I’m nine. I stand behind a leather couch in the larger area of the daylight basement everyone calls the rumpus room. It’s Easter Sunday and cool and hazy outside but not enough so that my grandfather will need to ignite the fists of coal already mounded in the grate of the fireplace. Three of my cousins play Monopoly. The dice on the game board fall like whispers.

The broader family argues and chats upstairs: My mother and sisters, my grandparents—the six who live here along with me—as well as aunts and uncles, more cousins, and the great-aunts and -uncles who were early-century migrants from Pocatello.

Down here in the basement, Uncle Bob comes out of my bedroom and puts his belt back on. His son Mike is behind the door, although I do not see him. The air smells like earth.

I don’t remember who stands beside me, leaning into the couch back, or who lies on its overstuffed cushions, or even who plays the board game. I know a sliding door of plate glass is locked ten feet behind me, and a concrete patio beyond it, on a side of the house that lets in most of the sun. An early picture features me on a tricycle doing circles in the middle of that slab. I’m dressed in a four-year-old’s best three-piece suit, a hat cocked back on my head in a way Frank Sinatra might like.

I wonder what Mike did.

It’s springtime in California. There’s a rib roast in the oven upstairs, where the formal dining room is bedecked in dark-finished gloom and white linen. The china and silver won’t be enough, though, and the space will overflow as it always does on holidays, and so the younger among us will eat down here on Melmac with stainless-steel forks and knives. We prefer it that way, sitting on the floor Indian-style, as we call it, in the comfort of brown raised-grain paneling and brown linoleum tile, the Million Dollar Movie waiting for us on television if we all clean our plates.

On another Sunday with a smaller group of relatives, we might all gather down here in the rumpus room. An adult would tend the wet bar in one corner. Someone would pull an atlas off the bookshelf and start quizzing everyone on the names of state capitals. In season, football or baseball would rage all afternoon on the Muntz.

Instead, this Easter Day my uncle descends the steps from a wash of conversation with adults, walks across the brown tile taking his belt off before he reaches my bedroom, where he has told my cousin to go and wait.

And now, Uncle Bob comes out the door, putting his belt back on, like nothing is happening, like no one should expect any sound to come from that corner of the house again, my cave of a bedroom built into the side of a hill. He rises step-by-step back to a heaven where adults are laughing and talking and know nothing of the language he carries inside his arms.

___

Richard Robbins has published seven books of poems, most recently The Oratory of All Souls, which Lynx House Press released in 2023. He has received awards from The Loft, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Society of America. From 1986-2014, Robbins directed the Good Thunder Reading Series at Minnesota State University Mankato, where he recently retired from the creative writing program. He now lives in Corvallis, OR.

Artwork by Shelley Lennox Whitehead