THE ROD by Castle Freeman, Jr.

Forgiveness, Edith said. See the power of forgiveness. For a second, I thought she was kidding, but no. Edith’s a good church-going woman. She believes in forgiveness. So do I, I suppose. But Edith was seeing forgiveness, and I was not. I said no. Forgiveness? No, I said. Edith hadn’t been in the kitchen. She hadn’t seen the look her brother gave me. She hadn’t seen the blood. She hadn’t heard what Brink said. “I ain’t ready,” Brink said.
“No,” I said. “It’s not the power of forgiveness. It’s not that.”
“What would you call it, then?” Edith demanded. “You’ve heard how Pop used to be. How he used to be to Brink. You see how Brink is for him now. Forgiveness.”
“No,” I said.

* * *

Edith and Ernest had driven down from St. Johnsbury. Ernest’s a school principal up there. He doesn’t have a lot to say. Edith is a teacher. Ninth grade. She does. Grace and I had come on the train from the city. Grace was still in the Second District office. I was between jobs. In those days, I spent quite a bit of time between jobs. As much time as possible.
The four of us had come up for Carl’s, their father’s, birthday. There had been a little reception at the VFW. Then the family had come back to the house. The family was us. We had come because it looked sufficiently like Carl wouldn’t be having another birthday. He had had a stroke and then a bad fall in the spring. He was perfectly sharp, but he couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, scrawled his words on a note pad, looked like hell, and couldn’t take care of himself. That was where Brink came in. He was Edith and Grace’s brother, the middle child. Their mother had died quite young. In her forties? Her thirties, even? Some cancer.
Lately, since Brink’s wife had kicked him out, he’d been living with Carl in the old house. Now he looked after Carl. Without Brink, Carl would have had to give up the house. Without Brink, the whole situation, painful as it was, would necessarily have been far more so. The sisters were well aware of that. So was Ernest. So was I. So, surely, was Carl. Only Brink seemed not to find anything significant or praiseworthy in his care, in his devotion to his invalid father.
“It beats working,” said Brink.
Now he brought Carl into the house from the car. Brink carried Carl in his arms like a lost lamb. Carl hadn’t been a small man, but his illness had reduced him considerably, and Brink was a big broad fellow and carried him easily. He put Carl down in his wheelchair in the sitting room and rolled him closer to the little circle we made before the cold fireplace. Carl must be tired, but he would sit with us for a while before Brink carried him upstairs to rest. Brink laid a hand on his shoulder.
“How’s that?” he asked Carl. Carl nodded.
“Some would say it was working,” said Edith.
“What?” said Brink. “No; it’s turn-about, is all. Ain’t it? Fair’s fair, right? Right, Pop? I wipe your bottom now; time was, you wiped mine.”
Sitting in his wheelchair, Carl shook his head vigorously and wrote something on the pad he used to converse. He showed it to us.

NOT MUCH.

Carl grinned his post-stroke grin, slack-jawed, frightening. He waved the note pad at us.
“Pop means he didn’t wipe your bottom all that much,” said Edith. “He’s right. I probably did more of that than he did. For sure I did for you,” she said to Grace.
“Thank you, big sister,” said Grace. “I hope that was as much fun for you as it was for me.” But Edith wasn’t listening to her. She was watching Brink and Carl. Brink settled a blanket over Carl’s legs, then he bent and kissed his father lightly on the top of his bald, speckled old forehead. Seeing this, Edith smiled.
“You all set?” Brink asked Carl. “You want anything?” Carl shook his head, tried to hitch up his face into a smile, failed. His mouth was ajar, and one of his eyes started. He looked like a stone gargoyle leering down from the height of a French cathedral to scare the simple into faith. Brink turned to his sisters. “How about I make us a fire, here?” he asked.
“We’ll have to be getting on our way before long,” said Edith.
“Plenty of time,” said Brink. “Won’t take a minute.”
“Can I give you a hand?” I asked him. I got on with Brink. We kept it light.
“Sure,” said Brink. “Come on.”

* * *

Carl had never been anything but good to me, a newcomer, a stranger to their family. Grace brought me home one Thanksgiving. Carl had no particular reason to be welcoming to yet another of his headstrong younger daughter’s boyfriends; but he took to me, or he acted as if he did. He made out as though he and I were somehow allied against the two sisters, Edith and Grace, to the disadvantage of our beleaguered male selves.
“Don’t let these brainy women push you around,” Carl said to me. “They’ve had too much education.”
Edith and Ernest were there that first Thanksgiving, Edith heavily pregnant, her mild husband tender, attentive. Brink was on hand, as well, about to go into the navy. He and Carl hardly spoke to each other the whole three days. I noted that. Grace had told me of the old trouble between them. Carl’s savage discipline: slaps, belts, switches, canes, finally fists. When Brink was a boy, Carl and he were like a man beating a puppy. When he got big, they were like the Golden Gloves. The little finger on Carl’s right hand was bent in, Grace told me, because he’d swung at Brink once, missed, and hit the edge of a door. She had been there. She had seen that. It was almost funny, she said.
Brink did his navy, came home, got a job with an excavator, got married. Both girls were gone by then. Brink and Carl started getting along. They even set up as partners, working together from time to time on small foundation jobs. They went on that way for a couple of years. But Brink was never easy. He and his wife blew up, and, having no place else to go, he moved home. He and Carl started getting along even better. Then Carl had his stroke. Here they were.

* * *

I followed Brink through the kitchen and out to the yard and the big woodshed. In there, long, orderly stacks of cut and quartered logs, head high. “Here you go,” said Brink. He began loading my arms with logs from the nearest stack.
“Well,” I said, “Carl is looking pretty good, considering, I’d say.”
“Would you?” asked Brink. He stopped handing me logs and took up a light axe and a piece of scrap one-by from the floor of the shed. Bracing the piece end‑up on a block, he quickly split slender pieces of kindling off it with the axe, using short strokes so rapid the splits seemed to fall like shuffled cards. “Okay,” said Brink, and, picking up a handful of kindling, he started back to the house. I went after him.
In the sitting room, I laid my armful of logs on the hearth. Brink got down on one knee before the fireplace and arranged newspaper, his split kindling, and three logs for burning. He lit the paper with a match and stood. We waited for the fire. The paper and pine splits burned easily, but the logs didn’t want to.
“You need more kindling,” Ernest told Brink.
“Looks like it,” said Brink. He turned to go back to the shed. I started after him, but, “No need,” said Brink. “Stay where you’re at. I’ve got it.” So I sat down with the others.
“Where do you get your wood?” Ernest asked Carl.
Carl nodded toward the door by which Brink had left the sitting room.
“You mean he buys it?” Ernest asked.
Carl shook his head. He took up his pad. He wrote

CUTS IT.

“All of it?” Ernest asked. Carl nodded.
“By himself?” Edith asked. Carl nodded. On his pad he wrote again:

GOOD WORKER.

“I’d guess so,” said Ernest. “Heating an old place like this? That’s quite a job.”
“Hah,” said Edith. “Pop didn’t always think Brink was much of a worker, did you?” she asked her father. He looked at her, then at Grace, then away.
“Get in enough wood for a winter, out of the woods, working alone?” Edith went on. “You couldn’t get him to fill the woodbox, unless he was beaten about the head and shoulders.”
“Which he was,” said Grace.
“Careful,” said Ernest.
Grace turned to look at Carl, who looked right back at her, his gaze intent but chained, trapped, captive in his sagging, ruined face. He wrote on his pad and held it out to Grace.

SPARE ROD.

“Spare the rod?” said Grace. “Spare the rod? You? Did you just say spare the rod?”
“Be careful,” said Ernest.
“Well, well,” said Edith. “He knows how to work now, doesn’t he? He knows his duty now, as well. Where is he? Brink?” she called.
“I’ll see,” I said. I got up and started for the door. Whatever air had been pumped into Carl for a moment had left him. He slumped in his wheelchair. His head began to droop.
“Tell him Pop’s about had it,” said Edith. “Tell him it’s time for him to go up.”
In the kitchen I found Brink at the counter, as I at first thought washing his hands under the tap. Then I saw the line of blood spots on the floor running from the outside door to the sink, I saw a bloody towel on the counter, and I saw that the water in the basin was pink.
“Chopped my finger,” said Brink. “Stupid.” He was holding his left hand under the cold tap.
“Let me see,” I said, but Brink didn’t want to show me. “It’s only a nick,” he said. “I’m waiting for it to quit bleeding.”
“Let me see.”
Brink held out his injured hand to me. He was right: he had a gash at the knuckle of his left forefinger. It bled freely, but it wasn’t deep, and it was clean. Brink had been trying to wrap it with something to check the bleeding, but with one hand he was having trouble.
“Here,” I said. I took a dishtowel from a drawer and ripped it into strips, then used them to bind up Brink’s cut. I wrapped it tightly.
“Didn’t know you were a doctor,” said Brink.
“There’s a lot you don’t know,” I said.
“You, too,” said Brink.
“All set,” I said. I released Brink’s injured hand. He opened and closed the fingers. “Good job,” he said. “Thanks a lot, Doc.”
“You probably should go to the clinic and get that stitched,” I said. “But you won’t, right?”
“No. I mean, right,” said Brink. “It’ll be fine. Thanks. You want to go bring in the stuff I split from the shed? For the fire?”
“You know what?” I said. “We should be getting on our way. And your dad’s tired. Edith said to tell you he’s about ready to go up.”
“My dad,” said Brink. “My dad.” He let the bloody water out of the sink. He watched it drain away. He gave me a long, frozen look.
“My dad,” Brink said. “Sure, he’s ready. But it’s me. I ain’t ready.”
“What?”
“Look at him,” said Brink. “What’s it like to be him, now? Fun?”
“No.”
“No,” said Brink. “He had his fun. He had all kinds of fun. You say he’s ready. Sure, he’s ready. But it ain’t him. It’s me. He goes when I’m ready. I ain’t ready.”
“I meant today,” I said.
“I know what you meant,” said Brink.

* * *

“You’re quiet,” Grace said to me. The four of us were in the car. Ernest was driving Grace and me down to Brattleboro to the train. Then Edith and Ernest would get on the highway and drive back to St. Johnsbury. We rode old-fashioned style, not by couples, but by sex: men up front, women in the rear. “You’re awfully quiet,” Grace said.
“I guess I am,” I said. In fact, I was relieved. I was feeling relief at getting away from the house, away from Carl’s birthday gathering, away from Carl and Brink. I doubted I was the only one feeling that way, but why get into it? Edith spoke up.
“Spare the rod,” she said. “Spare the rod and spoil the child. Like Pop said? I always wondered about that saying.”
“Wondered what?” Ernest asked her.
“Well,” said Edith, “what’s it mean, you know? Does it mean, If you spare the rod, then you will spoil the child, so don’t spare the rod? Or does it mean, Go ahead and spare the rod. Go ahead and spoil the child. Relax. Take it easy.”
“We know what Pop thinks it means, anyway,” said Grace.
“What he used to think, maybe,” said Edith. “Not any more. Now look at the two of them. It’s something to see, isn’t it, how Brink does for him, and with all he took from Pop? All those years, all those lickings. And now the way Brink takes care of him? You see the power of forgiveness there.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “It’s not the power of forgiveness.”
“What would you call it, then?” Edith demanded. “If it’s not the power of forgiveness, what is it?”
“It’s the power of power,” I said.
So we rode on and parted at the station in Brattleboro. Edith hadn’t much of a goodbye for me. We had never really been friends. We never would be. So what?
Edith and Ernest would be home hours before Grace and I would be. I had hoped to read on the train, and Grace soon went to sleep, but as we were coming into New Haven, in the rain, she woke up and turned to me.
“What you said about the power of power?” she asked me. “What did you mean by that, exactly?”
“Pretty clear, isn’t it?” I said. “As a kid, Brink was in your father’s power. Your father abused his power. Now it’s turned around. Brink has the power. He knows it. They both do. It’s the basis for everything between them. I meant that, I guess.”
“It’s one basis,” said Grace.
“One?”
“You know Pop’s finger? The one he broke taking a swing at Brink?”
“He hit a door, right?” I said. “It was almost funny, you said.”
“It wasn’t funny,” said Grace. “It was my door he hit.”
“Your door? You mean the door to your room?”
Grace nodded.
“You never told me that,” I said to Grace.
“No,” said Grace.
“Well, then,” I said.
“Well?”
“That rod,” I said. “That rod of Edie’s?”
“What about it?”
“Who’s got it, now?”
“Brink.”
“What I said, wasn’t it?” I asked Grace.
“I guess it is,” said Grace. “Poor Pop.”
“Poor Pop?” I said. “What about you?”
“I don’t know,” said Grace. She looked out the rainy window. “It was a long time ago, wasn’t it?” she said.

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Castle Freeman, Jr. is the author of the short story collections Round Mountain (Concord Free Press, 2012), The Bride of Ambrose and Other Stories (Soho Press, 1987), and the novels All That I Have (2009) and Go With Me (2008), both from Steerforth Press, and My Life and Adventures (St. Martin’s Press, 2002). His recent stories have appeared in New Letters, Southwest Review, Idaho Review, New England Review, and AGNI.