On Saturday, April 16, 1960, our father plummeted from the gambrel roof of our three-story home. It wasn’t an out-of-the-ordinary day in New England. It had rained, sleeted, snowed and warmed to a balmy 85 degrees – all before noon. Mom zoomed off to a hairdressing appointment. Joey and I headed to the park across from our house with our baseball mitts, a wood bat and a bucket of hard apples from the trees that littered our front lawn. Well before we had arrived on Pill Hill where the doctors and lawyers of Adam lived, a Tudor house had burned to the ground and the lot was converted to a park with stands of maples and oaks, a couple of benches and enough grass to play a game of baseball without breaking any of the neighbors’ windows. Joey and I took turns pitching apples to each other. I was at bat.
“Here comes the wind up,” Joey sang. “What’s it gonna be? A fast ball? A slider? Or the gnarly curve ball?”
“Fast ball,” I yelled.
“Could be a spitter. The hot shot rookie loves to sneak in spitters.”
“No cheating spit balls!”
Joey drew up his leg, cocked back his arm. “Here comes the pitch. It’s right down the middle. Pow! She’s clocked it, folks. It’s high in the sky, it’s sailing over the maples. That baby is outta here.”
I threw the bat in the air and Joey and I raced around the grove of trees to see where the apple landed.
I found it in the middle of the street. “It’s here, Joey! I smacked it three hundred yards, don’t you think?”
I turned to see where he was. He had stopped and was staring at our house. I ran to him, tugged his t-shirt. “Come look!” He swatted my hand.
“What’s Dad doing on the roof?” he asked.
I looked at our white clapboard house with the wrap-around porch and the bright red door, and sure enough, Dad was perched on the upper edge of the roof with a book in his hand.
“Must be talking to God,” I said.
“He doesn’t have to sit on the roof to talk to God.”
“God can hear him better. Come on, Joey, I want to show you how far I hit the apple.”
Joey clutched his stomach. “Why is he up there?”
It wasn’t strange to me that Dad was sitting on the roof. The previous autumn, he spent two afternoons installing the letter S on the chimney – in my honor. It was in response to the kids in my Kindergarten class who had enticed me to remove my eye patch, then recoiled, screamed and called me a monster. To believe I was a monster wasn’t a huge leap. I was born on Halloween and my retina had detached sometime after my birth leaving me blind and deformed. It could have been repaired if someone had noticed before I turned six-months old, but it wasn’t visible to the naked eye –not until I was seven months and my eyeball shot to the outside corner pocket. Dad said those kids were more like monsters than me. I slid into the world on All Saints’ Eve, the start of a two-day celebration of All Saints’ and All Souls Days, once considered truly holy days, back when the soul was celebrated. Dad proclaimed me the human manifestation of the soul. I knew he had made all that fuss to make me feel better and it worked. I felt special, like a princess – the Soul princess.
I had no doubt Dad was on the roof to talk to God. They conversed often. Dad probably had a lot to say on Holy Saturday, the day before the great miracle, the resurrection of Christ, especially since he had been disowned by the Catholics and wouldn’t be honoring Jesus in any church the next day. I was only five at the time and I wasn’t aware of the events that caused his calamitous relationship with our Church of the Immaculate Conception. Joey knew more because he was eight and Dad’s umbrage began with Joey’s second grade teacher, Sister Agnes. I didn’t care what had happened, I was happy to miss church, it was so cross-eyed boring, and Dad said the Easter bunny would still come to our house and leave a chocolate rabbit.
Dad stood up. He hovered at the roof’s edge, the book clasped in his hands. Joey gasped and bolted across the street. “Dad, Dad, Dad.” The bright sun glinted off the S; rivulets of water from the earlier storm twinkled like liquefied crystals. Fat and skinny sun rays beamed directly on Dad. He looked beatific, like the haloed Jesus in the painting hanging in his den.
Dad didn’t wobble, he didn’t swing his arms in backward circles, he didn’t step forward, or leap. He simply tipped forward and plunged into the junipers. Joey reached him first. He was lying face up, his eyes closed; he looked peaceful, his body perfectly cupped by the thick shrubbery like a baseball in the palm of a glove.
“Dad, can you hear me?” Joey placed his hand on Dad’s chest. Time stopped. I held my breath. Joey moaned – deep – terrifying. He pulled back his hand and my bad eye thumped. It always thumped when I was nervous or scared. Joey fell to his knees, grabbed his head and squeezed his brains.
Copyright © 2019 Denise Meunier - All Rights Reserved.