STITCHES by John Fulton
You and your father are out in the fields hunting pheasants on a cold fall day and under an open sky, into which a flock of geese from the reservoir far below rises into a V. You follow the birds, squinting into the sun, until they grow distant, like dirty flecks, smaller and smaller, and until some inner sense of danger – something bad is about to happen, you think – makes you look down just in time to see your father topple over. His chest and shoulders and gun disappear into the thick cover and hit the ground with a dull thud that seems to land on your chest, sucking the air from your lungs. Your father is old, well into his seventies, and almost frail. And you, now a father yourself, and on this trip because you want to know him better before it’s too late, experience the pain of the impact, as if you were the one to have fallen. You run to where he lies on the ground and look down.
Later, at the emergency room, you recall how you found him: deep in the weeds on his back, unable to move at first, struggling for breath, even as he smiled – perhaps because he is that kind of man, quiet, inward, too embarrassed to show distress – though a splash of blood covered the fingers that staunched the deep cut on his chin and he couldn’t rise without taking your hand. You felt him trembling as you pulled him up, though it wasn’t his weakness that bothered you. It was something more, something you couldn’t make out then.
“Had a little accident,” he says now to the woman doctor in blue scrubs; she is attractive, young, and he does what he has always seemed compelled to do with women, trying to charm her, even smiling, though as soon as his lips curl into a grin, he startles with pain and pulls his lips flat again. The doctor chats about her two kids, a girl and a boy. They’re a lot of fun, she says, slowly sinking the needle into your father’s face then gracefully pulling the thread upward and, with a synch of the wrist, closing the corner of the cut. But they fight like cats and dogs.
Just a few more, she says, adding, with a glance at you, It’s nice that you and your father can come out here and hunt together. Even as she says this, sinking the needle into his face again, you lift your hand as if by reflex and touch an old scar, just below your lower lip, and feel the strange space of a story – something that happened a long time ago – opening up inside you, wide like the sky below which your father just fell. It’s a story which you remember more vividly than you want to and that seems about to disappear again into all the space inside you, a space you don’t often fathom. But the story doesn’t disappear. It isn’t as if you’ve ever forgotten it. But you do go about with it, as you do with most memories, as if it had never been there, as if you were the product always of this moment now, as if you had never been anything other than this man, this father, this husband, this professor who gets his children up in the morning, takes them to school, goes to the university, greets his colleagues in the halls, teaches his students, eats dinner with his family, reads in bed, kisses his wife before turning out the light, makes love to her, if he is lucky, goes to sleep, and gets up again – as if you’d never been more or less than this, as if the scar on your lower lip that you finger now as you watch the doctor pull the needle through and up once again with easy finesse – just a few more and we’ll be all done, she says cheerily – as if that scar were not there, and as if your father had never left your mother and you, too, many years ago – so many years ago that you, then a small boy, could never remember having had a father. You just remember him being gone. You remember, or think you do, a white envelope on a kitchen table that your mother opened to find a letter from your father and her husband informing her that he had left. He had joined the army, or been drafted, this being a time of war, and somehow he had kept this from his wife, or so the story goes, until he had already gone and she had come home to read his letter. And you, a very small boy, not able to read, could only know the story your mother – now dead nearly ten years – told you at the time and repeated through the years of your childhood. And though you, a man now, standing in a clinic watching his father receive stitches, hardly recall being this boy and go about your days as if he never existed, he is there now, evoked clearly enough in that interior space. The boy crouches beside his mother at the kitchen table, the letter in her hands, as she says, He left us. He’s gone. The boy and his mother seem to wait, the letter out on the table, for days, for weeks, for months for the man to return. And when he does not, they try to go to him. They mount a shiny flight of metal stairs and climb into an airplane, the engines of which make a scary racket. The boy has never flown before and isn’t prepared for the earth below to grow small, to disappear, for there to be nothing but air and clouds, isn’t prepared for his mother trembling beside him even as the pretty stewardesses, who wear blue outfits and little hats like upside down cones, look at them with a sweet calm that the boy wishes his mother could feel because it might mean he could feel it, too.
The country where they land is broad and strange. It stretches farther than the land does at home so that the boy feels smaller here. And it is cold. Patches of snow lie on the gray earth. And when people speak, the boy can’t understand their words and neither – this much is clear from her face – can his mother.
But what you remember almost more than anything else is that this boy who cannot yet read somehow knows – how could this be? – where to go and how to find his father, whom he doesn’t remember. Perhaps the boy knows this because his mother needs him to know it. The boy, it is clear enough to you now, will have many resources that he probably should not have because his mother lacks them. It is as if a man, already formed, already full grown, were inside him. And so the boy leads the way. Get in this car, mother, he says. Get in this bus. Get in this train. Follow me. It’s down this road. And so the boy finds his way to a house on the side of an icy street. His father emerges from the front door, looking nothing like the old man who lies on the table now as a woman sews him up. He is taller back then, broader in the shoulders. He wears a uniform with shiny insignias on it, and peers out into the cold air, squinting, though the air is not bright, with such intensity and disbelief that the boy has the strong sensation of being seen from the outside – can even see himself, a small, round-faced kid, a little husky, standing in front of his mother, whose eyes are dark and hard with accusation. What are you doing here? the man asks.
Behind him a woman leans casually against the doorframe, so casually that even the boy, as young as he is, understands that she lives in that house, that her presence means something irrevocable. Her smile is welcoming but there is a sheen in her eyes that doesn’t want them there. A wind blows her dress backwards and she crosses her arms and hugs herself.
What happens next, you, standing in the clinic, cannot quite put together. You know only that the man comes out of the house in his thick coat and leads the boy and his mother out into the icy road because he wants them far away from the house and the woman inside. And, in truth, the boy wants that, too. But the road seems incredibly wide and the boy fears that he will never make it to other side. His father is in front of him and his mother is too far behind him. The ice on the road is thick and the boy is unable to get his footing. And so he stops. He calls to his father, who is tall, towering, his hands huge at the end of his long arms, Help me! Hold my hand. And his mother shouts from behind the boy, too far behind him to do anything, Take his hand! He needs your help. And standing out ahead of him, the man says, You’re a big boy. You can cross the road yourself. But he is not big. In the middle of this road, he feels small. And so he turns and lunges for his father, who does not reach for him. The boy feels his feet kick out and his face hit the ice hard, his chin splitting open to the bone in the place where you prod at the scar now, just beneath the lower lip, in the same place, or very near it, where your old father, sitting up, pale, his eyes groggily looking around as if he weren’t sure about the world anymore, has a thick line of sutures, the cut closed up as tightly as that memory closes up inside you now, growing comfortably distant, though you do just register the faint reverberations of what that boy, bleeding on the ice, furious in only the way a small boy can be, screams out: Why didn’t you take my hand? Why? I needed your hand!
And you recall again offering your hand in the field to your old father. He was trembling and when he took your hand, he squeezed so tightly that you knew he was afraid, never mind his smile.
We’re all done, the woman doctor says, grinning, even as she looks with concern – too much concern, you think – into your father’s face, as if peering down a dark hole and trying to see to the bottom of it, because he took a blow to his head. She already asked him a battery of simple questions – his name, his birthdate and place, where he was, his son’s name – that he was able to answer, smiling, saying, Am I all here, Doc? You seem to be, she said. But now she hands you a sheet of symptoms and tells you to wake him every two hours that night with orders to bring him in if he is confused or hard to wake.
Outside now, the world seems overly large, emptier than you remember it; and as if to confirm this impression, your father cranes his head up and looks out, seeming to expect a clear limit, something to hold the distance in closer, and worried not to find one.
Your father is not to get behind the wheel – doctor’s orders – for at least another day, and so you drive his large truck. The land is flat as far as you can see, with only a few boxlike buildings, little houses, and the shadowy outlines of mountains on the distant edge. Here and there over the flatness, you spy huge green tractors dragging rows of metal claws into the muddy earth. Sugar beet harvest, your father says. It’s a big cash crop. They do all right around here. You live in a faraway city and aren’t used to this vastness. You don’t know much about farmers of any sort, about cash crops. You aren’t used to the large vehicle you drive now, the way it thrusts you above everything and seems to crush the ground below it. And although as an older boy you hunted on a few occasions with your father, whom you never lived with, whom you only saw on long weekends or over vacations, you are no longer used to shooting things, to killing them – or trying to. Perhaps it’s fortunate that you’ve had no success over the last few days, though you feel a surprising sense of failure, an almost shameful one that makes you self-conscious because at your age, nearly fifty, you are too old for such small feelings.
Wondering about your family now, you call home. I hope you’re having a good time out there, your wife says, unable to suppress a harriedness in her voice, a slight irritation because you left at a busy time – she has a lot to do at work. The kids are calling loudly in the background, Is it Daddy? It’s Daddy! It’s Daddy! And their eager voices make you miss them and experience a guilt that is too large for an absence of only a few days. You blame it on all the space out here. It confuses you. It makes the world inside you – the feelings there – larger than it should be. You blame it on your old father, sitting groggily beside you, who really did leave his family forever and whose guilt you seem to be feeling now perhaps because he never felt it – or seemed to feel it – himself. And this guilt makes you worry, as if you’re going to be gone a long time and not just a few days, makes you ask, Is everything all right there? Just fine, your wife says. I love you all, you tell her. Tell the kids I love them. And you do love them, your boy and girl, and think now how you will be home soon and hug them tightly, hold them, let them know how much you love them, let them know that you will never be gone for long.
But why didn’t your father love you in this same way? Why did he leave you and your mother? You’ve asked him before, but he has never given an answer that satisfied your sense of justice. We weren’t compatible, he said. We were two different people, he said. Recently, as the weather turned cold, you began dreaming about your father. Every night, it seemed. And although you could never remember the dreams, the sense of them lingered. When you woke in the mornings, you struggled to reassemble them, but all you saw was a blue sky with the naked branches of trees clutching at clouds overhead. The gentle rush of water meant a river was somewhere nearby. And with that river came a feeling you only recognized from the absence of it in your life. It was the feeling of having a father – of always having had one – nearby. A feeling as big and reassuring as the bed below you, the sheets wrapped around you, so that you held to them and didn’t want to let go. But soon you had to. And as you rose from bed and dressed, as you ate breakfast, took your kids to school, went to work, this feeling would once again be replaced by its absence. You talked to your wife about these dreams, your urgency to see him given his age, and she encouraged you to go. Do it now, she said.
And so you are here, feeling this strange guilt, regretting your wife’s irritation, never mind her earlier encouragement, missing your children as if you had betrayed them.
But now you stop the truck. Look at that, you say, excited and a little afraid.
What is it? your wife asks over the phone.
You’d better get out there, your father says.
I’ve got to put the phone down, you say, hearing your wife’s voice grow small – What is it? she’s still asking – as you take your gun from behind the seat and are already outside in the road. It’s too easy. The bird is right there on the roadside. For two days, you and your father have beaten through the underbrush, the dogs running out ahead, and only flushed a handful of pheasants, all of which you missed with the first shot and your father – never mind that his hands and arms shake from age – got with the second. You need to lead the bird, your father said. The sky is orange with sunset. The gun feels heavy and cold. You’re sure you’ll miss again. Then the bird goes up, you shoulder the gun, fire, and it comes careening down. I got it! you shout, hearing a clap of celebratory laughter – your father’s! – coming from the truck. You’re surprised to hear your wife’s frightened voice a moment later on the phone again asking, Are you all right? I heard a gunshot. Your father is smiling with approval, shaking his head in the dark truck cab. Good shot, son, he says. And you laugh. I shot a bird, you say. You killed a bird? Your wife seems almost upset, which only makes you more aware of your own embarrassing happiness – the size and scale of it. It’s too much to feel over such a small thing. And you try to repress what must be a silly, overeager smile, full of teeth. You try to wipe it from your face. But you can’t. And the harder you try, the more the emotion just grows – a big, boyish feeling, something like glee and pride. Your father shakes his head and says, after you hand him the dead bird, That’s a good-sized rooster. You hear your son – he’s five and you imagine him craning over his mother’s shoulder to catch the conversation – shout out, Daddy shot a bird! He shot a bird! How happy his excitement – and your father’s, too – makes you.
But it is an unreliable happiness, as you know from the dreams you’ve been having. It fades too soon, uses you up, and leaves you emptier than before. And it is this emptiness that begins to set in when you drive toward your father’s small camper, which sits out on the flat land alone. Your father climbs slowly from the truck and teeters for a moment when he finds the ground, though he thrusts his arms out to ward you away when you offer help. He opens the dogs’ crates and they bolt out and leap from the truck bed. In a circle of light from a lantern, he lays the bird over the tailgate, rips the feathers away, and cuts out the breast meat, red and glistening like a heart, and places it tenderly on a slab of wood.
It’s night now, the air growing cold, and your breath rises in white trails. Icy flakes of stars fall upwards at the top of the sky and the horizon seems all at once to close in around you. You can see almost nothing outside the light cast by the lantern, though you hear the huff and scamper of the dogs running in the near distance and see their shapes flash in and out of the dark.
Inside the small trailer, your father begins to make dinner at the hissing stove. He opens a bottle and pours out two glasses; the alcohol and the little blue flame from the burner begin to warm you. It’s a good thing you made that shot, your father says, cutting vegetables and the meat. Otherwise we’d be eating chili from a can tonight. And you experience a flicker of that wellbeing again. But it is gone by the time your father places the steaming plates of food down and sits across from you. The circle of light at the table is bright enough, though a dimness seeps into the corners and edges of the trailer and makes you aware of the miles of darkness outside from where a wind picks up and beats against the window beside you. You eat; and perhaps the food is especially good, salty and peppery and rich with brown gravy over it, because you shot the bird. Your father asks, What did you do differently this time when you hit it?
He wants you to learn something. And so you cooperate. You say, I led it.
Well, he says, nodding. There you go.
He talks about sports. They like their football out here, he says. And though he doesn’t follow the team you do, you can stay with him. You can talk about who won and lost last season and what might happen this season. He talks about the water pump he just replaced in the trailer where you’re eating now. Last week, the toilet wouldn’t flush. Now it works like new. He talks about the wind that blows outside, coming in gusts that hit the trailer and make it shudder, and that makes you think again of the distance all around. It’s covered in darkness now, but it’s there nonetheless. The wind starts every year in September, your father says. Blows right up until the beginning of April. It keeps the people away, never mind how beautiful it is out here. That’s how I like it. Without the people, he says.
Without the people, you think. That is how he likes it.
He looks toward the window and smiles. He talks about the metal roof he just put on the dormers of his cabin and how the snow will slide off it this winter. You look down at his hand – the one he’s eating with – and see that it’s shaking. It always seems to be shaking. You say, You shouldn’t be up on the roof. He is slow to answer and only does so after taking another forkful of food. Probably not, he says. But now I’ve got a good roof up there.
Roofs, water pumps, football, the wind. You’ve more or less had this conversation before and will no doubt have it many times again. And so you say, Why don’t you come see us? The kids would like that. In fact, he used to come on rare occasions, every few years. But that was some time ago and he never seemed to know what to make of the children. After all, he never had one of his own. There was you. But he didn’t know you until you were older, 8 or 9. Your kids only seemed to startle him, their volume and energy holding him captive at the kitchen table with his newspaper.
Boarding airplanes . . . going all that way, he says, sighing, I’m getting too old for that.
But you were up on a roof, you say.
He nods slowly, seeming to think. You look at him then, his face thin, pale in the yellow light, too much like a skull, with his dark eyes like shiny absences. Only then do you see the bruises, ugly rings of grayish blue beneath his eyes, which must have come from the blow to his head. He is staring seemingly at nothing, his gaze tilted down. Are you all right? And when he doesn’t answer, you say louder, as if he were outside in the wind and you were calling to him, Dad? He makes a kind of sound, though whether it’s an acknowledgement of you, you can’t say. Dad, you say, recalling the doctor’s warning, suddenly afraid for this old man, can you tell me your name?
After what feels like too long, he says, Frank Sinatra. He smiles – because he got you – wincing as he does so. But his eyes are still open in that stare, the face – his face – around them as still as a mask. And then he does something that startles you, makes you sit back an inch or two away from him. He lifts his hand – it seems too large, not quite human in scale, swollen at the knuckles, the nails beaten and dull with black flecks where blood scabs form – and seems about to touch you, to grasp softly, blindly at your face. But instead, he touches himself, prodding gently at the new stitches, a gesture that brings water to his eyes, opens them wider, and lets you see right into them and back to the clinic where you stood in the corner, your hand prodding your scar as you considered the boy on the icy road, as you listened to that boy scream, angry, furious as only a child can be. And all at once you feel that this isn’t your thought but your father’s – or perhaps both of yours together – the trailer, the circle of light in which you sit now looking into his eyes, the clinic in which you stood in the corner looking back at the boy.
There is too much space out here. You wish you were in your cramped city in bed with your wife. But you are right – it is his thought or both of yours together – because the anger you feel seems to bring his eyes up to yours, as if he registers it when you do. And when you ask about an incident you have never before discussed with him, Why the hell didn’t you take my hand? I needed you to take my goddamned hand, he doesn’t flinch, he doesn’t shake his head, he doesn’t ask when or where. Outside the wind slams into the trailer and shakes it. He says, That was a long time ago. And then he adds, You were so upset. Damn right I was, you say. I found you. I came from a long way away and found you. And then I asked for your hand. Why didn’t you fucking give it to me? I was a boy – a little boy. His eyes don’t move. You can still see inside them, all the way to that house, the woman on the threshold, the icy road that you couldn’t cross. I tried, he says. You did not try, you say. You were on the other side of the road, he says. You were too far away. I couldn’t get to you. You told me, you say, that I could do it alone. You were so angry, he says. You are both quiet now before your father says, You never forgot that.
The softness in his eyes is so clear, so obvious that you experience it almost as you would a touch. Around them is the loose face of an old man, so old, so beaten and cut and bruised that it does not seem to respond to the warmth in his eyes, to move and feel with them, to belong to them. But you see it, nonetheless. You see what he has never said: that he is sorry. And perhaps it is this that you want – that that furious little boy wants – more than an explanation, more than a reason.
And so you get up and clear the dishes, thinking that you were right to worry. You were right to come and see him now and not to wait. You walk out into the darkness to pee. The cold is bitter and you stay close to the trailer to guard against the wind. When you come back in, he’s easing slowly out of his pants and rolling into bed on the opposite side of the trailer from you. Good night, you say. But he is turned away and is perhaps already sleeping.
You rise several times that night and burrow a path through the dark with your flashlight until you find him, wake him, and ask him a series of questions – What is your name? Do you know where you are? Do you know who I am? Each time he answers them all, then turns, and falls immediately back to sleep. You hear his breathing – Is it too loud? Too labored? Too slow? you wonder – above the wind outside. The dark is of a thickness that does not exist in the city, that allows no shapes, no edges, nothing to escape, and in it you sleep without dreams, without images or thoughts, so that your sleep is like a perfect absence. When you emerge from it in the morning you forget for a moment where you are, who you are, that you are, just as you feared he might. And it is this fear that alerts you, wakes you fully. The light is chalky, without warmth or color, and when you see the lump in the sheets he makes, you worry that it is too still. You hurry to him. You try to wake him once more and are surprised when he turns, opens his eyes, and lifts his hand from the sheets, takes yours – which you offer again – pulls himself up, and then sits on his own.
John Fulton is the author of the novel More Than Enough (Picador, 2002) and two collections of fiction: Retribution (Picador, 2002) and The Animal Girl (Louisiana State University Press, 2007). The title novella of Animal Girl originally appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review.