Big Ray

Chapter 1

My father probably died on January 28, 2005, but I wouldn’t know he was dead until a few days later when my sister called to tell me. My father lived alone and nobody else knew he was already dead either.

*

January 29, 2005, would have been my mother and father’s forty-fifth wedding anniversary—if my father hadn’t died the day before, if my mother hadn’t divorced him ten years before that.

*

I turned thirty-eight years old on February 1, 2005, but my father didn’t call me to wish me a happy birthday, which was odd because my father called me nearly every day. I realized he hadn’t called for the few days before my birthday either, which was also odd, but I thought my father was probably just waiting to call me on my birthday. It wasn’t until the next day, February 2, that I realized my father hadn’t called me because he was dead.

*

The next evening, I walked into the house and I heard somebody talking. It was my sister leaving a message on the answering machine. I thought she was probably calling me to wish me a happy birthday, but her voice didn’t sound right, and I couldn’t understand what she was saying. I picked the telephone up and started saying my sister’s name. I repeated it until I got her attention. I knew there was something wrong and I was letting her know I was there.

*

I couldn’t get my sister to tell me what was wrong. She was crying and I couldn’t get her to stop. She was sobbing and then she started saying my name. She was repeating my name. She was getting ready to say something difficult. My sister caught her breath. She told me our father was dead.

*

I don’t remember what I said back. I just remember how hot my face felt. The skin on my cheeks and my forehead suddenly felt wet. I felt like I was running a fever. I felt like I had gotten very sick very fast and I was going to throw up. My chin started to shake and my eyelids fluttered. My eyes couldn’t focus. I remember looking around the room like I didn’t know where I was anymore. Maybe my eyes were looking for my father even though my brain knew I was never going to see him again.

*

The rest of that telephone call is difficult to remember. I think I might have said, No—as if I was disagreeing with my sister, as if I could have brought my father back to life just by denying he died. Or I might have said, Oh no—as if it was some kind of accident that could be fixed and didn’t really concern me. The more I think about it, the more I think I said, Oh no—which seems so stupid now, so inadequate. I’m sure my father would have been disappointed with my response, if he had known what it was. My father was disappointed with so many things about me.

*

I remember how I wanted to hang up the telephone. I wanted my sister to call back and say something else. I wanted her to sing happy birthday to me.

*

I asked my sister what happened and she said she didn’t know. She told me she had spoken with the police and the coroner’s office. She would call me back when she knew more.

*

I hung up the telephone and I stood there looking at it on the wall of the kitchen. My wife had come into the kitchen and she was standing next to me. She must have known from the tone of my voice that something was wrong. She put her arms around me and we stood there in the kitchen holding on to each other and not saying anything.

*

I stared at the telephone on the wall. I waited for it to ring again.

*

It was a couple of hours before my sister called back. She told me she would go to the funeral home in the morning. She said there wasn’t anything else to do until then. I remember how I just agreed with her. There wasn’t anything anybody could do.

*

I went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed. My wife followed me and lay down beside me. My father was dead and it felt like the whole world had changed. My wife held on to me and I lay in bed with a pillow over my face. It was all I could do right then.

*

After I found out my father had died, I cried so much that first night my face got puffy, my eyes prickly and dried out. I felt wired with grief and I couldn’t sleep. It was physically exhausting to have a dead father.

*

My father’s obituary lists February 2, 2005, as the official date of death even though that’s just the day my father was found dead. The obituary also notes that my father was a member of the Waverly School Board and that he enjoyed playing cards, hunting, and fishing. It is sad. Those are the most notable things about my father that could be written in an obituary.

The obituary then lists the family that preceded my father in death and the family that survived my father. I’m one of the people who survived.

Chapter 2

My father was born on May 3, 1939, in Mason, Michigan. He was born in a rented farmhouse and delivered by one of the neighbors who was a midwife. Ray Harold Carrier was the first child of Ruth and Harold Carrier. He had an older half sister from his mother’s first marriage, but he wouldn’t find out about her until years later.

*

My father never would have been born if his mother’s first marriage hadn’t failed and he always said the odds against him being born were large. In the family story, my grandmother’s first marriage was to a man whose last name nobody knows. I’ve looked for it in the public records, but there never was a marriage license filed for Ruth Everett, and I suspect it may not have been a real marriage. It could have been what was called a country marriage, an unofficial and not uncommon union often found in poor communities like the one my father grew up in.

*

This family story is sketchy in other ways. It is believed the young couple lived on a farm outside the small town of Mason. Supposedly, that farm sustained them through their first year together, during which time the young couple had a child, my father’s half sister. Not long after that, the man walked out of their little farmhouse, leaving my grandmother and their child on the farm. The man didn’t come home that night or for many more nights after that. My grandmother didn’t know what to do besides take care of the baby and wait for the man to come back.

*

One day, late in the afternoon, my grandmother was looking out the kitchen window when she saw two figures walking across the back fields toward the farmhouse. It was the man, her husband, but he had another woman with him—and then there was another man at the front door, a county police officer who handed my grandmother an official-looking document. Supposedly, she was too upset to read what the paper said, but she could tell it was signed and stamped. She had to vacate the premises or be arrested for trespassing. She was allowed to take her clothes and anything else she brought with her to the marriage, but that man and the other woman kept the baby girl. The county police officer walked my grandmother out of the farmhouse, off the property, and she didn’t see her child again until more than twenty years later.

*

There was always something a little unbelievable about this family story. It’s difficult to believe it happened that way, but I never heard anybody tell a different version. It was the kind of family story that wasn’t talked about much and, when it was, it was done in a kind of whisper. We were told we shouldn’t repeat any of it.

All we knew was that something pretty bad happened, but nobody was quite sure what. It’s possible that even my grandmother didn’t know exactly what had happened. Whatever it was, it made the story of my grandmother’s life seem confusing and incomplete and she passed on something of that to my father.

*

There is no record of a divorce for a Ruth Everett in the public records of Ingham County. Supposedly, the marriage was annulled and my grandmother moved back into her childhood home with her parents.

*

Years later, my grandmother met my grandfather at a country dance. We were always told my grandfather was a good dancer and my grandmother looked good in a gingham dress.

They got married about three months after that and my father was born about six months after that. We were always told my father was a small baby—that he was premature and nobody expected him to live. Because of this, my grandmother wouldn’t let anybody else hold her baby boy for the first few months he was alive. She thought she just had a few hours and then maybe a few days to keep this baby. Everybody was surprised when my father didn’t die.

*

The doctor called my father a miracle baby and some people in my family came to believe my grandmother’s arms had special powers. My father claimed to remember these first few days of his life and, in particular, how tightly my grandmother held him in her arms.

*

I’m pretty sure none of that about my grandmother’s arms and my father being premature is true. I have his birth certificate and his birth weight is listed as 6 pounds, 12 ounces—a pretty healthy weight for 1939.

Chapter 3

There is something I didn’t say about what was going on when I found out my father had died. I left it out because it wasn’t about my father exactly. Also, I didn’t want to equate a telephone call about my father being dead with this—that night, before my sister called, I had been in a car accident. Now