A Captive Audience

ROBERT HAMBLING DAVIS

This morning I walked up the road to the Methodist church where farmers paid their respects to God when I was a boy. I thought I’d find my father’s grave without any trouble, but it took an hour of searching through generations of Dempseys, Whitemans, Littles and Nelsons, distracted as I was by the platitudes etched in stone. 
His gray stone is still glossy enough to reflect my face in the steamy Delaware sun. It’s as humid as the day of his funeral, thirty years ago. I haven’t been here since then.
My mother wore a navy blue suit and didn’t cry until he was laid to rest. I can see the limp roses around the brassy coffin, the minister spieling at the sky. 
Then there was that doctor who never told us my father was dying, but said we should hospitalize him for the best care. During his last week, an ambulance came and took him to Wilmington General, where he babbled and wailed in the bed of a tenth-floor bile-green room and no longer recognized us. Seeing him like that was a relief after months of morbid silence. I tried to console myself with this thought as he rolled his eyes and head, a quivering stick of the man who’d sparred in gyms in South Philly and played semi-pro football when runners used the stiff-arm. 
His right thumb, broken in a brick fight when he was twelve, cocked acutely when I was a boy and we played marbles. The deformity only seemed to sharpen his aim and the force of his shooter as it sprang into my pack of cat’s eyes, knocking out two at a time, and when he knocked out three he threw back his head and yelled, “Move over, Oppenheimer!” 

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