by Jake Hinkson
The cruiser hung back. I kept staring at it in the rearview, but Sadie didn’t seem worried about it. “I know what I know,” she said.
“What?”
“I know what I know. I don’t need someone to tell me what to think.”
“Fine. You don’t hear me saying you have to think anything. I don’t care.”
“But you’re crapping all over it like I’m stupid. And I’m not. I just know what I know. I feel Jesus in my heart.”
“Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay, good for you. You feel Jesus in your heart.”
“You don’t think that means anything?”
“I didn’t say that. I don’t know what it means. It sounds good in songs and stuff but—”
“Okay, now you’re really starting to piss me off. I feel the lord in my heart. I feel him in my heart.”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said. “There’s nothing magical about the heart. It’s just a wad of tissue. When they bury me, a maggot’s gonna eat my heart for dinner and shit it out his ass.”
She had both hands together at the top of the steering wheel, and she gripped it like it was about to come off. “You can scoff all you want, but I know what I feel in my heart.”
“Hey, cool. Good for you.”
Before I could say anything about it she said, “I’d be dead if it wasn’t for Jesus. Did you know that? I had a bottle of Drano in my hands. I was standing in my kitchen, just as sober as you please, and I thought I should just drink it. So I did. I drank it with a bottle of Evan Williams. Passed out. And while I was passed out and dying on my kitchen floor I was granted a vision. I saw all these versions of myself standing in a row, side by side. Me at five years old. Me at ten years old, fifteen, twenty, thirty and so on. And we were all crying. Jesus walked up and kissed each one of us on the forehead. He healed each one of us. I woke up and went to the doctor and got my stomach pumped.”
I scratched my head and tried to think of something to say.
“That shut you up,” she said.
“Look,” I said. “Let’s just drop it. If your freaky Drano trip means something to you, then—”
She hit me in the face with her free hand and the car lurched over the right and hit gravel. She pulled it back on the road.
It was all I could do not to slug her. “What the fuck, Sadie?”
She glared at me like she was about to cut my throat. “I don’t let any man talk to me that way. My whole life has been one long slog through men’s shit. Don’t you sit there and blaspheme my vision.”
My face stung and I felt all the blood in my body rush to my face. My fists were so tight they hurt. “Listen to me, you cunt. You ever hit me again, I’ll fucking kill you.”
Sadie didn’t say or do anything for about ten seconds. Then she swung at me again. I pulled out of the way and punched her in the side of the head. She jerked the wheel and hit the brakes. A tire popped and rubber thumped against the pavement. We skidded off the road and down into the watery fields of rice, splashing through mud and plants. When we slammed to a stop, the pots in the back hit the floor, and rings and necklaces and cash spilled all over the floorboards.
We sat there blinking as the siren behind us grew louder.
“Oh no,” I said. “Oh fuck.”
Sadie took a deep breath and leaned back against the seat. She closed her eyes.
“Are you praying?” I yelled.
The cruiser zoomed up on the road behind us. The door flung open.
“No,” she said, “but that’s a good idea.”
O UR VIOLENCE
In June, the heat in Arkansas turns liquid. It seemed to pour in through the windows of my father’s little truck as we bumped down a dirt road a few miles outside of town. My brother was squeezed between my father and me, and when Dad pulled over and spread his topographical map across the steering wheel, Russell elbowed me to get out. When I didn’t move, he jabbed me harder. Dad threw a glare at us. Then he tapped his map with a thick finger. “This is it,” he said. He and I climbed out, but Russell just lay across the bench seat and thumbed through an issue of Captain America.
Dad and I measured off the first lot. He tied some orange tape around a tree and called, “Russ, that’s your five acres.”
I looked over at Russell. His face was hidden behind the cover of a red, white, and blue superhero bashing in the head of a laser-spewing robot. Russell rolled up the comic and slid out of the truck. Although I was a year older than my brother, he was my exact size. He pointed at the trees. “Over there?”
“Yep,” Dad said. “This is the dividing line. Gary’s is in the middle here, and five acres that way mine begins.” Towering above us, elms and oaks spread out, their branches thick and bent toward the sky like arms waiting to drop. Here and there were a few thin pines.
Russell brushed a gnat from his small, blue eyes, and asked Dad, “What’re you gonna do with yours?”
“I’m gonna build a house in another year or so,” Dad said. He pulled off his camouflage hunting cap and wiped the sweat from his face with his forearm. “We’ll build y’all houses here someday, if you want. Or you can sell it or build something else. Whatever you decide to do with it.” Behind him, the sun was low in the trees, and dark spots of red light fell across our faces like specks of blood, and he turned from us and shrugged, slipping his cap back on. He stopped at his truck and paused at the map spread across the hood like a holy text laid across an altar. Russell stood next to him and nodded, looking around as if already envisioning what he would do with his share of the land.
As we were getting ready to leave, and the sun was gone from the sky, but the heat of the day still clung to us like another layer of clothing, Russell and I began to fight over who would sit next to the window. It was a fight we almost always had and one that Russell always lost. I punched him hard in the arm a couple of times to force him to move to the middle of the truck.
Russell would not yield.
“Russell,” Dad sighed, “move over and let your brother in.”
Russell shook his head. “No,” he said. He stared at me when he said it, but I watched Dad.
He scowled and I stepped back. Gritting his teeth, he reached over and slapped Russell’s ear. It made a clapping sound, and now the blackened woods behind me seemed loud with frogs and crickets. Russell’s eyes turned moist, and his hand jerked up to his ear.
“Move,” Dad grunted and Russell slid close to him as I eased in. Russell looked tiny and thin next to Dad, like a shadow with color. Dad glared down at him. “You need to learn to listen and keep your mouth shut.” Holding his ear, trying not to cry, Russell nodded quickly.
“Yes sir.”
Dad leaned over and thumped me hard on the ear with his middle finger. “You leave your brother alone.”
Not rubbing my ear, I nodded. Dad started the truck and Russell drug out his comic book. He leaned in my direction as we rode back home, but as Dad tore down the rut-filled road we all bumped together, the silence between us drowned out by the tires and scattering rocks.
***
Russell and I didn’t talk much about our land in the years that followed. As we broke into our teenage years, we cared less and less about it, but for Dad it was different. While teaching a boys’ Sunday School class and working six days a week wiring buildings, he still found the time to clear his land and plan his house. Had my mother been alive to share his joy, it would have been complete. When she died of breast cancer, Russell and I were still very young. It had been just the three of us ever since.
I know that for Dad the land and the house were a culmination of his life’s labor. Before we had even cleared the land for the house, he would drive out there after work and walk it in the waning hours of daylight, just thinking, planning and, I think, rejoicing in his blessing. His work, felt in the calluses on his hands, and in the joints of his shoulders and knees, had resulted, finally, in the trees and dirt and grass that spread out be
fore him. He knew that to put a house on it would require even more work. Russell and I knew it too.
We worked a lot for him in those days. Dad was never a baseball-in-the-yard sort of father. Sometimes, when we were younger, he’d wrestle with us in the den, but mostly he took us to work. We grew up holding hammers.
Of the two of us, Russell was the prodigy. He could work like Dad. He moved like him, thought along with him so that Dad never had to ask for a tool without it already being in my brother’s hand.
I could do the work okay, I suppose, but even then, in my early teens, I always had my mind on something Brother Charles had said in his sermon the Sunday before. This preoccupation caused my work, more often than not, to suffer. And yet, to my best recollection, my father was lenient with my mistakes. He seemed happy when I’d ask him a theological question he didn’t know the answer to, and he would refer many of my inquires to Brother Charles. Dad never seemed to think much of himself as a spiritual authority, but I could tell that, in some way, it made him proud to think that I might someday be one. He regarded my ineptitude at work as an indication, I think, that I was bound for something more important.
When it came to Russell, however, he was far less forgiving.
“Get your head outta your ass,” he’d snap. Most of the time Russell would only stare down at his mistake, waiting for Dad to leave so he could cuss his own stupidity. But sometimes he wouldn’t contain himself so well, and he’d back talk or sigh as if he were bored. Our father came down hard on these lapses in judgment, and Russell would end up on the floor or backed against a wall, our father shouting down at him and kicking him in the thighs.
The year I was seventeen, Russell tried out for the football team. I was in choir and, by that time, heavily involved with the youth group at church, but I was excited for Russell. Neither of us had ever been very interested in sports before, but Russell’s sudden enthusiasm seemed deeply borne and he threw himself fully into the summer training.
In preparation for the tryouts, he and his friends lifted weights in our backyard. They ran miles in the warm, yellow mornings and slammed into each other in our backyard. Soon, definition showed on Russell’s chest and arms. He worked all summer long, exerting a self-control and dedication that I’d never seen him summon before.
Dad didn’t seem to notice Russell’s new interest very much. After years of wanting to start his own business, he had finally quit his job and done it. He bought all the supplies he knew he would need and got business cards bearing his name underlined with a little lightning bolt. Russell and I had to begin answering the phone, “Phillip Doan Electricity. May I help you?”
About that time my brother became ill and was in bed for a few days. I remember this because his football tryouts were fast approaching and he missed a week of practices. I also remember this because it occurred during Dad’s transition between jobs, so he was at home and cared for Russell that week. I passed by Russell’s room one afternoon and Dad was placing a cool, wet cloth on my brother’s forehead. As my father turned to leave, Russell closed his eyes and smiled. Dad had always been a good caregiver, cleaning sheets, bringing books or movies, and making healthy meals while you slept. His patience with us when we were sick seemed endless, I think, because he experienced our ill health as an echo of our mother’s long fight with cancer. I can remember as a small boy his great, rough hand resting on my smooth forehead, hot with fever, and the soothing, reassuring shiver that would sweep over me at his concerned touch. I know Russell felt that shiver as well.
In many ways, these moments of my father’s tenderness were the doors that opened our faith to me. I have never had trouble believing that God is a God of love.
In the same way, though, Dad’s rage worked toward another end. Though my run-ins with him were far fewer than Russell’s, I have known the fear of his descending wrath as well. The sheer physical strength of the man was overwhelming when he was angry. He seemed to tower over you, like Jonathan Edward’s angry God, and whether or not you felt you deserved the punishment you paid homage to his sovereignty with your fear. In those moments, everything in the universe disappeared except for your transgressions and his justice. Unlike many people, I’ve never had trouble reconciling that the God of love is also the God of Hell.
We saw a lot of that side of him during that year. His new business very often kept him working seven days a week, and he seemed to make less money the more he worked. Sometimes he had to take side jobs mending roofs or installing insulation for people at church. He got home some nights at eleven or twelve and would leave before we woke up for school the next morning. Throughout the school year, we had to help him on jobs. We’d walk out of the doors at school, backpacks slung over our shoulders, only to find Dad’s truck idling in the circle driveway. Russell would always groan. He didn’t complain, of course, but he began to work sloppily and this was the time of his worst clashes with our father.
One humid, late summer day, we were installing the wiring in a big, unfinished house in the middle of town. It was one of the first jobs my dad had been contracted for since beginning his business and we were his only help. Despite the fact that the windows of the house were open, the noonday heat was dreadful. We were standing in what would be the master bedroom and the air was like a pot of warm water. All three of us were covered with sawdust and sweat, and Dad chewed us out for putting the reciprocals too low on the wall. He pushed his cap back and said, “They come in here to Sheetrock in a minute, and they’re gonna cut too low cause you got the recep boxes to the damn floor.”
Russell’s face was wet and red. He put his hands on his hips and jutted his jaw and looked out the window. A tremor went through my hand.
“You listening?” Dad barked. “They’re gonna cut ’em too low.”
“Well, hot damn,” Russell said in a dull voice, “we wouldn’t want that.”
Dad’s lips jerked back and his teeth ground as if he were lifting something heavy. He grabbed Russell and flung him into the wooden skeleton of an interior wall. Then he slapped him twice. The first slap twisted Russell’s cap around and shook the skeletal wall. My brother’s face was red and pinched. With the second slap, Russell’s cap came off and hit me in the thigh. I backed up against an unplugged table saw. Russell covered his face with shaking hands.
Dad swatted them away and yelled, “You think this shit’s funny, boy?”
Then he stepped back. Sweat fell from his flushed face, and he rubbed his eyes. Then he avoided my sheepish stare as he stomped out of the room.
The front door slammed, and Russell dusted some yellow curls of sawdust from his jeans. He regarded his cap on the floor for a second, but didn’t move to pick it up.
I tried to think of something to say, but I was mad at him for some reason. Finally, I walked over to the recep box and pried it loose with the nail claw on my hammer. “’Nother couple inches?” I asked.
Russell picked up his cap and put it on. “Yeah,” he said, his blue eyes hot and small. He didn’t speak or look at me again as we reapplied the boxes. I knew why.
The physical pain of a whipping is momentary, like a burst of light that swells and fades away, but the embarrassment lasts far longer. The embarrassment, rather than the pain, is the lesson you learn. It is what you come to fear the most. Russell absorbed the beating as if it meant nothing to him because denial was the only weapon left to him.
When Dad came back, we had fixed the boxes. He came in, glancing about the room as if thinking about something else. Russell stood off in the corner, not looking at either of us, and spooled some black cord onto a heavy roll. A few minutes later Dad suggested we break for lunch. We loaded our equipment and went for burgers and cokes.
***
Russell did not make the football team that summer. He was strong but he was slow and unfocused in plays. I think that had he tried out any other year, he would have made the cut, but that particular team went to the state playoffs that year, a feat that our school had never pull
ed off before.
That disappointment changed something in him. He became more distant, less involved in school and church. His friends changed. The meager ambitions of his football crowd were replaced with the non-existent priorities of a new group of boys. They weren’t bad kids, really. They weren’t especially loud or obnoxious. They were just bored. They were lazy and disconnected and Russell didn’t so much join them, as much as he flowed into them, as if his stream had simply carried him into a larger body. I would come home my senior year, and they’d be strewn all over our living room watching television, or playing video games. Occasionally, Russell would coerce one of these guys into suffering through church with him, and together they’d stumble out after services, glassy-eyed and yawning.
At my graduation, Russell and Dad came up to me on the football field. The sun was gone from the evening sky, and all that remained of it were dark red slashes on the horizon. My brother shook my hand like he was a perspective employer and smiled. “Good job, man,” he said.
“Yeah, nice hat too,” Dad said, nudging him. They laughed at me for being too uptight to throw my hat, and I warmed to their ridicule.
At the end of that summer I moved to Virginia to attend college. Russell graduated the following summer, but he stayed in town. Dad had hoped that Russell would come to work for him after graduation, but instead Russell went to work loading trucks for Walmart and moved in with a couple of his friends. He bought a truck he couldn’t afford and spent the weekends riding around town and getting drunk.
This same period was a time of great transition for my father. He moved into a much more contented phase of his life, just as Russell and I were leaving. By this time his business was doing well, and he had a full-time assistant to help him. He finally built and moved into a new house out on his five acres. He seemed calmer, more cheerful and more thoughtful. Gray appeared at his temples as he passed his forty-fifth birthday, and he was at church more and more often, sitting on committee meetings and going out on visitations. When we spoke, more and more, the conversations turned toward the church.