Drive - A Memoir 116th Installment
“He’s
gone,” Edith said simply. “We’ll do the milking this morning
and tell you more after a while. I think you need some time to
yourselves.”
I
sat for a minute then got up and started pacing back and forth. I was
feeling a lot of things, but all-out bawling wasn’t my style. I
felt more distressed about what would change, not in the community,
but in me. I suddenly felt that maybe something was wrong with me
mentally. Shouldn’t I be crying or angry? I looked at Russ; he
hadn’t got up to pace but was just sitting and staring. Maybe I was
okay – at least we were the same. Demonstrating emotions was
something Edith and Vernon had never allowed before. How do we deal
with this? I should be shaken to my core, but I didn’t know what
emotion to feel or how much.
After
a while I said, “Let’s go out and finish the chores.” I paused,
then continued, “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t
know what to think. Right now I think I like the old rule, ‘If
you’re bored or have a bad emotion, you can go to work,’ and I
would like to go to work.”
“Me
too,” Russ whispered looking real sad. I wondered what I looked
like.
When
the work was done and everyone had returned to the house, Russ asked,
“What are we going to do? What’s planned? Do we have a funeral
and bury him somewhere?”
“No,”
Edith told us, “his family has arranged to have him sent back to
Texas.”
“You
told them!!” I screamed. “You told the S.O.B.s in Texas!” Now I
deeply felt an emotion…ANGER. “How could you! Tex never wanted
them to know where he was. You really screwed this up!”
“You
have been allowed to make choices and decisions, to control the
things around you.” Edith started to explain.
“But
you told them and that was wrong!” Russ was more miserable than
angry.
“I’m
afraid that you may believe you can always have things the way you
want. But life has rules. When you grow up there are rules, things
that are right even though you don’t believe them to be right. It
was the right thing to do to tell his family. They are his family for
heaven’s sake.” Edith was attempting to explain and help us
understand.
“It
was the responsible thing to do,” Vernon said. “When you’re
older you’ll understand responsibility.”
“We’ve
grown up fast, too fast. I guess we trust you to know what’s
right.” I had spent all of my new found emotion and didn’t argue
anymore.
The
next day I asked Edith, “We’d like to know what happened at the
hospital – you know – closure.”
Edith
started, “When we got there, Tex was in intensive care, still
unconscious from the surgery. We waited for a
500 more words tomorrow
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