I submitted this story to The Sun magazine back in 2017 and heard back with one of those polite and thoughtful letters that let one down easy. Here it is again with a few punctuation corrections and a name change for the main character Mack, now Peter.
BROODING
Peter climbed the stairs to his old bedroom. He was moving slowly between the second and third floors. The train ride from Chicago to Boston took nearly a full day and he’d been unable to relax on the trip. Peter was exhausted and he needed to get some rest, try to sleep. The family patriarch had died a few days earlier. Peter and his siblings had all traveled various distances to gather at this place they’d lived; this place from where all had flown, eagerly or reluctantly. Well, actually Peter was the only one who had been reluctant to leave this house and to leave his father. He was his father’s son. He was the youngest and his father had given him all the family names. First, middle, and last; he was tagged with all the highland history that came with them. He was the only sibling to have spent so much time with the old man alone in this house. Peter had left a few months earlier to join the Navy, October and now it was the middle of February.
The big, old house was heavy with cold and melancholy and grief. An awkward sadness filled the whole structure from basement to attic. The day was overcast nearly masking the sun. Peter’s feelings mirrored the light coming from the windows. He felt the brooding of the house and the brooding of the day outside. The mood all round suited the circumstance of the moment. Peter continued slowly up toward his room on the third floor. This house served as protection from the weather, from neighbors, and as he climbed the stairs, he felt the comfort he’d always felt here. He was home.
Peter’s contemplative mood was interrupted by his brother’s voice above and behind him. William had heard Peter’s footfalls and had come to the railing above the stairs. He spoke softly to Peter. Softly and secretively.
“Hey. You know how Daddy died, right?”
The question was loaded with something that Peter couldn’t quite put his finger on. The two brothers were always baiting each other. Right now, Peter wasn’t sure he could stand the conflict he sensed was hanging here on the stairs with him and William. He distrusted the question. He sensed his love of his father was going to be challenged.
“No. What do you mean?”
“He shot himself”, said William. “He committed suicide.” Williams’s eyes searched Peter’s face for the reaction. Peter’s shock couldn’t mask what was raging inside. He lowered his eyes quickly.
“I didn’t know”, was all Peter could muster. His face clouded over and he turned away from William as he took a few more steps upward toward the landing outside his room. He reached the third floor and without another word he entered his room and closed the door. He needed to cry. He didn’t want William or anyone to see him grieve. This new information was more than he wanted to hear. It was like a stabbing in his heart and he wanted to be alone with the pain. Goddammit, he thought. He crossed the small room to the bed and sat down softly. He reached for the pillow and covered his face and his sobs and he shook with the grief of abandonment and loneliness. Peter was filled with feelings he could not identify. He was afraid to take the pillow from his face. He held it with both hands tight against his skin and held it so his ears were covered as well. He was sobbing and choking and mad at everything except his father. He was feeling the ties of family loosening and dropping away setting him adrift into the ether of whatever was left of his world. His father had left him too soon; too soon. Peter felt abandoned and isolated and his body instinctively curled inward as he sat on the edge of the bed alone in his room.
Peter remained there with the door shut for nearly an hour. When he had cried enough, he stood and opened the bedroom door. He then turned and walked to the windows looking out on the gray day. He took a seat in the old armchair so he could observe and reflect. He sat on the edge of the seat with his elbow on the window sill and stared out at the gray light casting ghostly shadows into the room. He sat that way thinking about his childhood in this room at the top of the stairs. He sat remembering his father who was semi-invalid and unable to work full time, or sometimes not at all. His father who was irritable, often unapproachable, who stayed downstairs. Peter felt the stairs were a convenient protector.
He was looking out the windows of his room reflecting and brooding and he was thinking of his brooding father who no longer was alive and he was sitting in mixed reaction to the noises of the family in the house moving around busily, cautiously helping his mother and his grandmother with the business of getting used to no more husband and no more son to walk carefully around. Peter sat and felt the day inside of the house pass through him to the outside of the house. The brooding of his father was still present and passing up the stairs into his room. He could feel the consoling love of his father pass through him and out through the window pane to the outside February cold and somber day. Peter felt the comforting brooding and melancholy carry him out of this house filled with the damn people who would never be able to comprehend the connection of a brooding father with his son.
G. M. Goodwin
16 October 2015
Playing Fair and Being Kind 