Paternity -- v

Behind him the bales kept falling all over the spaces where he could walk. He twisted around quickly, as if he had forgotten what he was about. He scrambled down two levels of bales to get to the window, then dug his knees into the hay to look outside. “Slow down, Jesse--didn’t you hear me?” he yelled, and he grabbed the end of the elevator and shook it. He stayed there for a minute, ripped four bales from the track and stacked them, one atop the next, to keep them out of the way.

Seated over there, he had to yell for me to hear. “You think it’ll all be over, do you?” he said. “Just like that--like the mumps? You think it’ll all go away, just like that? Like a sore knee, is that it?”

“What?” I said. “She’ll be gone. She’s rich. You saw her old lady. She’ll take care of the whole business.”

The floor at the end of the elevator was cluttered with bales. He pulled himself up from his knees, grabbed the end of the elevator, and twisted himself around it; but his foot slipped in a crack, and he twisted his back when he couldn’t keep his balance, finally falling to all fours. Just like that, like a slap in the face with an open hand, another bale came off the end and slammed to the floor over his twisted foot.

He came up swearing under his breath, something he rarely did, and he grabbed that elevator and twisted it, wrestled it loose from the knot Andy must have tied to anchor it, the chain jangling like loose bells, then turned it completely upside down, dumping every last bale off the track and to the ground between the barn and the wagon. “Now slow down!” he yelled again at Jesse.

“You don’t have to lose your temper,” I said.

“You shut up,” he said, pointing back at me. “You talk like a child--it’ll all be over--” he said. “It’s no big deal at all because once you make a touchdown nobody will remember.”

Anger and hurt twisted his mouth and narrowed his eyes, pouring out in something close to tears. “We’re talking about life here. Don’t you understand that--or is all you care about getting laid?”

I never heard my father use that kind of language.

“Life,” he said, and he put both hands down on a row of bales and climbed up several levels, lifting himself to the nest of kittens he’d laid at the beam. He grabbed a kitten from the pile that he’d found up there, took it in his huge hand and held it towards me like some circus magician, the kitten’s round head protruding between his thumb and forefinger, the rest of its body in his fist, small and gray with long fur. He raised it higher and higher towards me, then jerked down suddenly, as if he were snapping his fingers, as if he were a kid snapping a lead pencil in half. When he opened his hand, the kitten was perfectly dead.

I couldn’t believe what he’d done.

He didn’t say anything just then. He looked at me and tossed the kitten across the mow somewhere. If his eyes could have spoken, they would have explained everything, but his eyes were vacant. He just stood there and stared, almost as if I could be next.

“Dad--” I said.

“You two made a child,” he said, “not a kitten.”

And just then Jesse came up the ladder, almost crying himself. “I tried to get that old guy to slow down, but he just kept on going,” he said. “I tried.”

“That’s what you made,” my father said, pointing at Jesse. “And who’s going to be nice to him--who’s going to dry up his tears, Gary? You going to be there?”

_____________________________

The action of the story is now over. What remains is the denouement--the sense of how all of this figures into Gary's adult life.

I didn't set out to write a story in which a father would deliberately and with no malice in spirit or mind kill a tiny kitten with his bare hands. I had no sense at all of that until, almost mysteriously, it happened. I remember thinking, "He could grab one of those kittens .  . . and then what? He could kill it with his bare hands. He could."

Would my father have done that? I don't know, but in a way, as the writer, I'm beyond that question already because my father was never up in a hay mow that I know of, and while he might have used the language Gary's father does, he certainly would have been that disappointed--not angry, disappointed.

Tomorrow, the denouement.