Story

He was 11-years old and it was Thanksgiving Day when he learned that his father had moved out.

He was lying on the sofa in the living room reading a paperback book when his younger brother came in from the backyard, the cold air and smell of rotting leaves pushing into the warm house as the small boy opened the back door and ran into the kitchen.

"Mom. Where's dad?"

"Your father isn't here."

"When will he be back?"

"Your father is living with his mother."

"Living with his mother?"

"Your grandmother Murphy."

"When's he going to be back? He'll be here for dinner, right?"

She slammed the cover on a large pot on the stove and the angry noise made the boy lying on the sofa go stiff. His hands locked on the opened book, the printed words blurred, and he waited.

But his younger brother knew enough to leave the kitchen. He came into the living room, turned on the television, turned the volume down low, then sat up close and stared straight into the flickering screen, his jacket and shoes still on.

In the kitchen, she slammed covers on pans, threw utensils into the stainless steel sink and blasted them with hot water.

The boy on the sofa stared into the open book without seeing the words. He was listening for, waiting for, an opening.

When he heard the folding wood doors of the pantry pushed apart and cans being shoved around the shelves, he closed the paperback book, got off the sofa, held the book with both hands tight against his stomach, and walked fast and quietly out through the kitchen. He made it to the carpeted stairs and ran as lightly as he could up to his bedroom.

Lying on his bed, he opened the book, and now he could see the words. He started reading, waiting for the familiar shift, the movement, and when it came, he let himself go into the far and separate world behind the words.

The book was not like any other he had ever read. The book explained how—whether you lived in a city, or, as he did, in a small town with many wooded areas—how to find, how to select, a special place. The book explained how, if you went to the right place day after day and sat there quietly, watching and listening, and maybe sometimes reading or whittling on a stick—eventually, all the animals living in that place would begin to show themselves to you. They would accept your presence in that place and you could watch them scamper through the fallen leaves, run up and down the tree trunks or flit among the branches.

The strange book had been left out on one of the smooth wood tables in the town library. From the moment he had picked it up and opened it he could not stop reading it. The librarian checked it out for him. Two weeks later when he had renewed the book he had already read it from start to finish so many times that he had begun to open it at random and read again whatever words his sight fell on. It was strange how even one sentence could bring back to him the whole experience of the book.

The book described the place where the animals would be. For weeks, everywhere the boy went, he looked for such a place, a place apart from people and their noise, a place with trees and grass and dense fallen leaves and maybe a stream. He explored the woods behind the school. There were good places there. And there was a field near his house. It didn't have a stream, but the grass was high and there were lots of trees. He carried the paperback book all the time, in his jacket pocket, or wedged into the back pocket of his jeans. He did not want to leave it on a table or forget it under his pillow. He did not want anyone else to read it. He did not want to lose it.

When he had tried to renew the book for a third time the librarian had said it would be unfair to other people who might be waiting to read the book. "But it's an old book," the boy had told her. "No one else wants to read it."

The librarian's hair was gray and black and there were wrinkles around her eyes that he had heard people call 'laugh lines'. She always wore lipstick that was the color of red or purple crayons.

"Look at the stamp," he had said, and opened the book to the inside front cover and pointed to the date stamps from previous borrowers. "The last person before me was over two years ago!"

The librarian smiled and leaned close to him and he could smell the perfume she wore and it made him think of the lilac bushes crowding the sidewalks that he would ride his bicycle past. He handed the book to her and she looked at the date stamp. "You're right," she said, and made a sound that he knew was called a sigh. "But we have to follow the rules to be fair to everyone. In two weeks you can take it out again." She dropped the book onto a pile of other books that would be re-shelved.

He had moved through the library, not wanting any other book but unable to leave the library without one. He took some books down from the shelves and made like he was reading them at one of the smooth wood tables. But he was only waiting. When the librarian gathered up an armful of books and walked into the other room he went straight to the book sitting on top of the pile of books to be re-shelved and took it. He clumsily untucked his shirt and stuffed the book into his pants, under his belt and pulled down the shirt to cover the book as he walked out of the library. The afternoon sun on the white sidewalk hurt his eyes and made him feel light-headed, but the book was secure under the belt of his pants and he did not mind how it pressed tight against his stomach and made every breath hurt.

When his mother slapped his brother's face—even from downstairs in the kitchen and through the closed door of his bedroom—the sound jolted him. His body went rigid—like the time he was walking to school and a passing truck had backfired. He could not move his head. The words in the book blurred and the separate world behind them fell away.

His brother was running up the stairs, crying loudly. He banged the bedroom door open and threw himself down on the other bed filling the room with the noise of his chest-hurting sobs.

The boy got his jacket, put the book into its side pocket, and went down the stairs quietly, carrying the jacket with both hands. He would time the opening of the front door with some noise in the kitchen—but before he reached the bottom of the stairs she was there.

"Where do you think you're going?"

"Outside."

"Get your brother. Wash your hands. Set the table."

She thrust plates and silverware and glasses into his hands and his brother's hands and they silently set the table as she continued to bang and slam things in the kitchen. But now she was talking. She was not talking to them, although she talked loud and even stared at them as she talked. She talked as if there was another grownup there. She said bad things about his father.

He tried not to hear her voice, not to understand the words. She got louder and the pitch of her voice went deeper. He concentrated on placing the plates and glasses carefully. Breaking something would be bad. But even as he struggled to concentrate, to keep his hands steady and movements careful, he was thinking of the time the river had flooded, and how the black roiling ugly water had swollen over its banks and gone into the town, half-submerging cars. When the water had reached the school it had knocked in all the first floor windows and flowed inside. Even after the flood the school stayed closed for days as people shoveled out the muck and debris and shattered glass that the unrestrained river had left behind.

At the table, he sipped carefully from his glass of milk or moved the lumps of food on his plate with a fork that felt treacherously heavy in his hand. He strained to keep the fork from hitting the ceramic plate because it made a ringing sound that reverberated forever in the empty house.

She kept talking, kept saying bad things about his father. The boy tried to blur the words but she seemed to know what he was doing and she talked louder, sometimes banging her glass down on the table.

He knew she was staring at him as he looked down at his plate. But he could not stop his thoughts from chanting, over and over and over, "Don't come back. Don't come back. Don't come back."

Sometime a little before Christmas his father did come back.

And the next day he and his brother had gone with their father, driving to their grandmother's apartment, to get some of his father's clothes and bring them back home.

His brother had jumped out of the car when they arrived, happy and eager. The boy stayed in the front seat of the car.

"Come on," his father said.

"I'll wait here."

"Why?"

He shrugged.

His father said, "We're going to be here a while. I have to pack some things. Your grandmother will make you lunch."

"I'm not hungry. I'll wait here."

The boy watched his father and brother walking away and he said, "She hates you. She hates all of us."

But he had not said it loud enough to be heard.

In the quiet car the air coming in the opened windows was cold but the sun on the windshield was bright and hot. He took the battered paperback book out of the back pocket of his jeans.

He opened the book randomly and began reading.

It was the part that told how squirrels would eat bits of peanut husks right from your hand, how rabbits would graze near your feet, how birds would alight near you, and hop around close to you.

You just had to find the right place, and go there, and be still, and stay quiet, for a long enough time.

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In the Name of the Father and Son
Part One

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