BEDBUGS (A reminiscence)

 

I keep thinking about the bedbugs, the only time we ever had them,

which was the year of Pearl Harbor, autumn and winter to be exact.

A long time ago. Here's how it was:

we had moved to Rings Mountain, North Carolina that fall

when my father, an army engineer, was shipped to the Philippine Islands

in a muchtoolate effort to prepare them for the coming war with Japan.

We were staying with his parents in a small fourroom house.

This was where we would wait out the war, my mother, brother, sister and me.

It was a strange, disoriented time. We'd already moved twice that year.

My mother, brother and I had one bedroom, my grandparents the other

and my sister had a room to herself, the living room.

We were starting over again for the third time in a strange school

and in a house that was much smaller and more primitive after

the luxury of four bedroom, central heated brick quarters on the post.

It was cold. It was cramped. And then the bedbugs

courtesy of a thrift store mattress my mother had bought

in Holyoke Massachusetts just before we moved.

They appeared suddenly, almost like magic.

We woke to fierce itching and blood speckled sheets.

And the battle was set. We sprayed the mattress, they moved

to the unpainted pine walls. We kerosened the walls; they moved back

to the beds.

We couldn't sleep and rose to dress in the cold and walk

to the smalltown school where strangers were barely tolerated.

I was the shyest and had the hardest time, my brother and sister

being the sociable ones.

Then, in late winter came the news that my father was missing in action.

The gloom of Carolina winter deepened. It was months before we learned

he was a prisoner of war.

Meanwhile, the bedbugs, drinking our blood, destroying our sleep-

parasites gnawing at the body of the family, already decimated,

drinking its life's blood.

Finally, as winter broke, a last concentrated effort,

the mattresses burned and replaced, the walls scoured again

and at last they were demolished. Then gradually our lives took form

around my mother and at last, order was restored.

The news came that my father was alive though not to return for four

years.

A little later, we rented a house from my aunt and moved to less

crowded confines

and finally bought a house of our own and were stabilized.

My older sister, a constant source of aggravation, graduated,

took a job away from home and then it was just my mother, my brother

and me.

The winters were still cold. We missed the central heating.

But we made one room warm with a laundry stove and crouched by it

till sleep drove us to our cold bedrooms.

There was a radio in that room, a record player, books to read.

And no bedbugs.

Looking back, I see this as the most peaceful time of our family life.

We worried about my father but now, as my mother took charge,

we relaxed, guiltily enjoying the absence of his unpredictable presence,

his drinking bouts.

Though the war went on for a time we existed on an island of peace.

Time passed and of course things changed.

The war ended. My father returned. I was ensconced now in school

though always something of a stranger, almost grown now.

Nights sitting in the front yard, sleepless, a restlessness in me.

For a year, I worked nights in a cotton mill, slept in class.

And my father changed, sick now, a dying man.

More time passed. I went to college. New crises. My father died.

And now some sixty years later, it all comes back.

And I think of - bedbugs, insidious, parasitic, attacking our sleep,

degrading us.

All somehow reflecting the loneliness of a strange town,

the loss of that central figure that for better or worse had been

the underpinning of our lives.

And somehow, emerging from that time, the growing conviction

that there was something in me out of kilter, something that didn't fit.

And now the years have passed, no resolution there

And here on this gray autumn day, I look back on the desolation,

the cold sleepless nights, and it all seems to be about one thing,

don't ask me why: bedbugs.

 

 

Albert Huffstickler