Chapter 4: When it Rains (Excerpt) [Edited]

By Light’s Last Dawn was my father’s last book before he died and is considered by many of his scholars to be the first and only hard-backed four-hundred page suicide letter ever written by anyone. The narrator remains nameless and most of his accounts are jumbled in a strange stream-of-consciousness style that jumps, without warning, back and forth between dates and locations, sometimes for a only a sentence or two. But there are certain similarities and an overwhelming nakedness to the voice that leads most critics to believe that it is his most autobiographical work to date. Many people wanting to know more about my father as he was in real life read the book like canon law and have pored over every exclamation point and chapter break as if their life depended on it.

A light drizzle patters against the window as I pull the book out from the pile in front of me and try to correlate it to the letters written in the same period, but except for a few letters of complaint to magazines in relation to their high subscription costs all of his correspondence seems to have died off by that point in his life. The only real letter of any importance I can find is one written to his sister who lives in Ohio asking her if he could come and stay with her family for an indefinite period of time. I have the sister’s reply paper clipped to the back of the letter and she cites hard times in one of her children’s lives and lack of spare room in her house as her reasons for declining his request, though I imagine it was much more than that.

It’s this period of his life that the publishers are interested in the most because so little is known about him during this time. In fact, I’m the only one who saw him regularly up to the very end. I lived down in the town at the time working the cash register at the convenience store and sweeping the aisles when it wasn’t busy and I would drive up to the cabin every weekend to bring his mail to him and sort through it, paying the bills that he would otherwise ignore and denying invitations to speak at universities and literary conferences that he would only be too drunk to speak coherently in front of. Most of the time he couldn’t be found anywhere in the house and I would rummage through the refrigerator throwing out anything stale or spoiled and stocking it up with fresh groceries again that I bought from the convenience store. Then I would wander into his study and sit at the big desk where he did all his writing and begin to go through all the drawers, searching around in the stacks of paper and thumbtacks and paperclips and corrective ribbon and ink pens gone completely dry for anything and for nothing.

Sometimes I would just sit there, touching the keys of the typewriter and listening for the deep, satisfying clack that filled so many days of my childhood. I had given him an electric a few Christmases ago but he refused to write with anything but a manual and the machine in its plastic case was stashed in a closet somewhere gathering dust. If the spirit took me I would sometimes roll in a fresh sheet of paper and begin to type out whole passages from one of his books, poring over the words like I imagine he pored over them as he wrote them. I tried to get a real feeling of his craft and a real feeling of himself as he was when he was alone with nothing but a blank page in front of him and endless hours to think.

When I began first typing out his books I began with the first book he had ever written and by the time of his death I had hit the final period of his last.