Bridge of Clay(85)
She reported he was doing okay.
For the three of them in high school, they each had to see a teacher, who doubled as a kind of psychologist. There’d also been one previous to this, but that guy had since moved on, replaced by a total sweetheart; the warm-armed Claudia Kirkby. Back then, she was still just twenty-one. She was brown-haired, and quite tall. Not too much makeup, but always wore high heels. In her classroom there were the posters—Jane Austen and her barbell, and MINERVA MCGONAGALL IS GOD. On her desk there were books and projects, in various stages of marking.
Often, at home, after they’d seen her, they had the sort of talks boys seem to have: talks but not talks at all.
Henry: “Good old Claudia, ay?”
Rory: “She’s got a good pair of legs.”
Boxing gloves, legs and breasts.
That’s all they ever bonded with.
Me: “Shut up, for Christ’s sake.”
But I imagined those legs, I had to.
As for Claudia herself, up closer: She had an endearing sunspot on her cheek, right in the middle. Her eyes were kind and brown. She taught a hell of an English unit on Island of the Blue Dolphins and Romeo and Juliet. As a counselor, she smiled a lot, but didn’t have much idea; at university, she’d done one small unit of psychology, which made her qualified for disasters like these. Most likely, she was the newest teacher at the school, and handed the extra work—and probably more out of hope than anything else, if the boys said they were fine, she wanted quite badly to believe them; and two of them actually were fine, given the circumstance, and one was nowhere near it.
* * *
—
And maybe it’s the little things that kill you in the end—as the months dropped down to winter. It was seeing him arrive home from work.
Sitting in his car, sometimes for hours.
His powdery hands at the wheel:
No more Anticols.
Not a single Tic Tac left.
It was me paying the water bill, instead of him.
Then the electricity.
It was the sideline at weekend football games: He watched but didn’t see, then didn’t show up at all.
His arms became uncharged; they were limp and starved of meaning. His concrete stomach mortared. It was death by becoming not him.
He forgot our birthdays; even my eighteenth.
The gateway into adulthood.
He ate with us sometimes, he always did the dishes, but then he’d go outside, back to the garage, or stand below the clothesline, and Clay would go there with him—because Clay knew something we didn’t. It was Clay our father feared.
On one of the rare nights he was home, the boy found him at the piano, staring at the handwritten keys, and he stood there, close behind him. His fingers were stalled, mid-MARRY.
“Dad?”
Nothing.
He wanted to tell him—Dad, it’s okay, it’s okay what happened, it’s okay, it’s okay, I won’t tell anyone. Anything. Ever. I won’t tell them.
Again, the peg was there.
He slept with it, it never left him.
Some mornings, after lying on it through the night, he examined his leg in the bathroom—like a drawing, stenciled to his thigh. Sometimes he wished he would come to him in the dark, and reef him, awake, from his bed. If only our dad would have hauled him through the house, out the back; he wouldn’t care if he was only in underpants, with the peg tucked in at the elastic.
Maybe then he could be just a kid again.
He could be skinny arms and boyish legs; he’d hit the clothesline pole so hard. His body would catch the handle. The metal in his ribs. He’d look up and inside those lines up there—the silent ranks of pegs. The darkness wouldn’t matter; he’d see only shape and color. For hours he could let it happen, beaten gladly through till morning, when the pegs could eclipse the city—till they took on the sun, and won.
But that was exactly the thing.
Our father never came and took him like that.
There was nothing but the measure of increments.
Michael Dunbar was soon to leave us.
But first he left us alone.
* * *
—
By the end it was almost six months to the day since her death: Autumn was winter, then spring, and he left us barely saying anything.
It was a Saturday.
It was in that crossover between very late, and very early.
We still had the triple bunk at that stage, and Clay was asleep in the middle. Around quarter to four, he awoke. He saw him beside the bedsides; he spoke to the shirt and torso.
“Dad?”
“Go back to sleep.”
The moon was in the curtains. The man stood motionless, and Clay knew, he closed his eyes, he did what he was told, but talked on. “You’re leaving, Dad, aren’t you?”
“Be quiet.”
For the first time in months, he touched him.
Our father leaned in and touched him, both hands—and they were hangman’s hands, sure enough—on his head and over his back. They were powdery and hard. Warm but worn-out. Loving but cruel, and loveless.
For a long time, he stayed, but when Clay opened his eyes again, he was gone; the job was officially done. Somehow he still felt the hands, though, who had held and touched his head.
There were five of us in that house then.