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PAPA SINGS

A week or two later, I woke in the middle of the night and heard a strange sound, like a buzzing or humming. I tiptoed to my door and pulled it open. It hardly creaked at all.

 

 

A

The sound was coming from the living room and when I got halfway down the hall, I realized it was Papa. He was half singing, half chanting, and little of it made sense.

“I am the Green Man, the growing man, my mouth full of leaves,” he said. “I wake in the spring, am reaped in the fall, slumber all winter dreaming of green.” And then he sang out, his voice clear as in the past,

“Do I live for Summer or die for Snow?
I cannot say. I do not know.”

I was about to go in when I heard Stepmama say, “Oh, for God’s sake, Lemuel, stop that caterwauling!”

And then the sound of a slap, and Papa stopped.

Did I run in to protest? Or run back to my room in fear? I know what Molly Whuppie would have done. What Gretel would have done. What Janet who loved Tam Lin would have done. But I just stood there stock-still, listening.

Papa began again but in a softer voice, little above a whisper:

“I curl like a fiddlehead, sprout like a ramp, rise tall as corn. How green I am. Green as grass, as leaf, as stem. All, all green.”

And then he sang:

“Get your beans, green beans, and gold,
I am a has-bean, so I’m told.”

Another loud slap and then Stepmama must have gone back into their bedroom because I heard the door slam.

Only then did I tiptoe into the living room. And there was Papa in front of a blazing fire, dressed only in his nightshirt, dancing.

“Papa?” I whispered. “Are you all right?”

He turned around and stared at me, through me, and said quite clearly, “Green. That’s it. Green. I am the Green Man, the growing man, my mouth full of vines and leaves. I wake in the spring, am reaped in the fall, slumber all winter dreaming of green.”

And then he sank down onto the hearth and fell fast asleep.

I couldn’t move him, so I just lay down by his side and—listening to his soft snores—finally fell asleep myself.

 

 

Stepmama must have been worried about Papa, though, for the very next day she sent for Doc McCorry, a scruffy old man with trembling hands, near to retirement.

Doc McCorry scratched his thinning hair and pronounced himself baffled, and after two more visits and a lot of prescribed tonics to Stepmama, he never came back.

Did I believe something bad was happening? Of course. Papa was clearly sick, fading away. Did I believe that Stepmama was the bad thing happening? Not for a moment.