The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [34]
He was a striking man who cultivated a wild professorial mop of hair. Grayed prematurely, as if by the conflict of his thoughts, it flopped in long curls down either temple. When he was in a good mood, he let us brush it and arrange it and mother took pictures of him with a head full of plastic barrettes. He didn’t mind looking absurd as long as he was prepared for it and was in charge of the circumstances. Caught off guard in a mistake or foolishness, he would lash out. Scream. His hair would fly around his face. On campus, no one dared touch his famous hair. I remember one trip to his office, watching from a high window as he appeared, hair first, a puffed mass that bobbed as he threw himself across the paths of the central lawn. Physically, he was a graceful man with a scholar’s bowed shoulders and bloodless hands. He dressed like a forgetful monk, but he was no saint, in fact he was a liar and he was frightening—he would repeat things I said and they would be wrong. I remember that. His pants were just a bit too short, and his socks often did not match, even though my mother bought many pairs of one color to prevent this.
I’ve inherited the slender bones of his face, the delicate chin and severe, pale mouth, and perhaps his dark striving for explanations. But my sister had a happier love for inquiry, or would have. She was a questioner, could never get enough of things. And they looked alike, too, even though I had his features. She had his hair, only pale brown, and all of his expressions. She had his hands. She had his unmatching socks and distracted frown. She was like a whippet, and very strong. They had the same frame, Elsie said.
As I stare into the melt of blackberries, I remember my father’s habit of folding his metal-rimmed eyeglasses down his nose while looking at me keenly. It was a gesture I found both sweet and stodgy. He was not a person you could feel one way about. Because like my sister, he had a cruel streak that came out in surprising ways, because he managed somehow to control my mother and sometimes exerted upon us all a disfiguring attention which set us against one another, I came to realize, even back then, that we both loved and faintly disliked him. Pop wisdom has it that the unpredictable parents hook you deepest with intermittent reinforcement; you become that rat who presses the lever a thousand times for a kind word, a gesture of love.
When he died, mother gave away everything he’d owned down to the last paper clip in his office, which has since remained an unused room except for storage. It is filled with boxes that we never open, things that we don’t want to look at. The blue pot escaped the purge and reminds me of him, though.
As I am standing there stirring down the blackberries and remembering my father, a siren, strange and alarming, goes off at the turnoff to our road. Our first instinct is to worry that our neighbors have suffered some calamity, and to stare out our window where soon, as the sound enlarges, we expect to see the squad car hurtle past. But the revolving white blue flashers and the wailing noise halt in front of our windows. I’m still stirring, mesmerized, as our town police officer, Lonny Germaine, emerges from the car, from which a magnified radio distorted voice carries. The electronic voice gives