A Root Cellar Memory

(Copyright 2006, 2008 by F. E. Mazur. All rights reserved.)

How ironic it sometimes seems to me that my mother, who worked throughout her life with her mind, became afflicted with Parkinson's, while my father, who's worked his entire life with his hands, suffers from Alzheimer's.

Before Janet's death she insisted I see the doctor to learn if I had it, Alzheimer's. She'd worried because she thought I was exhibiting signs, despite I wasn't 50. But the doctor cautiously agreed with her after running tests and capturing several pictures--slices--of my brain. He said my father also might have had the early form of it, except the disease wasn't much recognized in past generations as it is today. He was a tanned, in-shape physician with a Pete Sampras-inscribed tennis racket and a snowboard at the ready in the corner of his office. His advice included keeping my mind active. He asked if I read much, messed with puzzles, and did similar things that challenged the mind and demanded mental exercise. I answered that I still managed to slog through a dozen or so books every year, although my vision up close was beginning to show problems. I said also that when I was a younger man, I enjoyed writing short stories.

"Well, if that's so, Mr. M., then I recommend you do like the oilmen in this country are currently doing. Get that rusty pump working again, there's profit to be made. In your case, that translates to a longer quality of life. Making up a story insists on an attention to detail and chronology, doesn't it? So that's just what the disease often robs its victim of. Plus who knows," he added, laughing, "perhaps you'll win a Pushcart."

I intended to heed his advice, although I would not be sending out my stories (the early ones weren't really all that made-up anyway, if truth be told) to magazines for possible publication. Revising, rewriting, these were not things I'd done in the past, and they held no interest now. The fact was, once I'd completed a story, then assigned it a title, into an accordion folder the typewritten manuscript had gone with others. Already tired of it, I didn't read my words even to myself.

But before I could start, I was stopped. That's because my Janet was suddenly dead. Twenty-two years we were together with hardly a cruel word spoken, and we had hoped to be together for at least that same length of time again. But while shopping at the downtown stores in early February for a new comforter to keep us warm at night, a six thousand-pound slab of concrete dislodged from an aboveground municipal parking structure and killed her.

I quit my well paying but dead-end job (no reason I can see to mention it) and put the house up for sale after deciding to go and live with my father and look after him, as well as to help take my mind off the loss of my wife. A few years before her death, Janet, who could be compassionate to a fault, had suggested I bring him to live with us, only he wouldn't hear of leaving his home and the forty acres of woodland surrounding it. Now that I was alone and we had widower status in common, it seemed right to make the move. Although he hadn't appeared to worsen during recent visits, and he remained capable of taking adequate care of himself, all the same I knew it was just a matter of time until his condition deteriorated to the tipping point. And once that occurred, I knew, too, horrible things could happen.

I arrived here at the home of my upbringing in early June, a house sufficiently isolated, particularly so when the foliage was out, that other structures in the neighborhood were not visible from any of the four directions. My father welcomed me, literally, with open arms, and ordered me to park my car in the garage since it is a much newer model than his own. It was always a strength of his (and a strength I hope I've inherited, should my Alzheimer's--if the doctor and his tests are correct--progress) that he knew who and what were important to him, and who and what were not. Both sides of this coin remained unaffected by the disease. For example, eating had never held a special place for him in the events of any day. When my mother was alive and in control of her motions, he downed without remark or savor whatever she cooked and put on the table. After she became debilitated and especially after she was gone, he ate the contents of his cupboards and refrigerator without preference or discretion. Six pickles and a bold slice of cheddar were regarded the same as a plateful of galumpki. It was different with his drink. He knew at any moment the contents of the liquor cabinet, what he was low on, and what he might be in the mood for on the following day, and I found this had not changed. With people, he exercised himself in similar fashion. Never had he failed to recognize my mother or me, to call up countless memories of our family vacations to Wildwood and Ocean City, and he loved Janet so much that he could have told anyone asking, where his daughter-in-law had grown up and what her interests were. Yet he loathed his closest neighbor, and one of the earliest signs of the disease was that he forgot the man, name and all, along with his spouse.

One night several months after I had unpacked my suitcases in my old upstairs bedroom, a car drove up our lane. There was but a thin crescent of moon and a light snow was falling, nothing sticking. While I sat watching a Boston Pops holiday special, he sipped at his Drambuie and pushed around a few magazines on the coffee table. These were magazines without subscription that came in the mail from the gas and electric companies, and the "pushing around" of things was a new habit just beginning to form. He saw the car lights at the same time I did and glanced at the clock.

"Who do you think that is?" I asked.

"I don't know," he answered, and I wondered if he really didn't, or had he invited someone over whom he later forgot about, which he had done previously.

The house with its covered wraparound porch sat away from the end of the lane. The car came to a stop directly in front of the garage. I switched the porch light on and could see it was a much older car, one of those manufactured before the demand for better mileage. A huge rusting crater decorated the passenger side and a hubcap was missing from the rear wheel, which was one of those skinny, donut-like spares that were around for a time, a tire you weren't supposed to travel on at speeds faster than fifty. Two men got out and they looked to be in their early thirties. Both were of the same height, but one had an excess of cockiness to his walk. The other had a few pounds on the first, most of it seeming to hug the waistline. Both were stuffed inside dark, bulky canvas jackets like you see warming seamen in icy waters, and neither was wearing a thing on his head. They stepped onto the porch and knocked at the door. We'd never had a bell installed.

I started to open the door, but was prevented by my father's hand. It reached in front to quietly click the lock.

A second, louder knock sounded.

"You in there!"

"I'll be right with you," my father said in a calm voice.

He then raised a finger and waved it at me in a side-to-side motion.

"Aw, come on," said a second voice. "Open up." And then I heard a rattle of the storm door, but it was locked too.

My father, who had gone into his bedroom, returned in just seconds, and he didn't look any different. I worked my eyes at him as though to say "What's going on?" but he stepped to the side of me, unlocked the door, and opened it.

"Hey, we need some help," one of the visitors said through the storm door, and all I could see of him was his hand, which was on the latch, and the hand was dirty. I thought it probably belonged to the cocky one.

"What is it?" my father asked. His tone was friendly but cautious.

That's when I stepped out, which produced a rapid eye movement between the pair. Cocky wore a silver ring in his left ear and a tattoo of something I couldn't make out stretched down his neck and under his collar. His skin looked much less like a natural cover protecting the flesh that lay beneath and more like a husk, desiccated and shot through with crevice upon crevice. Meth user is what came to mind.

"Our cell phone's dead," the heavier one said, addressing me with his eyes, which were selling an affability the moment did not warrant.

I started to ask what was their problem, why they were in need of assistance since it appeared their car hadn't broken down, when my father cut me off.

"Why up here, off the road?" he asked.

"Hey, we tried other houses, old man. Didn't we, Robes? It's the Christmas season. People are shopping, what'd you think?" And without waiting for another reply from either of us, this one, the cocky bastard, must have become suspicious of my father's awareness and wrenched the storm door open with such enormous violence that it broke loose from its hinges.

Barely a second elapsed, it seemed, and they were inside the house, pressing guns in our faces. The cocky one shoved my father backward, shoved him hard, causing him to stumble and smash his leg on the coffee table.

I started to say "Take it easy," but never got all of it out as the other one swung the barrel of his gun across my face. I lurched to the floor bleeding. My jaw, I thought, must certainly be broken.

"Now you both shut your holes unless we ask a question," the cocky one said. "You don't? Well...." He pretended to fire his gun at each of our heads and said, "Bingo, bango."

My father was rubbing his leg. He righted himself and backed onto the sofa.

"You all right?" he said to me.

Blood was trickling out of my mouth and the bones circling it were reeling with pain, but I nodded anyway.

"Who the fuck are you?" The cocky one asked. "This beef jerky's supposed to be living alone."

"He's my father," I said.

"Yeah? Well, see that he behaves."

His partner had disappeared into the rear of the house, and now came some mumble from that direction, which made Cocky turn partly away from us, even though his gun continued to point in our direction. My father raised himself from the sofa, a silent movement so arresting of me because of its ageless grace that my mouth ceased hurting. And as he did, his right arm reached with equal grace behind his back to the lower spine where he withdrew a gun of his own, one of two he'd owned for as long as I can remember. This one was the .45, a semiautomatic he'd inherited from an uncle who had fought in the war in France and Germany. He glided the two steps to our closest invader and placed the .45 at the back of Cocky's head. In a calm whisper, while he took away Cocky's gun, he said, "Tell your friend to come out here. Tell him to drop his gun."

When Cocky hesitated, my father cocked his own, just like in the movies.

"ROBES!" Cocky shouted. "GET OUT HERE!"

My father beckoned me to hide, and I slipped onto the first stair leading to the second floor.

"What's up?" I heard Robes say, and it was clear by his tone a step or two remained before he would discover that circumstances were changed.

"Set it down," I heard my father order.

"Where's the other one?"

"Forget it, Robes! Do as he says."

Silence then, as Robes was thinking. Ten seconds might have passed. Finally, Robes's gun hit the floor, and I was summoned.

"I'll call the police," I said as I picked up the gun.

"We don't want to sit on guard," my father said hastily. "We might fall asleep."

"So what do you want to do then?"

"Find a flashlight, son. We'll take them out to the root cellar."

I'd helped my father build the root cellar when I was a boy. We dug out a shoulder-high knoll at the rear of the backyard, some two hundred feet from the house, then packed the inside wall with rock. To support the roof, a dome, my father interlaced several timbers he'd felled on the property. Afterwards, we rounded the top with soil so that this root cellar looked like a very large green tortoise, partially buried, once the grass reappeared. The door, too, became special. Not the original one, but the door that was hung a few years later and was on it to this day. Two thick slices of solid white oak with a Sargent padlock about half the size of my palm.

On the walk back to the house, I took the .45 from my father's hand.

"What's the matter?" he asked. "You don't trust me? Your mother didn't trust me with it either."

"Not the case, Dad. I just see you're favoring the leg. I don't want it to give out, and then maybe the gun accidentally goes off and one of us gets hurt."

He didn't respond to this, and I wanted to think it was because he knew my concern was an honest one. I was grateful that in the face of what had just happened and worse, what might have happened, he had remembered the gun, what it was for, and where to find it. It was, in a way, striking a blow against the Alzheimer's.

I shined the light on the grass in front of him so he could safely see where he was stepping.

"Dad, do you remember the Fantuzzis?"

"They were your mother's friends. I remember."

"No, they weren't Mom's friends. They were that family that lived in that rundown house at the end of Slidell Hollow. They had a passel of kids, remember? But that was about all they had. They moved out when I started high school."

"Thieves. They should have been hanged."

"Not really, Dad," I said, smiling in the dark. I was pretty sure he was thinking of another family from further on down the road. The Lomasters. The father and his three sons were notorious for stealing items right off a family's lawn and front porch. To this day I'm convinced it was the middle boy Dwight who took my J.C. Higgins, the only bike around with a speedometer.

He gave me that look that was supposed to assure me (but in fact and without his knowing, it did just the opposite--this simplest form of cover for the Alzheimer victim who's not yet surrendered completely to the disease) that he was extracting items from his memory, which was the reason I had brought up the Fantuzzis and numerous others in the months since arriving. Living alone, he'd had no one to stimulate his memory, and I wanted to serve in that role. It would be a beneficial thing for me as well, and if our recollections of an event were different, what would it matter, so long as his were not so far off the mark to suggest we were losing each other. I tried once more. This time narrowing the Fantuzzi field.

"What about little Guido? Do you remember him?"

I thought he might because Guido, along with his brothers and sisters--but Guido especially--was, in a way, the reason Dad had replaced the door on the root cellar. The Fantuzzis were poor, and so each autumn the children raided nearby cornfields, knowing ahead of time which rows were planted with the sweet ears. They descended on the orchards too, ripe with various fruits, and some of the neighborhood's more promising backyard gardens. This was their way of insuring the family got its dietary greens and daily nutriments. However, they never took more than what they felt was needed for sustenance, and never did they vandalize what was left behind. Some of the residents in their area of operation complained to the county sheriff, but the Fantuzzi family was early proof for me that being poor did not translate to being stupid.

Then one year the stealing escalated, and orchards were destroyed, gardens mutilated, and our root cellar broken into and everything ruined, including hundreds of canned fruits and vegetables put up by my mother. People again pointed a finger at the Fantuzzis, explaining that the shift from theft alone to theft with vandalism was because they had left childhood and were en route to their teens.

Dad and I were cleaning up the mess when Guido showed up.

"I didn't do this, sir. My brothers and sisters didn't have anything to do with it either."

"I know that, Guido."

"I mean it, sir. We didn't do this. We haven't done any of this around here that people are saying we did. We wouldn't do this kind of thing."

"I know, Guido. I believe you," Dad said.

"You do?" The expression on Guido was one of surprise. He must have thought my father would call him a liar.

"Sure. You're a nice kid. And so are your brothers and sisters. You want to help my boy and me clean up this mess? We could use the help. You show up tomorrow, too, Guido. I've got a surprise for you."

The next day Guido and I helped my father to hang the new oak door with the big padlock. When it was done, my father reached into a pocket, pulled out two keys on a ring, and removed one. This he gave to Guido.

"You're in charge, Guido. You and any of your brothers and sisters can walk in here whenever your family wants some fruits or vegetables. Or if you just have a craving for an apple and it's that time of year when there aren't any on the trees."

Anyway, I asked Dad a second time if he remembered little Guido Fantuzzi, but he said he didn't know any Guido, and we went back inside the house where I set the guns of our intruders on top of the refrigerator.

"Where do you want yours?" I then asked him.

He took the .45 from my hand and went back inside the living room to finish his drink. The television was still on, but the Pops Christmas concert had finished. He placed the gun on the table with the magazines. As I picked up the phone, I started to say that he should unload the thing, but then thought better of it. There wasn't much chance the home invaders would break out of the root cellar, but if they did, it seemed wise to keep the gun loaded and ready to fire.

How could he not have a single recollection of the smallest Fantuzzi, I asked myself. I just couldn't believe that he had forgotten little Guido so completely! It was my father's words that day inside the root cellar that were responsible for the self-esteem I saw in Guido in the remaining years before his family moved west. I put the phone back in its cradle--I'd already forgotten why I'd picked it up. But I told myself then and before going to bed that night, I told myself I would bring up Guido again the following day.

The next morning when I came downstairs, he was fixing himself a bowl of cereal.

"We got hunters," he said.

I looked out a window at a beat-up car parked squarely in front of the garage. Most times the hunters would stop, walk up to the house and ask permission, but down the years there had been some, strangers, who just drove up, got out, and disappeared to the back of our land. There were times even when they'd blocked in my mother from getting out to work, and we had to move their car into the field on either side. That was going to be the case this morning if these trespassers didn't show up soon, because I needed to go to the store for several items, and I would move their car with my own if forced to.

But for now, I put some water on the stove for instant coffee and went to sit in the other room. One of my father's two guns was there on the table.

"Dad? Why's your .45 out?"

"That must be your mother's doing," I heard him say from the kitchen. "You know she doesn't like having guns around. She wants to throw it out."

I shook my head--before coming, I'd warned myself not to be overly dismayed by the occasionally serious lapse--and then remembered that yesterday, or maybe the day before, I had asked him if he remembered the Lomasters. Old man Lomaster and his sons were people you always had to be on the lookout for, because they would steal a person blind, steal things right off your front lawn and porch with you in the house. To this day I'm convinced it was the middle boy Dwight who took my J.C. Higgins, the only bike in our part of the township with a speedometer. And Dad was convinced they would try for his car next! This, I figured, was probably the real reason for the gun's appearance, even though Lomaster himself is dead and his sons live elsewhere.

And then I thought, Check to see if he's loaded it.

I released the clip into my other hand. Two cartridges had been jammed in, above the spring. Each angled so it would not fall out. Each too small for the weapon. Each a .22, the caliber of his second gun.

He appeared out of the kitchen with his bowl of cereal. Some milk had dribbled from his mouth and was beading at the corner. Up till then I had not felt sorry for my father. But I now knew he was a danger to not just himself, but to others as well. I realized he would require watching more closely, and that I would have to take preventive measures. The first of these included hiding the gun from him. I would have to keep it myself.

"What happened to your face, son?" he asked, wiping away the milk at the side of his mouth.

I rubbed the swollen spot he was staring at. It was there when I'd awoken, yet I couldn't recall getting out of bed during the night and falling. In any case, it didn't matter, because the only thing that was important now was insuring the safety of my father. It was a sad thing to realize that he was losing his good sense. And it would worsen, and quickly. Before the day was over, he would accuse me of ripping the front storm door off its hinges and wonder when I was going to have it repaired.

Afterword: Sadly, both M. and his father perished one year later from a fire that started in the kitchen. The preceding manuscript survived and police returned to the property after learning of its contents.

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