The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [37]
Oh yes, and my father also had blue eyes, though his were paler and a bit washed-out, with amber flecks.
“Between the eater and the eaten,” said my father, absurd when drunk. “Perfect unity. I have proved it with a mathematical formula.” We nodded. “I’m glad someone understands how faith eats reason and becomes a new beast. Or some two.”
He liked to work in his upstairs office after dinner, and we sneaked past him, or tried to be in bed before he came down the stairs. Still, I remember him always holding hard to the stair rail, blurred and loquacious. This one night, he’d caught us and so we sat on the bottom step with him, ready to bolt. He talked to us and praised us and compared our looks and held our hands. He tried to teach us how to whistle by putting our fingers between our teeth, but couldn’t do it himself and dribbled spit, which I pointed out. He kept trying to whistle in novel, boyish ways until at last he grew furious at our polite silence and we jumped up and ran.
“Get back here, you little shits!” he yelled as we leapt up the stairs. “If I really am your dad, and I’m not sure I am your father, why don’t you little twats tell me to go to hell?”
“Shut up,” said my mother, charging down toward him, for once forgetting that they fought with elevated diction.
The novelty of the shut up silenced him. We squeezed past her, thrilled we’d been called twats, which we understood. You’d think that the appalling thing he said would have upset us or caused us to lose sleep, but it didn’t. Although, as I said, we loved him, not only the word but his idea excited us, for we then spent an hour whispering, imagining that he was not our father. It gave us inspiration to picture our father as, for instance, the man up the road who tapped maple trees, pounding hollow tubes into the bark, adjusting the buckets underneath with a kindly, brown hand. Or our father as the man who ran the pygmy zoo in summer, a wretched attempt at attracting tourists, of which there were none. The zoo man displayed pygmy breeds—tiny goats, dwarf rabbits, and miniature stubby-legged horses; he loved, he said, all the runts of the world. And although I was tall, his philosophy was one I appreciated. When my parents fought, they grew like giants while I shrank.
My father was becoming frustrated with his work, and from the upstairs bedroom he had converted into his office, I would hear him talking as he worked. Sometimes it was to argue a position along and we’d hear the muted rise and fall of certainties, though we could rarely get the words. Other times he seemed to be pleading with someone else, his voice a low wail. “Opposite ends?” I heard him cry once. “But no! Each lives by its contrary!” We melted away from the chattering sounds, usually left the house entirely, when we heard the high crackle of his voice.
Those were the times we roamed far, picked berries, waged our jewelweed wars, made investigations into the habits of the salamanders, tracked deer and coyotes, observed the spiders. One day, we returned from puttering in the woods, hoping it was all over, to find him eating a bowl of cereal in the kitchen clad in nothing but a pair of boxers made of that peculiar boxer-short material, thin cotton printed with intricate red-brown squares and diamonds. I was familiar with the melting physique of my father, the drooping muscles of his chest and arms. But I hadn’t ever seen him in the boxers, legs mean and knobby, white feet tender. I turned away, but my sister turned toward him.
“Everything is elusive and in the air, but this, this is real.”
The wonder in his voice caused me to look back. He was looking at Netta as he stroked a four-inch pile of neatly stacked white paper, his typescript. It didn’t register to me at first that his work was finished. The way he nodded, grinning, saying yes, yes,