The Colorman by Erika Wood Page B

father’s passing in some ways felt alright, and that this sudden equanimity seemed to outweigh her grief. Flipping through pictures she hadn’t seen before, she expected—and eventually began trying —to feel sorrow and the kind of railing-at-heaven sense of unfairness that she was feeling at the wake. But instead, she saw a life fully lived. A life that had been fun and filled with success and meaning and fully experienced at every moment—along with, of course, the prolific and thorough renderings of those times in her father’s books and letters, even in articles and lectures. But it didn’t seem right to feel such easy admiration and a sense of liberation now: it was too early for that, wasn’t it?
    Rain hopped back up the stage steps and pushed aside one of the screen doors. The patio was broad and welcoming with the garage doors up. Tarps covered well-preserved wrought iron furniture. A fire-pit and chimney stood, detached, at the patio’s edge. Though years of weather had blown and iced and rained into it, Rain could still detect ash at the base of the hearth. As she took a stretch and a deep breath of country air, Rain turned and took in the view toward the beautiful old brick-faced factory building down the dirt road. Highland Morrow and its strange and haunted chief. It was near enough to add a picturesque sense of company, but far enough to feel apart.
    On her way back in, she noticed another black tarp against the house. A sculpture maybe? She lifted a corner. Powder-blue enamel. Chrome. A wheel. It was the Vespa she’d seen in her father’s pictures. Faded, pale blue and cream. Flat tires. Dirty. But no rust.
    All at once, Rain felt a terrible mix of excitement and anguish. She sat down at the end of the porch looking at the Vespa through tears of a pure, Christmas-morning, greedy joy mingled oddly with a bitter feeling that she’d missed out on something. Even before she had gone to boarding school when she was fourteen, her father had moved them through several different apartments in the city, always casting off excess belongings. Though she had never acknowledged it, their impermanent transience had untethered her. Whatever longing for a more stable family life she might have harbored, this was not for the daughter of John Ray Morton. They were supposed to be quite above such conventional desires. But this house, though merely her father’s storage facility, carried vast chunks of his past and hers, too.
    Giving in to the tears, Rain tried to sort out this strange cocktail of feelings. We treat grief so delicately, not wanting to disturb the wasp’s nest that it is. Others approach us gingerly and even when we “give in” to it, we’re somehow throwing ourselves upon only a single aspect. The lonely howl. But in reality, grief is messy and boisterous, crowded with the accordion shaped collapse of time that a life’s end creates. All of her father’s life and her time with him seemed suddenly to carry equal weight, so that what she got from him in her daily life no longer outweighed the past. “The Past,” which John Ray Morton very literally and literarily always put down as “merely a construct of the mind,” as if events once passed weren’t real anymore, as if we could choose to empty them of significance and only apply onto them that which our clearest thinking and most logical brain could concoct.
    Rain could still feel that familiar sense of being cast adrift. But the house, this Vespa, the heaps of photographs in the boxes and just being locked to a piece of the earth made her feel ruddered and thrillingly in control. She still couldn’t shake off that inappropriate Christmas feeling, like she had been given a gift she’d never even hoped to wish for. She felt resentful and angry at the one person she’d give anything to see again. How could she be unearthing anger now? When he was alive, she had