Madrigal of the Everett Clan

This might offend the residents of Washington, Indiana, or those whom the description matches. This is a ballad or an epic of an ironic nature, given the lack of travel in the story, and the drama coming purely from the friction of the huge Everett clan, from which the narrator has found himself estranged in a city full of his family. Somewhat inspired by The Beans of Egypt, Maine.

The city of Washington, Indiana lurks like a hunchbacked stepchild in the corner of the state. Taking the two lane highway into the loose collection of dirty, rundown houses and a few dying businesses perched on the edges of cracked and eroded parking lots haunted by starveling cats feels akin to suffocation. The town has two restaurants to speak of: one is a family pizzeria that stays afloat through monopoly and the popularity of pizza, and the other is a breakfast joint that exists in a perpetual haze of airborne grease. The only thing the twisted and forgotten town has to offer is the single two story motel, designed to look like Mount Vernon or the White House.

            It is here that I will watch my grandfather’s corpse get carefully boxed up and dropped into the earth. It is here that my mother, recently divorced, harrowed by stress, and seeking the comforts her girlhood offered her, will happily inform us we are going to live with our great aunt Samantha. It is here that I will wage my war against my future.

            I’ve never met my aunt Samantha Everett before today. She is wrinkled, sort of brown from her Indian mother, and hates the clan she has adopted as a survival tactic. The Everett clan is a sprawling mass of relationships, feuds, old grudges, dying relatives, squabbling children, land disputes, marriage disputes, ancient debts, more ancient relatives, dementia, cancer, heart disease, dissension, sedition, and death, carefully knotted through southern Indiana and burled in places where the history is so marinated into the land and culture they may as well have rights of nobility, replete with the noble obligation.

            Until today, the only things I’ve seen of Washington are all I’ve needed to see: the inside of the insipid Mount Vernon motel, where they keep cheap bottles of tainted water and an out-of-date collection of apple juice in the mini-fridge; the inside of the Gruccio Family Pizzeria, run by the decidedly not Gruccio Alsop family; the inside of two of the town’s three funeral homes, in which I wandered freely, seeking food and respite from the hordes of family I didn’t know and hunted by my haggard mother.