My father slept on his side. On a cot one foot off the floor with a pillow between bony knees. As a young boy he toppled from the top of a slide and smashed his femur. In his telling, he landed sideways atop pavement pocked with weeds along cracks. It is the tiny things onto which our minds latch in times of great pain: the dandelion heads scattered between broken bone and concrete. My father grew up in the middle of the country, where the air loomed heavy and hot through the spring, summer, fall, slicking surfaces with dew from morning through until the next. Teachers told him it was unlikely a child could slip or tumble from that great a height without pushing or prompting. Impossible, they meant to say. Thin plastic bars held the top of the slide from the air below in squared fragments. If someone had not shoved him, they said to his parents when they were called in to the school, then the fall must have been intentional. A jump, they did not say, though it wouldn’t have mattered. My father’s parents didn’t think in English.
My father would tell the story to my brother and me as a kind of warning when we were children, drinking chamomile tea as he did so, sober he stayed during those years, his eyes lucid blue. The skies rarely approximated the color of his eyes, but sometimes I find them there at the fade of unclouded day or along the edge of a white stone dampened by rain. When he told the story, we never knew of what exactly it was meant to warn us.
For a while following the fall, it seemed he was fine. Healed. Children’s bodies aren’t so fragile. But decades after the playground incident, his gait warped askew, one leg having grown to stride longer than the other. When he moved across our house, to water plants or to gather our laundry in his forearms, he did so in a kind of gallop. Always he wore gray or brown shoes which, depending on the shadows in a room, would camouflage with the floor so that it appeared he limped around attached to a place below the ground. Though he laughed loudly and exaggerated his movements to make us smile, the gallop pained him, manifesting in crooked hips that bit the mind through sleep. I know this only because my brother told me. He saw him once, in the night, when he woke jerking and sobbing from the pain. I had been away at school. My brother had crept into our father’s room and lain on the floor beside the trembling cot until he and our father fell back to sleep. He woke silently to our father beside him on the floor. He’d moved sometime during the night. Before the light slipped through in the morning, our father rose from the ground by steadying both palms against the wood beneath him. I could hear the sound of his body moving as my brother described it. The toes of one foot pressing down against the cold floor, then those of the other. When I imagine him like this, on his hands and knees in a shadowless room, my brother staring through the static dark, I close my eyes to quiet that sound. My father would never speak of his pain to us nor anyone else. One laughs so as not to cry. He taught this way of being by example.
Sometimes his limp looked like a kind of waltz. This is how I remember it. One, two, three. One, two, three. One. Yet I know that memory’s a trick of the mind.
I remember, while in the mountains as children, what should have been a two-hour walk took us and my father ten. Every twenty steps, he paused to admire a small chirping animal or flower, press his palms into wet soil to examine a mushroom or stone. By afternoon clouds dragged through the sky, weighing it to the ground, and he forced us to turn around before we could make it to the planned destination, afraid of us getting stranded in a lightning storm. Limping through the front door of our house, his pants fell on his hips, his pockets heavy with algae and dirt and collected stones. I know now, looking back, that the examinations were mostly an excuse for him to stop and rest without having to acknowledge the aching in his muscles and bones. I remember my brother’s smile as he watched my father’s mouth pulling outward to describe this plant or that, his face collapsing into pleats while he laughed and stretched his fingers at us. Sooty in the lines of his palms and knuckles, the soil stained his skin the color of drought.
In the years after my brother died, my father stopped laughing.
For my brother’s first birthday after his death, I flew to my father’s cabin in the mountains. Each day, we went for a walk behind his home. Outside, in motion, my father fell right into himself. He watched the sky through the net of trees, insects through the mesh of soil. If he saw a deer he would hush me, staring at it with a focus nearly terrifying. At five p.m., he poured a glass of whiskey to the brim. At five-thirty he poured another. It went on this way until he eventually fell asleep at the kitchen table, his knees falling to one side of the chair and snores ricocheting up his throat like skipped pebbles along water. And so he fell back out of himself again. If my brother had been there he might have removed the stretched glasses that had fallen down his nose and covered his shoulders with a blanket. But I just pushed him lightly on the arm, woke him before giving him a brief hug and watching him drag up the stairs to bed. I shut off the lights and locked the doors. In those moments, I was glad I was there and not my brother. My brother had a mind of his own; he refused to adopt the walls my father wanted him to, the walls that might shelter him from the pain inherent to every day. This meant he was porous in a way I could not be. Kinder, and also angrier.
On the last night of my visit, I woke in the middle of the night to a terrifying sound. That of a dying animal. Seconds rocked by before I realized the noise was ripping out of my own throat. I remember the sheets fell with me as I landed on the floor from the side of the bed. I broke. That’s what the noise was—a breaking. I remember staring at the shadows of the trees shaking on the wall as I sat on the floor unable to quiet the sound, until my father crashed into the room, using his shoulder to tumble the door from its frame. From the floor he hoisted me back onto the ledge of the bed. I know, he said as he watched me scream, his eyes bloodshot. I know. Many hours passed this way before I eventually fell asleep against his side, the breaking done, quieted. When he drove me to the airport the next day, a bruise peered out from below the sleeve of his shirt. He reeked of whiskey. My voice had disappeared. When I turned on the radio to quiet the silence, he shut it off immediately. Outside the airport, I watched on the concrete the shadows of other families melt from many into one and then warp into many again as they embraced and parted. My father walked me to the very edge of security, where a teenager scrolled on his phone and chewed gum, his jaw grinding. The final time we had seen my brother had been in the same airport, his departure after we’d flown home together for my father’s birthday. I remember my brother had brought in his backpack a case of chocolates for the celebration that caved in upon themselves from the heat of his body, liquid upon removal. I’d come empty-handed. I’ll see you, my father said at the security gate as we parted. He said this, not Goodbye, as a farewell. Goodbye belonged to a vocabulary we’d lost.
On the plane, my hands fidgeted with shame, cuticles torn raw as I picked at myself, unable to stop. I imagined my father driving the road home alone in the quiet car, limping into his empty house with his arm bloated and blue. In that moment I thought: there is nothing to do with pain like this. And then the man next to me coughed a wet growl of a thing and in quick response a baby began to wail and, inexplicably, I started to laugh.
Few friends visited my father. Once, though, I remember a man came over for a whiskey. My father had met this man because his son went to high school with my brother. The boys were in trouble together frequently as children for joking during class, questioning the teachers. Later, they were disciplined not for their presences but for their absences, first physical and then, absence of a different kind, finding the substances that could excavate themselves from their bodies. The men’s two bodies were nearly indistinguishable from the doorframe from which I watched them. My father patted his friend on the back while the man cried about his own son, who had left home for college the evening prior. Stone. My father’s face was stone. My brother had been dead just a year. I thought of a line in a book, “People who are less happy, I find, are always consoling those who are more.” What a gift, I thought. What a gift.
My father ate and drank with great appetite. As a boy though, he told me, he hid the carrots his mother would place on his plate in his brother’s sock drawer. Sometimes I imagine the drawer is that of my own dresser. Here the drawer is the top one and all the socks are my brother’s and the carrots strikingly orange, cartoonish and oversized. My father was the middle child, though he seemed the oldest in both demeanor and appearance. Six months after my brother died, my father found his own brother lying silently on his kitchen floor in a smear of blood. It was then that my father lost the ability to cry. If he began, I always guessed, he would not be able to stop. But of course he would have, because that is what we do. Continue. Though both of us had lost our brothers, we never spoke of this. Nor did we ever speak much of either of their deaths at all.
I flew to his cabin after my brother died to help organize the funeral. What I remember: an old man chain-smoking outside the funeral home and talking on the phone about baseball, breaking the stunned quiet with a “hell yeah” that slit with the force of a world absent meaning. Alien, the world then felt. It was summer, the air warm and the ground messy with flowers. All the trees blooming. My father’s house felt as if it sat at the bottom of a well, months washing by there as if below water without surface, warped in the dark. As the sun spun, he counted time in days since my brother’s death. That was the only temporal marker. Thirty-six days after, my birthday came. My father and I left in the morning to walk up a peak with the hope of forgetting our minds as our bodies moved closer to the sky. My brother’s death had alleviated my father’s limp. Any manifestation of physical or emotional pain no longer existed, and somehow he moved as if my junior, his knees plowing through air.
When we neared the top of the peak, where trees failed to grow in sparse air and ground was broken rock, a storm slammed across the sky like it had all those years before when my brother and I were young. We had moved too high above tree line to seek cover as lightning collapsed in shells of white, clattering with the taste of metal in our mouths. My father did not stop moving as rain gathered in streams down scree, his fingers slipping atop the piles of cracked rock while his feet scrambled higher, higher. We’re going to die if we don’t turn around, I yelled at him. The lightning, I can taste it. And, without stopping, he turned his head only enough to glance back at me. I’m already dead, he said. There was nothing for me to say. I walked down the mountain alone while he continued to the top of the peak. The storm breaking around his shoulders as he tore through the water and sky and electricity to look for his son, that is how I saw him in my mind. Hours later, he stumbled upon me waiting beneath a tree near the start of the trail. From the rain, his hair hung wet, sticking to his forehead. Did you find what you were looking for? I wanted to ask him but didn’t. Neither of us could look at the other. Are you hungry? he asked, staring at the ground.
My father never knew I saw him dance. Years after my brother’s death, I flew home for the holidays. On New Year’s Eve I had gone to a friend’s house, while he had stayed home alone, drinking whiskey. In his house, the kitchen and living room were built near the front door. Easier, that way, to bring in wood chopped for a fire. When I came home in the early morning, the light in the kitchen flared white. Inside, my father’s silhouette moved close to the floor like an animal. He held his arms bent and crooked in front of his body, his elbows jutting out in either direction, his hands angled in harsh lines at the wrists. With his eyes shut, wrinkles pooling around his eyes, he pulsed his chest slowly back and forth, his feet shuffling in shadows along the floor. While his chest swayed through the air, he leaned his chin back and smiled furiously, raising his arms in the air above his head, his fingers limp while his elbows trembled. Then he crouched to the floor and sprung back up, hands positioned behind his head, his chest heaving into the air, feet lurching from the ground. Laughing, laughing, he laughed with his mouth cracking open, his face wet with sweat from the exertion. Eyes still closed he began to spin around and around and around, arms carving wide and narrow in the air above his head, coming to circle around his chest, his fingers grabbing at empty space, knuckles curling white into fists. Bearing his opened chest between his arms, he spun throughout the kitchen, his knees bobbing toward the floor, his fingers pulling together in snapping motions, friction, while his eyes collapsed into themselves, sobs howling from his throat. Unheard, his sobs, the excretion of his pain pausing at the glass of the window of his house and crashing back down on itself. His face was soaked in tears. Pink, like a child’s in cold. I turned around and went back to my car, sitting there in the bare night until I saw the kitchen light go dark.
The story ends there because I decide so. I stand up from the computer. Downstairs, I can hear my mother and father and brother chatting against the sounds of the radio. The weather, they say. Today it will rain like television static. From outside the sun is nudging at the house’s window, dogged in its arrival. Behind my eyes I see a man who is not my father throwing his body across an empty room in the middle of the night. When my father walks, he does so in a churning pace, his gait even. I cannot recall ever having seen him dance. Downstairs, my brother begins to sing along to the song my mother plays on the radio. “If today was not a crooked highway,” he sings. “If tonight was not a crooked trail.” His voice pitches astray. My father’s laugh breaks up the stairs like bone. “If tomorrow wasn’t such a long time.” My father screams to join him. “Then lonesome would mean nothing to me at all.”
