Why I fixated on the blue of his suit, and not on his wizened face or heavy, callused hands, is a mystery. But that color leaked and oozed around him, a living thing, filling the coffin, until a briny tide threatened to lap over the edge where I hung balanced on my mother’s thigh. Pa’s body bobbed in the expanse, a buoyant hollow shell. For the first time in my life, he was small. His jug ears and fleshy, round nose were unbalanced without a sly smile. No longer reddened from the West Texas sun, his pale face floated, inert, and in danger of submerging. It was my first encounter with death. And it would color all the rest.
I was the only five-year-old in the procession that shuffled down the aisles and past the casket. Mom, awash in her own grief, had insisted on dragging me up to view the body. The service had bewildered me, the copious raw emotion packed into an otherwise normal worship with hymns and a solemn sermon. Any other Sunday, such displays would get a sideways glance for the weakness they exhibited. Our religion was the stern, Puritan kind—all rules and fear.
The explanation for why I needed to view the body was what you’d expect: “Pa’s in heaven. We won’t be able to see him anymore.” But he is right there, I thought, as we inched closer. Other family members bent over, whispered and sobbed, reached in to touch. When it was our turn, Mom hoisted me up in the cloying air hovering over the box. Then, I understood. Pa was there—but not. Something was missing. He was empty. Alone in a vast cerulean current. And I worried it might take me, too.
This had been coming, even if my young mind hadn’t grasped the fact. As long as I could remember, we’d been driving the 300-odd miles between Las Cruces, New Mexico, and a little-known Texas burg named Imperial. My grandparents’ farm was on the dusty outskirts of the one-stop town, at earth’s end. Despite what we called the place, it was more ranch than farm, with horses and goats and chickens. A few peacocks lurched around in their awkward gait, so flamboyantly tropical against the desert landscape. Their indigo bodies sparkled.
Every three or four months, we’d load up in whatever used car Dad had recently bought. The car I remember best is a mud-tinted 1969 Buick Skylark. He bought it from a church member who aggravated my mother but was an inexhaustible source of secondhand automobiles. Today, jacked up on fat tires and painted metallic, it would be classic muscle. Except for one other—a two-tone Oldsmobile—that Buick has replaced all the others in my memory.
Later, I would learn that the way we packed for those trips wasn’t normal. There was some indecipherable moral in my mother that required paucity. She provided Dad and me each with a brown paper sack—matching luggage, my wife calls it now. Usually from Piggly Wiggly, with that creepy, cheerful pig in a canted paper butcher’s cap on the side. Everything went in the bag, and if it didn’t fit, it didn’t go. The one exception was Dad’s suits, laid flat in the trunk, in a hanging bag. A preacher has to maintain a certain appearance. Mom gave herself an extra paper bag for food. It crowded her legs, wedged into the floor well in the front seat. The other "luggage" was lined up on the back seat where I rode.
The bleak landscape along Interstate 10 is largely uninhabited once you pass El Paso. Nothing really grows in West Texas, except maybe those seesawing oil derricks. A few towns, barely equal to the definition—Fort Hancock, Sierra Blanca, Balmorhea—interrupted the desert creosote. The scraggly brown and green brush flowered tiny yellow buds after a rainstorm, and was the only thing growing for miles.
Van Horn, another near-abandoned whistle-stop, marked the halfway point, where the time zone changed. Dad always pulled off the interstate there and fiddled with the manual stem on his watch. That was where we ate lunch. Not in a local café or one of the Dairy Queens that littered Texas roadways, but in the car. No matter the season, it was always uncomfortable, because Dad wouldn’t waste gas running the car for air conditioning or heat.
Butter and sugar sandwiches were the fare. Wonderbread—the kind with the festive, colorful dots on the packaging—squeezable butter, and sugar from a Tupperware container. Mom made sandwiches in her lap and handed them around on paper towels from a roll in the paper sack at her feet. There was endless space in that thing. The one item not in the magical grocery bag was drinks. Dad carried an enormous, green metal thermos filled with coffee. But Mom didn’t drink much for fear she might have to use a public restroom somewhere along the way. “They’re just nasty,” she’d say, her nose wrinkled up under disapproving Irish-black eyes.
Upon arrival at the farm, Pa met us on the screened-in porch. “Parker,” Dad greeted him cautiously. Pa had a sharp tongue, and a healthy Texan dislike for outsiders. Mom moved past the glaring men to find Gram waiting in the doorway for a hug. The two tiny women together didn’t add up to more than a few pounds, though my grandmother was the thinner of the two. In fact, little more than a skeleton. In a picture of her from that time, she is wearing a bright, horizontally striped frock with no belt. I wonder now whether she wore that to conceal her wasted figure. Later, when she moved into an assisted care facility, you couldn’t make out where her rail-thin body began under the heavy blankets.
The porch was Pa’s territory, and he always won the staring contest. It was his favorite place to sip blistering coffee, and whittle. Whittling was our thing.
I was too young for a pocketknife, even though the family viewed them as the equivalent of a knight’s holy sword. Every male had at least one, but several usually floated around in their pockets, ashtrays, or dresser drawers. Pa included me in the affair by sending me for good sticks. He always praised me for my selection, rubbed his dense, knobby hands through my hair. It made me feel a part, included. Inclusion was a rare commodity.
I had siblings—an older brother, for whom my first memory was his departure from the family house; and two older sisters, who were more like adjunct mothers. I don’t remember them ever traveling to the farm with us. They were all older than me by more than a decade.
My parents’ mid-life crisis induced my adoption. The phone call from the agency came through as my soon-to-be sisters were watching “Dialing for Dollars.” Everyone always teased about that, as if my adoption had been a mix-up in the telephone lines. They got a baby instead of money. It was meant to be funny—but everything funny in my family carried a sharp edge.
Older parents and siblings translated to older aunts and uncles, and much older grandparents. Cousins from Mom’s family sometimes visited the farm, but I was younger than them by a lot, too. When they played Hogan’s Heroes, fashioning a POW camp in the goat pens, I never escaped but was left behind to suffer the consequences with whoever played Colonel Klink. When they rode horses, someone stayed aground to bridle lead my horse. When they went into town, I was left behind. On the summer nights we bedded down in groups on the porch, they stayed awake and talked among themselves about things I didn’t understand.
But Pa went to great lengths to include me, even near the end. In addition to hunting up whittling sticks, I was his regular errand boy. He was reduced to a cane and, eventually, a walker. “Where’s that boy?” he’d call out from the porch. “Go find my cane, I left it somewhere.” Sometimes it was his walker, or his folded-up cowboy hat, or his glasses. I kept track of those things, knowing the day would be filled with chasing them down.
On my own, the farm was a place of wonder. Every day, I bounded down the porch steps into the endless desert azure, intent on discovery. Once, I found myself standing on ground that moved in a brown wave. Tarantulas, hundreds of them, skittered across the dirt. It was a miracle I’d jumped into the throng without squashing any. I had no idea how to get to safety. Pa talked me back from his rocking chair, step-by-step. Another time, I found myself in a mosquito swarm. And another time, the farmhouse was overtaken by huge, flying ants—that’s what thrived best in the wasted West Texas desert: mosquitos, tarantulas, and flying ants. It was an alien land.
Mom was different there. Maybe it was worry over an ailing parent. But it felt like more. She was freer, more self-sufficient, spirited. In photographs from her youth, she is a wild thing. Shaggy, mussed ebon hair around heavy-lidded eyes. The corner of her mouth is turned up in a smirk—like Pa’s—“I know something you don’t.” You can see the girl who leapt a fence to taunt a neighbor’s bull. The defiant girl Gram spanked nearly every day before school, even though she promised herself she wouldn’t. Those episodes lasted until the day Mom looked up through insolent tears and said, “When I grow up, I’m gonna have a little girl, and I’m gonna name her ‘Mother,’ and I’m gonna beat her every day.”
In her wedding picture—taken at the farm, of course—she looks more like that impish girl than my mother. Dad is Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity—granite jaw, piercing eyes. Though she’s pretty and fresh in her full skirt and bobby socks, she looks like she’s about to shed it all and run untamed through the desert.
One winter night there, she took me out with her, bundled in thick wool against brittle air. From the passenger side, she pushed me into the cab of an old Chevy step-side. Baffled, I slid over to the bench seat’s middle, expecting her to get in behind me. But she slammed the door, walked around, and hoisted her tiny body up into the driver’s seat. She levered the bench seat as far forward as it would go. There had to be a mistake. Back home, Mom didn’t drive—that was Dad’s dominion. And this was a big, unruly pickup. I’d only seen Pa, or an uncle, get into the monster. But she wrenched the key and the engine growled to life. There was an extra pedal that she pumped with her short leg, barely maintaining her seat. Once in motion, she stomped the pedal and jimmied the gear shift under the wheel. As an adult, I once tried a “three-in-the-tree” standard transmission, and marveled at how she’d whipped the beast into obedience that night.
Dad was different, too. He was more cautious, more circumspect. There, in another family’s womb, he was an interloper. Beyond that, preachers were eyed suspiciously. Maybe people felt like he was watching—judging. It’s one thing to listen to pulpit condemnations about what other people are doing. But in their homes, I think they worried they’d become next Sunday’s sermon.
Several times during Pa’s last years, Dad was called back home to deal with church problems. When the phone call came, he quickly packed and left. Mom and I made our way back by Greyhound. A couple of times, he opted out of the trip altogether, leaving us to make the round trip on the bus.
Those rides were fun. As a rule, our family’s circle didn’t extend much beyond blood and the Bible. So, interacting with the world directly was exciting. There were abundant shapes and sizes and colors, endless diversity. As a rule, everyone was friendly. “What a cute little boy!” The driver and the passengers rubbed my unruly brown mop. The acceptance in those simple words—to be included, welcomed, wanted without condition or expectation—was intoxicating. I drove my Matchbox cars up and down the plastic mat in the aisle throughout the long trip, eager for the attention. Everything about those bus trips was aquamarine because of the thick tint material that covered the windows. Nothing of the sun’s yellowed warmth ever penetrated. Others’ acceptance was not a stand-in.
In between trips, we got the looming call about Pa. Mom and my sisters sat and wept on the couch. Why I remember the couch so vividly is not a mystery. It was the ugliest, orangest monstrosity every constructed. Ungainly patterns swirled through the fabric in confusion. The cushions were hard enough to repel if you dared sit. Years later, after Mom died, that was the most difficult furniture piece to clear from the house. It was heavy in a way that can’t be explained. Maybe from everything it had absorbed.
As a boy of just five, I couldn’t comprehend what on earth or in heaven could make my family so deeply sad. Pa was dead, but that didn’t mean a lot to me—not yet. Through her tears, Mom tried to explain. I cried empathetically more than from a true sense of loss. That would descend later as the concept settled on me.
Whether Mom and I went ahead on the bus, or we went as a family in the car has slipped from memory. My sisters were there, I’m sure. Maybe even my brother, but I don’t remember. Much about those days is hazy, opaque. Like the blinding sensation at peering into a pale summer sky—you sense the iridescent hue more than actually see it.
After the funeral, I stayed on at the farm as Mom helped Gram with the business of death. Since then, I’ve helped Mom and both my sisters through such a time, and it’s brutal. The quotidian events demand attention like a Kafkaesque circus. Then, as you sort through bank accounts and government forms and orphaned clothing, you realize there’s no one left. They’ve mourned, or genuflected at its altar, and gone home to the safety of their own lives. There’s nothing but empty chairs in the coffee-scented air.
Even as a youngster, that’s how I finally comprehended that Pa was gone. The farm was soulless. It never looked so gaunt, breathing its last as it eroded back into the sand and scrub. The bright cobalt sky shamed the chipped, faded paint and cracking boards. But Pa’s robin's egg blue kitchen chair, bound together against age with thick bailing wire was empty. That was death.
Two great aunts stayed on when everyone else left. Auntie—pronounced Ainty in West Texas—and Aunt Inez were either spinsters or widows, I’m not sure which. They were polar opposites. Auntie was tall, sporting a beehive on her regally shaped head. Aunt Inez was squat and doughy, like a fresh-baked bun. Without anyone my age on the farm, and Mom and Gram grief-ridden, I latched on to them like I’d latched on to Pa. Every steel-dyed morning, I bounced into their room and shook them awake so they could watch me board the school bus.
Riding to school was a thrill because it wasn’t something I was allowed at home. Whether Mom looked at the bus as a luxury or too much a part of the world, I don’t know. But the farm was many miles from anything. So, I had a ticket to ride. The driver, a hero with a magical behemoth, came to visit before my first ride. We sat on the porch with sweet tea—the official West Texas drink.
“Do you want to catch the bus first or last, young man?” she asked.
Not only was I going to ride the bus, but I could choose when she picked me up. Having such a weighty choice boggled my mind.
“It’s a long trip, so I can pick you up before all the other kids, or I’ll pick you up on the way back through. If I get you last, that’s the shortest ride. It’s up to you.”
That sealed it. “First, please.”
“You’ll have to get up pretty early. S’that okay?”
I looked over at Mom and she nodded. Auntie and Aunt Inez were infected by my enthusiasm. They said they wanted to watch me catch the bus. I never doubted their excitement and assumed they wanted to watch every time, not just the once, on the first morning.
At the farm, things wound down. Everyone pitched in to make the place ready for sale before Gram moved into the big city—Odessa. The goats, whose musky milk I’d drunk at breakfast, disappeared. As did the horses and cows. The pack of half-feral dogs was parsed out to homesteads nearby. The furniture and household was divided up between aunts and uncles.
Even Pa’s walker and cane were carted away, never again to be the object of my searches. How I longed to run my hands up and down the cane’s shellacked, gnarled body.
The last task was the chickens.
The irrational fear I still maintain for chickens rivals other people’s fear of spiders and snakes. Of course, I was too young and too small for the task. All the birds were herded into the big barn. Even the peacocks, which were not as fleet of foot but impressed with their dog-like bark. Somehow, the adults thought it would be fun to have the kids wade into the feathers and beaks to catch the fowl. All I remember is hundreds of wings thwapping and thunking. The birds scampered and leapt into the air, trying to avoid capture. It was a squawking and thudding cacophony. The air was alive.
One or another older cousin tried to protect me from getting spurred, but not so much that I missed out on the “fun.” Someone grabbed a writhing mass of white and red and brown. Even now, in the safety of my memory, I can’t recall which cousin grabbed that winged creature of fury. All I remember is someone bending down and handing me its scaly, barbed legs. It wrenched in every direction at once, threatening to pull me into the feathery mob. I was led through a slim opening in the barn door, which was closed behind us to keep the other chickens inside until the melee was over. Whoever was with me, helped me hold on to the raging fowl until it could be deposited into one of the wire cages stacked out front.
I wish that my last memory of the farm was a better one. Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered what the last task was. Maybe I would have associated any task, if it was the last one, as the last gasp.
Finally, the farm itself was sold off. According to my uncles, who frequently drove by the place, it stood in disrepair for many years before the buildings were torn down, or returned to the desert on their own. For a time, I’m told, it was a shrimp farm. Of all things, that parched land was artificially flooded to sustain the growth of ocean creatures.
The fallout from my first real confrontation with death haunted me. Mom had dragged me up and held me over that hateful box to see Pa’s vacant, inert face. Everything that followed conspired to drive home the vile meaning—the animals disappearing a few at a time; the farmhouse stripped and every item carted away; the cane and walker stolen from Pa’s clever hiding spots; his lonely chair in the kitchen. Everything was missing, like Pa.
And it was blue. All of it. Every memory, every sensation, every passing thought. The otherwise royal, ocean blue of Pa’s suit was death itself.
Soon after we got back, Mom found me sitting on the concrete curb in our driveway. The newest secondhand purchase was parked there, a two-tone Delta 88 Oldsmobile. It was two shades—the body cornflower and the top midnight. Neither exactly matched Pa’s suit, but it didn’t matter. Furious, hate-filled tears rolled down my doughy face. I pummeled the fender and door with my small, still kid-soft fists. And ached for death, or God, to grant Pa some miraculous dispensation.
Mom crouched and enveloped me in her strong arms. She rocked me back and forth, weeping with me. “I know, honey. I miss him, too.”
She thought it was the right thing, holding me up to see the reality of Pa’s death. Introducing frailty and mortality into the human calculation as soon as possible, no age too young. Coupled with some good fire and brimstone from a preacher, it was terrifying. Funerals aren’t for the dead, after all. They’re for the living. A chance to see what waits for us all, to revel in our vitality while it persists. She’s not to blame—death is.
But in the funerals that have marched through my life since, I’ve never again participated in that awful Puritan custom of viewing a loved one’s dead, empty body. It wasn’t necessary for me to see the evidence of the soul’s absence to understand that my friend, or my mother or father were really gone.
After Pa, it was all blue.
Mac McCaskill is a law school graduate, former US Army bomb disposal tech, and has been an FBI Special Agent for twenty years. His work can be found in Carve Magazine, The MacGuffin, West Trade Review, and phoebe, among other publications. He was shortlisted for The Fiction Desk 2017 Newcomer Prize. And he’s finished his first novel.
You can find more of his work in Slush Pile Magazine at: