The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [47]
There is a terrible thing about fighting your father, I never knew. It came on sudden, with the second blow, a frightful kind of joy. Suddenly a power surged up from the center of me and I danced at him, light and giddy, full of a heady rightness. Here is the thing. I wanted to waste him, waste him good. I wanted to smack the living shit out of him. Kill him if I must. If he died, so be it. If I died, well, I wouldn’t! A punch for Doris, a blow coming back I didn’t feel. A kick for Raymond. And all the while me silent, then screaming, then silent again, in this rage of happiness that filled me with a simultaneous despair so that, I guess you could say, I stood apart from myself.
He came at me, crashed over a chair that was already broke, then threw the pieces, but they easily bounced off and I grabbed a chair leg and whacked him on the ear so his head spun. I watched, like I say, stood apart. Struck again and again. I knew what I was doing while I was doing it, but not really, not in the ordinary sense. It was like I was standing calm, against the wall with my arms folded, pitying us both. I saw the boy, the chair leg, the man fold and fall, his hands held up in begging fashion. Then I also saw that now, for a while, the bigger man had not even bothered fighting back.
Suddenly, he was my father again, as he lay there in his blood. And when I kneeled down next to him, I was his son. I reached for the closest rag, and I picked up this piece of blanket that my father always kept for some reason next to the place he slept. And as I picked it up and wiped the blood off his face, I said to him, your nose is crooked again. Then he looked at me, steady and quizzical, clear, as though he had never drunk in his life. He kept looking at me as though I was unsolved, a new thing, and I wiped his face again with that frayed piece of blanket. Well, it really was a shawl, a light kind of old-fashioned woman’s blanket shawl. Once, maybe it was plaid. You could still see lines, some red, the background a faded brown. He watched intently as this rag went from his face and as my hand brought it near again. I was pretty sure, then, I’d clocked him too hard, that he’d now really lost it and there wasn’t a chance. I mean, a chance of what? I suppose a chance of getting a father back. A thing I hadn’t understood I wanted.
Gently though, he clasped one hand around my wrist. With the other hand he took that piece of shawl. He crumpled that and held it to the middle of his forehead. It was like he was praying, like he was having thoughts he wanted to collect in that scrap of cloth. For a while he lay like that and I, crouched over, let him be, hardly breathing. Something told me to sit there still. And then at last he said to me, in the sober new voice I would hear from then on out, did you know I had a sister once?
There was a time when the government moved everybody off the farther reaches of the reservation, onto roads, into towns, into housing. It looked good at first and then it all went sour. Shortly after, it seemed like anyone who was someone was either dead, drunk, killed, near suicide, or just had dusted themself. None of the old sorts were left, it seemed, the old kind of people. It was during that time that my mother died and my father hurt us, as I have said. But now, gradually, that term of despair has lifted somewhat and yielded up its survivors. We still have sorrows that are passed to us from early generations, those to handle besides our own, and cruelties lodged where we cannot forget. We have the need to forget. I don’t know if we stopped the fever of forgetting yet. We are always walking on oblivion’s edge.
I do know that some get out of it, like my brother and sister living quiet. And myself to some degree, though my wife has moved to Fargo and I miss her, and miss my children between their visits. Before my father died, he found a woman to live with him. I think