Coming Home - 1. Chapter 1

OUT AT SEA ON A DAY LIKE THIS, with the horizon only broken by a distant passing ship, you might fancy you can see the curvature of the earth. It was like that here too. Around me in every direction, reaching out to all points of the compass, the land lay flat, stretched out and featureless but for the dead stubble in the cornfields—all that remained from the recent harvest. It was a lonely place: like the emptiness far out at sea, a large place that seemed to have no bounds; the horizon only broken by a house and farm buildings off in the distance, and tall as a ship, a grain elevator even further away, but that was behind me to the east, at the edge of the little town that from here seemed swallowed up in the flatness. Even larger, the sky, cloudless in the late October afternoon, loomed emptily above the land. The chilly but dry wind, gusting from the west, flapped open my unzipped coat. Beside me stood a young oak, vital but windblown and bare, the supporting stakes long unneeded and fallen over, its branches stiffened against the bracing onslaught.

You can easily imagine that on a dark night, moonless, with only the stars and faint farm lights cutting through the blackness, it would be an unbearable emptiness; lonely, with not even a deer scratching along the surface looking for sustenance. No, you wouldn’t want to be here at night.

It was a dead place, even by day: brown and dry—yes, dead and lonely this time of year… even the dark loamy richness of the soil looked dead… Soon, a flat, empty whiteness would smoothe over all the deadness, with only that hardy oak sapling breaking out into the frigid sunlight, a lone intimation of life, out of place… You might think everything was dead here, with all the brown, but in spring, with warmth, life would break out again, coming forth in a fragile, raw, but awesome beauty… And then the land would turn green and robust and the cornstalks would grow tall enough to fence in this tiny piece of emptiness…

The seasons roll forward with the sun, as they always do. And season after season after this, you would see the limbs of that young oak grow large enough to shelter the grave from the hot summer sun.

I dropped to my knees and brushed a drift of oak leaves away from the stone:

Michael Erik Lindstrom, Jr.
Beloved Son
1954 – 1986

Beneath, deeply etched, a cross: clearly a rebuke. They even tried to hijack his soul, post mortem.

“Michael!” I hoped that from where she waited she hadn’t heard me calling out his name.

His name. His dates. Nothing more, nothing more out here that ever belonged to him. He didn’t belong here amid this emptiness; it was not his home. Disowned in life, in death he’d been snatched back here. Only thirty-two; his fragile life cut down by a terrible disease. A beautiful man, in so many different ways; but often misunderstood… and the beauty inside him, misunderstood by me. Yet nothing here would tell you about any of that; or about his trauma and loves, his joys—the way he was: so lively, the way he lived: so exuberantly, or what he meant to me. I reached out and ran my fingers over the stone: just a cold, meaningless granite chunk that had no logical reason for being here on this stoneless plain.

I laid the flowers beside the headstone and stood, squinting in the sunlight. It was so long ago, twenty-five years, and my grief was so old, suppressed but still there; it came back again, but now with heart-wrenching regret… Michael! I’m sorry! I wish I’d known… you never told me… and I never looked.

Then it came, out of nowhere, as if buried deep inside me: “Michael! Come back home!” I knew it wouldn’t make any sense to her, but this time, I didn’t care if Kathy heard me or not.

She came up from behind and stood beside me; for a long time we were silent. I put my arm around her shoulder, and then she spoke.

“God—cemeteries are so lonely! I’m so glad you came out here with me today, Robert. Thanks!”

“Yes, it is lonely here.” I wanted to say more, but the words flitted away before I could put them together into anything meaningful.

Between gusts, the silence, the stillness of the place… and the deadness.

“It’s a lot flatter here than in town,” she said, as if trying to fill in a void. “I fancy it makes it seem even more lonely. It’s not quite the Great Plains, you know, but close… At night, from town you can actually see a faint glow from the Twin Cities. Even when I was little I wanted leave here and go live inside that glow… I prefer coming out here on those days when I feel I need to be alone… it clears my head. Odd, isn’t it?”

“Not really. I know what you mean…”

Silence, but for the wind. The awesome solitude of death. Being, then not being… the unimaginable nothingness.

“No one else comes out here anymore. No locals. I’m the only one—and it’s a long drive out here from Minneapolis. Sarah, my wife, came with me a few times, but I don’t expect her to. She loved him too, but she’s not from here and I was the only one from this town Mike was ever close to after his father died. Not even his mother. No, never.” She pursed her lips and pointed out another stone to the right of Michael’s grave. “She’s buried right there, next to him.” It seemed she wouldn’t mention the third gravestone to the right side of his mother’s; but I already had an inkling about that grave. After pausing, she said, “And he’s right there beside her—the bastard! He was a closet case too—the worst kind—did Mike ever tell you about that?”

I shook my head, surprised. “No. Michael never said much to me about him.”

“And she never knew, either, right up to the very day she died—he was always like another Jesus to her and could do no wrong. I fancy she never let herself see what she didn’t want to see. As far as I know Mike was the only one around here who knew about him—he despised him—and Mike got out of here as soon as he could... I always wonder if that sleazebag ever tried anything with him…”

“From what you said, and knowing Michael, I think there would have been hell to pay if he had.”

Stillness, but for a distant flock of Canadian geese, faintly honking, migrating north to south over the curvature of the earth, fleeing this dead place…

“Well, enough of that! I planted this oak tree by myself and watered it every time I came out. For a long time it looked like it wouldn’t make it, but it’s taken hold and doing fine now. It’ll be a while before it gets big like the old oak that used to be here—definitely not in my lifetime,” she wryly chuckled, then sighed. “Boy, we sure had so much fun playing out here… that big old oak tree had a broken swing… we swung on the rope, like Tarzan. It sure was nice out here… for us kids that tree was our second home, our summer place, until it wasn’t… after my uncle cut it down… A fit of spite, I guess—he didn’t like us kids having fun out here on his land. Or anywhere else, for that matter. But oh boy—we had so much fun out here when we were kids—and Mike was always so naughty!” She chuckled again. “A real, bad, boy!”

“Yes, I know what you mean. He was so naughty I couldn’t help falling for him, and that’s one of the things I’ve always loved about him—I always had this thing for bad boys like him.” She laughed, but at the same time I thought she was about to tear up when I said that.

“Anyway, that was several years before my uncle got hooked into that stupid church and then he conned him into donating this land for a cemetery—but only a handful were ever buried here, and none recently… I heard the church is pretty much kaputt now—good thing too.” She pointed her thumb backward over her shoulder. “He’s over there now, my uncle, all by himself near where we parked. Never married… always was a bitter old man, at least in my time.”

I REMEMBERED WHAT KATHY had told me in the car: “I really can’t say why. People who know would think it was guilt or remorse, maybe even regret, but I guarantee Mike’s mother was never capable of that! Anyway, she insisted on the whole kit-and-kaboodle for his funeral. You know, all the works: pricy coffin, embalming, a hearse—and on this dusty farm road we came in on— hah! They must have had a lot of fun cleaning that hearse after the funeral, and I hope they made her pay extra for that too! But, oh my oh my!—the poor, poor bereaved mother! She sure did put on that act. And all the Jesus stuff that goes with it. Prayers and whatever. But she’d always treated him horribly when he was alive—her own son! Especially after he came out, and then even worse when she found out he had AIDS. Reckoning Day! Hell and damnation! God—such a hypocrite! Jeez—she sure went bonkers with all that holier-than-thou religion crap!” Knuckles clenched, she gripped the steering wheel, then relaxed. “Sorry Robert, I got a little carried away. Still makes my blood boil, as you can see.”

“It was just his mother, right?”

“Yes—definitely not his father. He was a really nice man.” She glanced in the rearview mirror and flipped the turn signal to pass a truck. “Damn semis!” Before us, the highway reached out to the horizon, straight, flat and empty.

“The best thing Michael ever did for himself was to get away from her by moving to San Francisco. And you know, even his dad told him it would be better if he got the heck out of here—pronto. Believe me, Mike was torn about leaving, deep down. The two of them kind of had their own little support group, and he called his dad long-distance from San Francisco all the time, like once or twice a week. The poor man died about a year later—I always think she drove him to an early grave. A broken heart, or something like that. He’s in the Lutheran churchyard now, in the Lindstrom family plot… It’s not my family and I’m not one to butt into their business, either—but you know, between you, me and the fencepost… after his mother died I always thought they should move Michael next to his father.” Her voice trailed off. “They were always really, really close, especially after his mother went off the deep end…”

“And after his father died she married the preacher, right?” I asked. “I think that’s what Michael said. God—it’s been so long! It’s coming back to me now… That all happened before I met Michael.”

“Yes, probably. It was around, let’s see… hm, 1978, I think.”

“I met him in ’79.”

“Not much of a gap between husbands, either—he only married her for her money, I fancy. Those nutty self-righteous bible-banging preacher types always do… Did you know Mike never came back to Minnesota after his dad’s funeral? Sad.”

She braked, waiting to make a left-hand turn off the highway onto a narrow, paved but unlined country road.

“You know, Robert, Michael was extremely fond of you.” She glanced in the rearview mirror. “To be honest, from the way he talked about you, I was hoping you guys would end up as a couple, sooner or later. But it never happened, right? Yikes!” From behind, a driver sped, passing us. She braked. “They go too fast out here on these roads, always did. And sometimes they never make it home.”

“No. To be honest with you Kathy, the chemistry wasn’t quite right. Close, but not right. And then, I met someone else and like a fool dropped Michael like a hot potato…” I hesitated before going on, “It’s not something I care to admit, and I’m not proud of doing it. I was young and naïve—not that that’s an excuse, because I was in the wrong. No question about that! I should have been more sensitive to how he felt. I didn’t realize until much later how much I hurt him—I’ve regretted it ever since. But until now, I didn’t know how strongly he felt about me—he never said anything.”

I gazed around us at the passing countryside; ever since we left the outskirts, the gently rolling hills had grown flatter, and the farms, larger.

“Michael and I hadn’t seen each other in a long time, and I never knew he was sick until near the end… He never told me. I found out from someone else… Before we could get together, he was gone.”

“Yes, he went pretty quickly at the end. But he never liked having people make a fuss over him…”

“No, he never did.” Deep in thought, I glanced blankly at the road ahead. “Michael always seemed so strong to me, but I never picked up on how fragile he actually was inside.”

“Yes, I always suspected he was too. He bottled things up a lot. It all probably had to do with his mother. Like I said, I doubt she ever regretted how horrid she was to him…”

“Poor guy, having to live with all that. And then, losing his father…”

We fell silent for a while. The road ahead curved, then straightened again, as if trying to trick us into thinking it hadn’t deviated. Just like some people…

“You know, as my grandmother liked to say, ‘Life is a highway, paved in regret.’ She knew what she was talking about too—she had a lot to regret, and was always hitting the bottle… trying to get away from it, I guess. Didn’t get along with that nasty old brother of hers, either. He was no help. Dysfunctional family like Mike’s… But that’s neither here nor there.”

“Good thing Michael never drank much… or did drugs as far as I know, for that matter,” I mused aloud. I didn’t tell her the dark thing I’d always known but kept to myself: his addiction was sex, not drugs or anything like that. I held back my own secret too: that was how I first met him… but maybe Kathy already knew.

“Robert, I’m sorry, I was watching the road back there when that ass was cutting me off and I didn’t say it right a few minutes ago: Michael absolutely loved you, you know that? He said the years you guys were together were the best years of his life. He said you gave him stability.” She swerved to avoid a pothole on the empty road. “His dad, you, and me—we’re the only ones he ever truly loved… And you and I are the only ones still living who ever loved him back.”

Regret: it hit me hard right then. Michael… you never said that to me… You must have locked up so much, and I never picked up on that… We never even said “I love you” to each other… the closest we came was on the phone when we said “luv ya” before hanging up, but that was a casual thing and didn’t mean anything special, at least, not to me… but maybe, to you it did. I’m sorry… I never found the key to unlock you because I never looked for it… I let you call me Robby but you never wanted me to call you Mike, like Kathy does… and I never bothered to understand why.

She turned onto a dirt road, and focused intently on avoiding the dips while I pulled myself together.

“Thanks for telling me that, Kathy. I needed to hear it. I have a saying about regret too, from a dear old friend—he’s well into his nineties now—who I met right after I moved to San Francisco, a few years before Michael. He likes to say, ‘Regret is what makes us human, so don’t bottle it up.’ He’s right about that! And Kathy, right now that’s exactly how I feel: very, very human. And humbled, too.”

“I’m right with you there, Robert.” She sighed, heaving her chest. “We just keep going on and muddle through it all, don’t we? Hm, like hitting all these damn potholes, as if the dust isn’t bad enough already.”

I REALLY LIKED KATHY. The evening before, at a book signing in Minneapolis—the last stop on this long trip—I was surprised when a woman came up to me and pleasantly said, “Hi Robert, I’m Kathy Melius—I was a friend of Michael Lindstrom.”

“Kathy! Oh my God! I know who you are—I’m so glad to meet you. I remember Michael often talked about you—he said a lot of good things about you.” Almost instinctively, we hugged, like old friends who hadn’t seen each other for a long time. Then I offered, “Have time for a drink? I’m sure we’d both love to swap stories about him.”

From the first, we connected easily, and not just because of Michael. A likeable, earthy, midwestern type with a guttural voice, Kathy loved tossing out idiomatic turns of phrase and when she said, “I fancy,” evidently her favorite, it came out as quaint and rather charming. A half-amused look seemed to always enliven her face, as if something humorous was always lurking nearby. Slightly overweight, she kept her grayish hair short and barely combable; it looked like it might have once been blond. “It used to be blond,” she told me. She reached up and pushed her gold-rimmed glasses back in place on the bridge of her nose. “And long, too. It’s that Scandinavian thing, you know—there are a heck of a lot of us up here. Yeah… that was back when I was still pretty—hah—that’s what Mike always told me, but as usual he was just being naughty!” Her self-mocking laugh seemed to well up from somewhere deep inside. She pointed a finger upward to make her point: “Now, you know as well as I do, that wasn’t true—Michael was the pretty one—and certainly not me! I tell you, I was no match for him in that department.”

“I sure wasn’t, either, not even close,” I said, mimicking her tone. “But remember, Kathy, when we were young, we were all beautiful,” I teased, voicing a thought that had recently occurred to me.

“Touche!” she exclaimed. “Yes. At our age, looking at it that way… Well—you got me there! I sure can’t argue with that anymore.”

“Michael was so good-looking, I felt intimidated by him—my friends always said he was ‘drop-dead gorgeous.’ When we went out together, I always worried that people might think: ‘just what does that absolutely gorgeous guy see in him?’ Yes—plain old me. It’s true—I was always a little bit on edge at first because I was afraid I wasn’t good-looking enough to be his friend and he would drop me. He always liked to make fun of himself, saying he was just a scruffy Viking, but I always thought he looked more like a Nordic hero, like Siegfried. A lot of other people probably thought something like that too.”

“No Robert, you’re wrong. You’re still very handsome—that means you must have been quite a looker back then too! But you know, Mike was intimidated by you too. In a different way, though. He told me so, several times: you were too brainy compared to him, that’s what he said. He felt inferior to you.”

“But my take on Michael—and I’ve always felt this way—was that he was much smarter than he ever allowed himself to think. Yet in a way, he also seemed clueless about how attractive other people actually thought he was… Yes, he knew he was good-looking, but he never thought he was that good-looking. And that might have left him defenseless and finally got him into trouble… if you know what I mean…”

“Yes… very possible… By the way, I’m going out there tomorrow—to his grave. I’m a bit overdue. Want to come along for the ride? I’d love to have you come out with me. And afterward, I’ll take you on a Grand Tour of our little metropolis so you can see where Mike grew up. I haven’t driven through for a while myself.”

“SO THERE YOU HAVE IT. That’s our little old downtown—blink and you miss it. Not much—and as you see it’s looking pretty darn shabby these days. Pretty dead around here now. Every time I drive through town, another storefront’s empty… The economy in farm towns like this hasn’t been good for a long time, you probably heard about that in the news. So now, when you get home and next time you hear about all that you can use this town as Exhibit A.”

She veered onto a dogleg and pointed. “There’s the supermarket where Mike worked after school—it’s been closed for a long time.” She turned her head slightly sideways. “Oh my! That one’s gone too! Sad… This town was a pretty nice place for us kids when we were growing up, lots of fun… but now… I don’t know. I’m glad I left a long time ago, it’s too depressing here. Glad I grew up when I did too—there’s nothing for kids to do here anymore except get in trouble. The movie theater closed a long time ago too, like everywhere else—Mike and I used to go there all the time…

“Where was the school?”

“The next town over, seven miles away by car. About ten or so the way the school bus went. A lot of farm kids out there way off the highway… took forever, a lot of extra time for Mike to get himself into trouble,” she chuckled. “And then he’d catch it when we got to school.”

“Yes, that sounds like him.”

“By the way, I love living in Minneapolis. Wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Funny—that’s what Mike always said about San Francisco.”

She took a sharp right, directly into the sun, and flipped the visor down. “I’m taking you the back way past the church…” She stopped the car and pointed. “The churchyard. Over there, just the other side of that fancy old iron fence—that’s the Lindstrom plot—his dad’s right in front of that tree, the one with the flag… It’s a shame…” As we drove away she commented, “Cemeteries are always in your face in small towns like this. Not much else here.”

“It’ll be getting dark soon, but of course, there’s one more thing you’re probably dying for me to show you before we head back to the city. I saved it for last.” She looped around the front of the church and headed back the way we came, then crossed the main street; no traffic lights here, I noticed. “By the way, that used to be the Eklund house over there—his mother’s family. Nice people. But for the life of me I still can’t figure out how she turned out the way she did, coming from a family like that.”

She rolled the car to a stop and shifted into park. “And last but not least, this was Mike’s house. Looks pretty small, doesn’t it? It was a pretty nice place back then. His dad put a lot of work into it.”

From my side of the car, I had a clear view without getting out: bungalow-like, in a vaguely craftsman style with faded cream-colored stucco and peeling dark brown wood trim, the house looked rather forlorn and ramshackle. In another town, closer in, a small quaint place on a large lot like that, possibly a half-acre, it might be worth freshening up, but not here… probably a nice comfy house in its day, but not anymore. Yet this had been Michael’s home; he’d known it intimately, it had been a part of him, and no doubt he loved living here, early on, before all that … I pictured what it must have been like for him growing up here. Yes, it had to have been a special place to him. For a moment, a strange fantasy hit me that he was with us in the car, looking out wistfully, but I brushed it away…

To see where all that had happened was telling. Now, all those fond and not-so-fond memories that he carried with him from here to San Francisco have long since dissipated into nothingness… And we only knew what he'd told us, or what we might infer.

“What time’s your flight tomorrow?” Kathy asked when she dropped me off at my hotel.

“Noon.”

“I’ll run you down to the airport, Okay? It’s the least I can do… for Michael.”

“Thanks, Kathy!”

“And Robert, you behave yourself tonight—I can tell Mike was a bad, bad influence on you!” She playfully shook a finger at me. “Now don’t you make me worry.”

“See you in the morning.”

“Luv ya!” she said, and drove away.

IT WAS NOT GRIEF that I carried home with me on the plane; it was too long ago for that, and any tears had long since dried up: no, not grief anymore; it was regret. I was regretful, and rightly so, and feeling very, very human… And for a writer like me, very humble. I had made an art of folding human thoughts and feelings into my work, but in truth, after all these years and all that I’d written about it, I still knew very little about human nature, now even less than I ever thought I knew.

The engines cut back and the plane levelled off; I leaned my seat back and closed my eyes. This last leg home was my pilgrimage, a kind of penance on a regret-filled flightpath, a kind of closure, by the way of memorializing a life-changing trip that Michael had taken some thirty-five years ago: Minneapolis to San Francisco, nonstop, economy, and perhaps in a window seat like mine. Three and a half hours or so, to thrust one world behind him and land in another, from the place where he had been born to the place that would be his new home, a southwesterly span along an arc of the earth.

I might have been dozing off—or perhaps, half awake, my mind had only drifted off into some unknown space, or was it addled by the supernatural theme of the season? Now I fancied that yesterday in that empty place I had collected something that wasn’t mine, and carried it with me through the little town for one last time, then out of there into the big city… Did souls, if they exist, ever get restless? I fancied they did. Did Michael’s want to go back home where he belonged? I fancied his did… and that’s where I was taking him: home. Finally, after so many years… Michael, I’m taking you out of that dead place… and bringing you back home where you belong... There, at last, your soul will be able to contentedly settle down, romp among the hills of the lively city you once enjoyed so much, playfully flit through a high-floating wisp of fog, and on a sunny day like this, happily gaze out to sea.

The plane bounced and jolted me awake. I slid the window shade up and looked down: emptiness. Still high above the Great Plains—I saw the one-mile grid stretched out endlessly, etched upon the flat land below like a pale, empty spreadsheet reaching out beyond the horizon. Just below the upraised wing tip, the curvature of the earth, clearly visible to me. Or so I fancied. And somewhere out there, just over that curve, coming closer: home.