Old Man By Ryan Mattern

I’m glad you are not around to see this because it would have surely done you in a second time. The sun has stopped shining on Linesville. The town is silent without the hum and patter of the steel mill. The whistle that bellowed through the streets, over our tree, and in through my bedroom window, to let me know you’ll be home soon, has ceased, never to ring again. Every open window has been boarded up, and nearly every store closed. Nip n’ Sip was bulldozed and the unlit sign of Greta’s Chuck Wagon is all the stands at the Galleria. The cheerful banter of Mulberry Avenue has dropped below a whisper. Every person in town is now a ghost, or at least has a tendency to become invisible. Our house, once yellow and alive with your records, has been abandoned, homing only soot of the last coal burned in Linesville.
I walked to the mill yesterday——took our secret path down where the fireweeds grow tall over the old railroad tracks. The wood has turned completely black and begun to reject the rusted out spikes. I put two of them in my backpack. One for you and one for me. You don’t realize how heavy those things are until you lug ‘em to the factory and back. But I’m sure Caty will think its just kitschy enough to put up on our mantle, and I know you wouldn’t mind having one on your——it will look nice.
I stood with my hands on the lever of an oar compress for hours, imagining I was you. Listening to the soft creaks of the wooden buttresses and every once in a while hearing the scuttle of squirrel making it’s way through a broken window. I swear I saw you and Bill Perry hauling coal into the giant metal furnace, Mom’s name faintly visible and poorly scripted on a scroll that was wrapped around a heart, tattooed to your forearm. I looked at all my tattoos. Worn. Fading. Meaningless.
You barrowed more scrap metal to the compress and told me to move out of the way. Though not before mussing my hair and calling me knucklehead. After making your steel, you disappeared when the Corbin’s youngest boy came into the mill, hurling stones at the decaying machinery. Just as you were there, you were gone. Like a dream, but even they scarcely come to Linesville anymore.
I played poker with Jimmy and his brothers last weekend, and his dad mentioned you. Suddenly the words was and good man strike a different key. I knew he meant well, you know, singing your praise, but it’s never gone. That lingering aloneness, like the Laffy Taffy we would eat together in your truck, was too sticky to remove. The game went well, and though I won a hundred bucks, I still feel like I lost. Never has a full house reminded me so much of our empty one.
I went and saw Mom and Gary in Niles a little while ago. Mom is still herself, and I still call Gary him. She was gushing about seeing a cardinal the morning before and how there is nothing but crows in Linesville.
Them ain’t crows Carolyn. Issa damn soot from the mill coverin’ up everything. Sky too. Shitheap.
I punched him square in the fucking jaw before he could say another word. He flew clear out of his chair and onto the linoleum of their kitchen. He laid crooked and wheezing like the egret we ran over. Mom asked me to leave and told me she’d walk me out. I try not to listen to anything he has to say, and know deep in my heart that if you loved our town, it’s worth staying. Mom laid into me about my tattoos and short-temper. Said I was just like you, cursing your name at the sky for ever teaching me to hurt a man. I smiled. She said I smiled like you too.
Everyday I feel like if you were still here, Linesville would still be alive. It would still smell like eggs and shit from the steel and paper. But I knew the horrible odor meant jobs. People. Family. Cars would still have an excuse to go down highway 71. The names of forgotten lover’s carved deep into every tree would have a longing, jealous audience again. That maybe everything would be ok.
I had never seen a Cardinal, but I’ll be damned if one wasn’t on the porch this morning. I asked it if you were ever coming back, but it just pecked and hopped about. But before he flew into the overgrowth, I asked it if I could please die soon.