(A letter to Dan Peters)

2004, Mt. Vernon, Washington

By Michael Daley

It was busier than usual here the day your book arrived; my mailbox was full, and so were the phone messages. A book from the poet, Bill Yake, yours, plus the usual ream of crap in the mail. Good news on the phone, too. After a year-long fight with AT&T, they’re calling off the dogs, admitting that $1400 worth of roaming fees was, as I told them, due to a stolen phone and not me, the criminal genius, the little guy, the trustworthy customer. Hurray for the unincorporated world! But I couldn’t get to any of this, or answer messages, even got in trouble with my wife because I didn’t pick up the phone. I had to read every word of your book as soon as I came in the door.

You don’t spend a lot of time describing the accident, but I recognize its ripple through your life. That’s been true for me. My one-year anniversary made me fearful, not sure why. I drove the road for the first time in months, and haven’t since. A detail that struck me was you at 18 sitting down pulling grass. I’ve imagined this scene over and over — you, the grass, your hair, fingers, people not talking, bright sun, the terror a teenager must feel, wondering if it’s what I felt. My reaction was to stand in the middle of the scene and try to find out as much as possible. I am reminded of my father taking my son and me, my two sisters, and nieces to a simple breakfast and visit for an hour or so. He kept standing in the middle of the fast food joint asking people to hurry and get us our order. And asking each of us: Did you get your orange juice? Do you have the donut you wanted? It annoyed me he couldn’t let people behave as they’re supposed to. He finally sat, too distraught to enjoy the minutes we had.

I was standing like that, mouth open, asking everybody what happened, telling those who asked I didn’t know how she got in front of my truck on a 50-mile-an-hour highway. My neighbor saw me and pulled over after the emergency vehicles and troopers arrived. As she approached, I said, “I think I killed someone.” She offered to call my wife on her phone, but we were so far in the sticks nobody’s cell phones worked. Before her relatives came running, I could not bend down to where she was, could not step across the ditch where she’d been thrown, or look at anywhere but at her, or talk to her, her back to me, gray hair with twigs. I could not believe she was not going to move. I didn’t hear her moan. I started shouting.

For those minutes my terror was so great I was certain she would stand up, get better, could not possibly be dead. These things didn’t happen to me; I was not that person. My sense of unreality fought against the desire to ask if she was alive. When the people came out of her house, one was the older man I had admired weeks before sitting on his tractor in their field, one of my favorite meadows. He called her name with increasing alarm, and then something about the way he said her name made me guess he wasn’t surprised, that he had thought someday she would be killed returning from the mailbox; that’s what I wanted to think. Her niece held her, covered her up, and kept talking to her. I resisted asking if she was dead. A young man out from a nearby farm began to berate me: “I don’t see how …” but stopped, recognizing the futility now of blame.

Eventually a woman with the EMT told me she’d died instantly; they were taking her to Emergency where they would tell the family. They insisted on leaving hope, but told me outright. All that afternoon, through interrogations with troopers, the accident report, a talk with a pastor, no one accused me. She was in the middle of the road where she shouldn’t have been; it was a tragedy. How did I not see her? I don’t know, I told them many times.

I loved driving through that little valley, the eastern slope of the Cultus range on one side, Cascade foothills on the other. Why didn’t I notice a thin, gray-haired woman walking from her mailbox until I was 15 feet away? I was standing, my full weight on the brake, unable to turn out of the lane and avoid her. All my life I have been the driver who just misses the deer or rabbit, even the child. When I got out of my truck in the middle of the road, I couldn’t help her get back up, or pick up her mail spread over the asphalt.

My wife made arrangements for me to see a counselor. The counseling appointments were vital, and continued a few weeks until I was out of the prolonged shock the counselor diagnosed. Then I gave it up. Helpful as the woman was, it was hard to get a word in edgewise. I never found someone else. Maybe my recovery — you used the word in a way I hadn’t ever thought applied to me — got stalled somewhere in there. Although I’ve done all the other right things and kept my eye on my mental health all year long, I still feel, and this was prompted by reading your book, among the wounded. I can’t re-enter life serene and content.

I appreciate your willingness to show that in a poem. I can’t help thinking that even with your compassionate eye toward students, you never fully let go of the boy who died. It is a kinship I feel reading your poetry, unluckily for us, a sad brotherhood. The counselor told me people would come forward to tell about accidents; you’re the first. I’m grateful you let me know how we survive.

My father never got over his participation in the deaths of Japanese citizens during his bombing missions. Right out of the military, he hired on with the Post Office, got up and did it every day. Never complained, even when he worked a second job. Other things came out when he was drinking. Many times he had to be manager of the Post Office with a hangover. My mother used to send me to the corner saloon, where I sat on the stoop below swinging doors, until some uniformed guy asked Frank Daley to come to supper. One night my mother, my sister, and I huddled in the bed, door open to the kitchen where he was throwing dishes, pots and pans, the long kitchen knife twanged in the floor, linoleum turned up at its edges. Years later he was throwing dinner plates around the room, during the actual dinner. He never hit my mother, or any of us.

Returning sergeants like my Dad were supposed to suck it up, work all day, have a few stiff belts before and after dinner, fight or fuck the wife, and sleep it off. He was pretty much delayed, and not recovering, the rest of his life. Meaner and meaner those last years, he must have been in a lot of pain. His sour advice over the phone every couple of weeks, “Never get old, Pal. Shoot yourself first!” repeated to me, his only son and heir.

On his deathbed four months ago, spoon-fed orange juice thick enough to swallow without choking — he’d lost the ability to swallow — he asked the nurse almost childishly, “Should I excuse myself, if I have to spit up?” We composed a letter to his doctor, also a military man, but he couldn’t remember whether captain or major, and this kept us from sending the letter requesting a full examination of his entire body because he thought there was something wrong. We completed a two-sentence letter to the doctor and he was very proud. Showed it to his orange-juice nurse: “This is very good,” she said. “I thought so.”

In his last hours, all that was left of him was the squint with which he approached any problem. Bushy eyebrows knit together on each inhale, exhales took sometimes a full minute or more. My sister left me alone with him even though, as far as I knew, he couldn’t hear me, but all I could do was cry like never before, and tell him I couldn’t live on my own.For many years, I’d talked things over with him in our weekly phone calls. That is, I would run things by him or ask advice. Less and less the last several years.

I didn’t tell him about the accident. I knew he’d worry, whether out of sympathy for how I felt — which I thought unlikely — or concern I might be arrested. I didn’t tell him and yet I wanted to know what he would have thought about the call I received six months after the newspaper carried a picture that didn’t look like the woman whose face I’d seen in profile for a second, who had never seen me, nor heard my truck. After I read her obituary five times, a lengthy one showing she was well-loved and would be sorely missed, I was grateful to learn she had no children and was survived by cousins, nieces, and nephews. From hers I learned to write a suitable obituary for my father. I was struck to learn she was a member of our local Land Trust, active for many years. I made a donation in her name. The newsletter never printed the dedication from me, so her family never knew. I sent them a short letter of condolence, and, of course, did not attend the funeral. The family never contacted me as my counselor had optimistically predicted.

Six months after the accident a trooper interviewed me over the phone, to tie up details. I was shaken back to severe depression when I hung up; after all this time I thought even without a final report, I could live with the memory. Although he spoke in a kindly way, he was determined to arraign me for vehicular homicide. I wasn’t as upset about a trial as about the possibility I had been driving negligently. I went out to the scene of the accident and drove the road again. Every morning as I drive to work I wonder if it was my fault. Another trooper said, “She’s dead, you’re the victim,” a common formula to get drivers to fill out the report or admit guilt, yet for all his cynicism, I’m consoled by it. If I’m a victim, it’s of nothing but fate or misfortune.

What if I’d remained at school to correct one more student essay, or chat with another teacher a moment longer? She’d have crossed the street in safety, perhaps felt the breeze as I passed behind her. I’ve asked myself why I didn’t take longer. Is there only one possibility for our deaths? Or do we miss so many till the law of averages catches up? The trooper did not believe in accident, only causes and effects, most of which are avoidable. An acknowledgment of fate would mean I was always to be the instrument of her death or accident, that ours was as random an encounter as wind tossing branches into the street. The notion of cause and effect must include my need to be somewhere else, our need to move with the clock from one occupation to another, too busy to pull over and admire the way tall grass sways in her pasture.

When I left the room where my father died, he was Everyman. The pinch in his eyebrows gone, mouth open, empty, cheeks hollow, white hair all but gone though he’d had a haircut and shave that afternoon, his skin yellow. We closed his eyes, his head on the pillow; he’d been facing the ceiling all those hours slowly finding his last breath. He was no longer there, his body a husk.

Immediately after the accident the vet told me our cat had a rare, inoperable cancer in his nasal passage. I decided on chemotherapy and forced pills into him; though I kept thinking I should be taking more care of myself than this cat, it was for my son. Many nights he had to face the death of his pet and couldn’t comprehend its irrationality, how undeserving of death the cat was. He knew nothing of the accident I’d been in. We never talked about it. All I could do was console him over his pending loss. In the middle of the night when I could see nothing but the torments of an unforgiven life, the cat would have trouble breathing or my son would awaken in tears. When the first anniversary passed, and after my father died, I thought I could begin to be of use intentionally instead of as a simple shuffling figure of duty and routine.

It wasn’t until the second or third dream that I had a sense of relief. He pulled up outside a hospital; I was in the bed there. He was driving a ‘57 Chevy, green and white. In a small, loose, happy crowd of people storming the building, he walked buoyantly across the bright snow field to get to my room. The woman I’d only seen in profile in knit sweater fluttering past, heading toward another room. He wore an odd hat with earflaps, like one in a news photo when he graduated from gunnery school in 1942, coming into the room from sunshine with the widest smile I had ever seen. The smile he used to have when I was a kid, one I hadn’t seen in so long, though 11 years of cancer made his humor the more sardonic — a beatific smile, lips stretched, and cheeks swollen with happiness. I woke up like that, my face straining to smile.

Michael Daley published Way Out There: Lyrical Essays, from which this piece is taken, in December 2006. The publisher is Pleasure Boat Studio.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 | Email This Post

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