THIS SEASON OF MERCY by Jack Driscoll

Your dad spends the night in a small-town jail cell for women and believe me the hang-ups begin, the crank calls, the muffled late-night threats, the sharpshooter’s heavy silence. It’s possible, dressed like he was on a Saturday night and the drunk tank most likely occupied, that Deputy Overmyer only meant to protect him. Either that or teach him a lesson, though lessons of that sort were the ones my dad did not easily comprehend.
All I know for certain is that my mom’s the one who bailed him out, so I didn’t actually see him behind bars, but I was still wide awake when the family pickup pulled into our driveway. By the time the front door lock clicked open and my parents entered the living room, I was already positioned on the couch, pencil and math book firmly in hand. Props to make them believe I’d stayed up late determined to solve those nearly impossible story problems that Sister Regina, our seventh-grade teacher, called barometers for measuring our future as failures if we did not brighten up.
At first my parents didn’t see me there in the half dark, but when my mom twisted the dimmer switch and the ceiling light intensified, they both just stared, my mom’s unformed words turning first into hesitant, audible, deep breaths before she finally composed herself enough to say, “Henry, as long as you’re up to see this, I’d like you to meet your father.”
I tensed right tight to that sharp edge in her tone, thinking that my dad might grab hold of something near at hand, like he did that ceramic flower vase a few years back after he’d tied one on and my mom dressed him down pretty good and then back up the other side. He didn’t heave the vase like I thought he might, his arm half-cocked, but I could sure see that as a possible outcome, the imagined blue and yellow explosions of crockery loud as shotgun fire against the living room wall.
This time, to my surprise, he just shrugged and smiled, and, for a moment, I believed he might drop the wavy red wig he held, and then reach out to shake my hand like some happy-go-lucky middle-aged cross-dressing interloper. His smeared lipstick was as bright as boiling lava, and he needed a shave, and I knew right away that he’d been drinking and fighting, and that this time my mom’s anger would lose out – and most likely already had – to her slow-growing depression and unyielding fatigue. She’d been diagnosed two months earlier with Lyme disease, and even her regular customers at Cutz went elsewhere to get their hair done, not wanting to drive this far outside of town to some makeshift beauty salon in our living room, and my mom’s joints having already turned arthritic.
“In vino veritas. There’s truth in the wine. Isn’t that right?” she said to my dad, as she poured herself a full glass of ginger ale, and sniffed its not-so-complicated bouquet, and raised it directly at him. “You,” she said. “To you, Frank,” and only then did he step forward, exerting his disguised manhood by taking hold of both her wrists, and sipping carefully, and then winking his painful bloodshot wink over at me.
He’d pulled some off-the-wall stunts in the past, but this one put them all to shame, and it wasn’t a reach to assume that it would at some point shame him too, and maybe already had. All I could conclude was that the slaughterhouse where he worked had laid him off again, or worse, though I did not at that moment want to consider that possibility. Bad enough they’d already cut back his hours, he’d said, and predicted each night at dinner that it was only a matter of time before they cut him loose for good. Bastards, he’d called them. A bunch of vindictive, northern Michigan canvas slappers.
Which only contributed to my mom’s longstanding anthem of college, college, college, what she called trading places, trading up, and she said, “Some education – him seeing you in this condition. Jesus. Go clean yourself up. Take a cold shower, Frank, and a good long look at yourself, and go to bed.”
His expression went vacant, but he nodded then in earnest and released his grip. When she turned her face away from his attempted swollen, split-lip kiss to her cheek, the giant tears he mimed seemed to place no end to the potential blend of romance and pathos in our house. They’d gotten almost good at this, for my sake I guess, the two of them acting out the strange and sometimes – as my mom once called it – Elizabethan drama of the everyday gone momentarily berserk. But I could see that the effort had finally worn her down and that she was real close to crying.
I was both startled and confused to see my dad like this, but not really all that worried. Or I was, but I’d just turned thirteen, and dad’s bruised, distorted face seemed less pained somehow than it should have been. I mean, even all busted up I could still detect a smug satisfaction which on TV might actually have passed for a tough-guy sort of charm, though I much preferred him in his white hard hat and steel-toed safety shoes, his normal dad look each morning when he dropped me off at school.
From as far back as I can remember, I was frightened by storms. I hated them, and even though the one predicted was still well out of earshot, I could almost feel its distant, gaping rumble, the temperature already starting to fall. And, not all that far behind, those fast-approaching, interminable months of snow, the barn decrepit and roofless, but the silo out back still standing, a round criss-crossed refuge of rafters for the doves to get out of the blistering winter winds and the cold. Some nights I’d dream long lines of them perched motionless, a tiny halo of light illuminated behind each feathery, bent head.
“C’mon. Enough already,” my mom said. “Enough for one night,” but my dad turned and limped into the kitchen instead where he emptied an ice cube tray into a hand towel, which he folded and pressed against his left cheek and eye, the socket’s bruised, black-and-blue orbit spiraling inward, and the crooked elastic waistband of his multi-flowered print skirt riding low on his hips. On the dinner table, his portion of the pork chops congealed in their white fat, and a single corn muffin off to the side, and my dad silent and hungry for nothing but an honest paycheck for an honest day’s work slicing muscles and tendons, and now, that gone, his appetite piqued only by revenge.
My mom uttered not another word. It was well after midnight and she looked terrible, pale and gaunt, and she simply shook her head at my dad’s ridiculous spin about the healing power of fisticuffs to clear both the air and the head. Cathartic was the word he used, though I wondered how cathartic are kidney kicks that leave you for weeks with blood in your pee?

October and no snow yet and Halloween just one week away, and there we were – father and son – sitting together on the back porch stairs, our eyes fixed not on the full moon or the stars, but on the way the light’s gauzy blue illumination covered only that part of the yard where both the llamas were buried, dead to some disease that only my mom, whose pets they were, could possibly pronounce. She was smart that way and knew the Latin names for shrubs and trees and birds and, had she ever been asked, could have delivered mass in that ancient and mysterious tongue that even the catechism nuns always mangled for us with their mumbles and their bowed black and white heads.
“Smoke?” my dad asked, and after my standard no thanks he said, “That’s my boy,” and pulled a flattened pack of Pall Malls from under a white satin garter, and lit up, and draped the skirt hem back over his bony knees, covering not runs but wide angry rips in the nylons.
I assumed they were my mom’s, a woman who, as my dad maintained, deserved a better shake in this life, but what she got was him and he hadn’t been real easy on either of us lately, though come Judgment Day I’d testify before God that he was not in his heart a cruel or violent man. On other, lesser counts, guilty as charged, and I felt gut-certain that this latest one would go badly for us, and so when my dad mentioned a police blotter, I imagined it soaking up all our blood.
“It’s likely not a prison crime,” he said. “Nobody died or lost an eye, but there was a mess made, and most of it by yours truly. So yeah, I’d place this under the general heading of pretty bad.”
“Did you start it?” I asked, and he said, “Henry, you go into Ma Dieter’s bar dressed like this, like some Chatty Cathy, and ask if it’s Happy Hour and if any of the mothers present got change for a three-dollar bill, you gotta like your chances. Odds are you’ll get exactly what it is you came for.”
He was not a big man, wiry and square-shouldered, maybe five-foot-eight is all, but in that outfit those out-of-proportion Popeye forearms engorged from all that lifting and cleaving of beef and swine seemed downright lethal, like wielded sledgehammers dead-centering a cattle spike, and driving it like lightning deep into the brainpan. Plus, he had a speed bag in the garage which he’d sometimes tattoo in rhythmic, symbolic pummeling of serious but lesser betrayals – promotions turned down, vendettas played out – “But you take away a man’s livelihood,” he said, “you leave him without any income at all, he’ll go into survival mode and there’s no telling what madness takes hold. Maybe I crossed the line tonight,” he said. “And no doubt it’ll cost us, but someone calls you a slut and that catches on, you best remind that someone about the virtue of keeping his damn mouth shut.”
“Why’d someone call you that?” I asked, trying, but unable, to ignore how he was dressed.
“Henry, listen to me, okay? It’s like this. Sometimes on the line there’s bad stuff transpires, stuff I can’t abide. Violations. And if you don’t buddy with those at fault to just let it pass – just let it go, Frank – they don’t like that, and they let it be known. And suppose mid-morning one day the metal doors to the killing area get padlocked. And the FSIS inspectors are there with their cameras and clipboards, and failing grades mean fines are handed down – steep fines – and who’s everybody looking crosswise at? Later someone sidles up to you and says, ‘Moo, moo,’ and not in a good-natured sort of way. Trust me, the next Biblical flood arrives, they’ll be the ones throwing the animals off the ark.”
I knew my mom wanted another pair of llamas, maybe by next spring if she was feeling better, though most of the talk I’d overheard had more to do with paying down debts. Like the three hundred bucks my dad owed some lug named Norman Martel who spent way too much time at the bleed rail, cracking jokes with his bullhorn voice. And stitched in block tomato-red letters across the wide back of his supervisor’s coat: MEAT YOUR MAKER.
Not to mention the pickup’s clutch slipping so badly that my dad had to take the long route home from work so as not to get caught downshifting between midnight and dawn – depending on his hours – just to make that slight rise in the distance beyond those endless fields of standing corn. Many nights I’d closed the door to my bedroom, not wanting to hear any more. And lying awake I’d try and try but just couldn’t imagine the pickup’s window rolled down like old times, me riding shotgun, and the radio cranked and my dad belting out, “And he’s bad, bad Leroy Brown/The baddest man in the whole damn town,” his all-time favorite tune, which these days when it came on only made him go silent.
I hoped he hadn’t any plans to settle this or any future disputes with anything but his two fists. That was bad enough, given how bad could run pretty deep with the local economy already up to its elbows in what my dad deemed the proverbial slop. Prosperity in these parts meant hitting the lotto, and he’d spent plenty trying, playing, week after week, variations on that same unlucky combination of our three birthdays. My mom had forgotten to take in the laundry, and my dad pointed out at all of his ankle-length white aprons hanging on the line, one for each working day. I didn’t say so, but they looked like ghost torsos, bleached and slightly billowed from the breeze, and nothing but darkness underfoot.
He hand gestured as if to say, never mind that, and snubbed out his cigarette and peeled off the remaining two or three press-on nails which he flicked out into the grass. Then he slowly rubbed his fingertips with his thumbs, his left one sewn back on two different times and my dad in a cast back on the job the very next day, an injury waiver already signed. Not back on the slaughter line, but rather checking levels in the hog waste cesspools where the flies amassed and buzzed all summer, or hosing watery cow turds into the concrete gutter troughs.
I figured some measure of sleep was already taking place in his mind, given how quiet he’d gotten, and I calculated that if I got up to go to bed he’d simply follow my lead and tomorrow we’d all wake a step or two closer to our imminent selves, my mom’s upbeat turn of phrase in a crisis. Which of course she hadn’t said lately, and I’d grown well enough acquainted over the years with how trouble had a way of following certain people around, and how reading trouble in our house did not mean reading between the lines.
Still, the way he looked seemed like punishment and humiliation enough, and possibly might have been, but when I got up and he said, “Henry, this isn’t over and whatever gets said, whatever that might be . . . “ it put to rest any hope that we’d slide by this night quite so easily.
Above us my mom’s knuckles rap-rapped the windowpane, and my dad, already leaning on his elbows, bent his head even farther back to stare up at her, though I noticed as I knelt down in front of him that only a few blurry stars were reflected there. The Corona Borealis, I thought. And not another single sound from anywhere as I unlaced his shiny black knee-high hooker boots and leveraged them off, one at a time, my hands and arms – even my shoulders – straining to free each of his cramped and blistered heels. No way did those boots belong to my mom, not in this or in any previous life or fantasy that I could imagine, and I hadn’t a clue where he’d dug them up.
“Ah, that’s much better,” he said. “That’s good, Henry. Now help your old man up, would you?” I could almost feel the tremor in his thighs as he stood and steadied himself for a moment on my shoulder and, still grimacing, he said to me, “Doing the right thing is hard enough. And to do that thing right is a whole lot harder, and all a person can do is work up the nerve to try. At least there’s that,” he said, “and precious little else that stands out or holds up for long in a person’s life. To believe otherwise is just another mealy-mouthed, chicken-shit lie.”
Oh, right, my mom would have said, paving the road to the poor house with all the best intentions. But I kept that thought to myself and nodded as if his words supported my view exactly of what a father should stand for in the face of any injustice. In all fairness, his sermon wasn’t that much different from what the nuns preached about our actions reflecting our hearts. And not to worry, as my mom so often reassured me, saying, “He just comes apart. But never all the way apart,” though I wondered this time if he had, and if she was still up there watching us negotiate the stairs in the moonlight.
“Goodnight,” my dad said, once we were inside, the door closed and locked behind us and my mom’s black choir robe pressed and laid out on the recliner. Nobody had mentioned not attending mass in the morning at Saint Francis, the patron of kindness to animals for whom my dad was named. Saint Frank. He who had worked twenty years in the same slaughterhouse, and ate his meat rare and without apology, and hated the way that lone wolf paced and paced all day in his cage at the zoo. He who had sat next to me in the same up-front pew every week, where we prayed while my mom poured out over the entire congregation a music so pure that I believed her voice, and hers alone would, forever and ever, save us in our time of need.

The storm did arrive, and deep in some strange dream space the wind chimes outside sounded like cow bells, like a slow herd of them crossing the creek, not towards the barn but straight into the chutes of the slaughterhouse where the mushroom-stunner failed to knock down an enormous, gorgeous white bull. His eyes burned red, the high arc of his pee so golden it sparked each time he leapt and roared, as if to signal those cows to stop and turn around before the drop gates closed.
Then they passed right by me, all alone on the line, though I could hear my mom crying from somewhere far off, and Roger Cluff, the notorious seventh-grade sex fiend and bully, suddenly older and uglier, appeared by the scalding vats where he exceeded yet another ear-piercing octave each time he squealed, “It’s not the length, it’s not the size – it’s how many times you can make it rise.”
The cows, leg-shackled and hanging upside down, limp and milky-eyed, barely even twitched when the sticker slit their jugulars. My fingers steamed as I tried to stem the hemorrhaging while the throats of the floor drains gurgled with blood. Or was it human laughter boiling up as that white bull’s endless torment echoed out into the pastures each time someone cranked up the voltage, cranked it so high that brass ring through his nose turned molten.
Where was my dad? Where was Sister Regina? There was a terrible story here, and a problem with God, who appeared as no more than a headwind slowing by so many seconds the arrival of two transport trailers hauling beef cattle from opposite coasts, one from Oregon, the other from a farm in upstate New York. I crossed myself, and right there where the imaginary lines intersected, and because there were no traffic lights or stop signs or cautions of any kind, it was ordained that those thundering, slat-sided semis would arrive simultaneously, each traveling at precisely seventy-five miles per hour into the blue heart of the heartlands just before dawn.
On impact, the sky turned a muted pink, and I awakened sweating and startled by the smell of sausage sizzling, and my mom calling my name from downstairs, and I felt both saved and blessed as I hurried down to breakfast. The scrambled eggs the way I liked them, not too dry, were just sliding out of the skillet onto my plate, which my mom handed to me as I sat down next to my dad in his normal place at the head of the table. I knew just how hard to spin the Lazy Susan so the grape jam would rotate exactly twice around before stopping directly in front of me, followed by a reverse half spin for the butter dish.
I’d never before seen my dad sip orange juice through a straw, or shake his head no when my mom offered a warm-up on his coffee, or order us in no uncertain terms not to answer the phone, though all three of us listened intently to the voice on the machine: “First, find your pig, Frankie,” and the sound of someone else snorting and grunting in the background, and the receiver eased back into its cradle.
“Probably just a wrong number,” I said, and my dad said back, “Not hardly,” making clear as he stared first at my mom and then at me that we’d be screening all calls for the time being. Which I hoped wasn’t really necessary but it took maybe four minutes for the ringing to begin again.
“We’ll be there for the burning,” a coarser, nasally voice said, at which point my dad put down his coffee mug and picked up and, instead of the outburst I figured would commence, said, “It’s Sunday morning. The only thing burning here is the fog,” which must have been what my mom was looking at out there in the field, her back towards us, and first light coming in through the window. The varicose veins low down on her legs had gotten worse, branching out blue above her calves, and the way she hugged herself so tightly made the whole kitchen go suddenly cold.
I could only hear my dad’s half of the conversation, of course, which was brief, and he said, “Then take it on faith,” and hung up and unplugged the phone from the wall jack.
Her back still to us my mom said, “So this is how we’re going to live? Skip mass and hide out here in our own little corner of the cosmos until you heal back up? And what then, Frank?” she said. “What’s our strategy after that?” And when she turned around to face him, the emptiness in her eyes frightened me way more than any possible number of anonymous phone threats.
There was no playacting this time for my sake, though my dad might have responded better, or better yet, said nothing at all. My mom, turning his statement into a question verbatim, said, “The price of admission? That’s it, Frank? That’s your answer? Well, terrific, because we sure have paid for it, haven’t we? The absolute best seats in the theater.”
When he didn’t answer, she said something about the boonies and living among men who slap their girlfriends into marrying young, as if the brute force of love were merely a kindness, a show of affection gone too far. I did not at my age care to examine the implications in that, though even then I felt the impossible shifting weight of things both valued and abused, and therefore lost. So I was glad when my dad got abruptly up and turned on the radio on his way outside. Turned it up too loud, but just in time for me to hear Paul Harvey signing off, as he always did in that strange, hesitating way he had of saying, “And now . . . you know the rest . . . of the story. Good day.” I hoped against all odds that maybe it could be. So I gulped and swallowed and followed my dad who was already inside the cab of the pickup, revving the cold engine, and the passenger door opened for me.
The muffler was doing its job, but when my dad let out the clutch so little gravel erupted that any visible evidence of an angry departure did not exist. I could tell by the way he gripped the steering wheel that he’d wanted badly to power the Dodge into fishtailing down the driveway to the blacktop road and maybe leave some rubber where he hung a slow right instead towards town.
We said nothing for awhile, and it didn’t at that point seem clear to me that he did or did not have a specific destination in mind, and was maybe following nothing more than an urge to be gone from the mounting tension inside our house.
Not all the leaves were down yet, but last night’s rain and wind had thinned them pretty good, and I liked the way they sounded slapping up wet under the snow tires that my dad always kept on year-round, and rotated after each plowing season, so at least the pickup didn’t shimmy. But sometimes the whole road seemed to if the Cedar River rose high enough outside its banks, the landscape swirling back and forth like the whole world was out of balance. I’d seen it happen a few times. But only once did my dad stop on Brown Bridge and take out from behind the seat his .22 pump with the long-tube magazine, and let me shoot tiny eyes into those pumpkins that had floated up and away from the low-lying fields and into the river’s main current. I hoped the rifle was not with us on this run, though I sure didn’t intend to cross-examine him about that or, for that matter, about anything else.
He lit a cigarette and lowered his visor and when he cracked his window I could feel the wintry air rush in and the heavy swirl of his Aqua Velva drift across my neck and cheeks. He had appeared at breakfast clean-shaven, his thick hair combed back, but the half-shadow on his face made his shiner seem even blacker, and when our eyes met in the rearview mirror, it was me who turned away.
“And?” he said, but I was already staring out the windshield and I just shook my head and said nothing back.
The sky had turned from pink to orange, and up ahead two deer bounded across the road – way up ahead – so when my dad braked hard it was not to avoid them, but rather to execute a dangerous U-turn, the passenger-side tires sliding off the wet pavement and bottoming and then grabbing just enough of the shoulder to keep us from flipping over into the drainage ditch. In the space of maybe a couple of blinks he’d changed or made up his mind about something, and by the time we passed our house the green speedometer needle had just nosed past seventy-five, but fell back to less than half that as we finally crested Wayne Hill. I wondered if my mom had seen or heard us speed by in the opposite direction from which we’d started out not fifteen minutes earlier. And if she had, whether she was every bit as frightened and confused and as knotted up in the stomach as I was.
I’d never once been in the slaughterhouse, though other kids whose dads worked there had, so I’d heard the grizzly accounts of giant blood clots breaking loose and spraying a fine red mist that hung for long seconds in the frigid air. Severed legs, the scooped-out skull-cradles of cows – details that always made me a little woozy and that I never, ever checked out with my dad, silently hating whatever part of him that might have contributed to making those impossible-to-listen-to stories true.
It defied all logic, given how he loved my mom’s llamas, and stayed up day and night with them in their slow dying, petting their necks and ears, talking softly and pressing cold washcloths to their lips and gums. My mom said he would have made such a gentle, compassionate veterinarian, but college for him never had much bite, and from way back our lives turning out a better way had proven to be an irregular thing.
His livelihood was what it was, or had been until those growing hostilities spilled over, eventually rendering him both vulnerable and defenseless but also, and unlike my mom, bitter and unafraid. It was no secret that he’d taken a position against the sadistic treatment of cows and hogs and goats. Which in turn, and over time, had brought the two of us – on a given Sunday morning in late October, 1985 – to be sitting in his red pickup with the engine off, and him asking me if I wanted to go inside.
“Your call,” he said. “Because I have some tools to pick up,” meaning his meat cleavers and boning knives, I guessed, and I flinched when he reached over and touched my shoulder. “You stay here then,” he said. “Anybody comes by, you tell them I’ll be right out,” and he held up his key to show me he wasn’t breaking in. “Right?”
“Right,” I said, though he’d parked well off the road behind some sumac thickets, and a good distance from the slaughterhouse parking lot for a reason, and that reason seemed obvious to me.
“Okay. Good,” he said. “I’m almost done here and once I get back and this is all behind us, we’ll come up with a workable plan. Whatever that might be. But for now the only thing you need to think about, the only thing you must remember, Henry, is that you and me – we were never here.”
“Never,” I repeated, a lie I wanted badly to believe but knew even then was no more than a weak-minded plea to insinuate ourselves away from the trouble ahead. And yet I could not think of a single other word to say.
He nodded then and checked his watch and started walking down a steep pitch of green field that leveled off after a ways, where he stopped and separated two strands of barbed wire before ducking through and waving back up at me.
He’d left the truck key in the ignition and I wondered if I could tune in that radio station from Winnipeg I’d found one night while the two of us were out just cruising the countryside like we used to do. For sure there were places around with higher elevations, but I could still see over the slaughterhouse roof and beyond the feedlots and boxcars all the way to Lake Tonawanda, and figured maybe with the day so clear the radio reception would carry right out of the country. But what I heard before I ever even touched the on/off dial were the distant cries of snow geese, a huge raft of them lifting away from the lake’s opal-colored surface. I’d say two hundred at least, their wings rippling in slow motion like light blue ribbons as they ascended above the tree line.
I got out and climbed into the bed of the pickup just to get a few feet closer to them, and my dad stopped and looked up right as they passed overhead. A non-hunter his whole life, he did not take aim down the length of his arms. He simply pointed skyward and then continued on, getting smaller and smaller until all I could see of him was that strange other image I tried not to conjure up inside my head. But the truth was simple: my dad in strumpet attire had cut a pretty unforgettable figure. And, because news always travels with fury in a small town, I knew that tomorrow at school I’d have to face the terrible reality of defending what he’d done, and possibly a whole lot more.
The snow geese kept rising, almost out of sight, and I thought then about how distance equaled velocity times time, how long before they’d put down again, and how often they’d be fired at, and just how many would die on their long migration home.
My dad had bought the pickup used and had never removed the rear-window decal of the Grand Canyon, and talked back then about road trips he had in mind for us, oceans we ought to see, though I had yet to cross state lines in any direction, and I was glad not to hear it spoken as an option on that particular day. Not that I much wanted to be where we were either, and the agreement that we hadn’t been here meant lies and alibis, what Sister Regina called the very longest route to Paradise.
I folded my hands and placed them on top of the cab and rested my chin in the fleshy circle of forefingers and thumbs and waited there for the slow weight of the sun to warm me. I can’t say how long I waited, or what transpired during my dad’s absence, but when I saw him again he was running towards me, the long back of a stark white butcher’s coat flapping out behind him. No knife or meat cleaver blades glittering in his fists, but he was holding something, a book or a ledger. When he raised it above his head, I thought maybe he was signaling to me to start the pickup for a quick getaway, and the blood chugged hot in my ears until I realized there was nobody in pursuit, nobody anywhere around. Just me, an accomplice who had dozed off momentarily, and my dad approaching fast and out of breath and saying as he arrived, “Easy as you please. Now come on, Henry, get down and let’s get the holy hell gone from here.”
We slowpoked our way home without much talk, the clutch so bad that my dad shifted without it, and without grinding the upper gears too badly. My mom had started a fire in the wood stove, smoke pouring out of the chimney as we pulled up. I could see her rinsing plates at the sink and stacking them in the dishwasher. Which on Sunday mornings ever since she’d gotten sick was my job, and I wished then that we’d come back with cider and some squash and warty gourds and maybe a few pumpkins to carve, the cold smell of fall all over us as we entered the kitchen. But only I went inside, empty-handed and saying, “Hi, Mom,” and then running right upstairs to my bedroom, where I stretched the blinds tight to the windowsills and slid fully dressed between the sheets and pulled the quilt right up to under my eyes.
My mom had talked from time to time about selling and moving closer to town, but as a family we’d never lived anywhere else. Two stories plus the cellar and attic, and some old ornament work along the cornices. Four acres is all and, as I said, a barn that had fallen in, but the house was big and sturdy in the wind, which I liked, though there were certain spots in the hallway that even my mom’s soft-soled moccasins made squeak.
I heard her approach and then stop right outside my door. She didn’t knock or talk or move. She just stood there in the heavy silence of whatever she was thinking until my dad whistled his way into the kitchen with an armload of logs that he dropped with a loud crash into the wood box. And then he called her name. “Annie?” And then a second time, not full boil, but louder, and that’s when I pulled the pillow over my head and pressed my thumb knuckles so hard to my ears that nothing, for as long as I could stand it, could ever filter through.

I did not brighten up in Sister Regina’s class, for sure not when it came to solving story problems. Nor did I resort to tears or rage as Roger Cluff’s acne flamed with each foul-mouthed taunt he hurled just inches from my face. All fall he smelled like a smokehouse, and I knew he helped his dad who, after the slaughterhouse was temporarily shut down, processed wild game in his garage.
“Spineless,” Roger Cluff called me, and bent over and pressed his snout close to my ear and grunted like a warthog. “You cost us big-time, you pussy twit,” he’d whisper. “Goddamn traitor, you and your faggot old man.” His eyes would blur and I could feel with each word the hate expanding all the way from the very back of his skull.
His hands at fourteen were already muscled, his cut thumbs cocked first thing each morning and the barrel-tips of his index fingers aimed right at my temples. Always full-faced. Always right up close and saying, “Ca-boom, ca-boom. You’re dead, faggot ass. You’re dead fucking meat.”
Although my mom asked for names, I refused to squeal on anyone, my clenched fists screaming silently from deep in my pants pockets. Except when I’d get home and go into the garage and swing wildly at the speed bag, but connecting solidly only when it hung still, the round red leather stained with the sweat of my dad’s knuckles. Sometimes just hanging there, it reminded me of some giant animal’s heart. I’d promised my mom no schoolyard fights, had sworn to it on the Bible, no matter the volume of blows I absorbed during each school day’s verbal melee.
I even lost a staredown to Marilyn Vanderbeam, a girl who sat across from me and whose gray eyes rivaled the favorite marbles in my collection, those with the smoky swirls inside. I’d taken to thinking for awhile that I could love someone like her later on in life. Someone who wrote poems on black paper with white ink, poems about angels and God and one she read aloud about the risen soul of her border collie. But after my dad’s trouble, she’d raise her chin in contempt and bead in on me in a way that made even my knees and elbows ache.
In December Sister Regina decorated the classroom with angels and doves, the manger alive with painted plaster wise men and camels, and a single donkey who seemed so peaceful curled up by himself in the straw. Seated at our desks we’d sing “Oh, Holy Night” and “Joy to the World.”
Sister Regina fingered her rosary and lectured us on what she referred to as “this season of mercy.” But she rarely called on me anymore, not even to wipe down the blackboard or go outside into the snow to whack the erasers free of chalk dust, all that knowledge dissolved into so many tiny cloud bursts. I could see the angry blue veins pulse low on her forehead whenever I raised my hand, a habit I finally broke that same week my dad started serving his sentence for damages inflicted on Ma Dieter’s bar and on a certain clientele of slaughterhouse regulars, a fine he outright refused to pay. Not back then would he pay, and as he made clear to my mom, “Not ever. Not one stinking dime,” though it cost him ninety days at Camp Pugsley, a low-security penal facility less than an hour’s drive north toward the Straits.
Against my mom’s advice he waived his right to a court-appointed attorney, arguing that the case against him was nothing more than spite and revenge. “Ma Dieter’s,” he said. “Good Christ. What’s Ma Dieter’s got to do with any single goddamn thing?”
It was late and they were alone in the kitchen and I’d sneaked into listening range just in time to hear him confess what everyone suspected and said but could not prove. That he was the whistleblower. Not a mole, but just some local nobody who’d refused to serve what he did not believe in and could not cure. “Your dad’s non serviam,” as my mom would later refer to it, but never without that sharp edge for the terrible, terrible price we all paid.
He’d struck no deal with anyone, but it was agreed nonetheless that his name, Francis Henry Burke, would, for his and for his family’s protection, nowhere be mentioned. Nor would he ever – profiled by his fellow workers as a crazy, disgruntled employee currently serving time for assault – be called to testify as an eyewitness against the evils of human cruelty. They did not need him to appear in court, the case against the slaughterhouse being airtight.
Before he left he had a new clutch installed in the pickup. And both times I talked with him on the phone, he joked about making potholders and key chains, and how maybe he’d market them once he got released. It was hard to imagine him spending too much time doing arts and crafts. I figured they’d have him de-boning chickens or trimming fat off the low-end steaks and chops, though maybe knives in the hands of criminals violated some fundamental code of law.
We had an unlisted phone number by then, and my mom spent part of every day talking with the real estate fellow who’d listed our house and who, given the circumstances, convinced her to reduce the price.
It sold shortly after that, sight unseen, to the manager of the new Arby’s already under construction in Roscommon, a town with a future about ten miles away. My mom borrowed against the sale and in that way arranged for a moving van, had a new muffler installed on the pickup, and padded her checkbook in order to keep pace with the torrent of ordinary bills.
My dad asked us not to visit, and we didn’t, not once. But when he got released on his own recognizance for two days at Christmas, we drove up to Camp Pugsley to get him. My mom put on a dress I liked, something she’d found while cleaning out the closets. A dress, I thought, from another era that made her look younger and pretty again, and I saw her almost smile into the full-length mirror as she turned in slow half circles, first left and then right before she closed the door.
“You look nice, Mom,” I said, which maybe I shouldn’t have, given that right then her neck muscles tightened and she closed her eyes. She held a purse in one hand and took out a Kleenex, at which point I left to go shovel a path to the pickup, and to scrape ice from the windshield. My mom did not like driving any distance with the snowplow attached, so my dad had taken it off, and I noticed as soon as I got outside that somebody had come by in the dark and made a swipe of our driveway. I had no idea if my dad had hired it done or if in secret a Good Samaritan on his way to work just wanted to do a decent thing.
In the car she talked about Ohio where we’d be moving shortly after the holidays, and where I’d be enrolled in a new school. “Nobody will know us there,” she said. “Henry, nobody.”
Right then, a sunlit cloudburst of snow turned everything bright white, a Michigan squall, and we slowed to a crawl for maybe ten minutes before the windswept world of scrub oaks and fields reappeared, first in patches, and then the whole road finally opened up again. I didn’t ask, but I wondered if my dad would be wearing one of those orange jumpsuits with numbers on the back. And if my mom’s purse would be searched by the guards, and if I’d be patted down before the two of us were led into some sterile visiting room as my dad was escorted through a maze of security doors, each one buzzing open as he approached.
There was none of that. Instead, he was waiting for us outside the main gate, dressed in his polar-fleece vest and jeans and shifting from foot to foot and working a cigarette hard. No hat or scarf or suitcase, though I could already from that distance see a red bow sticking out from each of his vest pockets. Presents he’d made or bought? We hadn’t put up a tree or stockings or even a front door wreath, the living room piled high with taped and labeled boxes.
When he saw the pickup, he cocked his head and took a final, slow drag and then held out his thumb like a hitchhiker. He appeared thin and, as he walked towards us, his boot heels kicked up tiny parachutes of feathery new snow, blanketing the sirens I expected at that instant to erupt.
My mom did not open the door or slide over next to me. Instead she rolled down the window and my dad leaned low and asked if we were going his way. The mustache he’d grown was mostly gray. And the way he locked onto my mom’s eyes and gripped the door with both hands made me momentarily light-headed, as if the world’s slow rotation had suddenly speeded up. My chest felt both empty and full, like I could breathe and couldn’t at the same time.
It wasn’t a real long kiss, but long enough for my dad to reach behind her so I could hold tight to his hand until the spinning stopped. Which it did, and all that had befallen us seemed, if not a blessing, then something approximate to that. Something, I thought, ready to bear its weight and be graced.

---

Jack Driscoll’s most recent novel is How Like an Angel (Sweetwater Fiction: Originals, 2005). His stories have appeared in The Georgia Review, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review, and Missouri Review.