Our Father

by Bruce McAllister

There’s a place my father takes me day after day, a little lake—a  name I can’t quite pronounce—so that I can hunt for the snakes,  lizards and salamanders I love.  When my mother complains, it doesn’t  bother him, not anymore.  We get up the next morning—she’s screaming, her face twisted in rage, trying to hit us with her fists,  the palms of her hands, a coat hanger, anything she can grab—and we leave the house again.  Her screams fade as we close the windows of  the car.  She is standing like a hunchback, her entire body twisted now, in the driveway, telling us that we’ll never add up to anything,  that a decent husband and a loving son wouldn’t leave her like this, and every day.

We drive away and soon are among the trees.  I try to get a glimpse of the water and, when I do, I shout, “There it is!” and my father, though he never spoke like this before, says, “Yes, and it’s going to be there every day, Brad—every day that we come here.”

We get up early the next morning, too, and though she’s still  screaming, we barely hear her.  We hear her less and less each day until she is but a ghost on the front steps and we, father and son,  are what is real, like the ring-neck snake, so tiny and perfect, and the fat salamander with its gold spots, and the blue-bellied fence lizard that suns itself on the split rail high over the moist soil that makes the other two happy.  I take them home and put them in  the terrarium my father has bought for me (though he shouldn’t have),  the one I keep in the little redwood cabin (the one he built for me and shouldn’t have) in the back yard, where we sit in the rain  watching the water drip from rafters and laugh and eat cereal for dinner in little bowls.  The lizard blinks on its piece of wood under the lamp, behind the glass. The salamander hides under its log. The  snake comes out and blinks, too, as if trying to understand, and the rain doesn’t stop until night falls and we sleep and wake to day and get ready to leave again.

As I turn to look back at the house this time, my mother is gone.  Where, I have no idea, but she can’t keep my brother locked in his room anymore.   I run back for him, laughing and shouting.   We can  take him with us now.   He smiles, chubby and nearly as big as I am.  He doesn’t like snakes or lizards, but he wants to come with us—of course he does—and we leave with our father, and it's just like heaven.

Copyright © 2006 Bruce McAllister