the night, I try to remember what the old man and I talked about in all the hours we’d spent driving to the lake or sitting in the boat. I can’t recall a single thing.
I don’t blame Rose for wanting to stay home. We've gotten these calls before and it was always a false alarm. The old man has been on the decline a long time.
When Ma got her diagnosis, my brother Roy temporarily moved back in with them. He stayed on after the funeral, helping the old man in the store and doing various chores around the house. Then one January the old man broke his hip and was bedridden after. Roy became his caretaker. Nobody else volunteered. This went on for years.
I blink against the glare of the headlights. The snow starts to thicken, and the gray sky is so close that it’s like I’m rising up into it.
3.
Dinners in the Flaherty house were chaotic affairs. Ma would make a huge bowl of something like macaroni or tuna surprise and a slightly smaller bowl of limas or Brussels sprouts. She would ladle up the old man’s plate and set it in the warming oven for when he got home.
We took turns saying grace. Mike was the joker and would always add something at the end, our sister Margaret being his favorite target. Bless us, O Lord! and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. And please try to help Mags not die a spinster. Amen.
After Ma died, Margaret quit coming to Christmas. Then Bonnie and Polly quit, and then everybody else. Last year it was just Roy and me and the old man. Even my wife couldn’t stand it any longer and drove our kids to her sister’s in Des Moines. I would have gone with her, but I felt obligated.
The old man was confined to his hospital bed so Roy and I sat with him in the bedroom. We listened to the NPR Christmas show and got drunk on tom and jerrys. In the morning Roy and I took down the Christmas tree and put it back into its box, the same Ev-R-Pine the old man used to sell in the store, decorations permanently attached. I said goodbye and drove home. That miserable experience was the last time I saw either of them.
In my family we have a saying: Flahertys were born to drink. In this we include honorary Flahertys who married in. Drinking is central to all our family activities, whether hunting, fishing, working on cars, eating supper, watching a game. In the family photographs, every adult has a highball or a beer in hand. I had my first drink at eight, my first drunk at eleven. All of us have similar stories. Flahertys are good drinkers and bad drunks. That’s another thing the old man says.
I see the glow of the 218 rest stop ahead and slow down. The entrance is drifting up pretty good. No cars are parked beneath the towering lights. Snowflakes whirl through the slanting beams reminding me of dust motes in my grandma’s parlor on those still Sundays after church.
At the last minute, I decide against stopping and pull the wheel around. The truck slips a little getting back up to speed. Few cars on the road and no plows at all. I fiddle with the radio. A foursquare Christian program booms out, the preacher’s harsh whine filling the cab with the old-time cadence stolen from the black Baptists. I snap it off and squint at the road. My cigarettes have slid across the dash and lie wedged in the far corner, out of reach.
At Nashua the snow stops. The clouds roll back to reveal a black sky speckled with stars. I think about pulling over to look at it for a while, gather my thoughts before making the final twenty miles. I roll down the window and put my hand out. The wind is so cold it almost feels hot.
I decide to keep driving.
4.
Dick, Mike, Roy, Me. Then came the girls. Margaret, Polly, Bonnie. Last of all was Chuck, so much younger than Dick that they only lived in the same house for two months before Dick went off to the Navy.
We were used to the old man’s absence. I suppose all of us wanted something from him, but we couldn’t say what. We never talked about it. Maybe it was different for the girls, but I know my brothers and I each felt the lack of him as we grew up. His special Sunday outings seemed to only show what we were missing. By the time Chuck was old enough to go, the old man had stopped taking us.
Ma was kind and tough and organized, shrewd enough to use our sibling rivalries to keep us from ganging up on her. Mike was easy. He was the joker and a natural loner, ever at odds with everyone. Dick and Roy and Margaret were the Responsible Ones. Polly and Bonnie were born ten months apart and were alike as twins, a free-spirited duo who avoided consequences by pretending to be dumb.
I was somewhere in the middle, neither a free spirit nor especially responsible. I was not good at sports, got mediocre grades. I didn’t sing in the choir or act in any plays. I thought of myself as the “oh yeah” brother, as in Oh yeah, he’s a Flaherty.
I grew up thinking I was the misfit. The least of us.
I make the turn onto the farm road and roll over the familiar half mile to the mailbox with FLAHERTY painted on it. The driveway is freshly plowed, probably by Roy. A skin of ice gleams in the moonlight like a glazed donut. The truck backslides on the grade, but I tromp on the gas and make the crest. I shut off the motor and listen to it tick.
I get out and close the door. I remember my cigarettes and walk around to the passenger side, my boots sliding on the ice. The door is frozen shut. I pound on it and after some tugging I manage to pull the door open.
The path from the driveway to the kitchen is sprinkled with sand and every window of the house is lit. The aluminum siding looks worse than ever, the windows not quite level, the lines jagged.
The old man got the siding wholesale and installed it himself, the only time I ever saw him really lose his temper. He was rushing to get the job done before it got dark because he didn’t want tp skip too much work, so probably he didn’t measure as closely as he should have. When he fastened the last panel to the wall, Mike came out to look. Mike was about fifteen then, at his most obnoxious. He started singing There Was a Crooked House. The old man whipped his belt off and pushed Mike up against the siding, tugged down his pants and flogged his bare bottom. I remember being amazed at the sound the leather made on Mike’s skin, a clapping loud as a starter’s pistol. The old man did all this in cold silence. After a few licks, Mike started crying, but the old man didn’t let up, just stood kept beating him with the belt until Ma came out and made him stop.
The old man put his belt back on and went inside the house without a word. I helped Mike walk into the kitchen. Ma got him some ice for his welts. Nobody said anything about it, then or after.
5.
All four of my brothers are sitting at the kitchen table in a haze of cigarette smoke. Roy looks up, his eyes tired. “Took you long enough.”
“I left right after you called. Roads are shit.”
Mike leans back in the chair, a beer curled in his palm. “Hell, it stopped snowing hours ago. You always were a pussy behind the wheel.”
I haven’t seen Mike in ten years. He looks the same as ever. Our mutual dislike hangs in the air with the smoke.
I nod to Roy. “What’s the situation?”
Under the kitchen lamp, Roy looks much older than the last time I saw him. Lines around the mouth, skin grainy and sagging. He presses his lips together and shakes his head. I see the tears in his eyes as he turns to hide them from Mike.
Dick settles his gaze on me. “The old man died a couple hours ago.” He reaches the bottle of Four Roses from the center of the table and pours a big knock into one of Ma’s juice glasses and holds it out to me.
I shake my head. “He in the bedroom?”
“Where the fuck else would he be?” says Mike. “He ain’t shoveling the drive.”
“Margaret is in there with him,” says Dick.
“When did she get here?”
“Around seven.”
“Everybody’s coming,” chirps Mike. His eyes are unfocused. “It’s a goddamned Flaherty family reunion.”
Chuck sits silent with his hands on the table. He’s grown a beard since the last time I saw him. It’s almost completely white, like Santa.
The narrow walls of the dim hallway are lined with framed photographs I haven’t looked at in years. My parents’ bedroom door is ajar, a pool of yellow light spilling onto the tile floor. I hesitate, then push the door open. Margaret sits in Ma’s old chintz armchair, pulled close so it touches the rail of the hospital bed. The mattress my parents shared for forty years is propped against the dresser, the disassembled head and footboards leaning against it. I wonder if the framed pictures Ma kept on the dresser top are still there.
“He looks so peaceful,” Margaret whispers. “Almost like a boy.”
Her voice sounds so like Ma’s. When we were kids, Margaret loved to act as Ma’s adjutant, relaying instructions and assigning tasks. Mike called her Mags Bossy, a name she despised.
I move toward the bed. The old man looks desiccated, his skin waxy, his eyes shriveled. Margaret strokes his hair with one hand, a tender gesture he’d never have allowed “He looks so dead,” I say. "I’m not used to it.”
She will not meet my eyes. “When did you turn so cold?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“Well,” she says. “At least you’re here. There’s a lot to do.”
“What about Roy?”
She heaves up from the rocker and gingerly takes up old man’s limp hand, then places it on his chest. She reaches for the other one and pulls it over so the wrists are crossed over his heart. All ready for the coffin, I think.
“You do know,” I say, my voice over loud, “that Roy’s been taking care of the old man since Ma died.”
“Roy’s been living rent free. Sounds to me like he’s been well-compensated.”
Bitter words rise in me and die before I can open my mouth. My sister is now an old woman, divorced with three children who live in different states and probably don’t like her either. It makes me sad, seeing her like this.
I wonder if the old man had ever told her anything worth remembering. I want to ask her, but instead I leave the room and close the door behind me.
The childhood room I shared with Chuck and Roy is stacked with boxes, but the bunk beds are still set up along the far wall, complete with sheets and blankets. Cowboys on the bottom bunk, NFL teams on the top. I edge between the cartons and ease onto the bottom bunk, Chuck’s old bed. Parched vertigo overcomes me as I lie down, a heavy sadness that makes me too tired to cry.
I dream I am in a restaurant with a friend from high school. He orders his food, but the waitresses ignore me. I ask him who is paying, and he tells me he found a credit card on the sidewalk. I become alarmed, for I know the police are coming soon. I get up to leave, but first I need to use the bathroom. I wend my way through endless hallways looking for a door that will open, shaking the knobs and finding them all locked, knowing the police are right behind me.
I wake in a sweat, my bladder full. The dawn sun in the bright clear sky knifes through the grimy curtains.
6.
The county coroner arrives at nine. I sit with Roy and Chuck in the kitchen, smoking cigarettes and drinking instant coffee while a clucking Margaret oversees the removal.
“VA gives us a three hundred dollar burial allowance,” Roy says. “Would have been twice that if he’d died in the VA hospital. I told him as much. But he wanted to stay home, so that’s what we got.”
“It’s weird without him here,” says Chuck. The white beard belongs on a mountain man, but in the bright morning his face is boyish, his eyes clear. “I wish I’d gotten up here more often.”
I sip my coffee and watch the county men slide the gurney into the back of a white van, Margaret hovering and giving them orders. “Poor bastards,” I say.
Roy lights another cigarette. “She hasn’t changed.”
Margaret strides in holding a manila envelope. “That’s settled. He’s to be cremated this afternoon. They told me it’s a slow week so they can get him right away.” She looks at Roy. “When everybody gets here, we can talk about the estate.”
I look at my Roy and Chuck, neither of whom looked anything like the old man. Of all the boys, Dick and I bear the most resemblance. I wish I’d gotten up here more often too. Rose and I only live three hours away.
It is late morning when Dick gets back from the Waterloo airport with Polly and Bonnie. Margaret gives them each a hug and sisterly kiss. “Welcome,” she croons. “So good of you to come.”
Dick goes out to his van, returning with a cardboard carton filled with a half-gallon each of bourbon, rum, gin and three of vodka. Behind him, Mike carries three case flats of Hamm’s. He set them on the floor, kneels and tears open the shrink wrap of the top one. He tugs out a beer. The snap and hiss of the tab are so loud it hurts my ears.
He smiles and raises the can. “Breakfast of champions.” He drains it in one swallow and gets out another.
Dick pours himself a bourbon and goes into the living room. We all follow him. The living room seems small with all of us in it. I try to remember the last time I’ve seen everyone in this same room. With a pang, I realize it was when Ma died.
Margaret sits on the sofa and takes out the manila envelope. “We have a lot to discuss.”
Mike smirks at me, silently mouthing Mags Bossy.
7.
“I got something I need to tell you all,” Roy says.
Margaret glares at him over her notebook. “Rules of order, Roy,” she says.
“The only thing I want is the ’55,” he continues. “The old man promised it to me. You all can fight over the rest of it.”
“Now hang on a minute,” says Dick. He’s into his second drink and his face is flushed. “The old man promised that car to me, too. Hell, he must’ve told me ten times.”
“Yeah?” says Roy. “When was that, Dick? Ten years ago? Fifteen? He told me last Monday, Dick. Last Monday. While I was wiping his fucking ass.”
“Now boys,” says Polly. “No need for this language. Let’s have some serenity.”
“Keep your AA horseshit to yourself, Pols,” says Dick.
Polly glances toward Bonnie. After Polly’s second DUI, Bonnie convinced her to go to rehab by promising to go with her. They’d graduated piously sober and moved to Phoenix together. I haven’t heard from either of them in years.
It feels so odd. When we were kids we used to see each other every day. We might not have had deep talks, but we shared our lives nonetheless. We ate together, watched TV together, sometimes went to the movies or games. Now we are all such strangers. Everything seems so serious now, so hard.
“There’s nothing in his will about the car,” Margaret proclaims. “I vote we lump it in with the other assets and divide it accordingly.”
“Assets?” says Roy. “What the hell you mean by assets? None of you was here. The old man gave me the goddamned keys.” He fishes them out of his pocket. “He told me it was mine. I’ve been driving it every day for three years.”
“I’m only going by what’s in the will,” says Margaret. “I personally don’t care. I have a car.”
“We’re talking about a two-tone 1955 Chrysler Imperial hardtop the old man bought new off the lot,” says Dick. “He worshipped that thing like a holy relic.”
“I’ve been the one taking care of it,” says Roy. “I’ve been taking care of everything. You know I have.”
“Give her to me,” says Mike. “That might piss the old man off so bad he comes back from the dead!”
Roy glares at him. This was always a sore subject. When we were growing up, none of us was allowed to drive the ’55. The night of his junior prom, Mike pushed it out of the barn and hot-wired it. Later that night he drunkenly dropped it into a drainage ditch. The old man almost killed him and probably would have, except the damage was all cosmetic. Mike was supposed to work all summer to pay off the bodywork, but in July he hitchhiked to Des Moines and joined the Marines. He and the old man didn’t speak again until long after Mike came back from Vietnam.
“Boys,” says Margaret. “We need to be fair about this.”
“Roy, give me the keys,” Mike says, snapping his fingers. “I want to see how she drives.”
“Fuck if you will,” says Roy. “The old man never forgot what you did,” said Roy. “Never forgave it.”
“Bullshit,” says Mike. “He always forgave me everything. Every one of you knows goddamned well that I was his favorite.”
This hits us all like a bucket of water because we know it is true. Mike, the happy-go-lucky joker, the homecoming king, the one who got the good grades. Both Ma and the old man were so proud of him. He was the tallest, the best looking, the smartest. Everybody loved Mike, and he knew it.
Roy stands up and walks to the front door. He stands there a minute, then yanks it open. He swivels his head to take in his sisters and brothers sitting in his dead parents’ living room. “Fuck you all,” he says, and closes the door behind him.
8.
Bonnie and Polly help Margaret clean out Ma’s closet. The old man left everything as it was after she died. They discover the mink the old man gave her the year he’d started to carry Zenith color TVs in the hardware store. He’d made a lot of money, so that was the Christmas Roy and I got new Schwinn bicycles, Margaret got braces, and Mike got a secondhand Husky dirt bike. The other kids were young, so they got toys, but good ones ordered from the FAO Schwartz catalog.
Bonnie and Polly start arguing about the coat, so I walk out to my truck to smoke and listen to the radio with the engine on and the heater running.
Chuck comes out and knocks on my window. I roll it down.
"You got a minute?” he asks.
“Sure.”
He climbs in the passenger side and nods at the radio. “I like this song. Hank Williams.”
“Ramblin’ Man. He makes his voice sound like a train whistle.”
Chuck nods again. He seems to want to say something but doesn’t know how to go about it. I help him out. “What’s on your mind, Brother?”
He stares at the dashboard, then takes a breath. “You remember when I fell off the roof? When I was eight?”
“Vaguely.”
“You were home from college. It was summer. I’d been flying a kite and it got caught in the bur oak that used to be on the side of the house. I got up on the roof and tried to fetch it out. I overbalanced and fell off right as you were coming out the kitchen door. I landed on my back right in front of you. It knocked the wind out of me. You remember?”
“You turned blue, right?”
His eyes glisten. “I thought I was going to die. I was looking up at you and I was sure I was going to die and I could tell that you blamed yourself for it because you could have caught me. I could tell you thought I blamed you for it. I wanted so bad to tell you that it was okay, that even though I was going to die it wasn’t your fault.” He starts to sob. “And that I loved you and was glad that at least I was going to die looking up at you.”
I feel awkward, my brother crying so hard his big Santa beard shakes. I slide my arm around him. “But you didn’t die, Chucky. I helped you up and walked you around until you could breathe again, remember? I told you it was going to be okay, that nothing was broken, right?”
He nods, looking more like the little kid he’d been than I would have believed possible. He wipes his eyes with his sleeve, blinking. “Don’t tell Mike, okay? That I was crying.”
“Don’t worry.” I turn off the engine. The air is clear and icy, the sun beginning to descend. “Let’s go back in.”
The girls have filled up some boxes in the living room. Ma’s china and silver, her scrapbooks, the Hümmel figurines. It occurs to me almost everything of any value had been Ma’s. The only things the old man owned were a Winchester 30.06 in moderate condition, a non-working Evinrude outboard motor, a couple of battered bass rods. And the ’55.
The old man’s slacks and folded shirts from the closet are piled on the bed, the shoes and boots in a row on the floor. I pick up a coffee-colored Florsheim. The leather upper is supple and broken in, but the sole gleams with newness. I turn it over in my hand. The heel is pristine black rubber, CAT’S PAW above an embossed cat with its mouth open in a snarl. The shoe is a size smaller than my father wore, a 9. My size.
I sit on the bed and remove the slip-on sneaker I wear under my snow boots. The Florsheim fits perfectly. I put on the other one and stand, looking down at them. They must have been his boyhood shoes, kept all these years. I open the closet and study the shoes in the long mirror. Something about the shoes makes me feel like dancing. I move my feet around like Fred Astaire.
9.
Dick and Mike sit at the kitchen table playing two-handed rummy. Dick is drinking whiskey. Mike has gone through one of the cases of beer and made inroads on the second. Nobody is talking.
The phone rings, making all of us jump. Margaret walks to the wall and picks up the receiver. “Flahertys,” she says, exactly in the way we all were taught to answer this phone. “Margaret speaking.”
I wonder if she does that at her own house. It occurs to me I don’t even know what last name she uses now.
"I see. Thank you.” She hangs up. “It’s done. Somebody needs to go get him.”
“Not me!” yells Mike. “Last thing I need is another DUI.”
“I’ll go,” I say.
“I’ll come with you,” says Chuck. “If you don’t mind.”
“No, it’s fine,” I say, glancing at Mike. He stares at us.
I tug my rubber snow boots over the Florsheims and reach for my coat when Roy opens the kitchen door, his face red.
"Leaving already?” he asks.
“Going to get the old man’s remains.”
“Cremains.”
“What?”
“That’s what they’re called. Cremains.”
“Oh.”
He takes the bourbon bottle from the table and pours a shot into a juice glass, then downs it. “Before you go I got something to show you. All of you.”
“Okay.”
10.
We stand in a semicircle outside the barn, our puffing breath mingling in the cold air. The girls shiver in their thin coats. Mike and Dick still hold their drinks, unsteady on their feet. Chuck stands next to me, hands deep in his pockets. Roy’s gloved hand rests on the rusted door handle. The afternoon sun slants across the naked sky and offers no warmth.
Roy clears his throat and spits on the ground. “I got something to say to all of you and you’re going to goddamned well listen to it. None of you were here in the old man’s time of need. After today I don’t give a shit if I ever see a one of you again. I’m ashamed to be related to you.”
He pulls back the sliding door. It looks like he used the old man’s acetylene torch to cut the car up into eight ragged pieces. They stand arrayed on the concrete floor amid the pooling oil.
“Mother fuck.” says Mike. “Mother fuck.”
Margaret’s hand drifts to her open mouth. Dick grits his teeth and glares at Roy.
“You can fight over who gets my eighth,” says Roy. “I don’t want it.”
Chuck starts to laugh. He looks at me, smiling.
“You ready to go, brother?”
You've posted this one before. I remember it. I don't know how this story was passed over for publication or award. I don't know how a whole lot of your writing could be passed over. It's damned good. Your use of detail is a thing of beauty -- as good as any I've seen. Keep going. (I know you have to, but I want to encourage you.) P.S. Now I wonder if I missed the Penn Station typo in one of your drafts. :0