EPILOGUE
When I was young, my toys were not, but store-bought joys are soon forgot, and as I rocked in Jeffery's chair I sensed his loss and deep despair. Caught up in dreams of years long past that led to horrors none forecast, I see within my young mind’s eye my home, my mom and apple-pie.
With night clothes donned and head laid back I rocked to the dipsomaniac who crooned, “memories are made of this,”--these reveries, my nemesis. Sounds drift up from a room downstairs where plates of spite fly through the air and smash upon the floor of dreams where insects crawl and reign supreme.
When he was four or five, I think, when dad was young and mom wore pink, they went back East and left Jeff home, they said they’d write, they’d telephone. But, when my parent’s backs were turned, at Christmas time, that’s when they learned that Jeff was gone, flurried away by his real dad one winter’s day.
It was too late when they returned from ill-spent days, pointless sojourn, to stop the wheel’s that fate had spun, Jeff’s lonely life had just begun. Everything was spinning around, engulfing him, pulling him down. A little boy can’t understand why Mommy left her little man.
As I grew up I learned the truth, how Jeffery spent his damaged youth, standing by the road all day, looking off and far away. Everyday he took his stance and gave young life another chance. He waited patiently all day. He never left to sing or play.
Aunt Emma said when she drove by she stopped to ask my brother why he kept on looking up that hill. Why did he wait? Why this vigil? “I’m waiting for my mom,” he said. And, she could see his eyes were red. “I’m sure she’s bound to be here soon. I’ve been so good and cleaned my room.”
A little boy grew up, it seems, and spent his life exploring dreams with half his soul left in the snow, a gentle man no one will know. Whisked far off when he was young, Jeffery’s song was never sung--unless the discharge of a gun can take its place and count as one.
Snow now falls upon his grave and life no longer keeps him slave to memories he can’t erase--of open arms, but no embrace. Sleep my brother, don’t you cry or waste your spirit asking why warmth found you not nor touched your heart, but kept your mom and you apart.
--Benny Olstein
