Damn Of An Old Scar
Periodically, a man comes by Mt. Pleasant to communicate to me his problems. Months ago the problem was, by all appearances, a grifter woman taking advantage of his son. As my moderate understanding of the Internet was superior to his, he asked would I attempt some background checks on the woman. I did so and came up with just a little dirt (and while looking also found a reference to a mistake from my own past.) The man later contracted someone more curious and better equipped for this type of investigation. For weeks after I was--despite my inclination towards eye wandering mountain gazing--his patient and attentive sounding board for each new clod of fresh dirt dug up on the woman taking advantage of his son. All of this culminated in the son loosing his cool and punching the woman in the face and going to jail for a few weekends. The woman, now the perceived if not actual victim, runs free tugging effortlessly a rather remarkable list of malfeasance. The son is now quit of the woman, but not the debt she helped incur.
At times the man would punctuate his stories of fiscal woe with ones of health, as his two sons would offer and then rescind the offer of their extra kidneys, so that the man could annul his marriage to the dialysis machine. Focused so long on health issues he would speak of his end with the resignation of one who has watched for years the seasons commence and then conclude, with some of the good and the bad in between, but never too much of one to make you forget the other.
I would ask questions during these sessions and when appropriate throw out a well placed condemnation, of this person or that, judgments with which he could only agree. Simple judgments of those things we deemed good and those things we deemed bad. The man and I derived comfort from these lines we drew which put us on one side of a moral issue and everyone else, except for good people like us, on the other.
Every so often I would suggest, whether I believed it or not, that things could only get so bad before they got better and patience would win out in the end and that all things have a course if we can endure the twists and turns of it. Yeah, he would agree, with appropriate skepticism.
On Wednesday he stopped by looking ill and said he was visiting so as to avoid killing the man with whom his wife of 30 years was having an affair. I told him I was glad he came by and not jokingly said he should always stop by before killing someone.
I offered him his preferred drink of sparking fresh spring water and poured myself some cold Russian vodka. He told me his wife had moved out and was the next day going to give him her decision as to whether the move was permanent, and precedent to her asking for 50 percent of everything they owned together. He talked for a good while until we both started yawning and he said he would have to leave soon to go hook himself up to the machine. Before he left he wiped clean from his cheek the three tears that had over the course of the conversation sprouted from the outside corner of his left eye and run down one deep crevasse in his tired face to form a small reservoir of clear despair, against the dam of an old scar.
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