Hummingbird Salamander(85)

“Get out of here,” I said, murder in my voice.

Instead, she retreated to the doorway.

“Don’t talk to her that way,” my father said. It was the most aggressive sentence I’d heard from him. He’d half risen from his chair. Now he looked at me and I couldn’t take it.

“Ned wouldn’t do that,” I whispered.

“You just didn’t want to know,” he said. “You were always so smart. But you didn’t want to know. So you didn’t. You forget all the things that happened. I felt at times like you made your grandpa too important. I loved Ned, but he was manipulative. He was petty. He knew he was handsome and he used it. He wasn’t an angel. Not even toward you. You just don’t want to remember.”

“Not true.”

He hesitated. I recognized the look on his face. Pity. The same look I’d given him so many times.

Then he said, “Your brother made fun of you behind your back. He made jokes about you.”

Silence. I just shut down for a time. Staring out across the kitchen. I wish there had been something out the window to distract me. There was nothing.

Why had I wanted the farm to be in ruins? Why had I wanted my father to be dead or some pathetic, lonely hoarder, no more lucid than my mother? It struck me that only after our whole family was gone had my father been able to be happy.

“That’s a lie,” I said. “If Ned didn’t tell me, it was to protect me.” Already constructing a reality of a noble Ned, making money for the family. Necessary, but not liking it.

My father sighed. Lawrence sighed. It was like he’d not breathed for so long that it came out all at once in this prolonged sigh of disappointment, of loss, of whatever the things were he felt that I couldn’t feel, or couldn’t recognize, coming from him.

“To protect himself. You don’t realize how angry you were back then, how violent. Toward your mother. Toward me.”

“I wasn’t,” I said, but even as I replied I knew it was true. Could see it now. Could remember it. Not like I’d repressed it, but like I’d told a different story for so long, it had eclipsed the truth.

Lorraine remained frozen in the doorway. Who knows what I would’ve done then, if not for what my father said next. A shouting match. Smashing things. Making my mother cry. Raging through the barn, destroying tools, smashing shelves.

“She came here,” my father said. “She left something for you.”

I didn’t need to be told who “she” was. The truth of it. The yearning. She had left something for me.

“What did she leave? When did she leave it?”

“About eight months ago.” A month before her death.

He placed an envelope on the kitchen table between us. So, he’d been prepared. He’d known I would be coming at some point. He’d kept the envelope close. Or had it been there the whole time, collecting dust in a kitchen drawer? An afterthought.

I knew I was looking at it like it was radioactive. Wanted to open it. Didn’t want to open it.

“She said you’d understand. She said it was important to her that you knew.”

No point in asking why he hadn’t called. I’d cut him off. Disowned him. But he could have found me. He could’ve reached out.

“I don’t understand. I don’t understand how you could keep all of this from me for so long. I don’t understand why you keep lying about Ned.” I felt like a child. I was a child. I could blow things up but I couldn’t put things back together.

“You were twelve pounds six ounces at birth,” my father said. “I saw you in the hospital and you were the biggest baby there. Like a giant. Mother said you’d be trouble. I said I didn’t care. But both Ned and you were trouble.”

“Don’t say his name again!” I screamed. It felt like blasphemy. I could feel my self coming apart at the seams.

“I know you killed my father,” he said, flat tone. Unforgiving. “You killed him. For nothing.”

For nothing. For something. He had known. Of course he had known.

That was enough, I guess. Lorraine had heard enough.

She swept in, gave me the focused murderer’s look a heron gives a frog or snake. She was almost as tall as me. Her hands had nails like claws.

“Enough! Enough now. Quite. Enough. Your father’s a sick man and needs rest.”

Like something rehearsed. In case the black sheep ever came home and baa’d too loud.

“I don’t think this concerns you,” I said, with as much control as I could muster.

“Lawrence, go lie down a bit,” she said, ignoring me.

He stood and with a wincing look that admitted no apology he walked off into the rooms beyond the kitchen.

That would be my last sight of him, ever. Stooped shoulders. Walking slowly away from me. Framed by the hallway and then turning into shadow. Just as I remembered him, finally, from childhood.

Lorraine sat down in his seat.

“There are a lot of people coming here soon,” she said pointedly, nodding toward the tent outside. “Good people. Godly people. Why not join us in prayer before you leave? It might give you some comfort.”

Comfort? She had done nothing to me, but I wanted to punch her.

“End-of-the-world stuff? No thanks.” I’d no patience for evangelicals.