FIRST THINGS FIRST
1976
What I need you to understand first is that my father was a good man. He was not that father conjured up in mass-market paperbacks: that mad, cruel, belittling, wife-beating drunkard, dredged up from the basement of Fiction 101 to explain away the wounded protagonist’s maligned and fateful existence.
No. My father was a gentle, prim, fastidious man. Emotionally reserved at times, perhaps, though no more so than other men of his stripe who came of age after World War II. He was a barber who operated his business out of a single-chair shop. He wore his hair shorn close as suede nap; his side part as sharp as the edge of his gleaming straight razor. He smelled of hair tonic and talcum powder, and his hands were pale and soft and warm. He rose every Monday through Saturday to eat a breakfast of two eggs, sunny-side up, two slices of toasted Wonder Bread, and three strips of bacon, crisp, washed back with a piping-hotcup of Folgers and a tumbler of cold OJ from concentrate. Finished, he’d dab the corner of his mouth with a paper napkin and give a clear-eyedthank you, dear to my mother as he pushed back his chair and set to buffing his Thom McAns until their faux black leather shone like a shellacked beetle shell. He’d grab his steel lunch box, packed with two deviled-ham sandwiches and two dill pickles, venture out to his GMC stepside, and drive to work. He’d appear again at 6:00 p.m., when my mother had some casserole or loaf waiting. This was his routine, his life, Monday through Saturday. He never missed a day. He never once raised his voice or his hand to me or to my sister, and never, ever to my mother. Not that I remember, anyway.
What I do remember of my parents from that time is their affection for each other. It was genuine, gentle, pure, and, at times, for a young boy, embarrassing. Often in the evenings, after supper, my mother would curl up in my father’s lap as he relaxed in his easy chair before he settled in to read. She’d rest her head on his shoulder, touch his brow with her fingertips. Many times, too, when my mother was at the kitchen sink, my father would come to stand behind her, wrap his arms around her waist, rest his chin on her shoulder, and the two of them would sway in place to a tune only they heard.
I have pieced together enough to know that what happened on the day of the Incident was not done because he was a bad man. A bad father. It was done because . . . well, we’ll get to that. This isn’t some magic trick where the secret machinations are kept hidden. No. This is all about the reveal. The truth. And we will get to it. We will.
But first, let me set the scene that may lead you to believe that my father was a bad or troubled man, even while I assure you that he was not. My father was a good man, and he loved me.
Of this, I am almost certain.
FIREWORKS
My stomach felt rotted out from the cotton candy I’d hogged down at the Autumn Carnival the previous evening, and before I knew it, I was puking liquefied sugar on my third-grade classroom’s carpet, my guts feeling as scraped out as a Halloween pumpkin.
The nurse called my house, but my mother wasn’t there as she ought to have been, so the nurse sent me packing the five blocks home. That’s what they did back then: sent you packing.
When I arrived home, my father’s pickup truck sat idling in the driveway.
What do you want me to tell you? That as soon as I saw his truck, I sensed a corrosive dread, an implacable horror? I wish I could tell you that is how it was, that I stopped dead with fear, but I can’t. There’s a blank there. You’d think instead there would be a blank for what came next. But no. I seem to have been born without the DNA for self-preservation.
What I can tell you is that his truck idled in the driveway, its driver’s door left open as John Denver’s “Back Home Again” floated from inside the house, out the open front door, and across the yard. The front door being open should perhaps have triggered foreboding in me as well.
Then I was inside the living room. I don’t remember entering the house. Suddenly, I was just there. John Denver’s singing died, and the record player’s needle crackled and spat endlessly in its final groove.
“Dad,” I said, or at least, I think I said.
I crept down the hall, the skipping record needle a threadbare heartbeat, heard through a weak ham-radio signal from half a galaxy away: cssusshh, cssusshh, cssusshh.
The door to my parents’ bedroom stood open. Through it, I eyed him from behind, slouched on the edge of my parents’ bed, his back to me.
“Dad,” I said.
Something was wrong. Terribly. Irrevocably. I could sense it, smell it, hear it in the sinister silence. Terror sheared through me. My stomach lurched. I felt like I would vomit again, yet nothing remained inside me. My guts heaved anyway, a violent convulsion I thought might rend loose my aorta. The bedroom walls throbbed, and I listed, greasy with sickness, as if I’d stepped from a carnival ride and my body had not yet acclimated to gravity as the world spun on its cockeyed axis.
“Dad,” I whispered, my mouth dry as bone dust.
I edged toward his side of the bed.
I saw his feet, dangling above the floor like the feet of a little boy. I knew he was suffering. This fact was as plain as the shotgun propped against his knees and pointing under his chin.
“Dad,” I said, and reached out for him.
The shotgun went off.
I shut my eyes and stood disembodied in a soundless, senseless vacuum. Hot blood speckled my lips. I tasted its copper as I stood there with my eyes closed for an eternity, and then stood there for an eternity more. A part of me, that boy, still stands there and will stand there forever. Unmoving. Unfeeling. Unalive. We speak of zombies as the undead, but I discovered in that moment that the true zombies are unalive.
My ears rang from the blast—a high, eardrum-piercing whine, like that of a wet finger traced along the rim of a crystal glass. I peeled my eyelids open, their lashes gummed with blood. I could not look at him. Instead, I looked out the window at our street, where the autumn sun shone golden, and the trees swayed softly in the breeze, oblivious to my ruin.
I wanted to swallow the world whole. Anger boiled in me, and grief swelled like a tsunami out in the middle of the mindless Pacific, invisible to the innocents on shore, yet out there nonetheless, gathering intensity, blind and unfeeling and utterly unstoppable.
I lifted my eyes to the ceiling, to see scarlet fireworks that would have been spectacular had they not been made of gore.
I looked at the floor and saw it: that small square slip of paper, as white as sun-bleached bone, that would be the instrument of my eventual desolation.
“Oh,” I said. Or, I think I said. I don’t know, to be honest. But that’s what I hear in my head all these years later as I write this. After all, I was only eight. What do you recall with certainty from when you were eight? Anything? Anything at all? I might have been howling my throat ragged, for all I know.
Whatever horrors visited me that day, whatever disease was passed that infects my blood no matter the words I write to make sense of it, there is one thing that will trouble me forever about that day: the note.
I picked it up and read those eight words, the first evidence that made me believe that not all was as it seemed. I folded the note and slipped it into my pocket. Later, I would secret it away in a box in the rear of my closet, and not look at it again for nearly eight years. Even now, I don’t know why I kept it or hid it. I did not understand what it meant. Those eight words were as inscrutable as Sanskrit to me.
But later, after my father had been taken away in a silent ambulance, my mother asked me if there was a note, imploring me to tell the truth, as if she knew there was a note, I gazed at her unblinking, and I lied. No. No note.
Some instinct told me this was the right thing to say. The safe thing. Though I’d wish later that I’d said Yes. Here it is. Take it. Please. Just take the rotten, poisonous thing, and thrust it into her hand and let her deal with it and been rid of it forever. None of what followed would ever have happened if I’d given her the note, and she’d read those eight words for herself. But I didn’t.
And so, here we are.
IN MEMORIAM
My father’s closed casket sat balanced atop what I imagined was a solid marble altar concealed beneath a flow of white linen. My mother had not wanted me there, but I’d begged her, ground down her will until she’d succumbed. “Lydia stays with the sitter,” she’d said, speaking of my six-year-old sister.
In the viewing room, mourners stood in knots of three and four, stooping to whisper in each other’s ears, kissing cheeks, and squeezing each other’s hands. Their faces were shattered and eyes empty with sorrow even as another, more potent emotion that I could not describe tightened the corners of their mouths.
I was the sole child present, all but invisible to the adults. When I was spied, looks of pity and anguish darkened the faces of the attendees as they forced smiles and whispered what a brave boy I was.
Brave? Brave?
The mourners flocked around my mother, mumbled condolences, hugged her, and grazed their lips against her bloodless cheeks.
Mr. Kane, who had been my second-grade classroom teacher, stood at the casket, his palms placed flat on the lid and moving over it, as if searching for a secret seam into which he could force his fingertips. It was as if he wanted to pry open the lid and check for certain that my father’s corpse rested inside. Mr. Kane was my father’s friend, perhaps his only friend, as far as I knew. Sometimes, he came for dinner at our house with his wife. More recently, he came for dinner at our house without his wife. I always felt a dissociation when I saw him in our home. He seemed as out of context there as a frog in a snowstorm. On his visits he did not look or act like the Mr. Kane I knew, and my father called him Henry. The first time he entered our home and said to me, “Wayland, what’s shaking?” and roughed up my hair, I had no idea who he was, until my mom said, “Aren’t you going to say hello to Mr. Kane?” He would chortle and give me a high five, which he never did in school. At school he was staid in his pleated chinos, his starched collared shirt, his skinny ties, and his oval wire-rimmed eyeglasses. At our house the eyeglasses were gone, and he wore faded, torn jeans, and T-shirts that bore images of exploding zeppelins, Campbell’s soup cans, and dancing skeletons. The neat side part in his hair was now untamed curls that reminded me of pencil shavings. Somehow, his disheveled dress and garrulous manner in our home made me feel both embarrassed for him and disappointed in him. It seemed impossible that both versions of Mr. Kane could be real. One had to be phony. Which one, I did not know.
What I did know was that when he visited our house, Mr. Kane made my father laugh as no one else could. I’d seen my father slap him on the back and call him a son of a bitch in a way that I could only infer as a high compliment. My father liked Mr. Kane, and I believed that Mr. Kane liked my father.
At the casket, I stepped closer to Mr. Kane. Squat white candles ringed the coffin, their yellow flames jigging in a draft leaking through the funeral home’s ancient windows. A tear dripped from Mr. Kane’s nose and extinguished a candle flame with a hiss. A tendril of smoke twisted into the air, followed by a whiff of cinder and paraffin. I wondered whether Mr. Kane was crying for my father or for me, because he had been the first person to show up at our house after my mother found me in the driveway all but comatose, my face painted with blood. Mr. Kane had nearly crashed his Datsun into the fire hydrant before leaping out and ushering me into the privacy of the backyard, where he used the garden hose and his handkerchief to try to wash the blood from my face as my mother dealt with the horror inside our house.
Now, as I stood beside Mr. Kane at the casket, I noted that his dark suit jacket was stretched tight over his soft frame, the fabric straining so much at the gut, shoulder, and elbows that I thought it might burst. His trousers, which were black and did not match his navy-blue jacket in the least, fell an inch short of his loafers, exposing white socks.
As he turned to permit other mourners to pay their respects, Mr. Kane stared at me, his emotionless face contradicting his tears. I assumed that his lack of emotion was due to the same numbness that made every face appear dead under that pallid light.
When he finally registered my presence, Mr. Kane whispered in my ear, his hot breath sour and yeasty, “I’m sorry. For everything.” He found his way through the crowd to the exit, not daring to meet my mother’s eye.
I skirted around the casket and saw through a gap in the linen that it was not situated atop a marble altar, but perched on a cold, skeletal metal scaffolding that looked so cheap and flimsy, I feared it would collapse if I breathed too hard on it.
As I stood there, worried that the casket might crash down on me, a memory from the previous week crashed down on me instead.
Every third Wednesday I had walked to my father’s barbershop for a trim, just before he closed shop at five thirty.
My father preferred to give me a haircut when there were no customers in the place—men from town, whose faces were dimly familiar to me, yet I didn’t know their names. Men who bragged about new lawn mowers and the ten bucks they’d won at the Tuesday-night card game. Men who quipped, “Is that stubble on the boy’s chin, or chocolate milk?” Or, “Give the boy a slather of aftershave to lure in the lady bees.”
“Enough,” my father would say. “The boy’s only eight.” And the men would clam up.
Although he never raised his voice, his tone was authoritative. And it was something more too, something that rubbed against the mild man I knew. The way he spoke advised caution. It insinuated a history between my father and the other men—perhaps something that had occurred in the past and established him as the alpha male, ...
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