Grieving in the Everglades (Short Story)

Every Saturday morning, my brother and I dressed in our Sunday best, got in my father’s used, Blue Buick, and drove with him to the grocery store to meet with the butcher.  The drive took us from our home in North Miami to the streets of S.W. 8^th where people spoke mostly Spanish, played dominoes, listened to Celia Cruz, and drank mojitos and Johnny Walker whiskey.
  
At the grocery store, where food labels had foreign names, we walked to the meat counter in the back and asked for Juan, who always burst through the swinging doors with our order in hand: pork chops, whole chickens, and USDA steaks (In our house we ate meat every day because my Cuban mother insisted it was part of a robust diet, even though my father had heart problems, and at 15, I had a severe case of acne that the dermatologist at the health clinic said would heal with a diet of fruits and vegetables instead of the meat, beans, rice, and fried plantains my family preferred eating). 


My sixteen-year-old brother Kevin and I had long ago figured that the butcher we had visited so regularly and had dressed so well for, over the last ten years, was our grandfather, who looked like our father—and like Kevin--with his broad forehead, thick brows, big nose, full lips, short stature and jerky, agitated movements, like a boxer who keeps his frenetic energy contained within the parameters of a ring.

When I asked my mother what the secrecy was all about and why our grandfather couldn’t visit us at the house, she said that love had its own way of being honored and to never ask my father about it. My brother and I would never dare ask anyway. My father wasn’t the type of a man you questioned about things he deemed understood or unspoken: he was bookish, quiet, and bad-tempered when overtaken by strong emotion.  Yet, he was gentle with Kevin and me, always sharing with us what he read in great novels, saw in televised tragic operas, or learned about international cities (he had always wanted to travel but after immigrating to the United States his financial responsibilities didn’t allow him to save). With my mother, he shared everything else.  We adored him and respected his secrets as our unspoken way of showing him love.


That Saturday morning, my grandfather handed the tightly-wrapped orders over to my father, wiped his hand on his blood-stained white coat, said it was the best meat in the house, gave us all a handshake, smiled, and asked Kevin and me what we did that week. My brother said he had started driving and had also started a new job as a gas attendant at the station where my father worked as a mechanic. I said I was reading “The Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison to which my grandfather winked, making me believe he might be bookish like my father and me.


My father had always insisted that we tell this “man” something true and real;  that this “man” was a good friend from Cuba who we should respect because it was the way of his world to honor long-standing allegiances, not the quick, easy ones of people in America who overnight seemed to find any reason to disregard long-term friendships or family.

Then my father stepped away and began to have his weekly chat with the butcher, but this time their conversation got heated.   My father’s s words were hissed in fast, syncopated Spanish words.

“You’re drinking again. I can smell it on you,” my father sounded accusatory.


“You don’t understand what it feels like to be alone--missing your country, friends, way of life. And… with nothing to live for,” the butcher said with his head bowed in shame.
  
“Be alone? Nothing to live for?" My father hissed in disbelief under his breath, pushing the older man up against the wall and pinning him to it.


 My brother who had stood motionless with his head bowed stepped towards the two men, put his hand on my father’s tight grip, looked him in the eye, and said, “come on, pop, let him go.” My father walked out of the grocery story huffing. We drove back home in silence and never mentioned the incident again. 


That following Friday my father died of a massive and sudden heart attack while he was at work. He was only 40 years old. Things happened quickly after that.  Our uncle paid for the viewing and funeral, where my mother wept openly and freely as if she would never stop crying again. 

Kevin and I never cried. After the funeral, we walked around like zombies, as if death had fallen on top of us, making us crouch beneath its terrible weight, and making it unbearable to grasp or to muster a tear for our father's passing.  Every night, I sat in Kevin’s room with him and listened in silence to records he played by Queen, Pink Floyd, The Who… 


It was sometime later that my mother, who was now determined to not be ruined by our dwindling finances, decided to move us to New York City, to live with her sister, and to start again.  We would return the used car to the bank that financed it, give up the rented house, sell whatever we could at a yard sale, and leave within the next two weeks.  She had borrowed money for her sister for the airline tickets. All was planned and decided. 


“What about our grandfather, shouldn’t we tell him what happened?” Kevin asked. 


“Your grandfather? It’s because of that old alcoholic that your father is dead--buying all that meat just to make him happy. Believe me, I blame myself for cooking it. He didn’t even raise your father or his brother. That’s why your uncle never forgave him. The heartbreak killed your grandmother, you know.  Forget that old man. He can't be trusted and you don’t owe him a thing,” my mother said and walked away ending the conversation. 

That following Saturday morning when my mother went to clean houses in the neighborhood to earn some spending money for our up and coming trip, my brother told me to dress nice. “We were going for a ride,” he said. I knew we were going to visit our grandfather. This was Kevin’s rite of passage into manhood--his personal decision to make things right by our father and grandfather, of which I agreed silently and wholeheartedly.

At the grocery store, Kevin asked the butcher who was standing behind the counter about our grandfather. The man with the heavy jowls and thick, square, bifocal glasses said he had quit several months ago. He was heartbroken after we stopped visiting. He knew our grandfather from Cuba where they grew up together. He also said that his friend had moved to America to make things right with his sons.
  
“Sometimes you make big life changes for the better, but they don’t necessarily turn out better, just different from the life you once knew,” the butcher said wistfully, as if he was talking about himself.


“We want to tell him our father died,” Kevin said without wincing.


“I’m sorry to hear that, son. You father was a good man, and…. so are you,” the butcher continued.


“Where can we find him?” Kevin asked.


“That old bastard is wrestling alligators in the Everglades. We did it as kids in Cuba.  I spoke to him on the phone last week and told him he’s going get himself killed, but he said that for once in his ten years of living in America he’s having an adventure--the only type of life he’s ever known.”


“Where can we find him?” Kevin asked again.


Follow S.W. 8^th, the road right outside the store, to Tamiami Trail, and then to the Miccosukee Indian Reservation. Read the signs. You can’t miss it. And don’t pass cars. It’s two-lane, two-way driving out there. Passing can get you killed.”


My brother stopped at a gas station, filled the tank, and drove us to the Everglades. For the first time in our lives, we were having an adventure. Several miles from our doorstep in North Miami, the whole world was changed.  My father had told us about the Everglades and its flora, fauna, and wild, leathery animals. He said it was the most ancient ecosystem in the world, and he promised to drive us out to see it one day, but he never did. 


Now, Kevin and I were seeing the Everglades for the first time in our father’s memory, and we lowered our windows, turned on the radio, and listened to mellow classic country tunes playing on the local station.  The cool November breeze blew into the car as we gazed at the national park with its long stretches of swamps and flat lands stretched across both sides of the narrow road. Looking at sharp thin blades of sawgrass, I was reminded to read the book my father gave me by Marjorie Stoneman Douglas.

I imagined panthers roaming through the gnarled underbrush and tussling with gators and snakes like in my favorite novels by Marjorie Kinnan Rawling.  Watching white herons flying across the swamps of Big Cyprus National Preserve, as it said on the sign, recalled a documentary I watched on PBS with my father on how in the early 1900's the park's shore birds were slaughtered for feathers to adorn women's hats. The Preserve's deep tropical forest also brought to mind the Seminoles, who never surrendered to President Tyler’s soldiers when they came to remove them from their native lands, hid in the most remote parts of the glades and survived and thrived there.

The sight of air plants in the cypress trees evoked my favorite belief that the orchids in the Everglades originated from the West Indies from winds blowing seeds during hurricanes like my father had said to me.  And, dozens of palms squashed against a fence built on the edge of the park and highway awakened a loving memory of the summer Kevin, dad, and I decided to learn the name of all of Florida’s 2500 species of palm trees, a project that yielded recognition of ten or so trees.

My grandfather wasn’t difficult to find. He was sitting on beat up picnic table alongside the entrance to a Miccosukee sign that promised fun air boat rides and alligators shows. Kevin made a u-turn and parked on the shoulder of the gravel emergency lane.

Our grandfather was tanned, youthful-looking, and burley. He had shaved his head, and he wasn’t wearing a shirt, just old sneakers and pair of worn jeans (I once overhead my father say he was only 59 years old).  Kevin took my hand as we walked towards the transformed man who had found a new life in the wild.  He stood up from the table, squinted his eyes from the early morning sun, and smiled as he slowly recognized my flower-patterned dress and my brother’s white shirt, blue trousers, and polyester tie. His smile, though, quickly turned to a frown when he sensed why we were there to see him.  Suddenly, he grabbed his thermos and flung it into the swamp.  When he hunched his back and started to fall, Kevin ran to catch him.  Then both men wept loudly as they held each other up. When Kevin grabbed my hand, I joined them--trembling, moaning, and crying a grief as ancient and familiar as the Everglades itself.