Magic Time. W. Kinsella P.

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СКАЧАТЬ him many years ago, slashed off by a saw at the lumberyard where he’s been employed all his adult life, working his way up from stacking lumber to feeder in the sawmill to servicing the equipment, to full-fledged maintenance mechanic.

      I was in first grade the day Dad lost the tip of his finger. I came home after school to find Dad in the living room rather than Mrs. Schell, who babysat my kid brother Byron and me while Dad was at work. He was sitting in his favorite chair, a leg slung over one arm of it, watching a game show on television, drinking a Tab.

      ‘What are you doing home?’ I asked.

      ‘Had a little accident, Mike,’ Dad said, turning toward me, holding up his hand so I could see his middle finger bandaged in a halo of white gauze, like snow in a coal bin in contrast to the rest of his hairy, grease-stained fingers.

      ‘Had a little run-in with a saw I was repairing. Forgot to unplug it.’ And he grinned, his face emitting light. ‘As you can see, I came out on the short end of the run-in, in more ways than one.’

      As I came closer I saw that there was a bright red spot, like the center of a Japanese flag, on the white gauze at the end of the damaged finger. My stomach lurched like it did when Dad and I went over the top on the carnival ferris wheel. I climbed into his lap and burrowed, trembling, into his warmth, soaking up the comfortable odors of grease, tangy sawdust, and Dad’s sweat.

      ‘What’s the matter, Son?’

      ‘You’re not gonna die, are you?’

      ‘Of course not. It takes more than a saw to do in an old warhorse like me. Doc says I’ll be back to work in a week. In the meantime, the Cubs are in town, so I’ll pick up tickets for you and me. Maybe we’ll even take Byron to the Sunday afternoon game, though you have to take your turn ferrying him to the bathroom.’ Byron was in play school at the time.

      I hugged Dad as hard as I could, burying my face in the comfort of his plaid flannel shirt, and held on until my arms hurt.

      ‘You don’t have to worry, Mike. Your dad’s never gonna leave you.’ And he rocked me in his arms.

      I pulled myself up and kissed his blue-whiskered cheek. Dad always knew the right thing to say. Neither of us mentioned Mom, but we both knew what caused me to get all scared and shaky.

      Though I claim to remember my mom, who died when I was four, I think what I remember are Dad’s stories of her. What I remember is sitting on Dad’s lap, him holding their wedding picture, an eight-by-ten that still sits on his bedside table, Mom younger than I am now, and beautiful, and Dad telling me about how they began dating, and how thrilled he was when Mom said she’d marry him.

      ‘Look at that, Mike, I look like a gorilla in a tuxedo. What do you suppose your mom ever saw in me?’

      Or else he’d hold the family portrait one of those door-to-door photographers took not long after Byron was born. I’m sitting on Dad’s knee, dressed in yellow shorts, with a white shirt and yellow bow tie, while Mom is holding Byron wrapped in a blue blanket, all that’s visible of him a little pink circle of face. Dad would talk about the day the portrait was taken, how I was so hyper that, though you can’t see it in the picture, he had a firm grip on the back of my shorts in order to keep me from leaping off his knee.

      ‘Your mom had just washed your face for the third time since the photographer got there. She wiped it again, tossed the washcloth over her shoulder in the general direction of the kitchen, and said to the photographer, who looked like he’d slept in his car with a bottle of cheap wine, “Shoot us quick before any more dirt gravitates to that boy’s face!”’

      Other times we’d look at dog-eared photographs from the chocolate box of photos that always sat on the mantel of the pretend fireplace in the living room. There were pictures of Mom next to a half-washed car; in jeans, shirttails flapping, as she ran laughing from a spray of water. Dad said that photo was taken before they were married, and he was on the other end of the hose. There was a color Polaroid of Mom in a yellow waitress uniform, her name, Gracie, in brown lettering above her pocket, her red hair spilling over her shoulders, smiling like she’d just received a ten-dollar tip. Her hair was so pretty in that photograph, and the photo was so clear I could see the freckles on her cheeks and the back of the hand that’s visible.

      ‘You boys got the best of both of us,’ Dad would say, holding up a picture of Mom smiling over a birthday cake flaming with twenty-three candles, Dad behind her chair, crouched in order to get into the picture, grinning like a fool, his fingers in a V above Mom’s head, making her look like she has rabbit ears.

      ‘You’re both built strong like me, with big bones, but you’re good lookin’ like your mom.’

      Byron is stocky, but he has Mom’s red hair and green eyes. I’m tall and slim like Mom, but I’m strong-boned and have huge hands like Dad. My hair is reddish-brown, and has a cowlick that refuses to submit to a comb, my eyes a greeny-hazel.

      Mom’s name before she married Dad was Grace Palichuk. Her grandfather had emigrated from Ukraine to work in the packing plants in Chicago. My grandfather, Dmetro Palichuk, followed in his father’s footsteps at the packing plant, but chose an Irish girl to marry, Margaret Emily O’Day, with dark rose-colored hair, green eyes, and freckles.

      Our family name is Houle. My father’s name is Gilbert. Dad claimed the original Houle was a smuggler and privateer, a crewman on Jean Lafitte’s pirate ship.

      ‘Lafitte and his men fought for the Americans in the Battle of New Orleans and were pardoned by President Madison. I saw the pardon, or at least a copy of it, when I was a boy. That original Houle settled on Galveston Island after the Civil War, but who knows how one of his descendants got to Chicago?’

      Sometimes Dad tells of a descendant of that first American Houle, a Wells Fargo driver and buffalo hunter in the Dakota Territory, who married a Black Hawk Indian woman (or Nez Perce, depending on his mood) and later became a livestock dealer before being wiped out by the great Chicago fire.

      ‘Your great-grandfather got mistaken for Billy the Kid. This was in some wild Colorado mining town. He was a skinny little guy with a big mustache. The town folks spotted your great-grandfather riding into town, and some young bucks tried to force him into a gunfight. He moved real careful and unbuckled his guns, let them fall to the ground. “You wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man would you?”

      ‘They didn’t shoot him, but they flung him in jail and decided to have a public hanging in three days. And it would have gone ahead except the real Billy the Kid rode into town. It was said he had a look about him, a rock hardness, a death-like stare. Nobody tried to provoke him into a gunfight. He made it clear he was Billy the Kid, and dared anybody to do anything about it. He even visited your great-grandfather in jail. He laughed when he saw him. “You look like a gunfighter Ned Buntline might have invented. You don’t look nothin’ like me,” Billy said.

      ‘“Send this little cowboy on his way,’ Billy told the sheriff, and the sheriff did as he was told. It’s said your great-grandfather never again wore a gun on his hip, and skedaddled out of Colorado like he was being chased.

      ‘It was one of his boys that got fleeced out of his socks in a gold-stock scam. I did see a photo of him, and he resembled your cousin Verdell in California; you know, a boy so dumb he’d sell his car for gas money.’

      * * *

      Mom died after being hit by a car right in front of our house. We lived СКАЧАТЬ