Facts in Peoria

It didn’t matter that her hands were small, nor that the park was full of strangers that morning: men on benches reading the obituaries of other men, women carrying grocery sacks who looked like the women on TV shows, the same celery leaves protruding, the same weary expressions. She had come to choose wildflowers to give to her mother on her birthday, and mornings were best. Drops of dew still clung to the Arrowhead asters and Blue Flag irises. Her mother loved flowers, and all of her vases were empty, had been empty since her father’s accident two years before. He was confined to the couch or his wheelchair, and did little but watch game shows and fill in the squares of the crossword puzzle in the Peoria Journal Star.

The accident hadn’t been his fault. One couldn’t blame the falling pig, either, as harmless in death as it was while living. Just a weighty thing. No, that distinction went to his co-worker at the meat processing plant, Jim Stillwater, who often showed up drunk for second shift. That afternoon he’d been too drunk to operate the crane mechanism that brought the beasts down for final inspection prior to slaughter. Final inspection meant the sniff test, the look-over, the injection in the abdomen, and the purple stamp that read PASSED. This particular pig—in life—had responded to the name Fritz at a farm down in Cairo. Fritz had paralyzed her father from the waist down. But Fritz was not the culprit, and her father and Stillwater were still tied up in court after two years. Her father wanted two million dollars. Stillwater was bankrupt. The plant had fancy lawyers from Chicago. The lawsuit might last years, they all suspected.

So, with Fritz long turned to sausage, her father tuning into Hollywood Squares, Stillwater probably sipping the day’s first beer over at Hodge’s, and her mother checking groceries at the Peoria Get-n-Go, she went to pick flowers. The next day—a Saturday—would be her mother’s 35th birthday, and she wanted to make it special. She had no money to spend, of course, but there were numerous empty vases strewn around the house and she figured she could fill at least two of them. That would give her mother solace, and solace—and perhaps a good massage after standing up for eight hours at the Get-n-Go—were exactly what her mother needed. I can’t do much for her, but I can do this, she thought. Her father’s workmen’s comp check would cover the cake, and maybe the neighbors would bring over casseroles and Pepsi. There was going to be a party. A party needs flowers.

Among the strangers arrayed around the park that summer morning was one who looked familiar. The school janitor? No. Uncle Eddie from Omaha? No. Redd the Plumber who fixed the bathtub on Easter? No. Then she recognized him. It was Stillwater, wearing his plant shirt with the strange slogan on its pocket: “Live High on the Hog.” He carried a coffee thermos in one hand and a steel lunchpail in the other. He called her over. “Hey, Missy, c’mon over here and say hi to Uncle Jim.” Her name wasn’t Missy, but she went over anyway. “Pickin’ flowers for your pretty mother, I suppose. Well, what a fine little lady you are for that.”  

“Tomorrow’s her birthday.”

 “I know that. What I don’t know is why your daddy ain’t here helpin’ you out. A little thing like you might get lost in a park this size. Mind if I give you a hand?”

The girl didn’t know what to say, so Stillwater hovered around her for five minutes as she plucked and nestled, nestled and plucked. The air was beginning to warm up. Thunderstorms were in the forecast for later that afternoon.

“Irises mean hope, you know, and these little asters mean faith. Every flower has a meaning, just like every body has a soul distinct from all the other souls of all of the other bodies. Even pigs have souls. You daddy’s the only person I know who ain’t got one, and that’s a shame. It’s the God’s truth and it’s a shame.” Stillwater was warming up, though he didn’t appear to be drunk. Maybe a little tipsy, that’s all. “I never meant for that pig to fall. It was faulty machinery and the damn plant knows that too. I wouldn’t harm your daddy. Your mother’s too fine to lose a fellow like him. You just go back home and tell him that. I meant your daddy no harm at all, swear by Jesus. Swear by my mother’s old Bible. No, little girl, I ain’t no killer.” She was about to run away, but he continued. “It’s the damn plant. They don’t give a rat about what happens on the floor. It’s all the meat to Arizona, New Mexico, that’s all they care about. You tell him that. You tell him.”

Back home, her father kept his eyes dead-set on Bob Barker and The Price Is Right. He looked pitiful to her, with a half-eaten plate of eggs on the couch and his arms curled up in a pillow obtusely. She wanted to tell him what Stillwater said, but she had other things to do. She had to call Maude’s Bakery about the cake and tell the neighbors about the party. There would be a party because there had to be. There’d be a party because her mother deserved it. She was turning 35, and that was a fact. She was going to drink a glass of Pepsi with ice cubes and have a plate of green bean casserole. Those were facts. That’s what was going to happen.

Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University.