The shed’s loose-hinged door creaks open as he steps inside and up onto the duck-board floor, distractedly brushing away a cobweb tickling his cheek as he reaches for the sturdy garden rake, hung on rusted hooks against the tool wall, then plucks a yellow metal can from a worm-eaten shelf, the liquid inside sloshing to-and-fro, as if awakening.
SAM HEARS THE SCREEN DOOR open and slap shut, the squeaking hinges a bird call, as welcoming and familiar as hearing his own name. From behind a jagged line of trees he watches his father step into the dusky light and walk brusquely toward the teetering shed, away from the house, away from him.
He waits for his dad to stop and look around, cup a hand to his mouth and yell: SAM!
Anticipating this call, Sam nervously grips the coarse bark of the tree he hides behind, waiting … waiting ….
But then his father is gone, slipping into nothingness beyond the shed.
He’s going to the leaf pile. Sam steps away from the tree to better see the distant clearing, ignores the icy teeth of the wind nibbling at his cheeks, its slim cold fingers curling around the back of his neck where the skin is chafed, but now dry. His heart has calmed down, doesn’t bounce against his ribs like a thing caged, a swollen and heavy THUMP THUMP THUMP in his chest. Now that he’s cooled off, it’s as if his heart has disappeared completely—comfortably vanished, leaving him clean and empty. The feeling carries to his mind, dulling the memory of his father’s rebuke, of striking him in the face, knocking him down. With the passage of time, Sam can think clearly of his daddy’s heated, hateful eyes, as if from a great distance, with an adult’s understanding that it had only been a moment, not a life.
Because life is not a single moment but all the other things—the love, the warmth, the eternity of goodnights and good mornings, the small kisses and the long hugs. The protection. The always being there.
Sam has a mad, painful rush of affection for his parents; a burst of such strong, raw emotion that he feels like soaring, flying across the earth to them, shouting out that he’s home! That he’s ready to be forgiven. That he’s ready to be loved.
Then, as if whispered to him by the fat, full moon, an idea springs into Sam’s head. A funny, wonderful idea of how he can win back his father’s affection, make things right again. Like they used to be—not in one lost moment, but in life. In his life.
Grinning, Sam scampers through the trees, careful to be quiet, to stay behind the tree line so his father will not see where he’s going, where he will hide. And then, when his dad comes close, comes to do the work, Sam will leap out, and maybe he will ROAR, bare finger-claws; or maybe he will run and jump into his kneeling father’s chest who will catch him and hold him and lift him, and together—together—they will go home, and it will all be okay.
It will be perfect.
MARGARET CALLS FOR SAM FROM the back door. Charles turns from his work, sweat beading his temples, and leans his weight on the worn handle of the rake. From a distance, Margaret appears to him as a doll, a living doll inside a child’s toy playhouse. So idyllic do they appear, this petite woman in her green sweater and dark blue jeans, a bright red scarf in her raven hair, the house seemingly unblemished by time, without rot, without decay. A flawlessness made true by the soft haze of burgeoning twilight.
He squints and his gaze leaves his wife, wanders the giant yard, the scattered beginnings of the woods that stretch back acres, some of it their land, most of it owned by the state, but left alone. A preserve.
Charles frowns at the darkening sky, the trees now rife with an army of shadows. Sam knows not to go past the creek, he assures himself. The creek is the boy’s boundary when playing outside alone, one he never crossed. Not to Charles’s knowledge, anyway. He’d been raised well, after all. He’d been ….
“Sam!” he bellows, not from fear, or anxiety. Only wanting to help. To parent. To be a good father, a good husband.
Margaret stands across the breadth of the yard as if pacing an opposing shoreline, the sea a blanket of thick Kentucky bluegrass; the expanse a rising swell of blue green between their two bodies, a rolling wave of stretched hillock that protrudes along the rear of the property. Charles once joked that it must have been an old burial mound…
“Charles! It’s getting dark!”
He lifts a weary, gloved hand and nods, showing that he understands the newfound severity of the situation. His wife turns and goes abruptly into the house.
Annoyed with me. With my damned temper. With her adventurous son.
He sighs, looks around the yard once more, watches the reddening sun cut through its middle, clinging to the horizon as if struggling against the oncoming night, the cunning moon, lengthening the already long shadows stretched like taffy from the trees. “Sam!” he yells, and in the distance hears barking.
“Tucker?” An unwelcome flutter fills his chest. A jingling bell of worry, the early pangs of panic. “Shit,” he says, surprised to see the white mist of his breath. He sets the rake against the low cinderblock wall surrounding the burn patch and heads for the sound.
As he walks toward the woods, he calls for the dog. The barking comes and goes but doesn’t appear to be moving, and Charles can’t help but wonder what the dog is going on about. Maybe he’s chased a raccoon up a tree, or a woodchuck into its winter burrow.
Or maybe he found Sam. Maybe the boy is hurt. Or face-down in the creek, head bloodied, cracked open by a wet rock when he’d slipped, slipped and fallen, and was even now breathing in the rough cold water.
“Sam! Tucker!” Charles quickens his pace toward the trees.
AS SAM WATCHED HIS FATHER rake leaves into a giant pile, he once more debated going home. Forgetting the game.
He’d remained quiet when his mom called for him, felt bad ignoring her, for pretending not to hear. Instead, he stayed hunched behind the little wall next to the clearing while his dad worked the rake, piling the leaves he’d brought over the day before.
Now Sam waits, quiet and unmoving—not even daring to breathe—as his father walks off toward the woods, calling for him, calling for Tucker. That’s when he knows it’s time.
He climbs up and over the low wall of scratchy cinderblocks, crawls across the dirt and plows head-first into the massive pile, as broad and tall as any he’s ever seen.
Upon entering the dark pyre, the leaves whisper crossly in his ears, as if angered, or disturbed. But he ignores their complaints and crawls deeper, the sickly-sweet aroma filling his senses as leaves crumble to mush and powder beneath his pudgy, dirty palms and hard knees; cling to the rough fabric of his sweater, fill his hair.
Finally, he stops, deep enough to not be seen when his father returns.
It’s dark beneath the pile and his eyes sting so he closes them tight. His breathing is heavy. There’s a sick feeling in his stomach from inhaling the cloying, syrupy taste of the air, thick with the aroma of ripe decay. But his dad will be back soon, and then he will spring from the pile and surprise him. They’ll laugh like madmen, best friends once more, then go inside for dinner. Later, they’ll read another chapter of their nighttime book, a story Sam adores, filled with pirates and magic and great adventure. They’ll lie together in his bedroom, the room his mother painted the color of a summer sky, decorated with fluffy white clouds high up along the walls; always floating, floating…
A few minutes pass and Sam allows himself to sink sideways into the densely packed leaves, which catch his weight easily, happily. They are barely whispering now, no longer upset. Just tired.
Relax, Sam, they say as they absorb him, cushion his small body like a pillow, like the soft, perfumed hand of God. Relax now.
MARGARET IS CHOPPING POTATOES WHEN Charles comes into the kitchen. His face is rugged with exertion, darkened by a shadow of beard he will shave clean in the morning before he goes to the club. His eyes are dark, as if brooding, or lost.
“Did you find him?” she asks, focusing on her task, feigning apathy. Margaret doesn’t want to be one of those young mothers. The ones who over-worry. The ones with only one child who carry around a fraught disposition like a cheap purse.
“No,” he says. “But I did rescue a jackrabbit Tucker trapped inside a Maple hollow. I had to chase the dog across half the damn yard before catching him. Tied him up by the shed, gave him a few of the biscuits.”
