Read A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father Online

Authors: Augusten Burroughs

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs

A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father (16 page)

BOOK: A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father
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And then a sense of dread rose up in me like bile in my throat, acid that burned. Because what if they hate each other, the astronauts, the Russians and the Americans? What if there is only hate?

What if God was looking someplace else?

I THOUGHT IT might be a year before I saw my brother again, or perhaps even longer, which is why it was very much a surprise to see him the next day.

It was not yet suppertime and I was in my bedroom writing in the little red diary my mother had bought for me at Hastings. It had a lock on the cover and I kept the tiny brass key in my desk drawer. Suddenly, I heard a scratching sound on my window screen. I looked up to see a branch scraping the screen. No tree was close enough to my window to scratch the screen so I thought it might be my father. But then, he would only do something like this in the middle of the night. I thought maybe it was my friend Greg so I got up and ran across my room, jumping onto my bed so I could peer out the window.

My brother was standing outside. He put his finger to his lips to silence me. Then he motioned for me to meet him outside. He pointed to the end of the driveway.

I slipped on my sneakers and ran down the hall and out the front door. My brother was standing at the foot of the driveway. I ran to him. His car was pulled over, just a few feet ahead.

“Get in,” he said.

I didn’t ask what he was doing here or where he was taking me. I just sat still and looked out the windshield.

My brother drove down a crude dirt road near our house that I hadn’t even known was there. It was a service road, used by the power company to reach the electrical lines. I was rather amazed that an entire road could exist so near my own home and I hadn’t found it. 
I can’t wait to tell Greg about this road
, I thought.

He continued driving until we reached a clearing strewn with rocks and broken beer bottles. All over the ground were rusty beer cans, eaten away by bullets. We climbed out of the car and I followed him around to the rear where he opened the trunk. There, beside the rusting jack and a pair of jumper cables, was the rifle.

I looked up at him but he said nothing. He simply reached into the trunk, pulled out the gun, and handed it to me. “Hold this.” He took out two boxes of bullets and closed the trunk.

He began walking toward the center of the clearing and I followed, a little nervous to be holding the gun but excited, too. “You have to learn how to shoot a rifle,” he said at last. He walked so fast I had to jog to keep up with him. When we reached the clearing he helped me raise the rifle to my shoulder. He showed me how to tuck it against my body and how to aim. I would have to be prepared, he said, for the kickback.

He was very serious as he explained these things. And thorough, making sure I understood each step. He showed me the safety and said, “Always have the safety catch engaged.” I nodded, trying to take it all in. “This is very important,” he said, pressing my finger to the safety with his own, engaging it, disengaging it. He almost seemed angry, but I knew he was not.

Even after his meticulous instructions, I was still fully unprepared for the force of the kickback, which nearly knocked me flat onto my back. I laughed, but he didn’t so much as smile and my laugh died and I stood up and fired again. He placed a series of well-shot cans on a log thirty yards away, lined them in a row, and had me try and hit as many as I could. He made me shoot over and over, as light drained from the sky and cans flew off the log. I liked looking down the length of the barrel through the two little guides that formed a sort of 
V
 at the end of the rifle. As it happened, I had fine natural aim and could hit almost anything he set before me.

Feeling pleased with myself and invigorated by my illicit new skill, I asked my brother if we could go get Greg, teach him how to shoot, too. He said nothing but took the rifle from my hands and cracked it open to make sure it was unloaded. He engaged the safety then handed me the two boxes of bullets. Without warning, he began walking back to the car and I followed, afraid to get left out there alone.

He opened the trunk and put everything back inside, then he got behind the wheel and I climbed in, too, thinking we were going to get Greg. But before he started the engine he looked at me and he said, “You are 
not
 to tell anybody about this, ever. Do you understand? Not Greg, not your mother, nobody, under any circumstances.” He was looking straight at me and I thought I might have seen a little sorrow in his eyes.

But I swallowed and said, “Okay.”

He put the car into gear and we started driving. “Now, we’re going to have to practice this, so I’m going to come back next week. Once you get good, you can’t fall out of practice.” He turned to look at me. “This is very important. This is not a game. This is not like singing along to your Barry Manilow records. The fact is, you aren’t safe in that house anymore. You have to be able to protect yourself because I won’t be around.”

He drove the rest of the way without speaking. Just before we reached our driveway, he pulled over and let me out. We didn’t say good-bye, he just drove away.

I walked up to the house, rubbing my shoulder where it still hurt from the rifle’s recoil. But soon, it wouldn’t hurt because I would get used to it. It was amazing to me, what a person could get used to.

 

TWELVE

IT WAS DARK.

I didn’t know whether the moon was full and ripe or just a slender crescent, balanced on its side like the white edge of an eye. Out there in the woods, the trees were thick and they were tall, obscuring the sky. Even on the brightest summer day, you could see only flashes of blue. The trees were greedy, hoarding all the light for themselves at the very top of the canopy, letting only a pittance shine through. So either the trees were blocking the moon or perhaps clouds were, a layer of them like a floating sheet.

Or maybe there was no moon at all, maybe it had vanished, bounced away from the Earth. It seemed possible tonight that the universe had gone insane.

Luckily, I knew these woods. Not only did I know the path that reached from the beginning of the forest in our backyard and extended deep, crossing a stream, running behind all the homes on our street, but I knew the landscape that held the path. I’d memorized the large rocks, had used them many times as desks, cars, horses. Beneath one low, flat stone I’d dug a hole and buried my locking fireproof box. I’d placed favorite objects inside—leaves baked with fall color, the silver ring from our trip to Mexico when I was small, a collection of stamps from countries so exotic I couldn’t pronounce their names. I would return as an adult and dig up the box, I thought. It was my time capsule.

I knew these woods and didn’t need moonlight or any light at all to know my way around.

But terror was dulling my vision in a way the darkness couldn’t.

I was barefoot and grateful for the thick cushion of moss that grew in great blankets across the forest floor.

At other times, I’d gently peeled this moss from the ground, careful not to tear it. I would hold it before me and think, 
You could almost wear this
. But the moss was fragile and would break apart if you tried to wrap it around yourself. Still, it astonished me that nature had created sheets of something so wonderful and green and soft it would be all right to lay a baby on it.

I could see jabs from his flashlight cutting into the woods on either side of me. He was back there, somewhere. The light beam was like a knife and I didn’t want it on my back.

I dashed to the right, through a clutch of young silver birch trees, and ran up the embankment, crouching forward to maintain speed. With his bad knee, he would have trouble with the hill. Lumbering forward, he would need to pause and massage the swollen, throbbing kneecap, catch his breath. The hill would slow him.

But when I suddenly realized the beam from his flashlight was gone, I worried that he’d cut around, that he’d thought one step ahead of me. That he was already on the hill, climbing it from the other side. What if I reached the top and he was there to meet me?

I veered back to the path then crossed it. I wanted to stop and listen, but I couldn’t. Fear pushed me forward. My breathing roared in my head, as though my ears were beside a gigantic heaving machine, a bellows stoking some hellish fire.

Even though I was wearing only pajamas and had no shoes, I wasn’t cold. I wasn’t anything at all. I was only a blur.

When I stepped on a branch, the rough bark cutting into my arch, I just kept running. The pain exploded in my feet, then shot out the top of my head, and was left behind in my wake.

MANY DAYS AFTER school and on the weekends my best friend Greg and I would play in these woods. School, meals, and sleep were interruptions to what became our private, untamed life.

We had a hospital, located just off the dirt road that threaded our two houses together, a natural clinic with walls made of ferns and witch hazel bushes, a bed of rust-colored pine needles. A waist-high rock with a nearly flat surface served as our apothecary, where we ground dried leaves and various barks into makeshift powders, deciding on the spot what they could heal.

“And for sprains, I think this will be good. We’ll grind it up and mix it with mud from the stream and then put it on the sprain. Birch bark will be for when your heart races. You’ll apply a paste on the chest.”

We stored an inventory of honeysuckle, gathered in spring. The dried, shriveled blossoms could be consumed whole and contained the power to revive somebody close to death.

We’d infused the ferns, flowers, leaves, and berries we gathered with healing powers. We never sampled our drugs because we were afraid of them, though to admit this out loud would have broken the spell.

Not far from the hospital was a wooden bridge, just a flat roof of thick wood planks over the brook that ran parallel to the street until it cut back and followed alongside Greg’s driveway. Beneath the bridge was our rock factory, where we smashed stone against stone, looking for diamonds.

We believed that if we split enough rocks, we eventually would find at the center of an ordinary gray rock a perfect white diamond, already cut with dazzling facets. Once or twice we panned for gold with one of my mother’s pie pans, but it was diamonds we believed in.

In the other direction, just past my house, was the pond. Here, we crouched down at the overgrown, blurry edge of the water and scooped clouds of pollywogs into our hands, just for the vivid sensation of feeling 
life
 slipping between our fingers and dropping back into the water. The pond was rife with all that was alive—cattails bursting white fluff, throaty frogs, snakes, and turtles that could take a finger. There were cunning little birds in brazen colors that flashed about like wild thoughts and perverse impulses.

The lowly majesty of a beaver’s dam at the mouth of the pond amazed us, being finer than any fort we’d ever managed to construct ourselves.

When a stranger parked alongside the reservoir and went for a walk beside the water or along the path into the woods, we stalked them from a distance, feeling possessive of every tree.

•    •    •

I WAS ELEVEN and I was strong and I knew these woods. What was hunting me beneath the black sky was old and crippled, with foul skin and a bad knee that caused a limp and required frequent visits to the doctor for draining with a hypodermic needle.

WHEN I WAS alone in the woods I brought Brutus with me. I’d seen other boys play with their dogs, watched them run in the backyard, shrieking with joy while the dog chased after, overtaking them.

My relationship with Brutus was different. I carried a walking stick I’d carved myself from ironwood and I never smiled when I was alone. Why would I? Brutus followed, sometimes charging ahead to chase a squirrel or lingering over the deflated but treacherously barbed body of a porcupine.

Sometimes Brutus sat while I lay on my side and stroked his chest. “I need you,” I told him and Brutus turned his head away from me. I thought, 
I need him too much. I need him to be too human
. I had the sensation of colliding with a limitation.

I PAUSED FINALLY and watched the trees for slashes of light, but saw none. As my heart settled and my ears became less occupied I listened and heard nothing but the thready pulse of the night. And I sensed that the hunt was over. I’d been prey and now I was not. Prey knows this. Prey knows when it has escaped.

MY GRANDFATHER, MY father’s father, in Lawrenceville, Georgia, sent us a pool table when I was very young. I liked to knock balls into the pockets, listen as they rolled inside the channel within the table and were returned at the mouth. I begged my father to teach me to play, but not once did he play pool with me. In time, the felt was shredded, books stacked on its surface, the balls long lost.

The stain that my baseball glove had bled onto the rock was still there.

At night, my father still answered, “Very much I love you.”

Five words.

I MUST HAVE made my way back into the house, walked into my bedroom, and closed my hollow-core door—no protection at all against a fist. I must have peeled back the covers and buried myself beneath them, nestled my head on one pillow, and placed another over my eyes. I did not wake up in the woods, I woke up in my bed. And I was confused, because it all seemed a dream. The dark was gone, the missing moon no longer a puzzle.

After dressing for school, I walked into the kitchen, the sound of my mother’s typing now reduced to just a background throbbing, like pebbles continuously running through the plumbing of the house.

My father was sitting at the table, grading papers. He had a mug of coffee before him, a cigarette burning in the ashtray.

Hesitantly, I said, “Hi.” I wanted to be small. I was still confused over the dream. And yet, I was aware that the bottoms of my feet felt sore, that they dimly ached.

Looking up, my father smiled and said, “Well, good morning. You better hurry up or you’ll miss the bus.”

It was when he looked back down at the paper he was grading that I saw the thin line of green.

BOOK: A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father
10.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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