Finding Father I: Scottburgh

 

Seaside towns hold secrets. Something in my father changes as we approach Scottburgh. He speaks softly, with less authority than in our home. He is moving into his past. To his boyhood. He is searching his memories, and, it seems, leaving us behind. He is looking for his own father.

The gates to the Scottburgh cemetery have rusted over. There is no area to park our car, so we leave it straddling the roadside and grass verge. People visit their dead on foot here.

Dad unlatches the gate and ushers us in. We are afraid to break the silence, not wanting to offend those resting. We are the only visitors.

His father rests in a lot under the family name with his wife, as requested. They lie proud but not showy. No porcelain statues, no angels or banners to intimidate. Simply their names. Tasteful. Modest enough to know that memory is marked by the mind and experience.

We walk to his childhood home. It has been destroyed and rebuilt and he describes the original structure for us. Over here is where he and his cousin were put to work as punishment for stealing mangoes from the neighbour’s tree. Here where he was made to smoke an entire box of cigarettes, and then promise he’d never do it again. Here, where he broke his arm by falling over the verandah railing, practising his Elvis impersonation for the town’s Christmas pageant.

Here his mother sat by the record player and cried, listening to Billie Holiday on the day of my grandfather’s death, until they made the music stop and put her to sleep.

Here he hid bottles from her as she drank more and more in the weeks that followed the death.

It is time to leave. My sister complains about the heat. Mom wants to get home to the dogs. My father stands in his seaside town. His eyes narrow. He turns away and takes a breath. Then he returns his focus to us, with a smile. I smile back and wish I did not understand him as much as I do right now.