Free Eureka Man: A Novel by Patrick Middleton

sixteen
years of pent up love and anger as the ignition to fire up his
memory. Seeing his father had left him feeling nostalgic and
longing to see his mother June. Nothing in God's creation could
console him the way his mother could.
    He was not dreaming nor was he asleep.
Rather, he was in that space before sleep comes where thoughts and
images were like a random slideshow. Chalk and erasers. Venetian
blinds and folded letters. Jealousies and longing. Images heavy
enough to entertain but not distinct enough for dreaming. Yet he
was hopeful that sleep would bring him a dream, the one that always
left him with renewed hope and energy. It always started in the
kitchen where his mother June was at her best, cooking and baking
and tending to her African violets that thrived on the windowsill
over the sink. There was joy and contentment in her lovely face.
For as long as he could remember they had played a game, his sweet
tooth against her ingenuity. He always won. She hid the chocolate
candy, he found and unwrapped the foil. Except that one time when
his little arms weren't quite long enough to reach the bottom of
the ten-pound cut glass punch bowl. It looked like the biggest
snowflake God had ever made when it tumbled off the shelf over the
kitchen sink and knocked him off the counter and clear across the
linoleum floor. Shocked as any child would be, he sat there in a
heap of broken glass and O. Henry bars and didn't know whether to
laugh or cry. After he felt blood dripping off his forehead, he
cried. But there she was. Shocked, too, but she made it all better,
and by the time they left the emergency room and she bought him a
double scoop of Rocky Road ice cream, she was calm again. He was
still seeing stars when she told him to sit in Mr. Winkler's parlor
while she disappeared into Mr. Winkler's bedroom to discuss a
business matter that had a squeaky rhythm.
    It wasn't until years later when he was in
the county jail waiting to stand trial for Jimmy Six's murder and
Mr. Winkler brought her all the way from Southern Maryland to
Pennsylvania to see him that he understood. But it didn't matter.
It didn't matter because she was there. With chocolate bars and her
beautiful face, she was there. It didn't matter because he and his
siblings had never had to eat grits or scrapple for breakfast;
there had always been sizzling hot bacon or cured sausages floating
beside the sunny side up eggs. Even on Sunday evenings when he and
Skip and Anna returned from their weekly visits to their
grandfather's farm, after a day of running across acres of
honeysuckle and the greenest fields, singing I can't begin to tell
you how lonely that song was, even then, she was there. Not June
Cleaver in an apron with pearls draped around her neck. But his
June, she was there. Hot or cold, in or out, she was there. And he
had sooo liked her company, to talk with her, to be around her. Not
just because she was his mother, but because she was humorous and
witty. They were special to each other. They sang and danced
together. She taught him how to jitterbug and when they walked
through the side door of the American Legion bar, every man sitting
at the bar turned his head to gaze into her big brown eyes. They
sat at a corner table with her girlfriends, Mary Jo and Elsie. The
women drank Pabst Blue Ribbon; Oliver drank Hire's root beer. And
after a dance around the jukebox, Oliver sat on Mary Jo's lap and
the first time she pressed his head against her breast, he kept it
there for as long as he could because he didn't want the warm
feeling that ran through him to end.
    When he reached his mid-teens, June and Ernie
Boy the Second separated and so did Oliver and his siblings. Anna,
who had despised Oliver for as long as he could remember, went to
stay with June's sister. Skip, who had always treated Oliver with
brotherly affection and relished the role of doing brotherly
things, moved to their grandfather's farm and drove a little French
car to school. Their younger