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The Sacrament of Satyriasis

Bill Tope

I entered the old homestead one last
time in preparation for journeying to
the graveyard to say a final farewell to
the old man. My mind was not on him
so much as on my mother, however,
who had died many years before.

I was the first of what would eventually
be fourteen children of Maureen
Metzler, a good German Catholic of the
old school. The kind of young woman
who blissfully spent her life barefoot
and pregnant, a new baby on her hip
at all times.

I was born when my mother was only
eighteen and I soon grew used to “Mo”
giving birth nearly every year,
eternally and forever with child. As
good Catholics, my parents saw sex
principally as a means to procreation.
When Mom died at 41 it was of
“natural causes.”

I might have laughed at that diagnosis
had it not been so hurtfful, so abjectly
tragic. Mom died of exhaustion, pure
and simple. Of overuse. She was,
with her tiny five-foot frame, brood-mared
to death. As the eldest and as a female
to boot, it always fell to me to act in loco
parentis in the supervision of my
growing flock of younger siblings.

My mother, always physically
discommoded, and my father, forever
preoccupied with his growing and very
successful business—he owned and
managed a string of large cemeteries—
were too busy to bother with the large
brood they created and then forgot
about. Following the births, they felt their
job was over.

A dedicated baby-making machine to the
very end, Mom seemed to lose interest
in life once her eggs ran out. The old man
lost interest in his now “barren” wife at
the same time, inseminating no less than
three more women as my mother lay
dying from tuberculosis over the final two
years of her life.

And the old man married twice more
after Mom died. One might forgive Mom
for marrying the selfish sonofabitch, but
the other two must have seen what he was
capable of; hell, maybe that’s what they
wanted, to “start a family.” The old man,
who died at 80, produced 16 more children—
that we’re aware of. Fortunately, I had no
hand in raising them.

I gazed at the walls in my father’s home office,
saw the many photos of pregnant women and
bouncing babies. the father’s day and birthday
cards. More gifted neckties than any one man
has a right to own. I took a final took at the
home where condoms and tampons never
found a place. As I walked out the screen door
hit me in the ass.

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