My Father’s Keeper. Julie Gregory

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СКАЧАТЬ grass that surrounded the trailer like a moat and I remember riding on a tractor mower in a lime green bikini, leaning into curves around weeping willow saplings, planted to give an air of permanence against the transience of our home. Yellow insulators hung on an electric fence and billowy seeds of milkweed drifted lazily in the summer breeze. A faded canvas halter tied up with baling twine hung just inside the tack shed, next to thick braided reins draped over rusty nails. The call of a lone bobwhite haunted the early summer dusk when I’d pad out in my bare feet and lock the shed doors to keep the raccoons out. A rusty horseshoe dug from the loose earth was haphazardly balanced over the mouth of my father’s garage, a treacherous structure at the edge of the driveway he had cobbled together with twelve-foot-long pieces of rusted sheet metal nail gunned over rough frame.

      The garage itself was a dark maze of car parts, milk crates overflowing with a jumble of tools, hand saws and claw hammers dangling from hooks overhead. And back in the dimmest, eeriest corner, in a place no child or budding teenage girl would ever willingly wander, lurked my father’s long metal workbench. The solo fluorescent light that lit his cave buzzed like a fly zapper from where it hung by a dog chain from the low ceiling to shine a five-foot radius on the concrete floor. But even on the brightest of summer days, there were parts of this creepy edifice that remained pitch black.

      Our hollow held the kind of raw beauty a band of wild hill children might—shy and innocent, but you could never quite trust them. You weren’t scared of the woods down on Burns Road; you were scared of who might be in there with you.

      With the passing of each season, memories of civilization faded and life dwindled to a crawl. Where once I hummed songs from the Sunday schools we used to go to, the lines and eventually the chorus were washed over by the jingles of toy commercials that rang through the trailer on any given Sunday’s worth of television: Mon-chi-chi-Mon-chi-chi, oh so soft and cuddly my pretty po-nee, she gives me so much love Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down. Danny and I strung them back to back, changing key and pitch to mimic the TV as Dad clicked through the three country channels again and again and again, waiting for a new rerun to start.

      By the time I was twelve, my father had grown to be one with his chair, plopping down in it from the time he came home from work until well after the late evening news. And, although I knew where he was physically, I couldn’t for the life of me find the dad I once felt so close to. He was still happy to see me when he walked through the door but, once he sat in his chair, efforts to reach him were futile. When I could, I’d sit on the couch for hours just to be there should he wish to talk to me. But he didn’t. I would rack my brain, think, think, trying to come up with something that might turn his attention from the television set. But the parting of my mouth, sensed out of the corner of his eye, would elicit a shush or be met by the swish of a forefinger in the air as he winced, leaning forward to piece together what he might have missed. As a last resort, I watched with him, anchored to whatever time we could have together. But even though I didn’t have the right things to say, I believed with all my heart that if I could find the secret words or right way to be, I could unlock the mystery and win back my father. We were so close when he broke his arms, surely I could find a way to resurrect our bond.

      “Who’s the King?”

      “You are, Dad!”

      “Who’s the King in this house?”

      “Dad is!” Danny and I ring in unison.

      “That’s right. I’m King and you better obey.”

      My father cackles with good nature while my brother and I disperse from the end of the couch to carry out orders. Dad’s throne was his La-Z-Boy chair and the food that piled up around it—corn nuts, pork rinds, almost empty boxes of popcorn, bags of corn chips—was the gold on his altar. The empties surrounded him like gilded gifts to be fingered when he needed reminding of his total reign. His was the authority to yell from the seat of his throne and have anything within a five-hundred foot radius delivered to him, without complaint and with total servitude by us kids.

      “Fix me some toast Sissy, would you? I want the good jelly, not any of that marmalade shit your mother gets.”

      And I would drop whatever I was doing and trot off to make the toast, trying extra hard to get it right.

      Our mother, with her ears like a bat, never missed a chance to pot shot him.

      “That’s right, Dannnn,” her voice spat from somewhere beyond the thin wall of the living room. “Turn the kids into your niggers. Make them wait on you hand and foot.”

      “You just go back to whatever you were doing, Dingbat,” my father would shout, then turn his head to snigger at us, his face scrunched up like a little boy and we’d snigger back, because we knew no better.

      If our mother was at least two rooms away, Dad called her the names of the wives and hated mother-in-laws he picked up from television sit-coms—Dingy, Dingbat, Dummy—all gauged by how thin her voice was as it hammered through the panelling. Otherwise, if she yelled from the open kitchen behind his chair, he squirmed from the embarrassment of being caught and fiddled with the remote.

      I didn’t mind running for Dad. The errands were usually quick and painless and he responded with exaggerated thrill to receive the fetched item—often making it into a game.

      “Let’s see how fast you can run out to the car, Sissy, and get me the bag of gumdrops on the seat. If they ain’t there, check the floor. Okay…ready, set, go!”

      “Whoa, you did that in 60 seconds?” he’d shout when I returned breathless with the bag. “Way to go, Sis!”

      It was only on the rarest of occasions when we were lucky enough to be left at home with our father and without Mom around, that a bit of the veil would lift, lightness would blow in the skinny windows and trailer life didn’t seem so bad.

      My father bellows out the kitchen patio door. Danny and I hold hands and jump from the deck into the gem green water of the pool, flourescent from the double cups of chlorine we dump in at random to clean it.

      “Don’t you guys go pee-pee in there.”

      “Dad!” I shout, “That’s gross!” But I can see my little brother, soaking to his neck in the water like a little snow monkey. “Danny!”

      Home alone with our father, we are just kids. When Mom goes to town on a shopping trip, she claims our time with a list of chores to do before she gets home. We follow her to the car, faces drawn. But as soon as she rounds the first bend, Danny and I run in the trailer and shriek down the hall to change into our bathing suits.

      My father slaps his hands together in jubilation, “When the cat’s away, the mice will play!”

      He loads up a ham sandwich with sweet pickles in the kitchen and, as we run past, we beg him to watch us dive off the deck into the pool.

      “Dad, Dad, Look!” I dunk my brother, who lurks just under the surface ready to spring up on my shoulders and push me under.

      Dad stands on the porch in his stocking feet and cut-off jean shorts and waves to us with a mouth full of food. He trumpets his nose on the hem of his shirt then pins one nostril with his finger, blowing the rest out. It bolts like a slash against the side skirt of the trailer, painted tan to coordinate with the plastic brown shutters. I can see it from the edge of the pool, where I hook my elbows over the side to watch my father.

      “You kids have fun, I’ll be in the garage if you need me.”

      “Dad, СКАЧАТЬ