Free Chinaberry Sidewalks by Rodney Crowell

disbelieving. When he did, Kenneth buried the blade of his Barlow knife in the old man’s chest. But he missed his target, the steel entering a few inches above and to the left of what might’ve been called his father’s heart.
    Something inside my mother snapped. The shotgun blast sent the essence of her nonphysical self literally flying across the room, where from a vantage point normally reserved for ghosts she watched her oldest brother stab their father in a blind rage of retaliation, thus making her neurological meltdown complete. Her out-of-body experience was brought to an abrupt conclusion when she saw the knife slice through his tobacco-stained nightshirt. “Why, son,” she would marvel when relating this story for the umpteenth time, “it was like my spirit just made a beeline back into my body. It made the loudest thwack you ever heard. After that, everything went blank. That was when I had my first convulsion.”
    Twenty-eight years of the most violent epileptic seizures imaginable was the price my mother paid for being the one person in her family who could handle this drunken beast. Those of us who helped her shoulder the burden of his excesses didn’t get off cheap either.
    Grandma Willoughby kept the lead watch on my mother’s condition until she died in 1961. That’s when I inherited her rudimentary epilepsy first-aid kit: an old rag for the grinding of her teeth and a spoon to keep her from swallowing her tongue as she writhed on the floor.
    My father had a sixth sense when it came to my mother’s epilepsy, and when one of her spells came on he had a knack for being gone. In fact, his absence was the main precondition for her convulsions. As far back as I can remember, she never once had a seizure in his presence. Epilepsy was the pink elephant in their married life as long as my grandmother and I were around to keep it covered up.
    When I began fourth grade, my mother landed a job as a janitor at Jacinto City Elementary School. To bolster her self-esteem, “fourth-grade custodian” is how, when asked, she framed her lowly position. In her mind, “custodian” sounded a lot better than “janitor” and also camouflaged that she was squarely, shamefully, in the fifty-cents-an-hour wage bracket. I wasn’t happy about her new job no matter what she called it, since it brought with it the prospect of her having fits right there at my school.
    It’s hard to escape unwanted attention when this scene unfolds: Mr. Wallace, the principal, or perhaps another teacher knocks discreetly on Mrs. Smith’s classroom door and asks if I might be excused from class. This means my mother’s on the floor somewhere, in the hallways or the janitor’s closet, contorting violently, foaming at the mouth and grinding her teeth. And feeling thirty-one pairs of nine-year-old eyes burning holes in your back as you leave the room is nothing when compared to walking back into class and facing those stares head-on.
    In this situation, adults were useless. They acted as if she were a dog with rabies and, fearing her bite was infectious, kept a prudent distance. Mr. Wallace gave me the impression that a man in his position couldn’t risk getting down on his knees because it might wrinkle the creases on his gray wool suit pants; to deal with an epileptic in the clutches of a grand mal seizure, you might, in fact, have to loosen your tie and maybe even roll up your sleeves. The others kept back respectfully, like friends of friends at a family wake. That made wading through the garbage cans and dust mops to fish my mother’s tongue from halfway down her throat exclusively my responsibility.
    Keeping her alive was something I became good at. The time came, however, when I just couldn’t do it anymore. On an otherwise normal day in 1970, unloading thirteen years of frustration, I told her: “I’ve had enough of your fucking convulsions. As far as I’m concerned, you can die during the next one. I’m through taking care