My brother Andy changes the talk from the cancer that could kill him, talk I’ve flown two thousand miles to have.
“Daddy let no one beat him, Teresa” Andy tells me.
I’m sixty, Andy sixty-five, our father dead fifteen years. Though I know all the stories, saw most of the punches, which sadly still define at least half the man our rawboned millworker father had been, I don’t have the heart to shut Andy up, especially with my husband listening. Had my kids been here...
“ ‘Member when that tenant, Harold, backed the car into the buggy, and you in it?” Andy says, though he’s talking to my husband. “First time I seen Daddy punch somebody. He dragged Harold out from behind the wheel with his left hand, and knocked him to the dirt with his right. There went those tenants, Harold and his brood, off in the night, Ma crying because of the lost rent.”
“I was in the buggy, Andy,” I say. “Of course I don’t remember.”
“I bet you remember we were going on a Sunday drive and come behind a guy at a stop sign kissing his girl. Daddy blows his horn, and the guy gives Daddy the finger.”
“Daddy bolted from our car, and the guy rolled up his window.”
“Then Daddy punched him right through the window, broke the glass and the guy’s jaw,” Andy says.
“A lot of blood,” I say.
“Outside the church for Midnight Mass,” Andy says, speaking fast now, “Two drunks take the space Daddy’s backing the old Nash into. When Daddy goes to get out, they slammed the door on him. Daddy pushed one down and punched the other, then Ma pulled that long overcoat of his down over his arms and said, ‘Don’t fight.’ After the drunk punched him about three times, Daddy shrugs out of the coat and punches both guys.”
The snow turned red. Ma was sick during the whole mass.
“Even when he was seventy years old and the dopers were raising hell out back, he asked them to keep quiet. One kid takes out a switchblade. ‘Pull a knife on me!’ Daddy says and grabs the knife, and lays the doper out, one punch. I still got the knife.”
As Andy shows my husband the black switchblade, I think how I had to buy a jar of foundation to hide Ma’s bruise after Daddy punched her two days before my high school graduation. Andy stepped between our parents, took one terrible blow to his chest, then hit Daddy right above the ear. The only time I saw Daddy fall, the time I felt most proud of my brother, but Andy never tells that story.
I stay silent and forgive Andy for his silence, but only, I tell myself, because my sons aren’t there. I understand Andy seeks refuge in our father. But I can’t embrace those tales. I won’t embrace them. No matter how much I want to punch something. And I wonder if I should take that switchblade home when I leave.
Merle Drown is the author of stories, essays, plays, reviews, and two novels, Plowing Up A Snake (The Dial Press) and The Suburbs Of Heaven (Soho Press, 2000), trade paperback (Berkley Press, 2001). He edited Meteor in the Madhouse, the posthumous novellas of Leon Forrest, published by Northwestern University Press in 2001. Barnes and Noble chose The Suburbs of Heaven for its Discover Great New Writers series. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the NH Arts Council and teaches in Southern NH U's MFA program. Pieces from his collection-in-progress, Shrunken Heads, miniature portraits of the famous among us, or Balzac in a Nutshell, have (or will) appeared in Amoskeag, Meetinghouse, Night Train, The Kenyon Review, Rumble, Sub-Lit, Word Riot, Bound Off, JMSS, Eclectica and 971 Menu.