Booty (vi)

He raised his eyebrows and looked out at the snow, and I told him the whole story, how we'd taken it along to check traps, how Mugsie had yelled at me to throw it across the river, and how it had gone in, how we'd looked all over and never found it. "Some nights I'd sit here at this window when I was a kid," I told him, "and I'd just about die thinking how much I wanted to go down and tell you the whole story. Confess, you know-confess the whole thing. But I never could. I just couldn't do it, Dad. Go!, I wanted to, but I couldn't." I picked up one of those leggings. "I sat right here on these steps, night after night, and I'd tell myself to go down and tell you. I was so scared." He had a faraway look in his eyes of someone almost lost. "I figured I could get away with it, I guess. And I did."

He ran his tongue along his lips, and his eyes showed this shadowy kind of questioning that I could almost feel because something was hap­pening in his mind. "You're telling the truth?" he said.

"Lots of nights I sat here and even cried," I told him. "But I never told you, not in all these many years. Isn't that something?" I tried to make it a joke. "I couldn't even pray, Dad," I told him. "I remember sitting right here on the steps and thinking that maybe if I could pray I could live with it --with what I'd done. But I couldn't because I knew that God wouldn't give me any peace until I told you. And I couldn't do that." It seemed so crazy. "I just couldn't." I stretched out my hands again. "It was about this long, and it was black, in a sheath."

He pulled his handkerchief up to his face and blew his nose once or twice, then brushed it across his nose.

“You don’t even remember it?” I said.

"When the war ended I had two daughters I didn't even know, and I wasn't thinking about booty. I was thinking about your mother and your sisters," he said. "You know, your mother worried back then about who I'd hug first when I got off the ship --her or the girls. What did I care about booty? What did I care about some Japanese bayonet from a scrap heap?"

He turned to look outside at the falling snow. "But what gets me," he said, "is why you couldn't tell me." He raised his hands in front of his face. "Did you think I'd be so angry?"

"No," I said. "I couldn't stand the idea of letting you down."

"Letting me down?" he said. He brought his hand up to his lips and his eyes rose over my head as if my whole childhood were replaying somewhere against the wall. "To lose that bayonet?" He looked straight at me, full in the face. "Was I that hard to live with?"

"No," I said. "Of course not. You were perfect, absolutely perfect, the most perfect father anybody could have. You never did a thing wrong. Never. I can't remember a time-"

"Oh, Lane," he said, "I was far from perfect. Oh, my Lord, I wasn't even close."

"Don't say that, Dad," I told him. "That's just like you. Don't say that."

He laid both hands down on his legs once that lost look came back into his eyes. "So I was perfect," he said, as much to himself as to me. "You really thought that, Lane?--you thought I was perfect. Oh, Lord," he said, "what did I do to you?" He tightened his lips, then looked straight ahead, almost as if something had finally come clear. "And today you can't talk to God."

"Don't say that, Dad," I told him. "That's the way it always is with you-all your life you took it all on yourself, everything. It's not your fault-nothing's your fault."

"You couldn't talk to me --that's what you said. What kind of father is it you can't talk to --tell me that, Lane? What kind of father is that?"

"I stole it," I said. "I grabbed it right out of the closet and I never asked you. I stole it, Dad-and then I lost it. Nothing's your fault here."

The face that had hung before me on so many childhood nights now stared incredulous, full of that innocence I had always known would hurt me, even back then, the same painful purity that made him so unap­proachable on those winter nights. Thirty years later I still laid a wound on him with that old bayonet.

"Did you think I wouldn't forgive you?" He removed his glasses and rubbed the moisture out of his eyes. "Did you think I didn't love you, Lane --is that it?"

I looked away.

"You think I'd punish you so hard?" he said. For a minute his eyes escaped, then refocused. "Then I failed you right there," he told me, and he grabbed my shoulder tightly, shaking me, as if I were a boy. "Then right there is where I failed you."

"You don't understand," I told him. "I'm just trying to tell you what I did, how it was for me. I'm just trying to get you to forgive me," I said, laughing the way it came out. "Thirty years ago already. My word, it's something I've never forgotten."

And just like that his back straightened, his eyes narrowed. "You remember all of that, don't you?" he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Some things you haven’t forgotten,” he said, nodding.

“I lost the bayonet and I never told you.”

He kept nodding, looking at me as suddenly I were his boy and not the man I had become. “I’m glad you remember,” he said. That’s what I pray for, Lane—every day. That’s exactly what I ask the Lord—just that you remember some things.” 

“I can’t forget,” I told him. “Not even try.”

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Tomorrow: The effects of the storm.