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DADDY LIT THE TITHE-fires, smoky blue and gray. The house stank like burning pork chops. The foundations creaked and groaned like fat Mr. Plackard at last summer’s blueberry pie-eating contest, his suspenders stretched and creaking like they were getting ready to snap.
Davey knelt in the living room, playing with his cars and trucks and his Sword in the Stone jigsaw puzzle, listening to a lonely cricket squeaking out a song. The cricket spoke from somewhere unseen, somewhere underneath in the darkness, between the cracks of the floorboards and the hidden rib beam rafters.
There was always something moving down under the floorboards of the house, especially when Daddy lit the tithe-fires. It was like the house was hungry for the heat. Sometimes Davey heard the house shudder, like there was something inside that scared it; something that crawled in the dark below the basement, creeping in the cracks of the stone foundation.
Davey looked at his puzzle. He knew there was a piece missing. There always was. Granddaddy had been up to his old tricks, pocketing the missing piece, so that just as Davey was about to complete the puzzle, Granddaddy could roll into the living room with the very last piece.
Davey heard the cricket, dragging its legs together. Daddy called it fiddling. The cricket is fiddling, he’d say. It means there’d be gold coming into the house. Davey didn’t mind the fiddling. It kept him company.
Of course, Granddaddy would have clacked his teeth and said the cricket was fiddling because it wanted some women flesh to fiddle with. Then he’d snigger that low wet Granddaddy laugh of his that always made Davey a little scared to be around his Granddaddy for long.
It was mostly Granddaddy’s wheels that frightened Davey. The wheels on his big, high-backed wicker chair that he squeaked around the house in; the wheels that left tracks on the wooden floorboards. They looked like large snail trails, all dark and smelly. No matter how much Davey coated that big fat axle with lard and beeswax, Granddaddy’s old wheelchair still squeaked and creaked like it was rolling over a road paved with baby mice and dead frogs.
The cricket kept making its noise. It didn’t sound like fiddling to Davey. There was something too meaty and greedy in the sound. It sounded like Granddaddy used to sound when he would clack his false teeth together and gum his lips, while Daddy carved up the Thanksgiving turkey.
“Bones and meat,” Granddaddy would always say. “Good gods, let’s eat.”
Granddaddy always wanted the drumsticks. He swore that if he ate enough of them, he’d grow back his legs.
“Like needs like,” he would always say. “Sacrifices must be made.”
Davey sat there and listened to the cricket sing. The aluminum blinds painted prison bars across the wooden slats of the living room floor. It looked like a giant crossword puzzle, with the floorboards running one way and the blind shadow-stripes running the other. Davey ran his trucks and toys along the floorboards and the shadow-stripes, following the road formed by the scattering of jigsaw puzzle pieces; crashing trucks and cars and airplanes, bodies flying, meat burning. He liked imagining crashed trucks.
He thought he heard the rolling of wheels and he shuddered, but it was only the wind rattling up against the shingles. He grinned and swallowed, something hard going down. It was easy to be scared when you were all alone, especially in this room. There were corners of the room that never learned how to light. Corners, where the shadows grew like mildew moss and soft dark knives, like the holes inside Daddy’s blue-black razor blades.
Davey looked at the razor blade in his own hand. He’d stolen it from Daddy’s bathroom medicine cabinet. Between the green bottle potions and the black tubed ointments, where Daddy kept the little stack of razor blades stuck together by invisible string. Davey had taped one side of the blade off with a slice of Daddy’s black electrical tape, but the blade still bit him when he used it. He worked it across the floorboards, making small hex signs in the boot polished wood.
There used to be dances here, back when Momma still walked. Daddy used to bring in a fiddler and old Jed Harkins from up the holler would pluck his guitar, and sometimes a long skinny black man in a stained white shirt and a tall black top hat would shake a tambourine and blow big puffs of smoke from a fat smelly cigar. Momma would shake and dance and Daddy would step with her, guiding her about the floorboards, like a large man guiding the doll of a child across a patch of treacherous ground.
Davey looked out of the window. It was too hot to play outside. It was hot enough to melt you, right down to your bones. It would have been all right if Davey had been out by the swim pond, but the swim pond was a long hot walk away from the house, and he just didn't feel like walking that far today and certainly not crossing the road.
Sometimes he didn’t mind the hot summer walk. He liked to imagine he was on patrol with the Foreign Legion. One by one his brave comrades would fall to the heat. Sometimes he’d drag and carry one of them, half dead, half alive, across the burning Sahara mirage. Sometimes he’d leave them behind, or cook them up in a great imaginary stew pot, if he was that hungry.
Sacrifices must be made.
That’s what Daddy always said, every time the going got a little harder. Every time there was one more slice of bill mail posted in the tin mailbox. Every time the crops grew a little more poorly. Sacrifices must be made. Like the chess game Daddy played with Granddaddy; the white and the black moving against each other.
Daddy taught Davey how to play as well, but Davey never learned to like it. It was way too hard, the rules too far beyond his understanding. Davey would take two or three of his Daddy’s pawns, really fast, maybe one of Daddy’s horse pieces, and then Daddy would move a piece and say, "Checkmate,” staring at Davey with those great light swallowing eyes of his and Davey would look down at the floor and his Granddaddy would laugh that wet creaky giggle.
Davey always played alone. There just weren’t any kids nearby, on this side of the road. That’s what came from living so far from the town, his Daddy said, but the land and the house had been in the family for longer than most folks could remember.
“It’s our burden, our blessing, and our cross to bear,” Daddy always said.
They used to have men to work the land, Granddaddy said. Slaves and chains and horses who would do what you told them to. It was a better time, the blacks in the fields moving like slow well-trained harvest ants, and the white men sitting in the shade of the old hungry house, rocking on squeaky willow rocking chairs.
Now things had changed, and the government tried to pretend that it knew better. Trucks rolled by regularly, like fat angry beetles, heavy and black and laden with cargo. They had forgotten the old ways, the old rituals. Paths grew over in old dead forests, and footsteps blew away in the dust, painted houses faded in the sun, and shadows learned to walk.
Davey had heard this, time and again, as his Daddy and Granddaddy would rant their old arguments back and forth like songs psalmed out in an empty church.
“Why can’t I have any friends over,” Davey would ask.
“Friends? What do you need friends for anyway? You’ve got your Daddy and your Granddaddy. Friends will only eat you out of house and home, take your time and your talk and whistle it to the winds. Stay alone, stay strong. Sacrifices must be made. Your Daddy played alone when he was a boy. Your lack of playmates don’t hurt you any.”
Davey had heard it all before, and he would hear it again. There just wasn’t much else to listen to in the old house.
“Solitude builds character,” Daddy would say. “A man stands strongest alone. Just use your imagination you can build whatever playmates you need from the stuff floating between your ears.”
Daddy always spoke in rules and commandments, using his words like hard-edged bricks in a wall of perfect sensibility. Daddy was a man of character. Davey wasn’t sure what character was supposed to be, but he knew a heck of a lot of ways to build the stuff. Raking leaves and dead grass built your character. Washing the dishes built character. Carrying extra bags of groceries from the long black horse wagon built character. There were lots of ways to build the stuff.
It seemed to Davey that character must be the easiest and hardest of things to build. It was easy, because Daddy knew so darned many ways to build the stuff. Hard, because every one of Daddy’s character-building activities seemed to involve an awful lot of work.
Chopping firewood built character, stacking it even more so. Picking weeds and digging up roots built a whole whack of character. Skinning cats, and dragging the first born pig to the hecate stone, singing the meat into the tithe fires, that built mountains of character. Hauling up the Green Lodger and dancing the may-ropes before the burning harvest bonfires built character every year sure as sunrise followed set.
“Sacrifices must be made,” Granddaddy would say. “There are less of us old folk left every year, so we got to work even more harder than the rest.”
Davey figured he had way more character than a boy ever needed. If he built much more of the stuff he might die from an overload of character. He imagined himself being squashed down, like an ant under a thumb, flattened by his weight of hard-sacrificed-for character.
Daddy didn’t quite see things that way. “Burdens build strength,” Daddy would say. “Pain seasons a man like sun dried timber.”
A spider scuttled out across the floorboards. The old house was full of them. They bring good luck, Daddy always said, luck and money.
Davey squashed the spider beneath his truck wheel. It took some doing to catch the scuttling little blackness, but a quick u-turn, and a jig to the left cornered the little bugger. He rolled right over it with the small rubber wheels of his favorite yellow truck, hearing the bug squish like an over ripe blackberry, grinding it into the cracks of the floorboards.
“Sacrifices must be made,” Davey whispered. “Meat brings meat.”
The cricket squeaked its lonely song.
And then Davey wept, remembering the day his mother had walked from the house and had stood in the road before the oncoming truck. The growl of the heavy rubber treads over hard tarred gravel. The hollow flat sound the wheels made as they rolled over her body.
He stared through tears at the spider, as the bit of crushed meat disappeared into the hungry pine boards.
Crickets and spiders - both meant money. Gold, Granddaddy said.
Spiders meant rain, too. Rain could be bad luck when Davey wanted to go swimming, but it was good luck when Daddy wanted Davey to do yard work, and the best luck of all when it came to growing things.
Everything had two sides and two edges, just like Grandpa’s flensing knife. Two edges, to cut both ways. Good, bad, it didn’t matter.
The cricket kept squeaking, down in the floorboards.
Daddy sometimes blamed it on squeaky floorboards when his bum was blowing bean farts. “Hmm,” He’d say. “Must have stepped on a duck. Have to oil those floorboards for sure tomorrow morning.”
Squeak, squeak, squeak.
Davey had heard squeaking like that once in Momma and Daddy’s bedroom, back before Momma had walked into the truck and stopped moving. Squeak a squeak a squeak, like somebody was jumping on the bed, and bang-bang like someone knocking on a door. When Davey opened the bedroom door to see who was knocking he saw his daddy’s legs shimmed between Momma’s legs, with the bed head banging like a big flat hand against the wall, and then his Daddy rose up like a magic dark giant, roaring at Davey and growing out big punishing arms, and Davey had ran for it, diving into the shadows.
Davey’s Daddy could do that, could change into a giant, but he didn’t do that too often. It was a trick he saved for special times, like when Davey had taken his saw and tried to cut his breakfast chair legs even so that the chair wouldn’t wobble.
He’d never liked that wobble. Tipping back and forth, in between, like a teeter totter.
Daddy had caught him at it and had changed into a giant and dragged Davey down into the basement, into the shadows, and then he’d given Davey a brand new stripe on his back with his belt, but Daddy didn’t do that too often, giving stripes or giant changing. Like the magic only worked at certain times. That was something Daddy explained a long time ago to Davey.
“There are seasons in a man’s life,” Daddy had said. “There are times when everything just makes sense. Times when you have to laugh, or just let your eyes rain tears down into the dirt. Times when you grin over meat, and times when you have to let it all go. Times when you tithe, and times when you reap. Times when the house is hungry, and times when it sleeps.”
Davey could see his Daddy on the television screen of his imagination, standing there as tall as an unharvested tree, the sleeve of his left arm pinned over the stump like a folded flag.
Daddy used to have both of his arms, back when Momma used to walk. He’d pick Davey up like a sack of seed and toss him high up into the air. Then he’d made a special sacrifice. He’d burned the arm in the tithe fires, trying to barter Momma back.
“It was too much to ask,” Daddy had said. “Or maybe I just didn’t ask it right.”
The cricket kept on squeaking. It sounded kind of scary and restful, like an alarm clock getting set to ring. Like native drums in those old Tarzan movies beating out loud and steady. Trouble was brewing, just like a tea kettle, getting ready to scream.
Squeak, squeak, squeak.
Something was coming.
Squeak, squeak, squeak.
There was trouble in the wind.
Davey stood up. He took a single step. The floorboard squeaked. Long and low like a door squeaking open. Like in one of those old black and white horror movies with Vincent Price.
Sqeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaakkk.
“Take me,” Davey whispered. “Take all of me. Give her back.”
But the house wasn’t that hungry today.
Davey knelt down. He could see the cricket now, nestled in a loose joint between two boards. He covered the cricket and the crack with one of his left hand fingers. He pushed the razor blade down, working it into the finger, just above the knuckle bone.
Davey bit his scream off in a tight hard grin, the tears turning to shards of glass in his eyes and slicing at his vision. The razor blade worked down through the joint, almost all by itself, severing the finger and sliding into the cricket’s spine. The cricket split wide open, and black juices shot out, and the cricket screamed.
Davey kept pushing. The meat of the cricket was tougher than it should have been. The cricket kept screaming, high and light like a tea kettle. Davey kept pushing down, biting his own pain, teething furrows in his lower lip, the meat growing soft and red and wet.
The razor blade worked a little deeper, coming up against the bone of the floorboards.
Davey picked up the small sacrifice.
It was slippery and wet, and something in its touch made him cry.
He pinched off the bleeding in the hem of his shirt.
He knew what his Daddy would say. His Daddy would tell him that he should take the finger up to burn in the tithe fires, so that a little more of Momma would come back. Daddy had brought the arm, and Grandaddy the legs, and the cats and lambs and dogs had filled in the many other spaces.
But Davey swore he’d keep the finger tucked in his pocket like a marble for the rolling. He would hang onto it until he could put the very last piece in.