Burn Down the Ground

by Kambri Crews

“That what?” I pressed.

  Mom swallowed and sniffled before squeaking out her next words. “I said that you were traumatized. I started to cry, so they had to stop for a minute while I tried to catch my breath.” Mom gulped and gasped as though she was in a live-action role play of the trial.

  “It’s okay, Mom, take your time.” I wished I had gone after all. It was selfish of me to ask her to do this alone. She and I had been through it together then. Why not now? I felt like my family had abandoned me, and now I was doing the same to her.

  Mom inhaled deeply several times before continuing, and I forced back the golf-ball-sized lump in my throat. “I said you were traumatized, and your daddy covered his mouth like he was trying to control his emotions, so I know it bothered him to hear it. I told them he was a good father and a good provider and real talented at construction. I ended up crying and crying after I got off the stand, but not in front of the jury—outside the courtroom. Do you think he’ll have to go to a regular jail?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because he’s deaf, do you think he’ll go to a regular prison?”

  “He tried to kill someone.”

  “I hope not,” she said, preoccupied with her own train of thought. “There are too many predators in there.”

  Dad won’t even hear them coming.

  I shuddered. The thought was too much to bear.

  I heard Greg barreling down the hallway, snapping me out of my spiraling self-pity. His voice got closer as he asked an equally sharp-dressed, high-priced attorney, “Can you make a meeting at four o’clock?”

  “Can’t. My son is starting a T-ball league today.”

  “Good,” Greg quickly retorted. “Now you’ll find out if he’s gay.”

  Greg could always count on me for a reaction to one of his zingers. Instead I kept my head down and scribbled on my shopping list: Kleenex for desk. A napkin from the deli does not make a good tissue.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Greg asked, slightly annoyed that I was ignoring him.

  I put on a blasé face and shuffled papers as I told him, “My dad was just sentenced.” Greg was one of the few people I had confided in about my father.

  “Oh,” he said as he sized up my grim look. “Come on, I’m hungry; let’s get lunch.” I was a regular lunch companion for Greg. I always joined him and his two partners or a client. He headed to the elevator without asking them, but I didn’t balk; I grabbed my purse and trailed after him. We weaved through the horde of tourists in the Channel Gardens and passed the gleaming golden Prometheus statue that lorded over the iconic skating rink outside our offices. I blinked back tears, which became easier with the fresh air and sunshine, but that damned lump in my throat was lingering.

  We arrived at Joseph’s Citarella, a fancy restaurant next to Radio City Music Hall. “I’ve been meaning to check this place out,” Greg stated, and quickly secured us a table for two by a window. The menu was mostly seafood, prepared with words I couldn’t decipher or pronounce, all listed at exorbitant prices; my eyes crossed. Growing up, the only fish I ever ate we had caught by ourselves or was prepared by Long John Silver’s and doused in malt vinegar. Catfish and perch deep-fried over a campfire I can handle, but what the heck is kanpachi or skate or fluke? My mind wandered. I thought about how Dad showed me how to eat fish without choking on a bone and used his favorite pocketknife to deftly shave corn off the cob in a way that kept the kernels attached in perfect little rows.

  I wonder if that’s the knife he used to stab Helen?

  I sighed pitifully and Greg swooped in to take over. He was not opposed to a scene; he just wasn’t used to not being the center of it.

  “I’m going to order for you. She’ll have the tuna steak medium rare,” he instructed the waitress. He looked back at me and said, “You like meat, so I know you’ll like this. You should order it rare, but since you’ve never had it before we’ll start you out gently.” He rolled up his pant leg and jabbed himself in the thigh with a shot of insulin.

  I was skeptical. Mom used to make a tuna casserole with cans of Starkist tuna and the smell of it baking made our trailer reek and my gag reflex go into overdrive. Now somebody wants to charge thirty dollars for a lunch of cooked tuna? At least Greg was paying, and I was grown-up enough to know how to pretend to enjoy something.

  Greg was right about the fish. I really liked tuna steak and it was nothing like baked Starkist. We ate in relative silence. The silence may have made Greg uncomfortable, but I was too busy thinking about Dad and wishing I were Greg’s daughter instead. He had put his girls through college, helped pay their rent, and had gotten them out of jams. Maybe Greg would adopt me.

  I’m a good daughter.

  “So, how long did he get?”

  “The maximum,” I muttered. “Twenty years.”

  “That long, huh? How old is he?”

  “Fifty-five. He’s gonna die in there.” I chewed on the inside corner of my lip to stop myself from crying and stared at a sesame seed I rolled between my fingers. If I didn’t look Greg in the eye, none of this would be real.

  “Yeah, maybe or maybe not.”

  “He drank and smoked pot his whole life, he snorted crank; he’s not exactly the picture of good health. Let’s be real. My dad … is gonna die … in jail.”

  Greg took a big bite of tuna and smacked, “Yeah, well, he’s not dead yet. And, hey, at least now you’ll know where to find him.” Greg shoved another forkful of meat into his mouth and tacked on matter-of-factly, “He’s lucky he’s got you.”

  NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH

  On a beautiful summer day in 2002, not long after Dad’s assault on Helen, I sat perched on Greg’s window ledge peering down to the street below. The bagpipes wailed in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but they weren’t part of any annual parade. Instead, countless men and women in dress blues filled the street paying respect to someone who had died on September 11. This had become a near daily occurrence over the last year, a constant, palpable reminder of the attack. I remembered walking alone across the 59th Street Bridge that day in 2001. The acrid smoke rose from the heap that loomed to the south.

  For every funeral service, I found myself drawn to the same window ledge and leaned my head against the glass. As I listened to the sad strains of “Going Home,” I wondered which person was finally being honored.

  I wished I could swap Dad with the stranger in the casket.

  Dad will grow old and die in jail and nothing good will ever come of his life. No one would know him as he was or care to know him as he is. He will always be flawed in a stranger’s eyes; not worth anyone’s compassion or pity or love; earning his dank cell devoid of warmth and filled with pain and suffering.

  The heralded stranger may have been flawed; hell, maybe he was even a convict who had served his time, but he was now a victim. Innocent, unsuspecting, and undeserving of what lay ahead that September day. His family deserved great sympathy for their loss.

  If Dad could switch places with someone who died that day, that someone could go on and lead their life as flawed as they wanted it to be. I fantasized that they were young and vibrant and would be able to hear music and sing the way Dad always wanted; they were loved unconditionally instead of disowned by their whole family and they had a future and life worth living. Then, if anyone asked about Dad, they would not care about his flaws; they would only hear that I had sacrificed him unwillingly. Dad would somehow be worthy of their respect without reservation and I wouldn’t reject their sympathy.

  “Thank you,” I’d say. “He was a lot of fun. I’m sure he’s listening to Elvis in Heaven right now, where they say the Deaf shall hear again.”

  The day I received word of Dad’s twenty-year sentence, I returned to my apartment after work, ran to the bathroom, stripped off my clothes, and collapsed into a heap in the bathtub. I lay there as scorching hot water pelted me, hoping it could burn each layer of shame and grief from my skin. I sobbed and gasped for air, anguished at the t
hought of my father behind bars alone and loathed, his life wasted and reviled.

  I grieved, I presume, as one might for a father who had unexpectedly died without saying goodbye. A father who had been unnaturally stripped away in a swift, deadly blow, leaving his family to wonder what had been the last words said. When was the last “I love you” and had they meant it?

  This was my father’s due, but I was devastated. Despite everything, I loved him. Then I received a letter. It was from Dad and was filled with rage. Dad described fighting with other inmates. He was bitter with the system, asserting his innocence and complaining about everything. He didn’t think he should be in jail. I thought back to my lunch with Greg and his take on things as he munched on tuna. “Hey, at least now you’ll know where to find him.”

  So, I wrote back. Other than an infrequent note from David, I was the only one who did. I thought that maybe by writing to him, he wouldn’t be so angry or fighting so much. But his letters weren’t cutting to the heart of the matter: Why couldn’t he take responsibility for his violence? How did one child of ten become the blackest of sheep? I asked myself over and over. Just how could someone with so much charm and talent fall so far?

  Over the course of several phone calls with Mom, I grilled her for the uncensored answers. I knew that with Dad in jail she no longer had to worry about breaking social mores by bashing her ex-husband to their daughter. There was no more reputation to protect; nothing more to fear. It was time for the truth.

  “Do you remember the time Dad threw your necklace into the bonfire and we had to sift through the dirt like we were panning for gold?”

  “Yes.” Mom seemed leery of where this conversation was headed.

  “What were y’all fighting about? What made him throw it?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember, Kambri. It was usually the same thing over and over. Your daddy would drink too much and start accusing me of cheating on him. He was so suspicious.”

  From Dad’s letters, I knew what she meant without her needing to elaborate. His insecurity about being born deaf exacerbated his paranoia. He always feared that people were talking about him or keeping secrets.

  “If we were at an event,” Mom continued, “he might come by and squeeze my arm so tight to let me know, ‘I’m watching. Be careful what you do.’ I always had bruises that were hidden. There was another time when my mother and father, the Sloans, Aunt Carly and Uncle Doug, and your cousins were all visiting from Oklahoma. We used the leftover logs from the cabin to make big bonfires. We would sit around and talk and have such a good time. This year everything went berserk.

  “We had a few drinks, then all of a sudden your daddy just went crazy. He accused me of cheating on him and grabbed me by my neck and broke my necklace. All hell broke loose.

  “My daddy and your uncle Doug tried to stop him but he was too strong. I fell to the ground to look for my chain. I didn’t know this until afterward but your uncle saw your daddy was aiming to stomp my head with his cowboy boot. Just as he swung his leg, Doug intervened and stopped your father’s boot with his own foot. Doug actually saved my life!”

  My grandparents were there? My aunt and uncle, too? They witnessed something as frightening as the heel of a cowboy boot coming within an inch of Mom’s skull, and yet I never knew a thing about it.

  “My God, Mom! Why didn’t anyone do anything?”

  “Everyone was upset. Carly and Doug left for home the next day. Carly said she never wanted to be around if your father was there. He was always mean to her and she was tired of it! The next day he told everyone how sorry he was and he really meant it. You could see that he was really ashamed of himself. My parents stayed to make sure things had cooled down. I should have left and gone home with my parents, but I didn’t. Why didn’t I? I don’t know.”

  So he just got away with it.

  I thought about my grandfather and how he had convinced my mother she didn’t need to go to college. Getting married, raising children, and helping her family were her purpose in life. I wonder if he carried guilt or if he figured working through these family issues was just a fact of life.

  “That time you had a black eye, you told me you slipped and fell on the ice: I’m guessing that was a lie.”

  “Yep,” Mom said matter-of-factly. “Your daddy did that to me, too.”

  I had known Mom’s excuse sounded odd, but I was just a ten-year-old girl. When she said she slipped on the ice, I had wanted to believe her.

  “I went to work and people asked me what had happened,” Mom recalled. “I told them I fell and hit my face on the steps. Some came right out and asked, ‘Are you sure it wasn’t your husband?’ ”

  She had told them the same lie as me, but they weren’t naïve like I was. What’s more, they had witnessed Dad’s predatory behavior before.

  “There was a time a few of us were working late. Your daddy came strolling in, acting like he was Mr. Big Shot. When I think back, he was alerting the guys there that I was his and to stay away from me. Later a few people would ask me, ‘Are you okay? Everything good at home?’ I never let anyone know what was happening in my marriage, but I guess they could tell.”

  After years of keeping up appearances, Mom was skilled in self-delusion.

  “When your father and I first got divorced, he started dating a cute young blond deaf girl that I always saw him teasing and flirting with at the Deaf club in Dallas. One night at the Deaf club she came up to me with a very distressed look on her face. She asked me if your daddy had ever hurt me. I told her, ‘No. Never.’ She was really upset and asked again, ‘Really? He never threatened you or anything?’ She said your daddy had been hurting her. That he would grab her by her hair and shove her around. He was really scaring her, but I told her, ‘No, he never did anything like that to me before.’ I didn’t want the Deaf to know. I was too proud, I guess.

  “But I also lied out of fear because I just knew that your father would come after me and threaten me again. I hoped the girl knew I wasn’t being honest. After that he only dated hearing women because the Deaf knew what kind of a man he was and wanted no part of him.”

  After hearing about Mom’s volatile marriage, I began searching through public records for Dad’s name. The list of discoveries of his past offenses grew so long that I stopped being surprised. My father was a felon, a petty criminal, and a predatory domestic abuser.

  He was also a serial adulterer. Mom said the first time Dad cheated on her, David was only six months old. Forty years later, she still got so choked up thinking about it that she was barely able to tell me the story. They were newlyweds with a baby. It was the late 1960s, and failed marriages were stigmatized, symbols of shame and failure. She didn’t want to be a divorced, single mom, so she took him back.

  “I knew your daddy was still messing around, so when I found a woman’s coat in the back of our car I took it inside. I went through the pockets and—hey, do you remember my jade ring?”

  “Sure I do,” I said. I had always loved Mom’s jewelry. While she and Dad were out dancing, I rooted through her closet and played dress-up with her clothes, high heels, and rings. Mom was allergic to anything but real gold, so I knew everything I was touching was genuine, not to be trifled with. The jade ring was always one of my favorites. It was bold. Its oversized green face demanded attention. “Look at me!”

  “Well, I rifled through the coat and that jade ring was in one of the pockets, so I snatched it.”

  That beautiful jade ring I had admired all those years was stolen from one of Dad’s tramps?

  “Your daddy came home and asked if I knew what happened to the coat that had been in the car. I smiled and said it was hanging in the closet. He disappeared for a second, then came back looking real anxious and asked, ‘Where is the ring?’ I told him I took it and he said, ‘No, it’s not yours. I need to give it back.’ I told him, ‘No! It’s my ring now!’ ”

  She had challenged Dad’s audacity at wondering about his lover’s coat and she had w
on. The jade ring was her trophy.

  “I should have made him buy me something for every woman he had an affair with. Wow, the jewelry I could have had!”

  Mom and I cried and laughed and cried again as we recounted old stories about life with Dad on Boars Head, focusing on the good times. We recalled fond memories of movie nights at the Sloans’, trips to Galveston, developing our land on Boars Head from scratch, building that bridge, how he could tell a story so funny your sides ached from laughing.

  I was feeling better about the situation, that my dad wasn’t pure evil. Even Mom, who had every right to string him up by his balls, could still see some good in him. I joked, “At least Dad only tried to kill you and Helen and didn’t actually kill somebody.”

  “Well,” Mom said. “That we know of …”

  My heart stopped. “Ummm, what do you mean ‘that we know of’?”

  “Well …” Mom sighed. “There was the time he wrecked the Thunderbird. He had disappeared for a week and came home with the Thunderbird stinking to high heaven.”

  “I hit a deer,” he had explained. I remembered the incident. I had used the accident in my excuse to keep Ken, my co-worker at Showbiz, from seeing our dreadfully ugly car. Mom hadn’t bought it. We were in the city by then and the stench of death on the car wasn’t like anything she had gotten a whiff of before. “That smell. I’ll never forget it.

  “Just a few weeks later, he went out drinking at the Deaf club and I stayed home. I was asleep in bed when I felt the vibration of the garage door opening and shutting, but your father didn’t come to bed, so I went to check on him. I opened the garage door and your dad was just covered in blood, scrubbing the car clean. I said, ‘Oh my God! Are you okay? What happened?’

  “He said he broadsided the whole left side of the Thunderbird on a concrete divider on Airport Freeway while trying to avoid an accident on his way home from the Deaf club. A woman in another car was hurt and he stopped to help her. That’s how he explained why he had blood all over him and the car was wrecked.”