Faraway Places Read Online Free PDF Page B

there. Oh, I knew about his guns in there; his .22, his .25-20, his twelve-gauge. I knew about his saddles and his bridles, and his saddle blankets and his curry combs. I knew that he made outlines on the wall of things hanging on the wall so that when you took a curry comb down or the twelve-gauge down, their outlines in red were left on the wall like red haloes. For some strange, secret reason, he did that—made red haloes of his things on the wall. I knew about this stuff because once he slipped up and left the door open. I went over to the door and stood there at the threshold—looking in for half a minute or so before I locked it up again. In those thirty-some seconds I felt like I felt in the St. Joseph’s Church at Our Mother of Perpetual Help Devotions when Monsignor Canby put the Body of Christ in the monstrance andturned to the congregation with God in his hands and I was kneeling below him on the stairs ringing the Gloria bells. That’s how I felt looking in there, into my father’s place, like I was a footstep away from trespassing on some holy place, or maybe like I was lying flat on the cookie sheet with a ripple in it, staring at the sky; but even more than that, because the feeling I had way down deep in me was as bright as the toolshed without a shadow: I was looking into the mystery of my father’s awful, secret ways.
    After all those years that I had studied my father as faithfully as catechism: his Stetson hat tilted back, strands of black hair wet against his forehead; him in the barn, me hidden behind the post among the cobwebs, the milk strainers, and the bag balm, NBC on the red radio tuned to Dinah Washington or Tennessee Ernie Ford, the suction cups sucking the teats of black-and-white cows, my father’s fingers working their nipples, the gold of his wedding band pressed against cowhide; him in the toolshed banging on hot red iron, bright sparks flying from the welder, I could not look.
    I knew his smell, too, at close quarters with my father in the house, in the bathroom after he got done. It was only how he always smelled, but stronger, like his boots and his socks that he left on the back porch and by the stove in winter. Sometimes his smell was mixed with Old Spice, usually on Saturday nights and on Sunday mornings driving to nine-o’clock Mass.
    But after standing so long before that locked door, after locking it back up that one time he left it open, there I was that night after I found the nigger: holding my father’s secret in my hands.
    THAT DAY THAT I saw all three of them together was one of those days that came about from one thing leading to another: jumping in the river, swimming upstream, sitting in the water in the narrow spot by the jut of lava rock just down from the dogleg where the water was fast. That day I moved farther upstreamthan I’d been—to the wide place in the river where the dead limb of the catalpa tree got stuck on a gravel bar. I was sitting on that dead catalpa branch thinking about things, not any one thing in particular, just letting one thought lead to another, when I heard a woman scream. I didn’t realize until I heard the scream how close I was to the catalpa tree and the lean-to. I ducked down and looked over that way—the way of the scream—and I saw that woman Sugar Babe come flying out the back door of the lean-to and land on the ground, her long black shiny hair down around her waist, with only her brassiere on and her panties on. That brassiere and panties were white against her brown skin. She came flying out the back door of the lean-to, her hair flying, because he had hit her. Harold P. Endicott had hit that woman Sugar Babe. I knew for sure it was Harold P. Endicott because then he came out the door right after her. She managed to get up and then Endicott hit her again; she was screaming as she fell down in the dirt. Harold P. Endicott started pointing his finger at her like the Holy Cross nuns