Rich people. This I was interested in. ‘I understand. How far do you want me to go?’
‘I just want the girls to feel that I’ve taken care of them, the way I promised their mother.’
I used to be butter—the way I’d disappear at the sign of heat. There had been all those schoolboy days of knuckle busting skin, taunts about my chicken coop smell. My papa was a tall, hulking fist. He had ways of shaping children into adults. I used to wake at night, sweated lumberjack fever, to find my papa kneeling above me.
‘You’re not going to school today.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ll be teaching you how to be a man.’
Being men, we would head out, guns in hands, and stalk through trees fighting off cold-spine shivers each time Papa slapped my head for missing a target.
At home, Mama was a dust keeper. Hours then hours of menial tasks to keep herself from thinking, ‘If I stop, I’ll leave and I’m not sure I’d take the children.’ But there she stayed, haloed us with love.
My sisters and I would watch the way Papa kissed Mama, always with a danger tongue, demanding knuckles under skin. ‘Let me love you my way,’ Papa would say.
‘No, not now. The children.’
‘What good are you?’ Papa would slap her. ‘You’re ugly, anyway.’
I wanted to get him off her but never could work up the nerve. What was wrong with me? How was it possible I could look an animal in the eye, dagger a throat, but be too scared to pull Papa away?
Then one night Papa came home and said, ‘This family’s gone to shit.’ He spat on the floor before sitting down at the table. We watched him eat the cold mutton soup that had been lovingly prepared for him that afternoon. He slurped.
‘What’s gotten into you?’ Mama was a mouse. She moved to him.
‘Shut up, woman.’ He slapped her across the face.
I cleared my throat, tried to be the man Papa wanted. ‘Don’t you hurt her.’
He stood from the table, inched and inched towards me until nose touched nose. For the first time I noticed wild-boar–like hairs covering the sides of his nostrils. ‘You questioning me?’
‘God will punish you. That’s our mama,’ I said. I got knotted up, heart pounded, thought I’d vomit.
Papa pushed his index finger into my throat. ‘You’re wrong. I can’t be punished.’
The index finger pushed, pushed harder, and I could feel my breath trap underneath the weight of Papa.
He packed his bags and lofted his hat onto his head, he gripped my shoulder and said, ‘You’re it.’ My sisters waited for him to say he loved us, that he might come back for us one day. I tried not to get my hopes up—I loved and hated. But all Papa did was leave and that was it.
That night Mama sat on her knees and crossed her chest. I walked through the house nursing a hurt so big it made me feel like I would break. He had to come home. I thought of tracking him, wondered if I might need to take a gun. I wasn’t sure I had it in me. Instead, I walked to the Mackenzie River, sat on the bank, thought about the time Papa had let me hold his fishing rod. Light wood against the current. ‘Am I doing it right, Papa?’
‘Yes, sir, son. Yes, sir.’ He even young-pupped me on my back.
Papa had said that nice thing once.
I needed to cool off and so I walked into the water until it filled my boots. I looked up at the moon. ‘Why’s he get to do this to us?’ I said, I cried. Once when I had killed a deer and sobbed, couldn’t stop my shaking, Papa had said, ‘The first time doing this is always hardest, but it gets easy. Trust me.’ Hitting, fighting, blooding, yelling, strangling. A lot of things were meant to get easy.
Mama once told me, ‘You ask God for the right thing to do and he’ll tell you the answer is always in you. You just gotta trust it.’
I looked up to where the Lord might have been and said, ‘God, I want to make things better. What’s the right thing to do?’
I waited for an answer. I thought of Papa, all the hurt that he had made, thought about what he might do in my position, thought of him back home with us, what that could mean. I thought about holding a rock above Papa’s face, teeth smattering over lips, blood on cheek and chin. From a very dark place, I told myself, ‘It’s right to protect and it’s right to take care of problems.’ In my mind I smashed the rock into Papa’s face, felt a whole lot better. I didn’t hear God tell me what I was thinking was wrong and so I willed myself into being Papa’s son. I would make him pay, make him come home and everything would be right. I walked out of the river, water rushing from my clothes. A baptism.
Several weeks later, my uncle stood on our steps, his hat tilted low over his eyes, and with a clotted mouth told us, ‘Just saw him. Your papa’s been living just over in Rising Sun. I saw him at a wedding.’
My sisters breathed in shallow rhythms, burst into crying. They held each other’s hands and pulled at finger webbing as they called Uncle a liar. It made me want to hold them, tell them everything would be okay, that I would take care of everything.
‘He a guest?’ I asked.
‘It was his wedding. I saw him’s bride hold a new baby child. Looked a lot like him. Like you, even.’
I said, ‘Do you know where he lives?’
‘Don’t go looking for him, Benjamin,’ Mama said. ‘You stay right here with me.’
Uncle smoothed his fingers through his beard. ‘Yup. I followed him home. ’Bout a quarter mile from Baptist church you . . .’
I spat onto the ground. My tongue curled from a rancid metallic taste and I sucked it away.
I pushed past my uncle, began the hunt for Papa. I walked. As I entered Rising Sun, the smell of burnt hay and mud welcomed me after twenty long miles. I walked around town for hours, looked through windows and under fences for signs of new family life. Some houses were a ransack, others bare and ghost-like. I walked on.
And then, just like that, I happened across Papa and his bride. They were tucked behind a red fence. The wife, red hair and too-long dress, sat on the front porch reading a woman’s palm. Papa cut grass by the side of the house, wiped his mouth on his shirt sleeve. He looked happy. I had thoughts of rock, teeth, blood.
When the wife had finished with the woman, Papa walked over, kissed her on the forehead. ‘Gotta get these cutters fixed,’ he said. I imagined Papa’s lips on foreheads—Mama’s, sisters’, mine. I lifted my hand to my mouth.
‘I love you,’ the wife told him.
‘I love you too.’
What a thing it was to hear Papa say those words, like he had said them all his life. He took off down the street and the afternoon breeze picked up.
Papa’s wife saw me, came out from behind the fence. She smelled sickly sweet, her hair, around fingertips, threads of her blouse, stupid lips and full cheeks. Papa’s wife’s brow shadowed. ‘You alright? You seem lost.’
Sweat cracked along my back. ‘Not entirely.’
She grinned then. ‘Aha, well, I can make you see the light, all God’s good things. Get His spirit into you.’
I grunted at her. I did not care for magic.