© copyright by Kevin S. Giles

Homeward (Chapter 1)

My dying mother’s eyes flamed with denial. “Paul, no, not you, it was Louie!” she whispered, her failing heart allowing nothing more. Then she was gone, slipping away from me and all I had hidden from her. I had just begun to tell her a secret haunting me since 1965, my first year as a teenager. Now she would never know the depth of my regret.

The wind blew mournfully that night in Montana. I sat on the porch of my childhood house watching a magnificent Halloween moon crawl over the sky. Its blue light, deathly as my mother’s skin, washed into the shadows. Fallen leaves rustled over the road. The coroner had come. He reeked of Lucky Strikes and overheated coffee. Being a man accustomed to examining the dead, he probed casually at her with scabbed fingers and laid his ear to her mouth and shook his head as I knew he would. “No surprise?” He nodded to himself, anticipating my answer. Then he pulled her eyelids down and whistled his way to his car for a body bag to carry away what was left of my mother.

My trip from Oregon had commenced on a whim. It’s always best that a man moves quickly when he plunges into the heartache of his past. I didn’t want to drive the Chevy. It would have roared up the highway, turning heads, and in some strange way distracted me from my mission. I knew I didn’t have much time. The rental place found me a fast Jeep Cherokee, made for mountain driving, and put me on the road on a Tuesday morning in late October. I arrived in my hometown of Deer Lodge the next afternoon to find my mother’s life ebbing under a pile of blankets in her bedroom. Regrettably I hadn’t seen her for three years. Mom looked much older than she deserved.

A novel by Kevin S. Giles, set in his hometown of Deer Lodge, Montana, tells the story of a boy facing calamities in his first teenage summer.

My sister Sally, hearing of our mother’s sudden decline, had arrived a few days earlier to take stock of an impossible situation. She began a storm of cleaning that uncovered liquor bottles of various quantities that Mom had used to wash down her heart medications. In tandem those substances had bleached away her youthful beauty and worse yet, stole her heart.

I tried to make my confession after Sally left for a drive home to seek peace in solitude. Mom, shivering, interrupted to say she was cold. I searched the closet in my old bedroom and found a sleeping bag she and Dad had given me for my first Cub Scout camping trip. It was a good memory of our young family, held dear before the trouble started. I unrolled it over her and when she smiled I held her hand and, finally, began choking out my secret. She spoke those few words of denial and died.

She had waited for me to admit what I had done because she wanted me to know she didn’t believe a word of it. She wanted that understanding between us. She had followed life’s trail to an improbable end, just as had so many others I had known and loved, especially Louie.

Western Montana native Kevin S. Giles wrote the popular prison nonfiction work Jerry’s Riot, the coming-of-age novel Summer of the Black Chevy, and a biography of Montana congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, One Woman Against War, which is an expanded version of his earlier work, “Flight of the Dove.” His new novel, Headline: FIRE! is the third in the Red Maguire series. Masks, Mayhem and Murder is the second. The first is “Mystery of the Purple Roses.” More information is available at https://kevinsgiles.com.