Since he’d died on his stomach, the EMTs had turned Dad onto his back. He was in full rigor mortis, so his upper lip was mashed into his gums and curled into a sneer, exposing his khaki--colored teeth. His hands were spread in front of his face, palms out. Dad’s eyes stared up and to the left and his entire face was grape--pop purple.
What struck me when I first saw him—-after I inhaled my gum—-was that he appeared to be warding off a demon. I should have waited until the mortician was done with him, because I knew I’d never get that image out of my mind.
I walked out of Dad’s room on unsteady feet, determined not to cry in front of these strangers. The deputy and the sheriff stood outside my bedroom, examining the door to it. Both of them looked confused.
“Petty,” Sheriff Bloch said.
I stopped in the hall, feeling even more violated with them so close to my personal items and underwear.
“Yes?”
“Is this your bedroom?”
I nodded.
Sheriff and deputy made eye contact. The coroner paused at the top of the stairs to listen in. This was what my dad had always talked about—-the judgment of busybody outsiders, their belief that somehow they needed to have a say in the lives of -people they’d never even met and knew nothing about.
The three men seemed to expect me to say something, but I was tired of talking. Since I’d never done much of it, I’d had no idea how exhausting it was.
The deputy said, “Why are there six dead bolts on the outside of your door?”
It was none of his business, but I had nothing to be ashamed of.
“So Dad could lock me in, of course.”
Chapter 2
THE MEN ALL exchanged glances again.
“As . . . punishment?” the sheriff said.
I sighed, weary. “For my protection.”
“When did your father lock you in your room?”
“Every night since I was three,” I said, and went downstairs.
While the men in Dad’s room finished up, I gazed between the steel bars welded over one of the west--facing living room windows and watched dusk settle over the greening Kansas landscape. On a clear, early spring day like this the horizon seemed thirty or more miles away, nothing between me and it but cloudless sky and rolling prairie, patches of foxtail millet, goosegrass, yellow fawn lilies and blue phlox, black and brown beef cattle, and our family of five tall, sprawling oak trees, which were starting to sprout leaves.
I learned early not to praise the beauty I saw around me. Dad liked to show me how the pretty surface of things in this world always hid ugliness. For instance, the Star of Bethlehem flowers that grow like crazy by the side of the road are poisonous. And those oak trees. In the summertime they’re robed in hundreds of succulent, transparent--green leaves that clap politely in the breezes like spectators at a golf match. In the fall they turn Creamsicle orange with brilliant red edges. But when the bitter winter winds strip the leaves away, you see what the trees are really made of: sinister, granite--hard bark, angry--looking and full of vengeance for having to endure the deranged Kansas weather, those extremes of heat, cold, and humidity, the relentless wind, the sleet, the lightning.
Out here in northwest Niobe County, there’s little that dares stand in weather’s way, to talk it down off the ledge of its rage—-no trees except the five brave oaks, no other buildings. The nearest town, the one our junk mail comes to, is called Saw Pole and is fifteen miles away. Weather has peeled the paint from our house, the only one for thirteen miles in every direction, leaving the wood siding bleached gray, the color of bird crap. Memory snapshots from when I was three tell me the house was butter yellow at the time we moved here from Detroit. Now, you can still see fragments of color, remnants of someone else’s life, someone who raised flowers and watered a lawn and planted crops.
Watching out that window occupied me until the crowd began to thin—-first the firemen departed, then the paramedics, the police, and finally the coroner and his minions pushing Dad’s black--bagged body out on a gurney. Randy King was the last one there, still standing against the wall in the living room. Something about him, that pose, made me think of Curly in Of Mice and Men.
“If you want to go up and pick out a suit for your daddy to be buried in, I’ll take it on over to the mortuary,” he said from under the hat. I was glad I didn’t have to look at those pinprick pupils of his.
I went up the stairs and stopped in front of Dad’s bedroom door. It was as if there was electric fencing keeping me from going in, powered by my dad’s glare. But I didn’t have time to psych myself up. The sooner I got the clothes, the sooner I could get this last person out of the house, and the closer I would be to having the house to myself, doing whatever I wanted, for the first time ever.