Booty (finis)

I went to bed in my childhood bedroom that night, and for an hour or more before I finally closed my eyes I searched into the darkness for some vague sense of why I still felt cheated, why I felt like standing up and going to his room, to say something, to get something from him that I still needed.

I never did fall asleep. It was after one when he got me up and into my clothes because he said the snow had settled too heavily on the branches of trees that had not yet shed their leaves. What called my father up was some premonition that his trees were in danger in the heavy snow. It was a freakish storm, coming as closely as it did on summer's heels. Lightening occasionally slashed over the peaked corners of our house from a sky made luminous with snow, and thunder rolled and crackled the way it does in May and June when in the Midwest all eyes look west for the funnels that fall from thickened, late spring skies. The lawn was already white, and even the sidewalks had disappeared in the kind of heavy snow that falls in clumps.

"I don't trust it," he told me as we went out the door. "It's too heavy. There's too much weight."

A mountain ash at the southwest corner of the house swept so low to the ground it looked as though it were weeping. The branches of the oriental elms on the south side hung like inverted fishhooks, and the smaller shrubs twisted awkwardly against their shapes.

'There's a broom in the garage," he said. "Take the west side."

I ran around the house toward the garage in the eerie light of the storm. Snow covered the garden lot in the southwest corner of his backyard, even though what was left of cabbage plants jutted up like something emerging from the darkness. I turned the latch nailed up against the side of the garage, then pulled the door open. It was dark inside, so at first I felt along the wall where I thought the broom might be, just as I might have years ago, as if nothing at all had changed. Even in the dark, my hands found the horseshoes I remembered had hung there from the time a neighbor gave them to him, broken. My father had taken them along to the foundry to have them repaired, even though he never threw horseshoes himself.

The straw bottom of an old broom formed in the darkness, standing up against the bench, so I grabbed it and headed back outside and right then, all around town, the snow had become too heavy for the elms and maples and cottonwoods that line village streets. Already thick with leaves, the trees held tons of wet snow that wasn't melting. The temperature was right and the snowfall was heavy enough to make weary branches all over town submit, right then, right at that moment, to the early storm's thick burden, and in the midnight village stillness the crack­ing branches rang like gunfire, shot after shot echoing down the empty streets like nothing I'd ever heard before, limb after snapping limb like errant potshots taken in the darkness, one after another, an endless series of vicious cracks and the sound of thrashing branches falling in clumps.

I ran toward the side of the house, carrying the broom in both hands as if it were a rifle, then swept and swatted at the bushes. I attacked the oriental elm with the broom up over my head. A lower branch had already split, leaving a long thin blonde slash like an open wound.

I found my father hiked up in a front yard maple, not high off the ground, his booted foot coming down hard, stamping away, shaking loose the burden of snow. Bang, bang, bang-down came his foot, angrily, in a way I'd never seen before, one arm like a grappling hook around the trunk. But beneath his boot, the branch rose steadily with every jarring kick, slowly, loosened from its burden of snow, coming up free.

I stood there in the vicious rattle of gunfire all around, watching the father that I respect, and even love, his old broom in my hands like some useless weapon, and I realized that no matter how hard I might try to forget him and the booty of a life I thought behind me, this man and his saintliness, my father --like the God he loves and serves --is forever a part of me.