“I have some idea, Dad,” I said.
“That’s why she’ll be back,” he said. “She doesn’t know what it is to make a living and she sure as hell is too old to learn how at this late stage in the game.”
“Mom’s a very bright woman,” I said. “If she left you, Dad, I promise you she has a plan.”
“She can have all the plans in the world,” he said, “but she doesn’t have any of the cash dough to carry out those plans. Why did she do it, son? Please help me, son. Why did she go and do that?”
He put his face in his enormous hands and wept so violently that tears rolled between his fingers and down the back of his hands and wrists. He came apart as if he had thrown a piston in one of the valves of his heart. It was not grief I was witnessing; it was the agony of a man who knew he would have to pay in full the dues of his ungentle tyranny. He had to account for a thirty-year reign of mild terror and he brought to the task no talent for contrition.
“I treated her like a queen,” he said. “That was my problem. I was too goddamn nice to her. I gave her everything she wanted. I let her put on airs and pretend she was something she never was. I went along with everything when I should have just run a tighter ship.”
“You knocked her around, Dad,” I said, “just like you knocked us around.”
He tried to answer but could not talk. Great sobs broke out of him like waves breaking against an endangered beach. For a moment I almost pitied him until I remembered my eighteen-year apprenticeship in his guild of storm. Cry for my mother, Dad, I wanted to say to him. Weep for my brother and sister. Shed a tear for me, Dad. There were not enough tears in his body to absolve the thoughtless crimes he committed as both husband and father. I could grant no amnesty to the man who did not touch me as a child except when he was backhanding me to the floor. But I was astonished when he could finally speak and said, “I never laid a hand on your mother and I never once touched my children.”
“What?” I screamed at him, and again he sobbed out of control.
When he quieted down, I knelt beside his chair and I whispered, “This is what makes me crazy in this family, Dad. I don’t care that you hit us. I really don’t. That’s over and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. But I can’t stand it when I state a simple fact about this family’s history and I’m told by you or Mom that it didn’t happen. But you’ve got to know, Dad, and I’m saying this as a son who loves you, that you were a shit to Mom and a shit to your kids. Not all the time. Not every day. Not every month. But we never knew what would set you off. We never knew when your temper would explode and we’d have the strongest shrimper on the river knocking us around the house. So we learned to be quiet, Dad. We learned to tiptoe around you. We learned how to be afraid without making a sound. And Mom was a loyal wife to you, Dad. She would never let us tell a soul that you were hitting us. Most of the time, she was like you and would simply tell us it didn’t happen the way we remembered it.”
“You’re a liar, Tom,” he said suddenly. “You’re a goddamn liar and you’ve let your mother poison you against me. I was too good. I was too good and that was my only mistake.”
I grabbed his right arm, unbuttoned his sleeve, and rolled his shirt up to his elbow. I turned his arm palm side up, and I traced a scar, talon-shaped and purple with damaged skin, imprinted in the rolled muscle of his forearm. I stared at that arm with great tenderness. Enormous labor had shaped his arms into objects of lyrical beauty. The veins in his arm protruded like the roots of great trees along eroded banks. He had taken to wearing hats and long-sleeved shirts on the shrimp boat because he knew my mother admired the white pallor of men who did not work with their hands. My father’s hands were rough and stained with grease. You could take a razor blade and cut the moon of callus below his thumb and go a quarter of an inch before you drew blood. These hands had beaten me, but they had also worked for me, and I was a teacher because of them.
“How did you get this scar, Dad?” I asked. “Your son, the liar, your son who loves you, wants to know how you got this scar on your arm.”
“How should I know?” he said. “I’m a shrimper. I’ve got scars all over my body.”
“I’m sorry, Dad,” I said. “That’s not good enough.”
“What are you trying to do to me, Tom?” he said.
“You can’t change the way you are if you can’t admit to the way you’ve been, Dad. Think about it. Where did you get that scar? I’ll help you. Savannah and I are sitting at the dining room table. It’s our tenth birthday. There’s a cake on the table. No, I’m sorry. There are two cakes. Mom always made sure we each had our own cake.”
“I don’t know anything you’re talking about,” he said. “I should have gone to see Luke. You’re trying to make me think I’m a rotten person.”
“I just asked you where you got that scar, Dad,” I said. “You called me a liar and I’m trying to let you know that I remember every single detail of how you got that scar. I’ve had nightmares about that scar.”
“So kill me. I don’t remember. It’s not a crime not to remember something,” he shouted.
“Sometimes, it is a crime, Dad,” I said. “And now I want you to let me tell you about that night. It’s important, Dad. It’s just one night out of ten thousand, but it will help you get some small perspective on why Mom might be leaving you now.”
“I didn’t ask for no perspective,” he whined. “I asked for some help.”
“That’s what I’m giving you,” I said, and I began my story as my father wept in his outsized hands.
It began as it always did, without warning or time to withdraw. My father had left the dinner table early and was watching the Ed Sullivan Show on television. He was at the end of a bad shrimping season and that always made him dangerous and unpredictable. He had not spoken during dinner and he took a bottle of bourbon with him to the living room. But nothing in his carriage implied menace. Even his silence could be benign and ascribed to physical exhaustion rather than a secret consolidation of rage. My mother lit the ten candles on each of our cakes and Savannah clapped her hands in delight and said, “We’re in double figures now, Tom. We’ll have two numbers from now until we’re a hundred.”
“Come to the table, Henry,” my mother said. “The kids are about to blow out the candles.”
Had they argued the night before? Was there a fight between them left unfinished? I do not know, nor does it matter.
“Henry, did you hear me?” my mother said again, walking toward the living room. “It’s time to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to Savannah and Tom.”
My father did not move from his chair or make any sign that he had heard my mother’s voice.
“Let it drop, Mama,” I prayed behind the small fires of ten candles.
“Get up and help your children celebrate their birthday,” she ordered as she walked over and turned the television set off.
I could not see his eyes, but I saw his shoulders stiffen and saw him lift the drink to his lips and empty the glass.
“Don’t you ever do that again, Lila,” he said. “I was watching that program.”
“You’ll make your children think you don’t love them enough to even wish them Happy Birthday.”
“I’d make you wish you were never born if you don’t switch that TV back on,” he said, his voice without affect or inflection.
“It’s all right, Mama,” said Savannah. “Turn the television back on. Please, Mama.”
“I will not,” my mother said. “Your father can watch all the TV he wants after we cut the cake.”
Now, with all the engines of their intricate discord throbbing, the vibrations heartfelt in a ten-year-old bloodstream, I watched with powerless eyes as my father rose lion-eyed in the dumb sterility of his defeated life and shoved my mother toward the television set. He grabbed her hair and forced her to her knees as his children cried out in the keepsake light of birthday candles.
“Turn on the TV set, Lila,” he said. “And never tell
me what to do in my own house again. This is my house and I just let you live in it.”
“No,” she said.
He smashed her face against the picture tube and I was amazed it did not break with the impact.
“No,” she said again with blood running out of both nostrils.
“Do it, Mama,” I screamed.
Savannah ran to the television set, fought her way around them, and once again Ed Sullivan’s voice filled the room.
“She turned it on,” my mother gasped. “I didn’t.”
My father reached down and turned the set off again. There was a constrained terrible grief in that silence.
“I told you to turn it on, Lila,” he said. “You’re setting a bad example for the boys. They’ve got to learn that a woman is supposed to respect a man in his own home.”
Savannah turned the television set on again, but this time she turned the volume up too loud and Ed Sullivan entered our house screaming. My father backhanded my sister and she fell across the coffee table and rolled into a fetal position on the rug.
My mother ran to Savannah and the two of them wept in each other’s arms as my father moved slowly and deliberately toward them. He was hovering over them when six quick shots from a .38 revolver destroyed the television set in a spectacular explosion of wood and glass.
I turned and saw Luke standing by our bedroom door, calmly reloading the pistol as smoke spiraled upward out of the barrel of the gun.
“The television’s broken,” Luke said. “Now you can sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to your kids.”
My father began moving slowly toward Luke, his eyes pale and brutal and glistening with a dull animal shine. He approached Luke as archfiend, hitter of sons, wife-beater, lucid with seething, prowling fury. But Luke had reloaded the gun and snapped the chamber shut and aimed at my father’s heart.
“What makes a man act like you?” Luke asked. “Why would anyone so big hit his wife or little girl? Why are you so mean?”
My father kept moving toward Luke, who retreated toward the kitchen, the gun still aimed at my father’s chest. The noise I heard was the single merged voice of my mother and sister and myself screaming out in mortal steadfast horror.
When my father took hold of Luke’s wrist and wrenched the gun from his grasp, he hit Luke’s face with his fist. Luke went to his knees but my father lifted him up by the hair and hit his semiconscious son once again.
I found myself on my father’s back with his left ear between my teeth. He roared and I felt myself being flung across the kitchen counter and landed on top of the stove. I rolled off to the floor and looked up to see my mother raking his face with her fingernails. I ran between them, tried to separate them, and heard him punching her face. I pounded against his stomach and chest, felt him slapping my head, was dazzled by the voices and noise and potent light when I looked up and saw the butcher knife, which my mother was going to use to cut my birthday cake, come out of the light. A jet of blood hit my face and blinded my eyes and I did not know if it was my mother or father who had been stabbed. Savannah was screaming and I was screaming and my mother was shouting for us to get out of the house, but I could not clear my eyes, could not find my bearings while blinded with one of my parents’ blood as I clawed at my eyes with my hands.
Luke pulled me toward the door and through a red haze I saw my father staggering back against his own bedroom door with blood spurting from a wound in his forearm. My mother held the bloody knife in her hands and she was telling my father that she would plunge it into his heart if he ever touched one of us again. Luke shoved me and Savannah out the front door and told us to run for the truck.
“If you see Dad coming out of the house, run for the woods,” he said, sprinting back for my mother.
Together, Savanah and I stumbled toward the truck, our voices rising together in a single high-pitched wail of anguish. Later, I would find out that Savannah thought I had been stabbed in the face with the butcher knife. My father’s blood covered my entire face like a grotesque, sanguinary mask. My hands looked like sponges from an operating table.
In the light coming from the house, I watched as Luke and my mother broke from the front door together. Behind them, reeling and moaning with an eerie unsteadiness, my father filled the doorway as my mother entered the cab of the truck. Luke vaulted into the flatbed as my mother hunted for the keys in her purse.
“Hurry, Mama,” Luke cried. “He’s coming.”
My father lurched toward us across the grass, losing blood with every step he took, but coming with malevolent stubbornness as my mother fumbled with a set of keys. “He’s almost here, Mama,” Savannah screamed as the engine turned over and coughed, then exploded into life as we shot out of the yard and away from that staggering, bleeding man.
As we raced down the dirt road leading toward the bridge, my mother swore to us, “We’ll never go back, kids. I promise you that much. We’ll never go back to him. What kind of mother would I be if I let my children grow up with that kind of man?”
For two days we stayed with Tolitha and Amos; then we returned to our life on the island. Before we returned, my mother gathered her children together and told us we were never to mention to anyone what happened that night. She told us that the greatest virtue in the world was family loyalty and only the finest people, the very best, possessed it. On the night we returned, my parents were unusually affectionate with each other. It was almost six months before he hit her again or laid a hand on any of his children.
“To this day,” I said to my weeping father, “I always thought you would have killed the four of us if you had made it to the truck.”
“It’s not true,” he said miserably. “Not a single word of it is true. How can you say such a thing about your own father?”
“I find it rather easy to say, Dad,” I said.
“I don’t remember any of that,” he said. “If it happened, I must have been drunk. I must not have known what I was doing. I must have been drunk out of my mind. I admit I wasn’t the best at holding my liquor.”
“Savannah doesn’t remember it either, Dad,” I said. “I asked her about it once. Luke won’t talk about it with me.”
“So it could just be your imagination playing tricks on you, son,” he said. “Yeah. That’s it. You’ve always loved to make up stories about people. I bet you and your mother got together and cooked this one up to tell the judge, didn’t you?”
“How did you get the scar, Dad?” I asked.
“I told you I’m a shrimper,” he answered. “I do dangerous work. It could have been the winch, or the time the cables snapped . . . ”
“It was a butcher knife,” I said evenly. “And what about the television set, Dad? Do you remember having to buy a new TV set? Since we were a dumb-ass southern family who would rather starve than live for twenty-four hours without a TV set, we replaced that ruined set rather quickly. In fact, I think there was a new one already there when we returned to the house. Nor was there any sign of blood or violence or discord. As always, we just went on and pretended nothing had happened.”
“Well, maybe that’s what we should do now, son,” he said. “Pretend that nothing happened, even though nothing I can say will make you believe me.”
“But something has happened now,” I said. “Finally, you are going to have to face the kind of man you’ve been because Mom has left you. We can’t pretend that didn’t happen, can we? The family has finally come to a moment that we can’t pretend isn’t real.”
“Why do you hate me so much?” he asked, and there were tears again.
“It’s easy to hate a man who beat you when you were a little kid, Dad,” I said softly. “But I only hate you when I’m forced to remember those things.”
“If I did those things, I’m sorry, Tom,” he said, looking up at me. “I honestly don’t remember any of them. I don’t know what I can do to make it up to you.”
“You can start by giving me a great amount of money, preferably in twenties,”
I said.
He looked up at me, puzzled, and I said, “A mere attempt at humor, father dear. Now what would you like me to do for you? What can I do to help you? One thing I know, Dad, is that you can’t help being a southern asshole. You were to the manner born.”
“Could you talk to her and see what she wants?” he said. “Tell her I’ll do anything if she comes back. Anything she wants, she’s got. And that’s a promise.”
“What if she just doesn’t want to come back?” I asked.
“Then what would I do?” he asked. “What would I be without your mother?”
“You’d still be the best shrimper on the river,” I said. “You’d still own the prettiest island in the world.”
“But I’d have lost the prettiest woman in the world,” he said.
“There’s no doubt about that. But you’ve been working hard on losing her for a long time now. Where is she? I’ll go talk to her.”
“She’s where she always is,” he said. “She’s taking care of that Newbury bitch. I’ll never understand why your mother is so goddamn nice to the one woman in this town who always treated her like shit.”
“I understand it perfectly,” I said. “Mom’s been waiting her whole life for Isabel Newbury to need her.”
“But I need her,” he whined.
“Did you ever tell her that, Dad?” I asked.
“I didn’t have to,” he said. “I married her.”
“Oh, I see,” I said. “Crude of me to ask such an obvious question.”
He began crying again and I watched him without interference, thinking that grief might be the one emotion which could prove the redemption of Henry Wingo. Also, there was a cold part of me that thought my family deserved every single one of those tears and that they had been a goddamn long time in the coming.
When he controlled himself again he said, “You know that Tolitha left your grandfather when I was a little boy?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I never learned how a husband was supposed to treat a wife,” he said. “I thought Tolitha had left Amos because my father was weak. He never seemed like much of a man to me. I didn’t want that to happen to me.”