Onnie Otten

            Ronald Graughten sat wearily on the thread worn divan alongside the bed where his unconscious mother struggled to breathe as the shallow pool of life still left to her slowly evaporated.  He seldom left her side these last two months as cancer’s deadly python slowly squeezed the life out of her emaciated body.

            His brother and sister who lived in far away cities visited frequently to take their turns on deathwatch, but their own insistent families and jobs required them to shuttle back and forth as they awaited the inevitable but unknown date of demise.   So Ronald took leave from his job to serve long, lonely stretches to care for his mother.  Most in the neighborhood seemed not to notice except for a few old ladies who were hardly healthy enough to help, and too far removed from Ronald to console him. 

            When Brenda Graughten suddenly fell comatose, her son consciously chose not to call the doctor whose feigned intonations of hope and sorrow he disdained.   He knew his mother’s time had come, and that he should call his older siblings who would arrive panicked, harried and beleaguered with their children.  But he did not wish to share her final moments even with them.  They had lives of their own.  His mother was all he had.

            So all that evening and into the dark of night, Ronald sat in vigil.  With tears in his eyes, his mother’s hand in his, he waited as the reaper’s poignant scythe pricked and probed at Brenda Graughten’s being until it finally severed the nexus between body and soul.  Ronald continued to sit with his mother’s lifeless body holding her hand until it turned cold, and then felt the reaper’s blade turn and plunge deep into his forlorn heart.     

      Dawn’s early light filtered through the blinds illuminating his mother’s drawn, lifeless face.  Ronald sat immobilized, conscious only of the anguish of eternal loss as morning air hardened into a stultifying summer afternoon.   The day dissolved to dusk and on to the darkness of midnight’s lonely hour when exhausted, he unwillingly fell asleep.

            He awoke the next morning as the pungent odor of death began to take hold of the woebegone room.   Ronald pulled himself off the couch and stiffly left his mother’s bedroom without looking back.  He groped his way through the narrow grey hallway, down creaking, carpet-less stairs that seemed to groan, staggered through the kitchen past the table with its week’s worth of dirty dishes, and over to the wall phone with its long twisted cord wrapped tightly several times round the rectangular receiver.             

            A fly flew round him in sluggish surrealistic circles as he untangled the telephone cord and drew the hard black handle to his ear.  The dial tone emitted its empty edged drone rankling his dulled senses.    He first dialed the morgue, and then his brother and sister, dispassionately reporting her death, stating simply:  “Mom’s dead.  You’d better come home.”

            Ronald absent-mindedly made his way to the family’s modestly furnished living room, and collapsed on his late father’s high back chair with the faded imitation leather and gazed at the old family portrait that sat atop the drum table across the room.   The photograph, taken when the Graughten children were school age and his parents a picture of health, stirred contrary emotions.  Ronald sighed in relief for his long suffering mother who had more than her share of crosses to bear in life; cancer was the nails in her cross.  But in the next breath, he recoiled from a prickly irritation of which he could not explain.  

            Employees from the morgue arrived and went upstairs to take for what they had come.   His musings were interrupted as expressionless men in white suits unceremoniously carried his mother’s lifeless body down the stairs as though she were a discarded piece of furniture.   Their carelessness manifested a gross indifference to the tears rolling down his cheeks as they pushed past him in the living room and out the front door.  “True to the end,” he thought to himself.

            His siblings, Robert and Claire, their silent spouses and restless children arrived the next day.  Ronald left it to them to arrange the funeral.   He would have skipped it all, had her cremated and her ashes divided into three urns, one for each of her children.  He could not understand his mother’s indomitable faith in the Church, but he loved and respected her too much to ignore her wishes for a proper Christian funeral.

            A black limousine arrived the following day to deliver the Graughtens to the church the next morning.  The older siblings and their spouses sat in the second row leaving their younger brother isolated with an anonymous funeral home limo driver.  Ronald dreaded the funeral, though not for the usual reasons; he knew that the memorial service would resurrect melancholy memories, which he would just as soon forget.              

            The Graughtens, their spouses and a half-dozen older ladies from the church’s congregation were the only ones in attendance for the start of the requiem mass. The dead silence was interrupted when two faceless fellows from the funeral parlor wheeled a plain metal casket adorned simply with a barren crucifix up the aisle. Two altar boys dressed in black cassocks and white surplices and the priest in his black vestment followed in small procession.

            Nothing revived Ronald’s bitterness more than the sounds of their steps echoing in the near empty church.   And so he endured still another family taunt, a soundless derision, a tacit confirmation of what he felt all along:  No one really cared.

            Though he tried his best to concentrate on the services with their words of forgiveness and eternal life, Ronald’s thoughts drifted to the past and his grade school days. He recalled his innocence lost there so many years ago.

            It was a cool, blue-skied September morning before his first day of school when he as a five year-old boy walked out his front door in eager anticipation with brother Bob and sister Claire.  His parents beamed with pride and joy as Ronnie waved good-bye to them. 

            Big Bob was in seventh grade and taller than anyone in school, even the eighth graders, a fact that made Ronnie proud as they approached the school grounds.  But Bobby was rail thin, long legged, pigeon toed and meek.  He had thick, unruly hair, a large forehead, oriental shaped eyes and a droopy chin.  His overbite made it difficult for him to enunciate clearly.  His oversized head made a convenient target for both verbal and physical jabs. 

            The older boys were waiting for them when they ambled up the drive that entered onto the schoolyard.  They greeted them with their favorite nicknames:  Rotten Graughten.  Horsehead.  Bobby Bucktooth.   Bobby walked on, outwardly ignoring their slurs like water on a duck’s back.  But as a younger sibling, Ronnie learned long ago to read his brother’s moods, and he sensed his brother’s injured feelings.

            That same morning, the kindergarten teacher had the children recite their names for their new classmates.  When it came his turn to speak, Ronnie—who had the Graughten overbite—nervously lisped over the first consonants of his first and last names so all the class heard was “Onnie Otten”.  The fair haired, dimpled boy across the table laughed aloud and repeated the name sounding in tribal intonation: “ON-ee OT-ten; ON-ee OT-ten; ON-ee OT-ten.”  The class giggled in peels of mirth. 

            From that date forward, he was known throughout the school as Onnie Otten. Even a few of the children’s parents occasionally forgot themselves and referred to him by his schoolyard moniker.  He detested the name but learned quickly that it was futile to object.

            During the maudlin organ recital, Ronald looked over at his brother who had a faraway look in his eyes.  The kids used to make fun of the way both he and Bobby looked, laughingly referring to them as REE-tarts.   Yet, Bob was the smartest boy in his class, an occupational hazard for one with his looks and physical frailties.

            The teachers exalted in Bob’s academic accomplishments:  regional spelling bee finalist; top one percent in Iowa test scores; math whiz in Scholar Quiz.  An academic scholarship awaited him to a prep high school of his choice.  Yet, such achievements did not enhance his standing with his peers. 

            Ronnie remembered his happiness for his brother at the start of the next school year when Bob entered eighth grade.  No older boys to bully Bobby now. Yet, one day he walked into the boy’s lavatory and caught Bob with tears in his eyes.  His brother explained to him that Frank Hutchinson, a mentally sluggish kid with a broad back, had caught hold of him for a rough up in the cloak room after the teacher had left the room to take an important phone call. 

            Ronnie could not understand why, and what Bob told him made little sense at the time.   It seemed that Hutchinson had failed a test that his brother had aced.  Frank was in for it when he got home, but in the meantime, someone was going to catch it before he did.  It was a lesson that Ronnie would learn in his own time.

            Things were outwardly better for sister Claire.  She too was a scholastic beacon, but as a girl, she avoided the physical abuse incumbent within the male domain.  Nonetheless, her unattractive features and eccentricities left her ostracized from the main stream and netted her more than her fair share of abuse.

            Claire was two years older than her younger brother.  She was gangling, with wiry, dishwater blond hair, a sallow complexion with long face, punctuated by a long, pointy nose.   Her facial features averted one’s attention from warm, sensitive blue eyes that seemed to be looking far off into the distance. 

            Claire’s abiding love for animals was a source of ridicule from some of the other girls.  She sat by herself at lunch to sketch horses.  As she approached adolescence, her reading selection gravitated towards animals or 19^th century literature while the others read sappy love stories.  Any stray mutt or alley cat no matter how ragged found its way home with Claire. 

            If her scholastic achievements were not frowned upon with the physical severity of the boys, it still gave a few of her little miss classmates additional fodder to load their guns to shoot her down.  Ronnie witnessed many of the salvos himself when he was promoted in mathematics by two grades so that one hour each day he was his sister’s classmate.  It seemed to Ronnie that many of the remarks and “looks” the girls directed towards his sister were more for his benefit as Claire had grown outwardly oblivious to their derision.

            He recalled when the other girls gathered before the bell to kibitz at the desk of the class princess who was assigned a seat across the aisle from his sister.   He heard them talk together and say: “Well, of course, Claire cannot go to the party this weekend because she’ll be studying geometry with her brother.”  Or when another girl’s family would get a new car—the Graughtens were the only family in the neighborhood without one—a query would invariably find its way to Claire:  “Well, when are the Graughtens going to get a car?”

            To Ronnie, though, the most grating comments were the ones he could not hear, and the unspoken statements made in judgment.  A few of the girls would whisper and giggle with each other, then send a sideways glance in their direction.   Or when in line to hand in assignments, some girls would subtly jostle for position to avoid standing next to Claire as if they might catch some unknown contagion. 

            Midway through his eulogy, the priest finally settled down from the sublime to the real world.  Father Frankum was a tall, grey-haired priest, involved in the day-to-day goings of the parish.  He knew Mrs. Graughten well, and it disturbed him that so few attended her funeral.  He spoke of her with heart-felt emotion:

            “Brenda Graughten had a difficult life, but those who knew her never noticed because Brenda remained outwardly positive and friendly to all. She was a hard worker and played the cards dealt to her without complaint.  

            “The late Mr. Graughten, who died five years ago, was a taxicab driver for Bismark Cab Company.  The family funds were tight. But instead of finding a second income job to help out financially, Brenda stayed at home to personally raise her children, to imbue them with a drive for academic excellence. She knew that the family income was spread too thin for prep high school tuition.  So it was almost like she willed it that her children would receive academic scholarships.  From their earliest days, her children were tutored incessantly at home by their loving mother so that by the time her children entered school, they were already well ahead of the other students. 

            “She personally made sure that the early advantage was not squandered.  The Graughten children never missed a school assignment; their work was always top quality.  Their academic achievements consistently brought honor to the school.”

            Ronald knew the priest spoke truthfully without the usual hyperbole directed to the dearly departed.  Home was the beleaguered Graughten children’s refuge.  His mother always greeted their return from school with a snack and a smile, and she studied with each one of them in their turn.  She knew—although she never said it—that her children’s escape from societal estrangement would be through academic and then financial success.

            The priest continued:  “Brenda Graughten was dedicated to God and Church.  She was a life-long member in our Legion of Mary.  She was an active member of our Altar Society.  I often saw her here alone on the hottest days in this air-conditionless church vacuuming the sacristy rugs, changing the altar linens, and hand dusting the communion rail.  

            “Her skill with numbers and money was well-known as she served as Lady’s Club Treasurer for many years.  And for two decades of Thursdays, she served as cafeteria cashier, her daily count never off the dime.” 

            Ronald recalled that Thursday was Hamburger day at the school cafeteria.  The lines were twice as long as normal as children who usually bagged it got lunch money on that day.  And the line moved.  His mother saw to that.  She mentally tallied the monetary total of each child’s various trays of food with the mix of burgers, fries or chips, milk or juice, fruits, jell-o, pudding, Twinkies or cupcakes.   She stated the amount, the child simply surrendered his or her mix of coins and bills, and she quickly returned the accurate change.  During the final post-lunch tally, his mother scoped old coins for Ronnie’s collection and evenly exchanged them with her own pocket change.

            Ronald remembered standing in the cafeteria line and over- hearing remarks:  “There’s Mrs. Graughten!  Mom says she won’t let anybody else handle the money.  Nobody knows how much she lifts from the tray.”  Or simply, “Ew-w-w, there’s Mrs. Graughten!”

            The priest concluded his remarks:  “Brenda Graughten was not the most popular woman in the parish, but she was one of the most dedicated.  She possessed the true spirit of Christ.  She forgave the many slights she and her family endured.  She gave of herself to her family, her Church and her God.  And though it is nearly empty in our chapel here today, I tell you that she joins the host of saints in heaven with Jesus.  God bless Brenda Graughten.  God bless her children who must endure here on earth without her.” 

            As the funeral home employees wheeled his mother’s coffin out of church, Ronald recalled the days that the family pulled their grocery-laden wagon the eight blocks back home from the store.  As he got older, it was just he and his father on these excursions.   

        It was a pleasing experience to pull the wagon home and talk with his father, a solitary man of few words.  Warren routinely worked long hours driving a taxi, and he spent his remaining free time rehabbing the house, which he had purchased through the VHA.  So once a week the boy looked forward to the rare opportunity to talk with his dad, even if it meant pulling a wagon to do so.

            Warren was by most measures normal looking enough despite his long pointed nose and the jagged scar from a blow to his oversized forehead, which effected his mental acuity.    Warren also suffered a severe case of recurring hemorrhoids.   The malady caused him to obsessively scratch and pick at himself, a habit not unnoticed by the neighborhood boys.

            One of the more humiliating events for Ronnie occurred when talking with his father en route home from the grocery store.  Classmates hidden in the bushes across the street shouted at them after they passed by:  “Hey, Warren!  Try some Preparation H!  Why don’t you buy a car?  You must be going to the Movies; I see your picking your seat!”  

       The worst part of it all all was the gleeful laughter emanating from the bushes as they ran off, and the thought that to confront one of them at school about their jeers was to confront them all. It was a choice between doing nothing or standing up for his father and enduring further familial insults and the customary frontal shoves as a flanker stretched his leg out behind him to ensure his fall.  That’s what usually happened, although sometimes it got ugly.  So he suffered in silence for his father.

            Ronald returned from the cemetery to a quiet house that was now his alone.  He went upstairs to his room and gazed at his eight by ten photograph of his mother that stood on the nightstand.  The photograph revealed a woman with a long face, a large, crooked nose and big searching brown eyes that seemed to take it all in.  She had prominent mole on her broad chin.  Her large head was crowned with long, wiry, unmanageable hair, which gave her a constant wind blown look.  But the most noticeable feature was her large, protruding teeth.  He occasionally overheard a few kids call her horse face.

            Ronald knew as well as anyone that his mother was not a pretty picture.  What he did not understand was how they could not see the internal beauty of the woman.  He saw a woman who sewed his clothes ripped in scuffles, and more importantly mended his torn spirit.

            He reminisced about days when his mother’s counsel revived his flagging spirits.  “Ronnie, the other kids are just jealous and scared.  They’re scared of each other; they’re scared of failure; they’re scared of the future.  They need to feel superior and in control.  So they pick on you because you’re an easy target. 

            “The Graughtens are the smartest kids in school, and it drives them crazy because we don’t look the part.  But no matter what is said to our face or behind our backs, no matter if they push or punch or say mean things, we will answer.  We do our best in school.  We think.  We create.  We achieve.   And on Sundays, we go to church where we thank God for our intellect, our loving family and the courage to turn the other cheek.

            “And one day Ronnie, while these bullies angrily go off to their humdrum, dead end jobs, you will be an engineer or a scientist.  You will design the bridges they drive over; or find a cure for cancer; or build a rocket ship that flies to the heavens and makes us all proud.”

            His brother Robert did in fact work in the aerospace industry helping design the space shuttle down in Houston.  Sister Claire met her husband in Veterinarian School, after which they started a successful Animal Hospital.  She found joy in caring for her children and riding horses in the Maryland countryside. 

            But Ronnie was stuck in a dead end job at Boeing, one that paid well enough, but bored him.  Whereas Robert could focus on mathematics and physics to the point that the outside world was theory and his abstractions reality, Ronald was plagued by insecurities and hostile to his co-workers and superiors to the point that it effected his work product.  His job was not secure.   He dreamed of Australia.  It was far away.

            Months later, Ronald found himself at the Men’s Guild meeting.  He had joined the club four years earlier at his mother’s urging.  “You cannot hide yourself here, son.  You have to get out and serve the community.  Join the Men’s Guild Club and give back what’s been given you.”

            Ronald did not really want to join but he knew that his mother’s relentless persuasive powers were impossible to ignore.   So he acquiesced.  In fact, he was elected as the Guild’s treasurer.  Drafted was more like it.  Two years ago when nominations were made for club officers, Mike Mayhall boasted of Ronald’s efficiency with numbers and nominated him for the post without even asking Ronald if he were interested.  The rest of the men jumped on the bandwagon, and he was elected.  Unopposed.

            After the meeting, he stuck around the school hall and drank a few beers with the boys.  There was nothing else to do anyway.  Jack Falken, the Guild’s president and a former schoolyard nemesis came by to chat.

            “Onnie, I was sorry to hear about your mother.  Everything OK at home?  Anyway we can help?” 

            “Everything has been taken care of Jack; nice of you to ask though,” Ronald replied evenly.

            “Well, we like to do what we can.  Oh, by the way Onnie, how are we doing on the Church financial drive to pay for the new air conditioner that’s finally going to be installed in Church?  Summer’s just a few months off and it would be nice to have the AC up and running by then.  If I have to sweat through one more summer in church, I might convert to Baptist.  Their church is at least air conditioned,” he said as laughed at his own joke.

            “The stock fund is worth $ 67,000 right now.  The contractor requires a $ 20,000 down payment with the balance of to be held in escrow.  If we keep up with the current rate, we should have the money by the end of March,” Ronnie declared with an air of certainty in his voice.     

            “Onnie, your idea of putting the money in a stock fund was a great one.  We timed the transfer of the trust account to the stock fund just right.  Hell, that trust account at Commerce Bank was drawing one percent. Since I had that money transferred to the stock fund, the money made 25 percent in just one year. 

            “Remember when Sanders came over to us after one meeting and yelled at me for putting the money in the stock fund going off on how risky it was.  Well, I guess we showed him.  The last two months after church, the men and even some of the ladies have congratulated me on my idea of having the money transferred.   That’s just that much less they all have to tithe.  I don’t know why I’m working in sales; I should be an investment analyst or something,” he snorted.

            “Hey Onnie, I see you have the house up for sale.  You moving out of the hood?” asked Fred O’Conner. 

            “No, I don’t think so.  I just want to sell the house.  There are too many memories there.  I don’t need a three bedroom house anyway,” Ronald replied in a halting manner.    As he walked off, he overheard Falken comment to O’Connor that Onnie better get that Graughten smell out of the house if he wanted to get anything for it.  They both laughed at that one.

           The house sold and closed within a month.  Ronald had priced it to sell.  He moved into a furnished efficiency apartment in the neighborhood.  The Church fund drive continued and, at Ronald’s suggestion, the money remained in the stock fund for an extra few weeks because Treasurer Graughten believed that there would be another upsurge in the market.   The Church’s stock fund stood at $75,000 when the market went down on two consecutive days.  He then received an anxious call from President Falken. 

            Onnie, the AC contractor wants to get going on the job. Besides, I’m worried that the market might make an adjustment.  We don’t need to be greedy.  Pull the money now and put it into the Church’s operating account so we can make the down payment and put the rest in the escrow account!”  His last statement was more of a command than anything else. 

            “But Jack, we needn’t panic.  The market is still on the rise.  It’s just a minor adjustment after a string of ups.  Don’t you want to wait a couple of weeks?  All the analysts say that we’re in for a long bull run,” Ronald suggested.

            “All right, but if the market keeps going down get the money out!  I’m the President.  You act as if you’re some financial genius or something.  This is the Church money we’re talking about, and I don’t want to take any chances.  Get it out if the market drops again!” 

            Ronald knew Jack Falken.  Two weeks ago, he persuaded Falken to wait on the money when he convinced him that the church investment would continue to rise; but then Falken would get antsy if the marked moved downwards, and call back demanding that the money be pulled, barking out orders as if he were at the schoolyard again.

            That’s all the time he needed.  He already pulled the money from the stock fund; his plane ticket purchased; his employer given notice.  He secured his new identity purchased with funds from the house sale. He would be hard to find Downunder in Melbourne.  The feds wouldn’t spend much time tracking a small time swindle; there were too many big fish and political plumbs out there.

            Yeah, Jack hadn’t really changed.  None of them had.  Falken carelessly left all the details to his right hand man, Onnie Otten, and then boasted to others about himself when things went right. 

            But Falken failed to think through the details when he co-signed on the trust account transferring the money to the stock fund last year.  Ronald knew he wouldn’t which is why he suggested the transfer back when he was fretting over his mother’s terminal cancer.   The only signature needed for withdrawal from the stock fund was “Ronald T. Graughten”. 

            He did not know if he would go through with it after his mother’s death.  But all doubt evaporated at her funeral when he endured the echoes in the empty church.  

            The stock fund check cleared; he drew cash.  He wired the money anonymously to a charity for children with autism.

            Early the next morning, Ronald walked out from his apartment and boarded a Bismark cab.  The taxi drove on quietly through a light spring rain as Ronald looked out from the passenger window at the church one last time as the cab passed by slowly en route to the airport. 

            “They’ll all be sweating in there in a couple of months.  Just like they always did,” he chuckled to himself.  “Mom was right:  Join the Men’s Guild and give back what’s been given you.”