Booty (iv)

The night I had snuck the bayonet out for the first time and showed them, we were in Mugsie's backyard, standing around his burning bar­rel. Our traps, strung on an iron pole, were set over the flame to soak up the scent of burning leaves, a ritual we thought would rid the traps of human smell. Mugsie hauled the bayonet out of its sheath and held it high above his head, the snapping flames throwing a savage redness over his shoulders and his face.

“Your old man say you could use that thing?” John said.

I shrugged my shoulders hard enough to let them know that my father wasn’t aware of it being out of the closet.

“You just grabbed it?” John said.

Years later, when Mugsie became a preacher, he told me once how he'd never forgotten the morning we'd lost it. He mentioned it one day in a reverent, priest-like tone, as we sat over coffee in a sandwich shop, nudged the memory out as if he were bringing up something that might still be very painful. "Remember that?" he said. "You remember that day? Wow, I'll never forget where that thing went in. I was so scared." 

But the night I lost that bayonet-and for weeks afterward-I laid in bed and told myself that I had to admit the whole story to my father, if for no other reason than I simply couldn't live the lie with him. I was in seventh grade, and the loss of that bayonet colored every mo­ment of my day and kept me awake at night when I sat perched at the top of the stairs, guilt weighing on me so heavily that it pushed me downstairs to tell him.

But I was afraid, not of some exploding wrath, not even of punish­ment. I was afraid of hurting him because this perfect father had an imperfect son. So I wouldn't go down those stairs, I wouldn't tell him, and I'd go back to bed and try to sleep. Sometimes from the floor beneath I'd hear hymns coming from the radio above the refrigerator, my father sitting at the kitchen table, working on a Bible study or a school board proposal, and I'd tell myself that he really wouldn't hurt me. What I feared were his tears.

Seventh grader I was, and I felt the stain in me of something I'd never seen in him, so I hid, like Adam, ashamed of who I was before my father's face, sat upstairs for what seems now to have been hours, star­ing out of the window where my neighbor's dim garage lights spilled long yellow shafts over the pines in our backyard, and where, just a few nights ago, heavy snow lay softly stretched on the telephone wires in clumps the shape of that very bayonet.

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Tomorrow: The bayonet's appeal.