The Buick (Section I, with preface)

Background: The basis for this narrative, modeled after some of Robert Frost's finer long blank verse narrative poems (see, for example, "Home Burial" or "The Death of the Hired Man," although "The Buick" is still 3 times longer than those), is a true incident from my father's life. In February 1946, his mother, just separated from his father, took off in the middle of the night with her paramour, her mother and my father. Eventually they ended up in Montana. Several different "memoirs" my father left for his kids reference little about the trip, outside of him remembering how cold it was, how much his future stepfather stopped at phone booths, and one bad night in a hotel, all of which are captured here. It's not the first time I have written about this (for instance, Piano Center Stage), but those pieces have focused more on the downstream events that came from that journey. Now, as I approach my father's birthday, I am utterly fascinated by what might have occurred on that trip from Maryland to Montana. I cut down the time spent in Billings, as Great Falls is really where his journey ends . . . and new one begins. Because I am fictionalizing the material between the two terminals of the trip, I have changed the names; however, the personalities are true to the actual people.

It's two o'clock AM and the young boy,

Fresh off his birthday, is jostled out of bed,

Handed a suitcase, told to pack essentials.

"What? Why?"

                    "Hush," his breathless mother implores,

"We're going to get far away from here."

He's only been out of his father's house,

By his own count, about one hundred days,

Been Grandfather-less for even fewer.

In minutes, four people in a Buick

Century, the pride of the boy's grandpa,

Set out, heading west via Route 40,

Entertainer at wheel, protégée close,

Tiny grandma and fourteen-year-old boy

Huddled together for warmth in the back.

It's dark, February, year '46,

As the car speeds away from Hyattsville.

Away from what, we all might deign to ask:

For the grandmother, a cancerous corpse

Of her husband taken way too early,

Dragged by the pull of her spoiled daughter

And her precious, idolized grandchild;

For the entertainer, several bills,

Debt collectors, and his family too;

For the protégée, the boredom and chains

From the tyrant she had recently left;

And for the boy, drafting tools in his lap,

A few favorite books against his side,

The frightening apparition of a man

Who believed love came beside discipline,

His daddy, Jackson Franklin Wilkinson.

That Buick would have got to Route 40

Around Frederick when the boy must have 

Finally worked up the courage to ask,

"Where are we going?"

                                 "But that's a secret,"

His mother, or his (not yet) stepfather,

Or his grandmother must have told him back,

Although with a different tone for each.

"Get some sleep. We will be driving awhile."

The snow was falling all around the car,

The teenager reached for his inhaler,

The closed off interior triggering

Another all-out asthmatic attack.

Link to Section 2