• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 186 0

he sometimes was hired. But these were as modest and minimal as they could be. A woodpecker’s work. He never wore a hat. He was a big man, six-foot-six, a heavy body. He was a bad rider of horses and later on a bad driver of trucks. He could assemble river dynamite with his eyes closed. He was meticulous in washing his clothes every evening in case there were remnants, little seeds of explosive on his apparel. Patrick scorned this obsession. His father took off his shirt one evening and threw it onto the campfire. The shirt fizzed and sprayed sparks over the knees of the loggers. There were abrupt lessons like this.

It was strange for Patrick to realize later that he had learned important things, the way children learn from watching how adults angle a hat or approach a strange dog. He knew how much a piece of dynamite the size of a bullfrog could destroy. But he absorbed everything from a distance. The only moments his father was verbal was when calling square dances in the Yarker and Tamworth Hotels during the log drives. He was always called on and he walked up to the stage as if it were a duty and broke into verses, swirling around the guitars and fiddles, dropping in a last phrase tight before he hit the wall of the rhyme. Taciturn about everything else, his father was taciturn in his square-dance calling. His words would slide non-commital over the dance floor, the boy watching at the edge and mouthing the phrases to himself. Not a muscle moved in the large body of his father as he stood there calling “Little red wagon the axle draggin.”

The unemotional tongue. Patrick could see himself on stage striding up and down, his arms bent and cocky. “Birdie fly out and the crow fly in – crow fly out and give birdie a spin,” he would mutter to himself, later, in the daylight.

One winter night when he was eleven years old, Patrick walked out from the long kitchen. A blue moth had pulsed on the screen, bathed briefly in light, and then disappeared into darkness. He did not think it would go far. He picked up the kerosene lamp and went out. A rare winter moth. It was scuffing along the snow as if injured and he could follow it easily. In the back garden he lost it, the turquoise moth arcing up into the sky beyond the radius of the kerosene light. What was a moth doing at this time of year? He hadn’t seen any for months. It may have been bred in the chicken coop. He put the hurricane lamp onto a rock and looked over the fields. Among the trees in the distance he saw what looked like more bugs. Lightning bugs within the trees by the river. But this was winter! He moved forward with the lamp.

The distance was further than he thought. Snow above the ankles of his untied boots. One hand in a pocket, the other holding a lamp. And a moon lost in the thickness of clouds so it did not shine a path for him towards the trees. All that gave direction was a blink of amber. Already he knew it could not be lightning bugs. The last of the summer’s fireflies had died somewhere in the folds of one of his handkerchiefs. (Years later, Clara making love to him in a car, catching his semen in a handkerchief and flinging it out onto bushes on the side of the road. Hey, lightning bug! he had said, laughing, offering no explanation.)

He waded through the snow, past outcrops of granite, and into the trees where the snow was not as deep. The lights still blinked in front of him. There was laughter. Now he knew what it was. He crept on into the familiar woods as if walking into, testing the rooms of a haunted house. He knew who it was but he did not know what he would see. Then he was at the river. He put the lamp down beside the oak and walked in darkness towards the bank.

The ice shone with light. It seemed for a moment that he had stumbled on a coven, or one of those strange druidic rituals – illustrations of which he had pored over in his favourite history book. But even to the boy of eleven, deep in the woods after midnight, this was obviously benign. Something joyous. A gift. There were about ten men skating, part of a game. One chased the others