His eyes shifted back and forth, taking in the scene: Me, sitting on the floor surrounded by the toys his work as a carpenter’s assistant had bought. It was as if a timer in his head had gone off without warning and now we were moving briskly to the next phase of my life without delay or ceremony. “Every day I come home from work you’re playin’. It seems all you do is play!”
“I’m nine years old,” I said. My army of soldiers surrounded me, but toys were no defense. I had placed pillows on the floor for hills and draped a blanket over them. I deployed my forces across the wool terrain, each green plastic figure carefully placed. My father kicked the blanket and my troops went flying and the small unnamed, unspoken something I felt for him just because he was my father? That drained away.
“Put away the toys and pack,” he said, dismissing my choking protests with the wave of a calloused hand. He stalked up the stairs to the kitchen. I heard the empty clang of a pot thrown into the sink. “This week we’re going to the farm.” Without a sound my mother scurried to pack.
I gritted my teeth and my eyes felt big, boiling with hot water. “Mom and me are toy soldiers, too,” I said, but not loud enough for anyone to hear. “Just toy soldiers.”
The trees along the coastline turned their spines to the cold, salty onslaught, their spindly limbs pointing inland. The wind and the sea molded their forms into skeletons miming fear and anguish. The trees seemed to be reaching for us as we sped past. I rode in the car’s deep back seat glimpsing the trees from a well with brown vinyl walls.
“I don’t want to see Grampa!”
“Shut up and keep digging!” My parents said in unison. They cackled like crows over an old joke that never failed to amuse them. Bored and car sick, I tried to lure them out of the spell of the car radio — “Old-time radio and golden oldies!” — which seemed to make them drift away.
“Why does Grampa live on Slocum Island?”
“It’s where he used to work,” Mom said, not looking back at me. “His old congregation are his neighbors now. They take care of him.”
My father laughed. “He retires from the church and they’re still tithing.” I knew what tithing was. Dad gave me ten dollars a week and made me give back eight. “They give him tinkers but shell ’em first so he won’t be breaking the law. Like he couldn’t tell they were tinkers by the size of the claws!”
“What are tinkers?”
“Tinkers are undersized lobsters, sweetie. You’re supposed to throw them back so they get to grow up.”
“Who was Slocum, Dad?”
He shrugged. “Somebody dead, most likely.”
“Doug! You don’t know anything,” my mother said. “The island is named for Joshua Slocum.”
He looked at her sideways and raised an eyebrow in that aggressive way he had which said, “Oh yeah? Big deal.” I knew that look.
“Joshua Slocum was an explorer.”
“And he’s dead, right? Right, Charlene? Right?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Right.”
“Well?” His tone said neither of us should ask any more questions.
“Sorry.” My mother looked at the road ahead. She pulled down the passenger side visor and checked her make-up in the little mirror. I could see her jaw muscles working but she swallowed down whatever she might have said. Mom’s motto in life may as well have been, “Oh, please let’s not fight.” Her job was to keep Dad calm. When that didn’t take all her time she took care of me.
The road wound down the steep slope and ended at the water. The ferry to Slocum Island waited far below us at the pier, dancing in a restless back and forth pattern. The waves pushed the boat at port so the starboard side bumped against the wharf. When the tide was low, the water pulled and dropped so far away that the dock was a high wall of brown and black timber encrusted with sharp, black barnacles. The slimy seaweed reaching for the ship’s hull was a green cloud in black water. I thought of horror movies with creatures made of otherworldly green and black tangles of unknown plants rising from deep places. No one knew what the stinking monsters did when they weren’t above the surface, breathing air and crushing and eating humans. My guess was that the water dwellers spent most of their time telling their kids what they were doing wrong.
My father inched the car down the steep ramp to the ferry, probably a little too carefully because he knew he’d had two too many beers. The soaked ramp was slick under the wheels. I held my breath, convinced that if I lost concentration for a moment we would be sucked into the water. My mother saw my face in the mirror on her sun visor and gave me a half-smile. She said the trip across the channel would take only a few minutes. My parents looked straight ahead, silent. Our eyes never seem to meet each other.
The ferry’s engine rumble rose and fell with the mechanical effort of carrying us through the chop. The channel looked dirty green. Only the sea gulls seemed oblivious to Slocum Arm’s moods. I pictured my bathtub toys capsizing.
I squeezed my eyes tight but we were already tipping and sliding away. One side of the car lurched up as metal screeched against metal. The hard heavy scraping sound stopped and a brief cotton ball pause passed over us. All I could hear was the wind as we fell. The moment before we hit the water felt like letting go of a swing at the high end of its arc. The sound of the splash came, first low and dull and then rising quickly to high and light. We rocked back and forth.
For a brief moment, our car floated on the surface and I looked at the horrified faces of the sparse ferry crew. The frames of the movie stuttered and slowed. Someone blew a whistle hard and wouldn’t stop. The shrill note was the only sound that registered in my ice-fogged mind. A bearded man in a red plaid jacket on the deck of the ferry pointed at me. I felt the cool glass against my forehead, my nose squashed flat, as I watched the man rise. Sea spray licked the glass. The man’s mouth moved in slow motion. I think I saw his lips form “back seat” before the green murk rose past the glass and over the car roof. The whistle stopped abruptly, replaced by the roar of the water claiming its prize. We were sucked down.
Cold water rushed in, filling all the empty spaces between me and my parents. The shock of the water at our feet and rising fast made us move. We clawed at our seat belts and pulled at the door handles and pushed at the doors. We were cemented in a brick, pointed down at a steep angle. We plunged into deepening gloom.
My mother said something and reached back toward me. I’m not sure what she said, but her tone was desperate and aching. There wasn’t time to say goodbye. There really wasn’t time to talk. My father said something I couldn’t make out but his tone was almost calm. He could have said anything but his flat tone said, “I give up.”
I couldn’t hear their last words because I was screaming. I was screaming about how we had to get out — which had occurred to them, too, I’m sure — but panic reduces us to helpless babies. We sank. How deep could Slocum’s Arm reach? I wanted to scream more but the water bubbled past my chin and I held my breath. I could feel the pressure against my eardrums. The pressure kept coming.
Cold, silent slow-motion panic made us clumsy and stupid. I wanted to get out fast but water mixed with the panic makes simple things, like pressing a button on a seatbelt, nearly impossible. The icy water enveloped us so that we failed to save ourselves and, another insult, we knew we were failing and failing slowly. What air there was in my lungs burned fast.
My eyes were wild and blind in the thick night of watery places the sun can’t reach as we sank. Somehow, I finally unbuckled my seatbelt. There was a little pocket of air by the rear window to tantalize me and give me hope but the air would be gone in less than a minute. My face pressed against the rear window. I gulped oxygen.
I’m making this last longer, I thought. Why am I making it last longer?
The air disappeared and, through the glass, I glimpsed the surface shooting up to heaven in a trail of bubbles. The water pressed on me, trying to get inside.
We’re going where the fish have to make thei
r own light. No one will find us. The Coast Guard would give up and Grampa would perform one last service, blessing the spot in the sea where we were swallowed. Our car will be a gruesome aquarium. Our bodies will rot down here. We are contorted fish food with surprised looks on our faces. Tinkers will feed on us and they will get to grow up. They will be big lobsters.
When I began to drown in earnest, I flailed and I kicked. As my lungs filled and burned with salt and need, everything began to go black. In swirling eddies, I could feel my parents writhing in their seats. All things closed up, final like the snap of a steel-jawed, knife-toothed trap.
The water is hungry for us. The end was deep Black.
Eyes squeezed shut, I reached for my mother, but she was too far away. My hand closed on nothing.
Silent panic.
Desperate, I reached for my father.
And then I stood on my grandfather’s farm, or what was left of it. It no longer produced food. The farmhouse became my grandfather’s cottage. My father had long wanted to buy the 200-year-old farmhouse. When my grandfather became too old to keep it from crumbling, he started to call the ramshackle house “Bethany.” This was a sign to my father that he had to offer a few thousand dollars more to put a balm on my grandfather’s surge of sentimentality. The farm became ours, complete with all the antiques, the hole in the kitchen floor and the barn that would soon collapse under the weight of age, the ruin of weather and gravity’s pull.
To “work the farm” meant to do all sorts of menial labor that was too much for a nine-year-old boy (or at least too much for the lazy little boy I was.)
The first owners of the farm painted all their furniture with a tar-like substance. My first job was to paint chemicals on a child’s desk covered with a brown lacquer so thick, it was soft. I slowly scraped, peeling away years of layers to loosen the lacquer’s grip. The chemicals burned my hands and forearms and the fumes stung my eyes. I experimented with cursing. The wood of the desk revealed itself and slowly rose up clean from the layered brown muck. I discovered a secret hidden in plain view: It was pine, smooth and fresh and pure.
“The barn will have to come down,” my father announced, just as a hired bulldozer rolled up the lane to meet us. He knew I loved playing in the barn. “It has to be pushed down before it falls down, Tommy.” He walked away before I could protest. A few minutes later, my last playhouse was a flat pile of rubble. The dust cloud reached into the sky.
We pulled all the boards we wanted to keep from the destroyed barn. Years ago, there had been a few cows, a large space to hold hay and a little farm equipment. A small workshop had once stood at the end of the barn. No it was a clear space with a dirt floor amid the rock foundation’s rubble. My father motioned me to where he stood, bent and pulled on a rusted piece of metal protruding from the soft, black earth at our feet. It came up easily, as if relieved to emerge into the light.
I didn’t recognize the object in his hand and looked to my father, my face a question mark. “It’s a shoe for oxen. You’ve seen horseshoes. This is a shoe for the hoof of an ox. The animals pulled the plow in the old days.” He was quiet for a moment, examining the ground at our feet with a new intensity. “You know, I bet there’s more.”
We knelt, facing each other on the old workshop floor and dug with our hands. “Things get absorbed and buried. Give it more time and the frost brings it up through the soil again.”
A glint of sunlight off steel. A barrel hoop came up in his hands and his smile was beatific. “Beatific” was the word they used in church to talk about Jesus’s smile in the stained glass window. Digging up memories from black dirt was the only time I could remember my father displaying pleasure at something I could agree was fun.
I felt something smooth under my dirty fingers. In another moment I held up a square glass bottle in triumph. Soon we laid out our treasures: a rusted ax head, horseshoe nails, several more barrel hoops and a full set of ox shoes. There were four glass bottles. They looked like they might have held medicine.
“I feel like we’re on an archeology dig!” I said.
“Me, too!”
Neglected things pushed down for years revealed themselves. We became not one, but two nine-year-old boys. Something sweet passed between us, a father and son who enjoyed each other’s company, meeting each other across time.
I wanted to stay in that moment forever. It was better than Christmas.
“Tommy? Are you okay?” my mother asked. “Are you carsick or seasick?”
“How’s he supposed to know and what difference does it make, Charlene? You puke in this car, you’re cleaning it up, boy!”
I fell from Heaven. I rose up from the Black.
Exiting the other side of the ferry crossing, the car crawled up the steep, narrow ramp of the wharf on Slocum Island. Once on dry land, I realized I had been holding my breath as we climbed away from the ferry and out of the sea’s grasp. I felt the uncomfortable pressure of something at the center of my head as we drove inland to safety. I looked through the back window as we climbed up hairpin turns and away.
That was a long time ago. I am now the age my father was the day I panicked and blacked out in the back seat on the ferry crossing to Slocum Island. Was that a glimpse of future oblivion or Heaven’s prelude? I don’t know. We all find out in time.
Today, he, too, became buried thing.
Despite my father’s storms, I kept that moment of elation safe from the intrusion of darker memories. I choose to think his spirit will rise to catch sunlight. I choose to remember my father as he was amid the powerful magic of discarded totems. No one deserves Grace, but it can still be given. That is our power.
THE SCARECROW'S STAND
Love is the answer no matter the question,
unless the question is how to come up with a story like this. It’s another story that posits, what’s real? We are fooling ourselves, certainly. The question is, by how much? ~ Chazz
He dreamed of bales of sweet-smelling hay under a blood-red sky. Fresh fields stretched out forever and caressed his naked skin. A warm breeze carried whispers through leaves and grasses. He couldn’t quite make out what the voices said, so he walked toward them. The voices were as elusive as the wind but soon he came to a clear spot where deer had huddled together for the night. It was as if he’d been called to their sleeping place, where the hay lay flat in a rough circle. He understood now that the voices weren’t whispering but sobbing. In the center of the circle, a stag lay on its side with a vast gash in the side of its neck, its head more off than on. The acrid stench of copper rose from the broken deer.
As he looked closer, the pool of blood around the deer spread, growing as if from a spring. He stepped back to avoid the red tide, but it grew in all directions, flooding his perfect field of sweet hay. He turned to run for shelter, too late. Smeared with foul, sticky blood, it rose farther, surprising him with its heat as it climbed past his waist and toward his heart. In a moment it would fill his mouth and nose and get into his lungs. He became a writhing tower of blood, gagging and blind and full to bursting.
He opened his mouth to drown and awoke shrouded in sweaty sheets, wrapped tight like a cloth trap, a noose tight as wire around his hips and legs. He put his hand to his face. It came away wet with a smear of blood. He shouted and bolted. In the bathroom, he wretched but nothing came except a single drip of blood hanging in the toilet bowl water.
Washing up in the sink, the nosebleed had ended. When he was done, he threw the facecloth in the garbage can. He didn’t dare close his eyes, afraid he might see a bloody scarecrow, its misshapen head rolled back at angle impossible for a human. Beneath the scarecrow’s tattered rag face, he knew he’d see his own face, the torn mouth gaping in a silent, agonized howl. The gnawing need had returned.
He took comfort in the bright bulbs around the mirror that drenched his naked body. Sweat still glistened on his torso. He looked fit enough, though he had noticed that, despite his regular trips to the gym, the six-pack he h
ad been so proud of a couple years before had receded beneath his flesh.
“Fat shit,” he said aloud. He studied his face and pulled at the bags under his eyes. He wasn’t sure, but the look he had on his face might be…worry?
This wasn’t who he wanted to be, this skittish coward suffering a broken child’s nightmares. This couldn’t be what he really was. This mask he wore, had been wearing for years, suddenly disgusted him. The cravings, so successfully ignored and pushed down, were back. They gnawed at him with jagged pangs like a three-day hunger strike. The night waited for him. He had something to prove and he wanted so much to make that nightmare go away.
The dream always started out so softly but ended in blood. This was the third time in a month the nightmare repeated. Tonight it would send him out into the city to see if he was still the man he used to be. Like an old man who knows he has an appointment to get CAT scan results, he didn’t want to know the answer but he had to find the truth.
He gathered his morning clothes from the stand by his bed in a flurry. Crisp and ironed and clean, the suit was supposed to be for his morning meeting. Barely past 11 p.m., he stepped into the street. Always early to bed, the night stretched out before him like yawning jaws. He had to find a safe outlet to block the visions of sweet-smelling hay and the warm wind over his naked body and the neat bales. These were dangerous, seductive thoughts he had to stop and replace.
If he wasn’t careful, he would find himself driving out to garden markets in Amish country again. He’d wake up in a bed and breakfast with fancy quilts and stroll the farmers’ markets, his gaze lingering too long over the amputees, the Amish farmers with prostheses for arms and hooks for hands. That path had one bloody end.
It had rained while he slept and he was grateful for the freshness on his face and in his lungs. The sharp sound of his dress shoes on the concrete pleased him. The sidewalks were usually dirty and the people pressed too close in daylight, but in the dark after rain, he didn’t mind the city so much. He missed the stars you could see when there wasn’t a street light in any direction for miles. That was another country joy he had forbade himself.
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