Note: This essay is nonfiction based on true events. Names and locations have been changed to protect the innocent. Some dialogue and details have been reconstructed for clarity and narrative flow.
The police trucks are arranged in a phalanx 200 yards out as we pull up to the Big House. My brother’s college friends used to call it the Hotel Monroe. The great structure yawns before us. Our family home was birthed as a New England Colonial in 1972 at the dawn of the Me Decade, a conjoined sibling with The Joy of Sex, transcendental meditation, mood rings, biofeedback, and quaaludes. The house was constructed in an era of irony, when cynicism and lava lamps were cannibalizing the idealistic daydreams of the Summer of Love. The hangover was real. Reagan was rising. Agent Orange B-52s were carpet-bombing the subtropical rainforests of North Vietnam, and stateside, Nixon campaigned as the peace candidate.
Enlightenment didn’t stand a chance.
It took them fifteen minutes to call us because Dale Colgrave was hiding upstairs with my mother. Before entering, the police pounded on all three front doors, again. They called both phone numbers, again. Then they had to explore an 8,000-square-foot interior of formica, wood paneling, sunken living rooms, alabaster yellow paint, macrame wall hangings, ferns, mud-brown appliances, and linoleum that used to sparkle like a diffuse Chablis showroom.
The police moved meticulously through the house from floor to floor.
Cops don’t tiptoe in this kind of scenario.
They announce themselves loudly with weapons drawn, “Ms. Blackmoor, this is the police. We have entered your home and are performing a welfare check. Ms. Blackmoor, this is the police. We have entered…”
“It wasn’t until we were a few feet outside the bedroom that he appeared,” an officer tells me. He is stocky and short, wears Oakleys like his boss. He shakes his head as we approach. “I’m sorry.”
He casts an eye further up the driveway where two other cops are flanking Dale Colgrave under the low-hanging boughs of the grand Shingle Oak that sits centered before the house. Future bonfires of discarded landscaping debris also sit beneath the tree, longingly awaiting a match.
The winding Colonial-style brick and mortar sidewalks have crumbled and shattered, and it’s hard to say what is brick and what is lawn. I use the word lawn loosely. What used to be a manicured, edged, and irrigated advertisement for John Deere mowers and Kentucky Bluegrass is now pock-marked with weeds and the muddy divots of truck tires. Sections of metal gutter hang free and forlorn. Paint is peeling off the wood rot white trim, and the cedar clapboards dangle like the gray riven ribs of a whale slaughtered long ago. Piles of firewood, half-covered with cheap blue tarps, are stacked where cars used to park. Two Ford Pickups, one from the 1980s and one from the 1990s, sit abandoned in the field. Their windshields are the color of cobweb. The spring meadow grass frames their dull and duller red paint as though the trucks were intentionally placed for staging a Midwestern junkyard photo exposé.
But it’s the east end of the house by the garage where my father used to park his Mercedes that truly evokes the pure, crystalline energy of rotting human values. Everything we used to be is broken down and scattered amongst the carcasses of multiple dead lawnmowers and a window air conditioning unit, piles of fungus-encroached leaves, and waste bins that desperately want you to know they once had a higher purpose.
Trash is everywhere I look.
I grip Jane’s hand as we walk through this catastrophe and am suddenly grateful that my father has been dead for 37 years. That is the nature of the spiral, though. He sees the disaster through his son’s eyes.
Even my mother’s housekeepers foresaw this spiral.
Rosa Delgado took over for her parents in 1992. Mr. & Mrs. Delgado were first-generation immigrants who arrived on our doorstep in a syncretic state between worlds, with one foot in the native history of the Kichwa, and the other lodged in the guilty ditch of Imperial Spanish Catholicism. Mrs. Delgado Senior used to leave curated piles of coyote bones in our attic to appease the dead. And it was Rosa herself who was found putting salt on pennies behind the basement refrigerator that used to belong to my father.
Five years after my dad’s death, she told my mother she had a vision while cleaning the refrigerator, “One day, your husband say this place will turn to splinters and fall.”
It wasn’t just the Delgados who were seeing my father’s ghost. Many of my mother’s psychiatric patients reported seeing a tall man in a gray suit with a cane walking across the meadow as they drove onto the property for their sessions with her. My mother had a prescription pad for schizophrenia, manic-depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, insomnia, hallucinations, mysticism, killing an acid trip, and even a pill to take the edge off one’s own personal Jesus. Ghosts were no problem either.
What she didn’t have a pharmaceutical for was sociopaths.
Jane and I don’t pause to look at Dale Colgrave. We don’t have to. Want to see what we saw? Do a Google image search for: gun-toting, gold-digging, sweaty 70-year-old hillbilly crossbred with a child molester in threadbare suspenders and a greasy blue mechanic’s shirt with greasier blue jeans. You’ll be halfway there. He is unusually tall and watches us over the heads of the policemen guarding him as we walk together across the yard. I can feel the smirk on his face radiating through his bulging transition lenses that warped the eyes behind them. When he looks at you, it feels like hot spit running down your neck.
We enter through the front door into the grand foyer. The first thing I notice is the smell of urine and dusky, stale shit. Then my eye catches the gracefully arched brass headboard that used to belong to my parents’ bed. It is now standing in the living room, leaned against a tufted chair, as out of place as an albatross leaning against a velvet footstool. My father’s Steinway grand piano gazes angrily at the headboard. The piano sits before the picture windows at the back of the house, half-covered by a bed sheet.
The stairs still have their original carpet from 1972. I imagine my parents looking at swatch samples named things like Verdant Cascade, Moss Motor Inn, and Ficus Mist when they selected it. They went with Verdant Cascade, a medium-pile, mid-tone jungle green with a hint of avocado. The main stairway is littered with reckless stacks of unopened junk mail and bills. Some of the envelope heaps have been there long enough to gather their own dust. Newer past-due notices from credit card companies and months-old property tax bills, Cabela’s statements, Vitamin-Shoppe catalogs, and supersaver coupon packs are stacked on the bottom treads. It is like walking past a graveyard for my mother’s once immaculate credit score and thrifty saving habits. She used to impress these virtues upon us as children.
But we are children no more. There has been much death in this house. I can feel its salacious fingers probing the fetid air. After a pause, I hurry up the stairs, suddenly fearful that I too will be captured by its vampiric touch should I linger too long upon any one disaster.
In the curving hallway that follows the minimalist oak handrail and Colonial balusters all the way up from the foyer, the signs of hoarding begin, just out of sight. It is as though Dale Colgrave stood in the foyer and made sure that someone walking in wouldn’t see. There are cases of Coke, boxes of powdered donuts, five pairs of unboxed, unused hunting boots, galoshes, jugs of cranberry juice, hundreds of vitamin bottles, and stacks of Kirkland paper towels, adult diapers, and toilet paper. The second-floor carpet is a lighter green, almost yellow. It shows the wear. It shows the stains of unknown sugary substances. Even the Persian print runners are soiled and muddied.
The original antique furniture is interspersed with the garbage and clutter. A 19th-century rough-hewn walnut dresser stands at the top of the stairs. A leather-topped partners’ desk stands to our left. Both are covered with leaning, dust-catcher photographs of my family, including images of my grandmother and aunts on my mother’s side. There are photographs of my dad, my brother, my mom, and myself on family vacations from the 1980s: Maui. Germany. Switzerland. South Fork, Colorado. Red River, New Mexico. Esalen. San Diego. Zihuatanejo. And there are portraits of us taken around the farm itself. I shot some of the newer photographs personally, but those are from the 1990s. Other portraits hang on the nicotine-sunlight-yellow walls. Every reasonably accessible space is filled with the eyes of ghosts.
Despite the plethora of photographs, which almost make us seem happy, I notice that portraits of my father’s family do not exist. Not one uncle, cousin, or grandparent from the Kellor clan can be seen. My mother has erased them from time.
Jane and I slide past a cardboard box filled with Milk-Bone dog treats, though all the dogs are dead, and walk down the hall that leads to my parents’ bedroom. The hallway is lined with two solemn-looking policemen. One of them is the kid with glasses. He looks sad and confused, as if he can’t believe places like this house exist. The reality of it all has tarnished his young soul.
Outside, the faint, approaching wail of an ambulance rolling down Raventon Road can be heard coming closer. The sense of déjà vu is palpable. The odor of piss grows stronger.
As I walk into the master bedroom with its vaulted ceiling, I hear the buzzing of flies coming from my mother’s dressing room. Three officers surround the bed. One is propping my mom up with a pillow. They turn as we enter and make way, pressing their lips together.
She is gaunt and her hair is spectral white. Her skin is the color of chalk. She is wearing stained green sweat pants and a purple shirt that hangs loosely, showing the skeletal map of her chest and collar bones. The bare mattress and box spring are sitting on the floor. There are stains underneath her. She has no blanket, and the sheets are cluttered off in one corner of the bed. One of her front teeth is missing, and I can see old blood on one of her socks.
I ignore the trash, rotting food, and crawling insects.
I fall to my knees at the foot of the bed with wet eyes, “Mom, can you hear me?”
“Jude, is that you? My sweet boy?”
“Mom, what has he done to you?”
Her voice flickers with static, “What do you mean? I’m just fine. Everything’s fine. How are you?”
To be continued…
"What she didn’t have a pharmaceutical for was sociopaths." Nice.