My Father’s Keeper. Julie Gregory

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СКАЧАТЬ me. Floor-length frocks made of heavy velvet and scratchy gold lamé; high collars, dowdy sleeves, zippered backs. These were not the dresses on their way to the church bazaar, they were in fact rejects coming from it.

      “Thanks Madge, that’s great, why don’t you just keep them for Julie until she’s big enough?”

      “What a good idea, how old do you think she’ll need to be?”

      “Twenty, Madge. Twenty.”

      And Grandma Madge counts on her fingers, pondering aloud where she will store them for fifteen years.

      In the beginning my grandmother would take me for day trips to fish at the lake but every car ride home ended in a fender bender with her behind the wheel. Privileges were reeled in to the local Encino Park where she could pedal me around the lake in the Swan boats. But even then Grandma Madge never missed a chance for ministry on the fly and she’d sweep right past the water in one of her to-the-ankle long-sleeved dresses looking for a gang of homeless youths, me in tow.

      When she spotted a kid high as a kite with a bloody nose, she made a bee-line for him. The kid looked around, trapped. With nothing else to lose, he closed his eyes as Grandma Madge fished a Bible from her purse. Caught in the rapture of spirit, she began to weep; one woman in prayer, her bony hand bound to the wrist of the bleeding boy. And the Swan boats floated by as the kid sneezed and splattered blood on me from his broken nose while Grandma Madge tried to convert him to Christianity. It was soon decided that only my mother’s presence could assure my safety.

      I have only one photo from these rare outings with Mom as chaperone. The three of us are leaving the mall, my grandmother with a purse as big as a bowling ball bag looped over the crook of her arm. We have walked out into the parking lot’s bright sun and Mom has whacked me on the head with her fist. As I stand heaving in a pastel jumper with knobbly knees and long blond hair, she roots through her purse for the camera and passes it to Grandma Madge. And there we are, a snapshot captured in time, me wiping away a tear and my mother’s arm around my shoulder, veneered smile sealed upon her face.

      To her credit, I always remember Mom having a soft spot for animals and back then she’d take me to the slaughterhouses on the outskirts of Phoenix, where we’d buy up the little colts whose mothers had already had their throats slit. The babies would skit around the corral with wide-eyed fright, snorting through their nostrils, afraid to even let their hooves touch the ground. The feeling that hung in the air was sheer terror. I understood that instinctively, despite being so young, and the smell of death seeped through the car windows as we drove in the dusty lane leading back to the slaughter pens. Mom said that most horses here were stolen from farms and given to slaughter because of the foreigner’s love of horse meat, and that was the first time that I knew that we were different. Because my God, Mom would say, who could ever eat a horse’s meat?

      My father pants like a puppy, hangs his tongue out. The bike wobbles and spits down the sidewalk, my training wheels freshly shucked. He runs alongside, hanging onto the back of the bike seat.

      “You’re doing it baby, Go, Go, pump the pedals.”

      His shout at my side fades as I take flight from the push of his palm, pedalling furiously down the sidewalk. Like my father, my tongue hangs out, my face frozen in studied concentration. My arms are bent with a death grip on the handlebars, I’m riding my bike! And I have left my father behind. The ends of my long hair blow off my back, the squares of concrete rush beneath me. But I want my father here, running alongside. I turn to find him and see him back at the house, a block away. I tap my toes to the sidewalk to stop and the bike shimmies. My foot catches in the frame and I topple over, skinning my knee, my hair tangling in the chain. I look to my father and scream but it’s not the pain that brings hot tears. It’s my dad talking to the neighbour, only stopping long enough to wave wildly for me to walk back to him.

      That night, Dad pads down the hallway to the bathroom where I soak my knee in the tub. He rummages through the medicine cabinet for a hairgrip.

      He sticks the curved end deep into his ear and scrapes, sinking his eyes closed.

      “Honey, don’t ever let me see you do this.”

      He jiggles the grip and looks at it, then presses it to the leg of his shorts, popping a crescent moon of burnt orange ear wax onto his leg.

      “If you ever want to clean your ears, honey.” He sticks the bobby pin back in the cabinet. “You come get either me or mommy. You never want to run a bobby pin in your ear without one of us there to supervise.”

      It was just after the first Christmas in Phoenix that the call came in from the base. Dad had tangled himself up while clearing out industrial drains and been spit out again, with both elbows snapped.

      My father sits at the dinette in the kitchen, his casted arms folded to his chest like a mummy, anchored by double slings that criss-cross over him and tie around his neck. His fingers rest under his shoulders and look like garden grubs, curled black and blue.

      Our mother forks three poached eggs from pan to plate, “Here, feed your father,” she says and drops the plate on the table, walking out.

      I butter his toast and spoon a bite of egg onto the corner. I stand at his knee and lift it to his mouth.

      My father leans forward, armless. He bares his teeth and bites. A bit of yolk dribbles down his chin and I dab it with a napkin. The bottom rim of his eye wells, one giving way to a quiver.

      “You’re so good to me, baby.” A tear splashes down his cheek.

      I stand before my father, lift my small hands to his face. His drops his head into the cradle of my palms and I bear the weight of my father’s heavy head.

      “You’re so good to your Daddy,” he sobs.

      “It’s okay, Daddy.”

      “Will you take care of me, baby?”

      “I’ll take care of you, Daddy.”

      “I got nobody else but you.”

      He lifts his forehead from my hands.

      “I love you so much, baby.”

      A tear drops from his chin to my face.

      “I love you, too.”

      It trickles down and we are bonded; his tear in my eye, sealing me as my father’s keeper.

      With Dad at home in his slings, Mom tries another approach with Grandma Madge. We pick her up at her own crack jack house a mile away and drive to a pool party of one of the neighbours.

      “Whatever you do Madge,” Mom warns in the car, “for God’s sake don’t embarrass me.”

      I spotted her first when she stepped out of the changing cabana. My grandmother ran a band of long black hair from her belly button to her thighs and there it was in all its glory. When she spotted me and Mom across the patio at the bowl of chips, she waved over the heads of a pool of people, “Sannndy, Jeweeelly, over here!”

      Mom walked straight in the front door that night and said, “Dan, I could have died.”

      When Dad’s casts came off he returned to the base, only to find he no longer had a job. In the time he’d worked as a plumber, he’d racked up almost СКАЧАТЬ