A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father (15 page)

Without realizing it, I’d backed away from the sliding glass doors and my fighting parents in the living room. A cluster of pine needles brushed the back of my neck, making me flinch. Each year, the trees grew larger, fuller, their branches advancing, hanging heavy over the deck. Standing outside, I saw my father rise and walk across the room to his bottle.

I fidgeted just a little, shifting my weight onto my right leg, the binoculars bouncing against my chest, bumping my ribs. I pressed them firm against me to stop their sway. I listened.

I was alone with the binoculars and God and the astronauts and faintly, in the distance, I heard the fine 
buzz
 of an engine. I held my breath to listen. The sound grew fuller, wider, as the car approached.

As it got nearer, it sounded less like a summer insect and more like an engine, not a car but a motorcycle. I saw a light bounce against the trees. The engine revved lower as it approached and now I knew for sure that it was my brother. His was the only motorcycle on this road.

The glass door was heavy and resistant as I slid it open and ran inside. Although I didn’t care any longer if my father saw me with his binoculars, I still rushed to the cabinet and put them away. I shrieked, “My brother’s home! My brother’s home!”

A toilet flushed, then a faucet ran briefly and my mother appeared from the bathroom. Her hands were glistening; she shook them in the air to dry them. “Where?” she asked. Then she called out, “John Elder?”

“He’s not 
here,
 here. He’s coming down the road, I heard him.”

My father was nowhere. Where had he gone?

“Well, are you sure it’s him?” my mother asked anxiously, her long caftan punctuating her stride like an exclamation point.

I rolled my eyes at my dramatic mother. “It’s him,” I said, walking across the room. I opened the front door and stepped outside. The cool concrete of the front steps chilled my feet pleasantly. The deck had been warm, the black wood having absorbed the day’s warmth like a snake.

The motorcycle’s engine cracked the night in half; there was the silence of 
before
, the insistence of the engine in the driveway, and then the fullness of my brother 
after
.

The cycle cruised up the driveway, glanced around a rut my father had been promising for years to fill, swerved around the brown Aspen wagon. My brother crushed the brakes within his fist and the cycle stopped, kicking up dirt, spraying pebbles.

“Hey,” he called out to me, peeling off his helmet. His leather jacket looked wet with blackness and I thought again of the astronauts, the first time Americans and Russians had ever met in space. I thought of a mushroom cloud rising, opening to a trembling, high-tension bloom, a shock wave on the ground spreading out like ripples on a pond after a stone has been thrown. Evaporation.

He charged up the stairs, skipping the first. “What’s up?” he said, brushing past me. The contact of my arm skin with his jacket skin startled me out of my thoughts.

“Nothing,” I said indifferently, but I was excited. He was now home, and even if there would be no special dinner or pecan pie, the ether was changed. The molecules of oxygen in the air seemed to align themselves; the innate chaos surrounding everything seemed, suddenly, less.

He peeled off his jacket and slung it over the stairway railing before trudging into the kitchen to find something to eat.

“John Elder, please hang up your jacket so that I don’t have to walk around cleaning up after you.”

He blithely ignored our mother because she’d hung up his jacket as she spoke the words.

She continued to talk at him—“Where have you been? What have you been doing? Are you all right? How long are you planning to stay?”—but could extract little more than noncommittal grunts. He’d returned home as a race car returns to the pit: for fuel, to have the tires sanded, the suspension raised or lowered. He would eat a mixing bowl filled with cereal blanketed with sugar, then go to his room to change his clothes, make long-distance telephone calls, and exchange his boots. His clothes smelled like gasoline and I wondered if he was flammable.

I padded into my bedroom, sat at my desk, and picked up a pen. I drew a series of small circles, planets. And then I enclosed them within a larger circle, irregular in shape; the boundaries of the universe. 
Can the astronauts see it expanding before their eyes?
 I wanted to know.

A TEAR, a rip in the silent fabric of the house. “Fuck you,” screamed my brother. 
“Fuck you”
like a boomerang, loose in the house, knocking over lamps, ricocheting off walls, smashing glass. Even after the words themselves had evaporated from the air I could still hear them, I could still feel them and their consequences.

Instantly, everything was wrong.

An eruption of screaming, beyond angry, violent. My father’s deep, furious voice—it was rare to hear him scream.

Boots slammed against the floor, the house shook on its foundation.

It was like the universe was constricting.

Suddenly, my room seemed tiny and everything in it, frivolous. I saw it could all be wiped away, like a hand across a desk.

At once I was running, my calloused heels slipping on the wood floor. I knocked against the wall, shoved off, ran again.

There they were: my brother standing near the front door, my father opposite the stairway leading down. My father’s face was plum-colored, my brother’s legs were spread wide, he was ready to lurch to the left or the right, tensed to lunge.

My father made a move. “Goddamn you,” he snarled, teeth bared, lips peeled back. It was more of a growl than spoken human words.

My brother bolted in the opposite direction.

They circled the stairway and the central chimney behind it, my father chasing my brother. They froze when they reached their original positions.

All the while there was constant screaming, the words indecipherable. It was a dangerous noise and it packed my ears like a blaring opera of supreme violence. My mother was here somewhere on the other side of the room near the curtains. She was generating this noise, I realized. She was pleading, terrified.

I felt, 
There may be a death tonight
.

My father stumbled as he crashed toward the front door and my brother standing in front of it.

And my brother made a surprise move—forward, right to my father then suddenly around him, too fast to catch.

I was screaming, too. Useless words: “stop” and “wait” and “no.” It was like shouting at two dogs going at each other.

I looked again at my mother, searched her face for certain evidence—the dynamic arch of a brow, perhaps her neck taught and extended—that she possessed the power to make this end at once. But I saw only despair and hopeless resignation. There was no strength there at all, her features were wilted, her eyes so ruined with loss I had to look away. On her face she’d already lost her oldest son and seeing this betrayal made me desperate.

She had known all along that it would come to this. The day was here. Her shoulders sagged forward as though she carried a weight strapped on her back and had walked for miles, perhaps years, and could continue no more.

She brought her hands to her face, a cigarette still burning, poised between the joints of the first and middle finger of her right hand. She shook her head from side to side. “No, no, no, no, no.”

I felt a clenching, a contraction, and suddenly I was crying, wailing. 
Do something
, I said with my mind. 
Goddamn you, Mom, do something
.

But just as instantly, there was only this: a rifle in shadows, leaning against a wall, barrel pointing down.

I saw it before me, a vision.

And then 
yes
. I thought, 
Yes
.

This was God.

This was how God spoke sometimes, in pictures. Words take time to comprehend, ideas must be absorbed, understood. Sometimes, God wipes your mind and replaces the contents with a single image, unquestionable, and it is the only, the absolute answer.

Gun
.

I turned away and ran back down the hallway past my bedroom and into my brother’s. I winced when I stepped on something sharp but ignored it. In the dark, I doubled back and turned on the light. I dashed to the closet, slid the door open. There on the left was his rifle in shadow, leaning against the wall, barrel down.

Exactly as I had seen it.

Exactly as it was shown to me.

I reached forward and carefully hoisted the rifle, making sure the barrel remained pointed at the floor. I held the gun away from me, carrying it with both hands. As if it were toxic, a wood and metal germ, and I could not have it in contact with my body.

I was afraid of the gun but I was more afraid of what was happening inside the house. The evening was closing in around my brother, narrowing and sharpening. My father would kill him. My father was drunk and he would kill my brother. His face was red and swollen, hate wafted from his skin like a stink. I had to get back in there. I ran with the gun.

Suddenly, I was standing there before them. There was silence—perfect and clean.

Everyone was watching me.

Slowly, I stepped forward. It was as though I were in a church. The moment was sacred, holy, silent. I carried the gun to my brother and I raised it up as an offering.

“Kill him,”
 I whispered. His eyes met mine and held the gaze. “Kill him,” I said once more.

Nobody breathed.

Nobody moved.

The astronauts closed their eyes.

The moment was balanced on the head of a pin.

Then my brother’s head rocked back a little in astonishment and he blinked. He quickly took the gun and I could see, yes, I’d done the right thing.

I hadn’t known I needed my father dead until that moment. There was only a single action: get the gun. But now I knew my father had to die.

My brother had the heel of the rifle packed tight against his right shoulder, his head cocked sideways as he looked down the barrel of the gun, which was now pointed at our father. “Back off,” he commanded like an officer of the law. “Back the 
fuck
 off.”

I screamed with excitement rather than fear. “Kill him, kill him, kill him.” My throat vibrated as I screamed the words, the loudest sounds I had ever made. I felt heat rise in my face as my lungs emptied and my vision began to darken.

“Oh my God,” my mother screamed. “Augusten, no.” As though I had the gun. As though I were the one taking aim.

Her eyes were moist and she had disowned me. “Augusten, no,” she cried with such grief.

I wanted to yell back at her, 
Don’t you see what’s happening here? We have to make a choice
.

But I said nothing because my eyes were locked now on my brother, inching forward toward our father, who continued to stand his ground. “Back the fuck off right now,” my brother ordered again. Then he said, “I keep the rifle loaded.”

Like a key inserted into a lock and turned, these last words disengaged our father. For a moment, nobody moved. The air was charged with a hesitant faith. Was it really over? It was as if we’d defused a bomb and could not quite trust that the threat was truly gone. Then my father broke the spell by turning away from my brother and walking around the fireplace, out of my sight for just one moment. I was afraid to meet his eyes. But when he reappeared on the other side, he didn’t look at me. He had circled the fireplace and was now at the head of the stairs, head bowed as if in contemplation or prayer.

My brother lowered the gun, and I noticed it was trembling.

Our father let out a sigh and then descended the stairs, wincing with pain at each step. And then he was gone.

I realized what I felt wasn’t so much relief as disappointment. I’d gone ahead and accepted my father’s death. It had seemed, once my brother took the gun from my fingers, inevitable. And I found that this knowledge stirred in me a feeling that fit comfortably inside the word
hope
.

But just then, my brother took two large steps and was standing right before me. “Don’t ever touch my guns again.”

I was startled and looked up at his face. He was angry with me. And for some reason, this made me furious at him. “But I had to,” I said. He, better than anyone, knew this to be true. How could he be mad at me?

“No, it was the wrong thing to do,” he told me.

My eyes stung and I despised him at that moment, because it wasn’t the wrong thing to do. It was the 
only
 thing to do. 
I’m the one who lives here. I’m the one who has to spend every day with him. I’m the one who can
 see 
him.
 “He was going to kill you,” I said. “And you know that’s the truth. And I didn’t do the wrong thing. And you know that’s the truth, too.”

My brother carried the rifle with him back to his bedroom where he gathered together some clothes, another pair of boots. “When will you be back?” I pleaded. “How long will you be gone this time?” I feared he wouldn’t ever come home again. He did not answer me. With his arms full and the gun tucked under his armpit, he stepped over the threshold of the front door, bounded down the stairs.

And he was gone.

He took his car this time, not the motorcycle. Now, he would travel with a roof, four wheels. He wouldn’t need to come home just because of the cold, just because it was raining. He could live in the car if he had to.

Despondent, I stood at the front door, which was open wide. I stared out at the empty driveway, dust still floating in the air from the spinning tires. 
How will I live here now?
 I wondered. 
How will I ever be able to look at my father again?

My mother remained in the living room studying me. For the briefest moment, our eyes met and I believed I saw relief reflected back at me.

I stepped outside on the front steps and looked up at the sky. I saw that the moon had dipped behind the pine trees, throwing their spiky, feathery branches into shadowed relief against the glowing night sky. Frogs and crickets stained the air with their musical throb and I thought again of the astronauts. I wondered, 
How do they go to the bathroom?