Mama Just Wants to Barrelhouse All Night Long

Daddy had fallen down the well again.

I could hear him in there, moaning and crying, singing little snatches of those Johnny Cash songs every now and then. From where I stood, looking twenty, thirty feet down into the dark tunnel of the well, he looked like one of those baby rabbits after the cat had got to it.

"Are you all right Dad?" I called out. But he didn't answer. Maybe he didn't hear me. My knees trembled and I worried that if I yelled louder maybe the effort would launch me down there too. I cried out anyway but he kept on singing.

I ran on my rubbery legs through the back porch screen door. My feet clattered through the kitchen and thudded up the carpeted stairs. I paused at the door, fist poised to knock, eyes squirting tears. Mom always got angry when I woke her from a nap.


I tapped the door lightly, "Mom?"

"What is it?" She yelled.

"Dad's fallen down the well again."

I heard some rustling and then a groan.

"Then he must be hungry." She said. "Throw down a can of soup for him."

"Ok."

"And don't forget the can opener this time."

"Ok."

Be honest, I wished we could maybe leave him down there a bit. Not starve him or nothing, just let him stew in his own juices a little, maybe think through some of what's happened lately. Then, by the time we finally strapped some sort of harness to his shoulders and lifted him back up into the daylight, he'd be good and appreciative of it. He'd be all hugs and smiles and extra allowance, the way I figured it.

Or maybe that was just wishful thinking. Everything around here had changed -- and maybe it was for good -- the minute that damn oatmeal factory went belly up.

For a long time it had been a paradise of oats here. Piping hot oatmeal for breakfast of course. I'd eat that every day with a smile. At lunch I'd sandwich meats between slices of oat bread, dip oat meal cookies into milk for afternoon snack, and at night Mom would light oat candles and soak in hot oats until she shriveled. Good for he skin, she'd tell me as I rubbed fistfuls into her shoulders before it felt like I was too old to be in the room while she bathed.

Dad started to bring home oat sacks from work and mulched the shrubs, filled the cat box, spackled the cracks in the living room walls, and when he filled my sand box overflowing with oats I'd burrow into it up to my nose and watch him craft giant geometric oat sculptures on the lawn.

I think Dad and the others were trying to save their jobs by buying all the oats.

When the factory finally closed and half of town was out of work it was time to heal. Oat sick, everybody hauled their oats downtown and piled them high in the square. We poured gasoline on the heap and torched it, dancing hand in hand in a ring around the blaze. No more oats.

When I came home, Dad was in the well the first time.

He was singing that time, too. It was those old Johnny Cash songs he loved, the ones he'd put on the record player Saturday mornings when he came home from second shift at the plant. All of us kids would be stuffing our faces with cinammon oatmeal while he drank beers and tried to make Mom dance.

"This sad mess ain't no kind of music to dance to," she'd say, but he'd grab her by the hand and swing her around anyway. Then he'd move on to us kids, holding us high up in the air and twirling us in time to "Jackson" or "Daddy Sang Bass." The music never sounded sad to me, even though Mom insisted it was. "Least he could do is put on some proper dancing music. Herman's Hermits, or The Pips."

Now Pop was down in the well belting out those same tunes, and finally I heard what Mom had been hearing all along -- the sad, lonesome wail of them, how they clung to you like something thick in the air, a kind of smoke or humidity. And he'd changed some of the words, too. It took me a few minutes of listening to figure that part out. "I Still Miss Someone" had become "I Still Miss Oatmeal." "I've Been Everywhere" was "Oatmeal's Everywhere." And "Get Rhythm" -- that was my favorite as a kid, with its peppy tempo and happy lyrics -- was now a slow dirge about a shoeshine boy with nothing to eat.

"Mom," I hollered across the lawn. "I think Pop's really lost it this time."

"No surprise there, it seems the apple didn't fall very from the tree...Go get the harness and lower it down and he can climb into it if he wants to come up but tell him that if he wants his supper, he better be back up by six o'clock sharp. I ain't waiting on him!" Mom's voice cut through the window like knife parting oatmeal, only to be swallowed up afterwards.

"Whoa, Mom. Slow it down," I said. "You're talking in run-on sentences and ellipses again. Did you remember your pill?"

"Ellipses?" she said. "Ellipses? How you know I'm talking in ellipses?" She drank down the last of her gingerbread schnapps and waved the bottle at me. "I warned you before, smartass. I don't go in for that metafictional crap. Who do you think you are, David Foster Wallace? I'll toss your ass down the well, too. Go on and try me. You and old good-for-nothing can sort out all of life's problems together down there."