Body and Bread (13 page)

“So there wouldn’t be a
problem
if I acted like
you
?” Sam looked away, as though he were thinking it over. “Then we could both follow our dads around,” he said, his voice shaking, “forget what
we
want.”

“That’s called responsibility.”

“No, sir,” Sam whispered again. “You know the name for somebody like that, but I don’t think you want me to say it.”

“Exactly what I mean. No respect,” my father said. “Some things a man does, son, without question, because they’re morally right.”

“You think demeaning yourself is a way to show respect? You really want me to do that?” They stared at each other. “And is it morally right for a kid to be hit twenty times with a belt if he doesn’t?”

My father tapped Hugh. “You’ve got something more important to do this morning,” he said. “Go get your shoes. I need you to caddy.”

“But, Daddy, Sam—”

“Arrowheads will wait. Go on. I’ll meet you at the car.” He steered Hugh to the doorway, then faced Sam.

Sam nodded at Hugh, who turned to leave. Then he nervously popped his gum. “Why don’t you just give it up? Tell the truth, for once.”

My father reached to snatch the wad from Sam’s mouth. But as his fist clenched, he caught himself.

I thought, If he hits Sam, will Sam hit back? What truth is Sam after?

“You’re on your own today,” my father said, inches from Sam. Then he clutched the keys in his pocket, watched Hugh cross the hall.

“Don’t worry,” Sam said, grinning, “I’m used to that.” He shook his head. “When we do go, though,” he flinched, looking sideways, “I hope you’ll come with us.”

“Son, scratching will only get you raw. The way to stop your itching is to pat someone else’s back.”

Sam said he had to talk to somebody, so I agreed to go with him to meet Cyril and Terezie. At moments like these, increasingly predictable times prickled with disaster, I was sadly eager for him to go back to Austin.

He began talking before I could close the door of the second-hand Corvair. “Did you see that?” he said, starting the engine. “Could you believe it?”

I was afraid to say anything. I hoped he’d explain.

He shoved the car in gear. “Our father the hypocrite, scared to death.” He headed toward the road to the farm. “Sad.”

A sharp turn pressed me against the door. I grabbed the handle. “What’s he scared of?”

“Anything outside the rulebook in his head.
Duty
, what a joke.”

I shrugged, confused.

“Dad’s got wires for brains. Zing, this is how you work; zing, here’s what’s good and bad; zing, these are the facts. Easy—one, two, three, life makes sense. Guy’s a robot—no emotions, no imagination. You push those buttons, he blows a fuse.”

Our father had a jazz collection, and he’d built a tree house with elaborate shelves and a stirrup pulley for raising us to its floor. He’d recently explained that Buddha and Jesus were alike in their teachings about compassion. “If you could just talk to him without getting so mad.”

“Me? You were there, did I do anything?”

“Something about—”

“Look, I know he’s a good doctor and you look up to him and all. But you got to see past that. For instance, tradition.” I nodded. “It’s just a habit without a reason. The opposite of truth. Nobody remembers how the thing got started, but it’s sure as hell sacred. How stupid is that?”

I thought about Sundays at our grandparents’ house and the farm, about my brothers chopping cotton, about church.

“He doesn’t even know what a midden is, for Christ’s sake.” Sam shook the steering wheel, so I didn’t confess that I didn’t, either. “He sees me, he thinks he hasn’t done things right. I’m like Joseph after his brothers drop him in that well.”

“I know,” I said, not really understanding.

He rolled down his window, and the wind whipped his ear, ruffled his shirt. “Whatever’s left out of that rulebook might as well not exist.”

“Like what?”

His scowl got scary; then he sighed. “Like, you think he’s eaten baby eel?”

“No,” I moaned, repulsed.

“See? You never even tried it.”

“Gross…why would you?”

“To see what it tastes like.”

“Not me.”

“Why be born then?” He hung his arm out the window, slapped the door.

He’d told me to face the truth, no matter how ugly. Why was our father’s search for facts any different?

“I say if there’s something to know, bring it on. You going to tiptoe around like Dad, afraid, only eating baked potatoes?”

I had a general sense of what he meant. “I guess not.”

“Smart girl.” He squeezed my shoulder, but I could see he was still upset.

We drove without talking. If Sam was expected to be like Dad, I thought, was I supposed to emulate our mother? “But what about Mom?”

“Who? Madame Loafing Meat?”

I giggled, remembering an afternoon her younger cousin, a girl we rarely saw, had come to visit. They acted like girlfriends, chatting, and I was the outsider. “She never listens; I’m like nothing to her.”

He turned, rested his arm on the seatback. “Don’t you know the story about her grandparents?”

I did, but I’d sworn not to tell where I’d heard it. Aunt Lynette had said their parents died in a train wreck on the way to a friend’s wedding in Galveston, so their grandparents had raised them. The grandmother had had a temper, sometimes crawling under the front porch to ambush them when they came home from school. I pictured a crone like the witch in “Hansel and Gretel,” but Aunt Lynette laughed when I said that. She showed me a wallet-sized photo of a woman, her hair parted in the middle, holding a wide-brimmed straw hat, standing in a garden of vegetables and daisies next to a white clapboard house. The girls fended for themselves unless their grandfather fried a platter of squirrels. “Might as well’ve been rat,” Aunt Lynette had said.

“Now,” Sam said, “Mom’s a gourmet cook, and everybody thinks we’re perfect so she can forget about when she was a kid.”

“Really?” I said, looking out the window. A stand of mesquites bordered a fence in the distance next to the highway. Straight ahead, the sky’s edge seemed only a few miles down the road, its blue abutment a vast backdrop to the familiar stretch of concrete. “But, you know, sometimes Mom acts like it’s my fault,” I said. “And it’s not,” I added. “I don’t like that.”

Sam turned onto the farm road, stopping at the gate, and a covey of bobwhites fluttered from the hedgerow. He latched the gate behind us, then crossed the cattle guard, drove over a wooden bridge, and parked in the corral next to the Cervenkas’ house. He leapt out of the car, whistling as though he hadn’t just fought with our father, as though we’d entered a different world. Maybe we had.

We walked to the barn, where Cyril and Terezie were saddling four horses. I had to admit Sam’s girlfriend was pretty. Makeup would’ve made her look like everyone else. Faded workman’s jeans clung like kidskin. Would Sam tell her what had happened at our house? “I thought you were bringing Hugh,” she said, buckling a girth strap. “Everything okay?”

Sam kissed her. “Peachy,” he whispered. “I brought our Indian expert instead.” He aimed an index finger at me, his other arm draping her shoulder. He nodded at Cyril. “I.Q., my man,” he sang.

“Dad needed Hugh to caddy,” I said, stroking a mare’s neck, still worried about Sam and relieved I wouldn’t have to explain. A hog rooted noisily at a trough in its pen. “I hope it’s all right…” My plan was to hang back, try not to be noticed.

“Sure, it’s all right. Now the numbers are even,” she said, handing me the reins. “I’ve been on testosterone overload.” She was getting harder not to like.

“You interested in Indians?” Cyril said, swinging himself onto a saddle. He squeezed with his boot heels, and his palomino trotted into the barnyard.

The three of us joined him, galloping along the path to the creek. “Well?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, and he nodded. He’d been on a university archeological dig, and I hoped he’d talk about it. He would graduate soon in political science with plans for law school.

Eight cows meandered toward us, on their way to the afternoon pasture. “Hello,” I said, leaning to pat a dusty back. In between a cluster of live oak and agarita, I glimpsed a newly planted cotton field, the furrows raised like groundhog tunnels. Hugh would work there next summer alongside Cyril.

Sam led us into the creek, my horse leaping off the bank from a flat-footed position, rocking me forward as I clutched the saddle horn, soaking my jeans. The mare paddled, so I slackened the reins, allowing her to maneuver forward. Her breaths echoed off the water.

Sam steered us up a gently terraced incline on the other side. He dismounted near a spiny hackberry then tied his and Terezie’s reins to a limb. Cyril and I tethered our horses and followed Sam to a grassy mound in the open. It had to be the midden, and I wondered if my brother, as Hugh claimed, had actually found it.

Cyril produced a canteen, two small picks, and a hand shovel, which he passed around. He assigned us each an area and started digging with a hunting knife he had attached to his belt. We peeled back grass and poked through a top layer of dirt. Sam attacked the midden like he did everything, digging toward its heart. A few yards away, bluebonnets peeked through buffle, mountain laurel smelled like cider, and an owl hooted in a littleleaf sumac near the horses.

“You think Dad might come if we tell him what’s here?” Sam said, shoveling. “I mean, he’s a history buff, right?”

“Sure,” I said, wanting to hug him. Maybe they could somehow work everything out.

“Don’t get your hopes up, Chopin,” Terezie said, wincing. “He’s awfully busy.” She arched, stretching her back.

“Maybe,” Sam said. “Sarah could bring him some Sunday.” He lodged his shovel in earth, wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his shirt.

I nodded.

“He’s not going to believe this,” Sam said, breaking apart mud clumps. “I hope I’m here to see his face.”

“Look for rocks that are fist-sized, that have right angles,” Cyril said, holding one for us to see. He tapped its corner with another rock, and it flaked, brittle as glazed candy. “Burnt rock,” he said, showing its pink inside. Then we began finding them among a dark gray mixture of ash and charcoal. Terezie uncovered fossilized clamshells, laying them in the grass.

“What’s burnt rock?” I asked. “Are they arrowheads?” The stone I held didn’t have the triangular shape I’d expected.

“Tonkawas camped here,” Sam said. “This was their campfire, and before that it was where their ancestors butchered animals and scraped the hides. Any tools we find here could be 10,000 years old.” Squatting on one knee, he sifted more soil through his fingers. “You never know.”

He’d given me the book on Aztecs at Christmas, but we’d never talked about local Indian history. “Where’d you hear that?” I asked.

“From I.Q.,” Sam said, motioning with his chin toward Cyril. “But when you bring Dad, you’ll tell him I found the midden, okay?”

Terrezie shook her head. “Sam…”

“What?” Sam said, irritably sailing a rock at the trees. “He’ll want to know how we got here. What’s wrong with that?” He shrugged, daring her to disagree.

“Nothing,” Terezie said, digging again. “Not a damn thing.”

“Sam found this place,” Cyril said, “because he knew what to look for. He doesn’t need anybody’s help.”

We worked for twenty minutes without talking. Every so often, someone sipped from the canteen, the water still cool in spite of the heat. Sam inched toward Terezie, finally pretending to fall, his head resting in her lap. “Sorry, George,” he said, and she laughed. “No, really,” he said, gazing at her face.

“Can you cut the crap about your father?” she said, cupping his cheek. He kissed her; then, side by side, they combed the mound again.

Cyril hadn’t said anything for about an hour, and I wondered how anyone ever got him to talk. Lunchtime was nearing, and I still hadn’t asked him about his university dig.

“Bingo,” Terezie sang, cradling something in her palm. She stood and gave her prize to her brother. “What is it?” she asked, rubbing her scar.

Leaning on his haunches, his hat shading his hands, Cyril inspected the flint while Sam watched from behind. “It’s a dart point,” Cyril said, “either a Nolan or a Pandale. Beautiful.” He brushed dirt loose with his nail then turned the stone over.

“Way to go,” Sam said, massaging Terezie’s back. “My girl, She with Beautiful Dart Points.”

Terezie shrugged, smiling.

Cyril stretched across the midden, holding out the arrowhead to me. A narrow heart-shape, it almost measured the length of my palm. Still damp, its flaked grooves were dark as charcoal. I gave it back to Cyril, who put it in a cloth sack, then scribbled something in a small notebook.

Sam and Terezie took a walk, their voices only mumbles. Was he finally telling her about his argument with Dad? Cyril and I kept digging, he sometimes holding rocks up to the sun then setting them aside. I didn’t say anything when I found my dart point, instead carrying it over to the trees near the horses. Fatter than Terezie’s, it looked like a goldfish as it lay in my palm, its tip pointed to the side of my hand, its fin tail next to my thumb. Beveled along the lateral edges, it could’ve been a cutter or scraper, but more than likely it, too, had been hafted to a spear. Scalloped grooves chiseled the rim. Made with what? Another rock? Or a knife improvised from a deer antler? Could a girl have carved the flint? Had it been used to kill something, an animal, or even a man?