The Sprite

The morning after he gets out of the penitentiary, my father sits in the cane chair beneath the shade of the sugar maple while my mother cuts his hair. I watch from the stoop. With the window open behind me, I can hear them run the funeral home ad on the radio. It makes me think about the picture Hortense drew in third grade. It looked like a man hung from the neck. I slip off the farmhouse porch, walk across the yard towards them. The sky has a down. Across the gravel road, birds are sassing from dusty trees where yesterday they log-chained a roasting pig to a branch, and I watched my father reach up in the pig’s throat. He pulled out the heart, and all the birds flew away. It took five hours to roast that pig; and by the time it was done, the birds came back. Everybody went to bed with grease on their fingers, but I couldn’t sleep for wondering if birds ever got tired of their trees.

I stop at the clothesline pole, watch a praying mantis feed on a butterfly. A time ago, we searched for crawdads along the south creek, keeping dead easy against the shoreline so our limbs wouldn’t throw shadows on the creek bottom when Hortense found a tiger moth he mistook for a butterfly. Our mother had just told us the news about the old man winning his parole, and all I could think about was him finally getting out and coming home to us. But it was different for Hortense. He was fifteen by then and never really knew the man, never wanted to know what it was I saw that was worth writing all the letters I wrote to him. I was hunched over a flat rock ready to dip my arm in the creek, nudge that crawdad hideout with my hand, watch for one to scuttle in a muddy smokescreen when my brother’s voice stopped me.