Daddy Love: A Novel

  “Son.”

  14

  YPSILANTI, MICHIGAN AUGUST, SEPTEMBER 2006

  Dinah? Where are you, honey?

  He’d returned home late. So far as Dinah could know it wasn’t Whit’s fault, he’d had to retape his entire program for that night which was factually true. Not his fault but he was feeling guilty, anxious. And Dinah wasn’t downstairs though both the living room and kitchen lights were on. And Dinah wasn’t in their bedroom which was darkened.

  In Robbie’s room, darkened also—there was Dinah lying on the child-sized bed, in her bathrobe, and barefoot—not responding when Whit called to her from the doorway, or leaned over her to shake her.

  Dinah? Dinah? Dinah?

  II

  APRIL, MAY 2012

  1

  KITTATINNY FALLS, NEW JERSEY APRIL 2012

  Strange!

  Very strange striking sci-fi/fantasy images.

  Probably he’d gotten them from TV or the Internet. Or maybe, video games.

  What was the TV series—Game of Thrones? Maybe he’d been influenced by that.

  It was hard to know if the boy was “talented”—or if he was (probably) just reproducing images. None of the teachers at West Lenape Elementary School was very familiar with the TV programs or video games favored by the older boys.

  The sixth-grader’s drawings and watercolors were finely detailed, with a look of the subterranean. A figure—(a boy?)—in a shadowy place—and a rectangle of light—(a window?)—that opened onto what appeared to be houses at a distance.

  There were two distinct regions in the drawings: the shadowy space in which the figure dwelled, in the foreground, and a seemingly distant sunlit space outside a rectangular window.

  In some of the drawings, the figure was lying in a casket(?)—with an opening at the top of the casket, so that the boy’s eyes could be seen, widened and white-rimmed.

  His body was hidden inside the casket, trapped. You had to imagine his arms straight against his sides. Trapped.

  In some of the watercolors, which were more brightly colored than the drawings, and less ominous, the boy was in a canoe-shaped vessel that floated above the earth. All about him, stars and moons in a nighttime sky.

  Inside the canoe-like vessel with the boy was an animal resembling a dog. Sandy-colored, with erect ears and a long curved furry tail.

  A friendly animal! This was a relief. This was in contrast to the sinister tone of the drawings.

  There were no art classes for students at West Lenape Elementary School as there were no music classes, for the public-schools budget had been severely slashed; but one of the younger faculty members, an English teacher with a certificate in art education, volunteered to teach art during study periods to interested students.

  One of these interested students was Gideon Cash, a sixth-grader.

  The teacher, Ms. Swale, was surprised by the boy’s intensity, as by his strange, unchild-like talent. He’d been eager to draw and paint in a corner of the study hall but showed her his drawings and paintings reluctantly. He’d seemed to be discomforted by her praise.

  It was a challenge to cajole him into lifting his eyes to her face.

  He has this wounded look. But stubborn too.

  One of Gideon’s most remarkable drawings, Ms. Swale told the other teachers, certainly had been copied from a painting by Goya—Saturn Devouring His Children. The boy’s dark, finely shaded and cross-hatched drawing depicted a cruelly smiling bald-headed ogre about to bite off the head of a very small, doll-sized child whom he held in his fist as you might hold a peeled banana.

  The art teacher said it couldn’t have been a coincidence—it had to be “copying.”

  But you couldn’t accuse an eleven-year-old of copying someone else’s work.

  Saying with a shudder, “That hideous cannibal-image can’t be original.”

  Gideon Cash was a shy boy. So rarely spoke in class, you’d think he was mute.

  Maybe, deaf-mute.

  The father himself had suggested that Gideon was (possibly) “autistic”—to a degree.

  Or, suffering from “Asperger’s syndrome.”

  Even when his work was praised the boy stood silent, down-looking. His head appeared large for his thin shoulders and spindly lower body. His skin was putty-colored. A tiny fishhook-scar glinted just above his left eyebrow.

  Did you hurt yourself?—Ms. Swale asked. That looks like a nasty little cut.

  Gideon Cash nodded, yes. He’d hurt himself.

  Gideon had begun school late, his father said. When he’d been a little boy and having health problems they’d been living in a rural community in Maine where the nearest medical clinic was thirty miles away and in the public schools there were no classes for “special” students.

  His mother had died when Gideon was five, Chet Cash said.

  Lung cancer metastasizing to pancreatic cancer. Six months from diagnosis to death.

  Gideon never really recovered from losing her.

  Neither did he.

  So Chet Cash said, wiping at his eyes.

  Then, they’d moved to New Jersey. Chet had tried to home-school the boy for a while but by the age of eight it seemed that Gideon might be mature enough to enroll in a school with “special” classes.

  At the elementary school in Kittatinny Falls, Gideon Cash had surprised his teachers by learning quickly. He’d already known how to read, and how to do simple arithmetic; his father had suggested starting him in a class for learning-disabled students, but he’d been soon promoted to third grade.

  It was true, Gideon Cash’s “social skills” were undeveloped. He was both intensely aware of his surroundings and yet oblivious to them, as if he believed himself invisible. He shrank from his classmates. He seemed incapable of having a “conversation” with any adult—he could only listen, with a tremulous intensity, and a tense, nervous smile, and stammer an inaudible reply. He seemed to have difficulty hearing, or processing what he’d heard; when his teacher asked a question of the class, no matter in a friendly and smiling way, Gideon froze, in a panic that the question was addressed to him.

  Teachers learned to speak softly to Gideon, as to a frightened animal, and to speak in a soothing, repetitive manner, to allow the boy to understand that there was no threat to him, and that the situation wasn’t urgent.

  Other children waved their hands excitedly, to answer the teacher’s question. Gideon blinked and stared at the floor, twisting his fingers in his lap.

  Rarely did Gideon smile. Never did Gideon laugh.

  Alone among his classmates he never seemed to “get” any humorous remark. The boy, small for his age, only just sat at his desk frowning, staring and blinking like one confronted with a foreign language.

  Yet, Gideon Cash’s teachers said of him that they’d never seen any child so eager to please.

  At first, in the Lenape grade school, Gideon Cash had virtually no friends. By fifth and sixth grades, he’d made a few friends among classmates shy and socially awkward as himself. He’d liked to linger in his homeroom volunteering for tasks like watering the teacher’s numerous plants on a windowsill, or rearranging and improving the bulletin board. His teachers noted that he had something of the sense of responsibility of a much older child—an adult, even. He couldn’t engage with his teachers in anything resembling a normal conversation—he rarely lifted his eyes to their faces—but he was touchingly eager to be of use.

  Remarkably mature for his age.

  Intelligent, though lacking in self-confidence. Inclined to be anxious, though extremely well organized.

  Sweet boy. But something wounded in him …

  The loss of the mother, they supposed. The “sudden death” of the mother when the boy was so young.

  Chet Cash, widower-father, brought the child to school most days in his cranberry-red minivan and picked him up after school as he didn’t trust, he said, the school bus.

  Maybe when Gideon was a little older. Maybe then he could ride t
he bus with the other children.

  His son had a delicate soul, Chet Cash said. He had to be protected against older, rougher children.

  Chet Cash was an aggressively friendly man who might have been in his late thirties or early forties. He had a swaggering air. His thick dark hair he wore loose to his shoulders, like the boy general Custer in a TV epic, or tied back in a rakish pigtail, like a TV drug dealer. He exuded an air of the special, unique. Unclassifiable. His flat gray eyes were sharp, keenly alert even as he joked and laughed. When he visited the school to speak with his son’s teachers, which he did at least twice a year, he wore a white cotton shirt, or a flannel plaid shirt, with a necktie, he wore laundered jeans, or khakis. He wore hiking boots. He expressed an air of parental concern for his son who was, as he said, a very special boy and his only living heir. But when his teachers praised Gideon, Chet Cash frowned as if doubtful.

  “Gideon is a good boy. He’s been trained to be good. I guess I didn’t realize how ‘smart’ he is—he hides that, around the house—but I know how good he is.”

  And he said: “It’s a welcome thing to hear that Gideon is smart, too. I thank you.”

  Though he lived in the countryside south of Kittatinny Falls, approximately seventy miles from Trenton, it was rumored of Chet Cash that he was an ordained minister in a Trenton church. He didn’t appear to be a full-time minister and he’d listed, when filling out forms for the Lenape County school district, his occupation as farmer & artist.

  It was known that Chet and his son lived on the old Helmerich farm on the Saw Mill Road, that hadn’t been a working farm for twenty years. Affably he complained that they grew just a few “crops”—barely for themselves—and harvested what they could from the old apple orchard.

  His primary source of income, Chet Cash said, was the sale of his “artworks”—mostly, macramé products supplied to outlets in the Delaware Valley.

  There didn’t appear to be any woman in Chet’s life at the present time.

  Gideon’s (female) teachers were impressed by Chet Cash. A widower-father, he was obviously a very attentive father; you could see how he loved his son, and was protective of him, by the way he held the boy’s hand at a school open house, for instance, and absentmindedly cupped his hand around the boy’s head, as he spoke with Gideon’s teachers.

  Chet Cash hadn’t seen his son’s drawings and paintings until the April PTA open house. Ms. Swale would report to her colleagues that Gideon’s father had been visibly surprised.

  “Such striking images, Mr. Cash! Your son has quite an imagination.”

  The father was staring at drawings of shadowy, confined figures gazing with widened glassy eyes at windows flooded with light, and airy watercolors of child-figures borne aloft in a nighttime sky.

  “My son did these?”

  “They’re remarkably skillful for an eleven-year-old. Or—for anyone, of any age.”

  Beside Chet Cash stood the eleven-year-old Gideon, stiff, stricken with shyness, eyes cast down. He was wearing jeans and a plaid flannel shirt that fitted him loosely, as if it were a size or two too large for him. Very still and stiff the child stood as the adults discussed the drawings and paintings posted on the classroom wall and his father stroked his hair, and the nape of his slender neck.

  “You can see how different Gideon’s ‘art’ is from the other children’s. There’s an actual technique he’s used, in the cross-hatching. It’s hard to believe he’s only a child.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Chet Cash said slowly, “my son has quite an imagination.”

  “He’s gifted, Mr. Cash. He should be encouraged. Even if—possibly—he has copied some of these images from the Internet.”

  “Yes. ‘Monkey-see, monkey-do.’ But my son isn’t allowed access to the Internet, ma’am, or video games. Only TV which he watches with adult supervision.”

  Ms. Swale hadn’t put up the drawing of the bald-headed ogre about to bite off the head of a miniature child. That she’d hidden away in a drawer.

  Other parents with their children intervened. Chet Cash moved among them, pleasantly smiling, in the direction of the classroom door. Beside him his son moved haltingly, guided by Chet Cash’s grip at the nape of his neck.

  “Mr. Cash? Wait …”

  The art teacher hurried breathless after the father and son to ask if they were leaving already, before the reception?

  Chet Cash said pleasantly he regretted having to leave. But he had work to do, and Gideon had his chores.

  “Maybe—sometime soon—you’d like to come to my house for dinner? I live in town, just a few blocks away.”

  Chet Cash smiled deeply. A smile that didn’t lift into his stone-colored eyes.

  “Why thanks, Ms. Swale. That’s very thoughtful of you.”

  “Please call me ‘Brittany’—Chet.”

  “‘Brittany.’”

  Yet Chet Cash scarcely paused, moving in the direction of the classroom door, his hand at the nape of the child’s neck.

  * * *

  In the van they rode silently out to the Saw Mill Road.

  The child was gripping his hands tight in his lap. The child was having difficulty separating his thoughts from a powerful roaring in his ears.

  Now it will happen. You knew it would happen.

  The child understood that Daddy Love was both angry and “calm”—the “calm” of Daddy Love when he was very, very angry.

  The child had in his hands a thick brush he’d found in the storage shed, much thicker than a common paintbrush, possibly a brush used for some particular purpose around the old farm, like spreading tar, and this brush he’d dipped into something black, yes it was tar, hot steaming tar, and he was spreading the tar across the road in front of the van so that the van would careen into it …

  The hot black tar was so thick no oxygen could penetrate it.

  Trying to drive the van, trying to breathe, Daddy Love grew faint and lost consciousness and the van veered off the road and downhill rapidly in the direction of the Delaware River …

  “Son?”—Daddy Love’s voice was startling-close.

  Son murmured yes Daddy.

  “Your teachers are impressed with you, they say. Your daddy is proud of you.”

  Son murmured yes Daddy.

  It was a familiar landscape through which they drove. Returning to the farm on the Saw Mill Road. Yet, it was a strange landscape, without color.

  The hot tar had vanished. But the hot tar had taken all the colors with it like it’s said there is no color in anything at the time of a lunar eclipse.

  To the right was the Delaware River, a dull muddy-gray like dirty pavement only just visible through the trees. To the left, abandoned and overgrown farmland.

  It was early spring. Most of the trees were still leafless, but beginning to bud. This was a special time of year, he knew. Daddy Love said it was his birthday, in April.

  He was eleven years old, Daddy Love said. Daddy Love had showed him his birth certificate with a gilt-gold seal from the State of Maine, Hecate County.

  He’d been born, this document declared, on April 11, 2002. His parents were Ceila Cash and Chester Cash.

  Daddy Love seemed proud of this document. He’d had several printed up, for safekeeping.

  “You don’t remember your mother, Gideon. She was a lousy mother blowing smoke into a baby’s face.”

  He’d known better than to ask where his mother was. For Daddy Love was in charge of all such information, to be doled out when Daddy Love wished.

  “In fact your mother died a horrible death, of cancer, from smoking.”

  “In fact your mother died a deserved death. From her habit of smoking.”

  Yet, Daddy Love had sometimes said that Gideon’s mother was living in the north of Michigan. He’d looked up Michigan in a book of maps at school and saw the Upper Peninsula—“Traverse City.”

  The surprising thing was, Daddy Love himself sometimes smoked. Daddy Love kept packs of cigarettes in secret places in
the van and in the house. In the safety-box, as Daddy Love referred to the long wooden box in which Gideon was sometimes locked, for reasons of discipline, Gideon could smell the smoke from Daddy Love’s cigarette two rooms away, even if the face-lid was shut.

  There was the terror, that the face-lid would never be opened. The safety-box would never be opened.

  But always, the safety-box was opened eventually—by Daddy Love.

  Smiling Daddy Love, lifting Son to his feet.

  And how Son loved Daddy Love, at that moment! There was no love so powerful.

  It was a special time of the calendar now. It was April.

  Gideon had worn only a light jacket to school that day. But a wintry chill had descended from the overcast sky like broken concrete.

  Daddy Love turned the van off the River Road, and onto the Saw Mill Road. They were less than two miles from home.

  Quick before he could think how dangerous such a move might be if it failed Gideon seized the steering wheel and turned it as far to the right as he could and Daddy Love was too surprised to steer the van back onto the road and the van went thump-thump-thumping across the ground dropping down to the river …

  The van would sink. The doors could not be forced open, because of the water pressure. Muddy water would seep into the van, slowly at first and then more rapidly. It was a scene you saw on TV. It was a familiar scene. Yet, no one would rescue them for this was not TV. The daddy would not be able to force the door open and “rescue” the son for this was not TV.

  Daddy Love’s hair which was dyed-dark hair would lift, in the water, like snake-tendrils. Daddy Love’s eyes crazed in fury and the curses in his mouth drowned in the muddy water, and then silent.

  What happened to Son wasn’t clear. It was only Daddy Love who mattered.

  Son did not seize the steering wheel. In a paralysis of inaction Son remained hunched in the passenger’s seat beside Daddy Love gripping his icy-cold fingers in his lap.