Hold
it still," my father told me. We were in the barn, setting steel traps
for the raccoons and groundhogs that came to feed on our corn and beans.
"Easy now," he said. "We're almost home."
The trap rested on a piece of planking so he could step down on the prongs
of the spring-tension handle and spread the trap's jaws. It was my job
to reach my fingers down into the middle of those jaws and lift a round
paddle the size of a quarter and slide it into the slot at the end of a
steel tab. I had to hold it there while my father stepped off the handle.
If I let go too soon, the paddle slipped away from the tab, and we had
to start again. Sometimes the timing was such that my father eased off
the handles, and the trap's jaws snapped shut, the breeze flicking across
my barely escaping fingers. "You didn't hold it," he said then, his voice
harsh with reproach. "I told you to hold it still."
I wanted to please him, particularly that summer when my mother was away
all week at the university and he depended on me, but I could tell, even
then, that I wasn't the sort of boy he would have chosen as his son. I
was timid, like my mother, except on the occasions when anger overwhelmed
me, and I went mad. "Look at yourself," my father would say whenever I
threw a tantrum, sobbing and screaming and cursing at him. "My God. You're
a maniac. I wish I had a tape recorder so you could hear what you sound
like."
That summer I had no idea who I was to be. I didn't know whether I would
finally be like my mother, kind-hearted and shy, or like my father, high-strung
and full of temper. I only knew that often I scared myself with how unmanageable
I could be, a child savage and feral, overwhelmed by some fury boiling
inside me. I was 11 years old, too young for the rage that I held, a rage
I had learned from my father.
He had no hands, having lost them in a farming accident when I had been
barely a year old. He had tried to clear a corn picker's shucking box without
first shutting off the tractor that powered it, and the picker's rollers
had pulled in his hand.
When he tried to free that hand with the other, the rollers pulled it in,
too. The rollers mangled both hands so badly that the surgeon had to amputate,
and when gangrene later infected the stumps, he had to take 3 more inches
from the right and 2 from the left. After that, my father wore hooks, prosthetic
hands that were actually pairs of curved, steel prongs screwed into the
ends of flesh-colored, plastic holsters. He slipped his stumps into those
holsters, a harness of canvas straps settling across his upper back. When
he contracted the muscles in his shoulders, the pressure tugged at cable
wires hooked to levers at the bases of the hooks, and the steel prongs
opened. Often, from as early as I can remember, they opened to take up
a belt or a yardstick or a switch, anything he could use to whip me. He
whipped me because he was an impatient man, often angry with his life,
and I was a fussy child, quick to challenge him. He whipped me to make
me less defiant, and when it didn't, he whipped me again. He stung my arms
and legs and back with his lashes. My skin fired with red stripes. And
my mother allowed it, she, a grade-school teacher, who had lost a job because
she had been unable to discipline her students. She had taken another job
in Oak Forest, a suburb of Chicago, and we had left our farm in the southern
part of the state. We came back in the summers and tried to reclaim the
life we had left there. Then the school board in Oak Forest insisted that
my mother finish her degree. This was in 1966, and she was 56 years old.
She had started teaching after graduating from high school, which was possible
then after passing a licensing exam, and had worked on her degree in the
summers. That summer, to finish, she was living at a rooming house in Charleston
and coming home on the weekends, an arrangement I despised because I hated
being alone with my father. I feared that at any moment I might displease
him and draw out his wrath.
After we set the traps, we slid them under the mangers where the raccoons
and groundhogs had dug away the dirt. There were chains at the ends of
the traps, and we wired them to the manger slats. "All right now," my father
said. "Let's see what we can catch."
It was my job every morning to crouch by the mangers and pull each trap
out by its chain. I can still remember the moment just before I pulled-so
frightening-when I didn't know whether I would feel a weight at the other
end. I prayed that I wouldn't, because when I did, I had to pull the raccoon
or groundhog out into the open where my father bludgeoned it to death with
his hook. I remember the way the animals hissed and screamed, the way they
tried to squirm back under the manger, an escape I closed off by tugging
hard on the chain. "Hold him!" my father shouted. "Hold him!" He brought
his hook down again and again as I felt the raccoon or groundhog straining
away from me, desperately trying to get free from what held it.
So often that summer, my father asked me to do something beyond my limits:
to loosen a rusted nut on a piece of machinery, to lift a cultivator and
pin it with cotter keys to the tractor, to set the steel traps. "I can't,"
I often told him, and he replied, "Can't never did nothing. Try it again."
I imagine he had forgotten what it felt like to pinch a finger, scrape
a knuckle, smash a thumb. His hooks were tools, the tempered steel crafted
to withstand heat and pressure. When we washed dishes, he plunged those
hooks into water so hot I couldn't bear it. We had no running water in
our farmhouse, so we filled a dishpan and set it to boil on the stove.
"Get it hot," he always said. "I can take it."
He said this with pride, and it was clear that he enjoyed putting his hooks
into the scalding water if for no other reason than to remind me that he
was rugged-"The hotter, the better," he said-and that if I dared disobey
him, it would be no skin off his nose to make me pay the price.
One day I was trying to loosen a stubborn nut on a harrow tooth. The crescent
wrench kept slipping, and each time it did, my hand scraped across the
harrow frame and sent a fire across my skin.
"You don't have it set right," my father said. He was on his knees beside
me. "Tighten it up."
It was hot, even there in the shade of our maple tree, and I was tired
of banging up my hand, tired of the gnats flying around my face. I knew
that, one way or another, the nut had to come off, but because the farm
wasn't my responsibility, I was ready to give up much sooner than my father.
I wanted to go into the house and get a Pepsi-Cola from the refrigerator
and turn on the television. I wanted to lie on the cool linoleum, the oscillating
fan stirring the air over me, and forget about the harrow and the nut that
refused to turn. The truth was I wanted to be far, far away from my father.
But there was no way he would let me escape. He had to replace that harrow
tooth, and the only way to do that was to loosen that nut. Because my mother
was 60 miles away in Charleston, I was the one who had to do it. I could
recall all the times she had been the one to wield wrenches for my father,
and how sometimes, when she would have a difficult time with a piece of
machinery, he would speak sharply to her, frustrated, I suspect, not only
by her inadequacy but also because he so wished he still had his hands
so he could easily do the job. I thought of her in her rooming house in
Charleston. I imagined her sitting at her desk, the window open, a breeze
lifting the curtains and then letting them fall back as she turned another
page of a book, stopped to jot something down in her notebook, her fountain
pen gliding across the smooth, white paper. I saw how simple her life was
there compared to the life she had with my father and me, and I began to
fear that she would never come back to us.
That's when I started to cry.
"What are you bawling about?" my father said.
"My hand," I told him.
"That's just a scratch. You're all right."
I dropped the crescent wrench to the ground. "It hurts," I said.
"A little scratch, and you're bawling like a baby. Wah, wah, wah. You want
me to make you a sugar tit?"
I knew he was trying to shame me into picking up the crescent wrench and
getting back to my chore, and because I knew that, I stubbornly refused
to do it. I was too young and willful to appreciate that he was trying
to teach me perseverance. I was as intractable as the nut on the harrow
tooth and so was he. For years, that would be our trouble.
"Go to hell," I said. His offer of a sugar tit, which he often made when
he was trying to humiliate me, hurt my feelings and left me raw with indignation.
I scrambled to my feet. "You can do it yourself."
I started to the house. Behind me, my father called out, "You come back
here." I kept walking. I heard the slap of leather as his hook pulled out
the tongue of his belt. "Mister, I'm warning you," he said. He caught up
to me just as I was about to open the back door. His belt came down across
the small of my back, and I jumped away from the sting. I landed in my
mother's flower bed, breaking down a marigold, which seemed to enrage my
father more. The belt came down again, this time on the back of my thigh.
Always before, when he had whipped me, I had screamed and screamed for
him to stop, imagining that he would listen to the terror in my voice and
know how much he was hurting me. How could he wound me, no matter how mean
I had been? I was his son. I was the life he and my mother had created.
My flesh was theirs. Couldn't he remember pain? Eventually, I would give
up. I would drop to the ground or the floor and roll up into a ball and
wait for him to stop.
But on this day, for the first time, I turned and grabbed the belt, catching
the lash in my palm. I held the belt a moment and felt my father tug on
it. I pulled back, and it came free from his grasp.
For just an instant, he glanced down at his hook as if he couldn't believe
the belt was gone. Then he looked at me, his eyes narrowed, the worry line
in his forehead deepening with his rage. He took a step toward me. That's
when I threw the belt out into the grass, turned, and ran.
I ran down our lane, the hot air rushing up into my face. My father chased
after me. I heard the furious huffing of his breath, his boots kicking
through the gravel. I imagined, at any moment, his hook would reach out
and snare me. But he was 53 years old that summer, and I quickly outdistanced
him. I ran and ran, stopping finally at the end of our lane. I turned back
to our house and saw my father atop the small hill just beyond our hickory
tree. His cap had flown off his head, and he was kneeling in the gravel,
trying to pick it up with his hook. I was sobbing, choking for breath,
scared to death now because I knew I had no choice but to go back.
When I finally did, my father was sitting on the grass by the har1row,
trying to fit the crescent wrench to the nut. "I can't adjust it," he said,
and his voice was meek. XXXXI sat down on the grass beside him. "Do you
want it smaller or bigger?"
"Smaller," he told me, and he let the wrench drop from his hook. I picked
it up, rubbed my thumb over the calibration wheel and tried to close the
jaws just a fraction. "That's it," he said, encouraging me with a patience
that made me sorry for the anger between us. "We'll just keep trying, won't
we? Until we get it right."
My mother came home on the weekends. On Friday afternoons, my father and
I either drove to Charleston to get her or to Olney where we waited in
the city park until she appeared, having caught a ride with another woman.
These were the sweetest days. Even my father was in high spirits. He came
in from the field at noon, and after we had eaten lunch-meat sandwiches
and cleaned the kitchen, we set about making ready to present ourselves
to my mother. To this day, I am firmly convinced that the one thing my
father and I always shared through our difficulties was our profound love
and respect for her. Despite the fact that she allowed my father's violence
toward me, I always considered her the best and most noble presence in
my life. To my father, she was the woman who had loved him when he had
begun to think that he would be a bachelor all his life, and she had stuck
with him despite the accident with the corn picker that had tainted him
with anger and hostility.
That summer, I did for him what she would do for 26 years without regret
or complaint; I shaved him, I bathed him, I cleaned him after he had used
the toilet. I was 11 years old, and I knew my father's body as intimately
as I knew my own: the gray whiskers that grew on his face; the wrinkled
craw of his throat, red from the sun; the white flesh, loose on his chest;
the swell of his belly; the tuft of pubic hair; the uncircumcised penis;
the loins and scrotal sac often inflamed with heat rash. "I'm gallded,"
he would say, adding a d to the past tense of gall. I rubbed him tenderly
with a washcloth, patted him dry with a towel, and then powdered him with
cornstarch.
Never was he as timid as he was then-as bashful as I. He would look away
from me while I washed him, sorry that circumstances were such that I had
to perform this task. If anyone were to have seen us there, the aging man
and the son who had come, unexpected, into the middle of his life, they
would have never suspected the ugly rancor that simmered between us. They
would have seen the boy soaking the washcloth in a basin of water and wringing
it out with his small hands, and the father standing naked in the sunlight
streaming in through the window, his legs apart so his son could touch
the washcloth gently to his tender groin. How could I not love him then,
so great was his need. "Burns like fire," he often muttered under his breath.
And not once did I think of the fire he spread across my flesh each time
he whipped me. I concentrated on maintaining a gentle touch, one that wouldn't
hurt him.
There was a thin line at the end of each stump where the surgeon had folded
over the skin and sutured it. I rolled fresh white cotton arm socks over
those stumps and safety-pinned them to his T-shirt sleeves. I helped him
slip his arms into the holsters of his hooks and then settle the canvas
straps of the harness across his back. We stood before the wardrobe, and
he chose a shirt and a pair of trousers. He made his choices carefully,
matching colors and styles. "Blue," he might say. "Your mother likes blue."
When he was finally satisfied, I dressed him. I buttoned his shirt, held
his trousers so he could step into them. I fastened his belt. The finishing
touch was a dab of Butch Hair Creme brushed through his flat-top. He would
turn his head this way and that, looking at himself in the dresser mirror.
"Ready?" he would finally say, and I would race to the door, my heart light
and full of joy because my mother was coming home.
She brought her laundry and her schoolbooks. Saturday mornings, I woke
to the chirr of the wringer washing machine on the back porch, and I lay
in bed, content to let the cool morning breeze drift over me, to listen
to birds singing outside my window. My father would drive to the Berryville
Store and come back with glazed doughnuts. My mother steeped hot tea, and
we sat at the kitchen table, I still in my pajamas, and enjoyed the doughnuts
and the tea and talked about what had taken place in the week my mother
had been gone. My father bragged about his crops: the wheat, golden and
nearly ready to cut; the soybeans, lush and green; the corn, as high as
his waist. He told my mother what he cooked for the two of us, how we washed
the dishes. He never spoke of the times we got angry with each other and
he whipped me, nor did I. Neither of us wanted to ruin the calm of those
Saturday mornings when my mother was back in our house. My father spent
those days in the fields, and if everything ran smoothly, he never called
for my mother's help. Then she was mine. I was so crazy to have her, I
did the chores she assigned me without a peep of protest. I helped her
hang the clothes outside to dry. I dusted and swept. I chatted with her
while she did the ironing. I leafed through her textbooks, particularly
fascinated by her entomology book, with its diagrams of butterflies and
grasshoppers and moths. She was collecting insects for her class, and late
in the afternoon, when the housework was finally done, we went out into
the tall thickets of grass around our barn lot with her butterfly net.
One day we saw a monarch feeding on a milkweed pod. "That's a prize," my
mother said, and then she explained to me how the monarchs had just begun
to appear there on the Illinois prairie, returning from Mexico where they
had migrated for the winter."Mexico?" I knew where it was from my geography
class. "How do they get all the way down there?"
"They fly. Can you imagine? All that way. Such delicate wings."
The monarch's wings were orangish brown and laced with black veins. They
pulsed, rising and falling a bit. "How do they know the way?" I imagined
all the miles and miles to Mexico, the wide expanse of sky.
"They just know. Even though they've never been there. Isn't that something?
It's a miracle of nature, I guess."
I had been her miracle, surviving the increased odds that I would be a
Down-syndrome baby because of her age. But I didn't know that then, and
I didn't know that my father's first words to the doctor after finding
out my mother was pregnant were, "Can you get rid of it?" My mother would
tell me that after he had died, not realizing, of course, what it would
mean to me. When she understood how it had hurt me, she tried to explain
that he had only been afraid for her having a baby that late in her life.
But I took it as a sign of something I had suspected for years. My father,
though he may have learned to love me, would have preferred I hadn't been
born.
The pulsing of the monarch's wings was as regular as breath. "It's pretty,"
I said. My mother nodded. "In Mexico, people say the monarchs are the souls
of dead children lifting up to heaven." She bit down on her lip. "Listen
to me. What a thing to say. Do you hate your mother for saying that?"
My Grandma Martin had told me about my father's brother and sister, Owen
and Lola, who had died in their second summers. I shook my head. "It's
nice to go to heaven, isn't it?"
"Yes, it's nice," my mother told me, but I could tell from her sad smile
that she would be a long time forgiving herself for her comment, one that
had reminded both of us that sometimes children died.
Perhaps it saddened her most of all because she knew it was wrong to stand
by, silent, while my father whipped me. Or perhaps it grieved her because
she had lost the child in herself early in life, as soon as she was old
enough to help care for her brothers and sisters. She had become a woman
of duty and endurance, selfless and without need, at least none she was
willing to place before the obligation she felt toward her family. There
were eight of them: my grandfather and grandmother and the six children.
My mother, Beulah, was the oldest. Then came Jim and Homer and Gladys and
Anna and Harry.
They lived for a while on a farm south of Berryville, but my grandfather
couldn't keep up with the mortgage payments, and the bank foreclosed. His
name was Harrison Read, and I never knew him, because he died shortly after
I was born. In the photographs I have of him, he seems like a gentle man,
tall and thin but with a sad face and sloped shoulders, as if the burden
of his life and the poor choices he made in it had eventually worn him
down. The way I understand it, from stories various relatives have told,
he had a drinking problem and was prone, when drunk, to unseemly behavior.
More than once, he ended up in the Olney jail, arrested for public drunkenness,
and my Uncle Homer had to bail him out. Fortunately for all involved, my
grandfather was a sad drunk instead of a mean one, and if he could have
only given up liquor, which he eventually managed to do, he would have
lived a pleasant life, enjoying the Zane Grey novels he read aloud to his
children each evening, the pet raccoon he fed from a baby bottle, the St.
Louis Cardinals baseball games he listened to on the radio. I would gather
these facts about him much later, when as an adult, I would start to ask
my aunts and uncles for stories. When I was a child not old enough for
school, I spent the days with my Grandma Read. There was a library table
in her bedroom, and she forbade me from opening its drawer, an order I,
of course, disobeyed. Inside the drawer were two cigarette lighters, a
packet of pipe cleaners, a tin of Prince Albert tobacco, a deck of Bicycle
playing cards. These were my grandfather's last possessions, and my grandmother,
though she couldn't bring herself to throw them out, feared that if I handled
them, I would soak up whatever darkness had tainted him and brought him
to drink.
My mother had tried to save him. One day she found all the whiskey bottles
he had hid in the shed and set them on the front steps, hoping to shame
him into quitting his drinking, but as far as I know, her ploy didn't work.
He lost the farm, and for a while, he and my grandmother moved to the northern
part of the state and worked at the state hospital in Dixon. When they
came back, he leased the Berryville General Store and a house catty-corner
from it. My mother, after she had dismissed her pupils for the day, worked
in the store. I can imagine her slicing luncheon meat, weighing fruit on
the scale, testing the cream the farmers brought to sell, her attention
on making the proper measurement, the exact change, believing that she
was holding the world in balance, ensuring that my grandfather, who had
stopped drinking, had even become a member of the church, would continue
to live the decent, orderly life she had always wished for him. As a young
girl, she had taken care of her brothers and sisters; now she was safeguarding
her father and mother. She lived in their house, worked in their store,
convinced, I suspect, that her presence was necessary to their continued
good fortune. Surely she dreamed no life for herself, no husband or child,
until she met my father and was so overwhelmed with loneliness, she screwed
up her courage and decided to start a life with him.
He must have been as lonely as she, for he lived on the farm two miles
east of Berryville, caring for his old mother, who was nearly blind with
cataracts. His sisters, Lucille and Ruth, had married and left home and
started families. He was the one who stayed. I can imagine him coming in
from his chores to cook for my grandmother, to help her measure out her
medicines. I picture his hands, which I have seen only in photographs,
wielding a paring knife as he peels potatoes or delicately balances a medicine
dropper above my grandmother's cloudy eyes. I see him, after she has gone
to bed, listening to a Cardinals game on the radio, the volume turned low
so as not to wake her. He doodles on a Farm Bureau pamphlet, writes his
name over and over, the way someone might practice the name of his beloved.
Or if it's Saturday night, he puts on a clean shirt, tries to press his
best trousers, combs his hair with Wildroot tonic, and leaves for the Berryville
Store where he will help my mother carry milk cans into the storage locker,
willing to put up with the kidding he'll get later about making sure he's
old enough to woo a woman, all for her company. He knows the way as well
as he knows anything-the mile to the crossroads and the mile west to the
store. He likes to see his truck's headlights stretching their beams out
into the darkness, catching the glint of wire fences, whitewashing the
gravel roadbed, illuminating, finally, the metal Pepsi-Cola sign atop the
storefront. Sometimes he leaves the lights on a moment after he has parked
in front of the store, lets them shine through the window, until my mother,
at the cash register, turns, shades her eyes. Then he switches off the
lights so she can see he has finally come.
On Saturday nights, when my mother was home from the university, we drove
into Sumner, where we bought groceries, and my father loafed at the pool
hall or the barber shop, and my mother went to Harry Bartram's Beauty Salon,
where she had her hair done. I went with her and sat in the swing on the
front porch and read comic books until the light faded. Then I listened
to the Cardinals game on the radio Mr. Bartram kept playing inside. I waited
until my mother was finished, and then we walked uptown to find my father.
One night he came for us. I was sitting inside the beauty shop when I heard
his footsteps on the porch, saw his shadowy form fill the doorway. He opened
the screen door and stepped inside. "I've come to get you," he said to
my mother. "You and Lee."
She was slipping some money from her billfold to pay Mr. Bar1tram. "Oh,
we could have walked," she said. I imagine that she secretly enjoyed the
minutes we spent strolling together beneath the canopy of oak trees that
lined the street, neither of us with any obligation just then to my father.
"Not tonight," he said, and his voice was tight with worry. "There might
be trouble tonight."
"Trouble?" My mother patted her fresh hairdo. "What kind of trouble?"
"Bus Piper's uptown with a butcher knife. He's on a tear."
"Drunk again, I imagine," Mr. Bartram said.
"Drunk as a lord," said my father.
The story was this: Bus Piper, drunk, had taken exception to two teen-age
boys who had stopped to talk to some girls on the porch of a house across
from the barber shop. "Don't ask me why," my father said when we were in
our car. I sat in the back seat and listened to him tell this story in
a low voice. He told how Bus Piper had fetched a butcher knife from his
house and had used it to threaten the boys. Then he had gone up and down
Main Street, ranting and raving. "I wouldn't want you and Lee to meet up
with him," my father said. "He's a damn lunatic tonight."
I had never known my father as someone who would want to protect me, and
it was difficult to reconcile that image of him with the one I knew most
intimately: the angry father, his face twisted as he brought his belt down
across my skin. And what I felt, as we drove slowly through the night,
was not the peace of someone who suddenly finds himself in the company
of people who will save him but the terror of being exposed, the secret
life brought out into the open. I imagined Bus Piper out there in the darkness,
waving the butcher knife about, howling and screaming, and when I did,
I saw my father and me, recalled all the times we had gone crazy with rage.
"I want to go home," I said from the back seat. We had turned down Main
Street and were headed uptown to do our grocery shopping. We passed the
dark windows of the Sumner Press office, the marquee of the Idaho Theater,
the television store where a set in the window was playing. Normally there
would have been people parked in front, sitting on the hoods of their cars
to watch whatever program was on. The fact that they weren't made the town
seem dangerous to me, made whatever harmony my mother brought to us on
the weekends seem precarious. I thought of the raccoons and groundhogs
burrowing beneath our mangers, feeling their way through the darkness,
not knowing that the traps were there, the steel jaws waiting to spring
shut at the first wrong step. "I want to go home," I said again, but my
father was parking the car in front of Ferguson's Grocery, and my mother
was opening her pocketbook to find her shopping list.
"I'll just be a minute." She turned around and looked at me. "Lee, are
you coming with me, or are you staying here?"
My father answered for me. "He's staying here. If he goes, it'll take you
longer."
She opened the door, and at that moment, we heard a blast. Its echo went
on and on. People came out from the stores and stood on the sidewalk. I
saw a man lift his arm and point behind us, down the narrow side street
lined with two-story frame houses. I rose up on my knees and looked out
the back glass of our car. I could see the light from the street lamps
splintering through the trees, the shadows of the houses, porch lights
coming on. I heard dogs barking, a screen door slap shut.
My mother turned and looked at my father. She had the car door open. She
had one foot on the pavement outside. "Go inside the store," he told her.
"Take Lee and go inside." I knew then that what we had heard had been a
gunshot.
Men were running now past our car, running down the narrow street toward
the echo of the shot. "Go ahead," my father said, and my mother got out
of the car. She opened the back door and reached for me. I took her hand
and let her lead me quickly into Ferguson's Grocery. The clerks were standing
at the windows, their long white aprons tied around their necks. My mother
and I turned to look out the window and saw my father getting out of the
car. He started walking down the side street along with other men, following
those who had run.
My mother grabbed a wire shopping basket and started down the aisle. "Let's
see," she said, studying her shopping list, "what do we need for you and
your father?"
We were the only shoppers, and it felt strange to make our way up and down
the aisles, alone, as if we had accidently been locked in the store overnight.
Then customers started coming back into the store, and I heard fragments
of conversation: "Bus Piper," "his boy," "a 12-gauge," "both barrels."
It wasn't until later, when my father stopped at my Uncle Mick Green's
farm, that I understood exactly what had happened. My mother and I stayed
in the car while my father went to my uncle's door. I could hear them talking
softly in the night.
"Bus Piper's boy shot him," my father said.
"Kill him?" said my Uncle Mick.
"Point blank," my father told him. "Shot his head off."
I could hear the oil pumps squealing in my uncle's fields, could see the
bright flames of the gas flares.
"I suspect Bus asked for it." Uncle Mick leaned forward and spit a stream
of tobacco juice out into the yard. "He was a mean sonofabitch. Treated
those kids awful. Someone should have killed him years ago. How old is
that boy?"
"Old enough to fire both barrels of a 12-gauge. I expect they'll lock him
away for it."
"What you think about that?" my Uncle Mick said. My father glanced back
at our car then, and I imagined he was looking for me there in the dark.
What was he thinking? That there was too much of life ahead of us, too
much that could go wrong? Was he promising himself that, from then on,
he would be a better man? Or was he only checking to see whether I was
listening? He turned back to my uncle, leaned in close. "They ought to
give him a medal," he said in a fierce whisper, and in that moment, something
went out into the air and closed itself around my father and me. I imagined
Bus Piper's son, a boy I didn't know, and he became all alive. I knew his
terror, his rage. My father knew it, too. "A goddamn medal," he said again,
this time in a hiss as slow and as difficult as a last breath, words he
didn't mean for me to hear.
* Lee Martin is author of the story collection, "The Least You Need to
Know," (Sarabande Books, 1996) winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short
Fiction. "Traps" is part of the forthcoming memoir, "From Our House," to
be published this spring by Dutton. He teaches in the creative writing
program at the University of North Texas, where he also edits the American
Literary Review. |
