I went back, first time in 25 years. One of those drowsy summer afternoons, mid-August, you remember? The black fly on the table – he’s so fat he can barely waddle over to the blob of spilled grape jelly and start lapping.
Hello, fly.
Right here in this kitchen – my old daddy’s big right hand would come up.
Those afternoons when he’d been down to Casey’s? He smelled of burnt-tar and sugar-syrup, after Casey’s. Smelled like the wet leaking out of a swollen peach, golden-red-ripe and bursting with the sweetness of late summer in Iowa.
Swack! – the meat of his hand going into the bridge of my nose. “You little shit!” Now I’ve got red-points, fire-points winking through my field of vision. I’m blinking. Trying not to bawl. I’m looking at the flecks of silver in his jaw-stubble. At Casey’s, and also in town, they knew him as “C.J.” They’d all be sitting together at one of the back tables . . . half of them wearing John Deere caps, and they’re listening to a smutty story being told by the Ralston Purina salesman, Theo Box.
Haw!
C.J. slaps the table. “You oughta go on TV, Theo!”
I don’t know what was wrong with him. Never did know. He had some kind of black hatred eating in his chest. I used to picture it . . . like a black spider in there, fangs going in and out of his heart-muscle.
He got the cancer about two years after I left for Des Moines and got my first job managing produce at the Family Fare Market. I’m stacking lettuce and tomatoes all afternoon . . . he’s dying in the little blue house high up the bank of the South Skunk River. They buried him in the little Methodist Cemetery over in Story City.
It’s funny, the things you remember. After I’d gone to bed, one eye swollen a little but no big deal, I’d listen to the two of them shouting at each other.
She’s yelling: “You have no right. You have no right!”
“Get off my back, you stupid bitch!”
I’m listening to the frogs down on the river: gracka-gracka-grack.
As rivers go, the South Skunk wasn’t very impressive. More like a creek – a 30-foot-wide thread of dark water curling beneath the town bridge. The fish were small, bony things . . . stunted bluegill, a few minor-league yellow perch. And the minnows flashing in the shallows, like a handful of flung dimes.
When I was in grade school, I spent a lot of time down by the river. I liked the smell, that mud-stink rising in the heat, and the musky aroma of rotting logs. I liked to imagine the troll who lived beneath the mossy stones of the bridge. A little old guy with a pretzel-bent spine and greenish bumps riding his nose. . . .
I don’t blame C.J much. Not anymore. With the years, I’ve come to see that he was the prisoner of something invisible. Something I’ll never know about. A force. A dark thing, maybe unknowable, like that spider I used to imagine at work on his heart.
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