AUTUMN SUGAR

 

 

THE BOY’S NAME IS SAM. The missing dog—the family dog—is named Tucker, a Springer Spaniel with shaggy, chocolate-patched fur often tangled with bits of leaves and snapped twigs after a spirited run around the Jones’s wild acreage, a domain of half-tamed grass and thin woodland that partially encircle the cream-sided two-story Garrison Colonial, the only home Sam and Tucker have ever known. But now Tucker is nowhere to be found and Sam, only six-years-old, grows tired of searching. Of calling: Tucker! Tuuu—cker! Come here, come here boy! He’s hot inside his blue jeans and wool sweater, annoyed how the coarse collar itches and irritates the sweaty skin at the back of his neck.

Fatigued, he sits heavily beneath the naked, wiry branches of a sugar maple, breathing hard through doll-like lips, his cherubic face dappled with crawling shadow. Around him stands the hemline of an urban forest filled with fat old maples and gnarled oaks, the dark canvas occasionally broken by a spattering of white-barked birch. Only a few weeks prior these trees were alive and vibrant, bursting with hair the colors of fire—bright orange and deep crimson, flares of mustard yellow. Now the hard-barked pillars that surround him shoot from the earth crowned only with a tangle of bare limbs, wretched bent arms reaching toward a flaccid sky in futile agony, desperate to touch the aquamarine pate, demanding their color be returned.

But that silent, distant sun droops listlessly toward earth, weary as an old man reaching the end of a long walk. The deepening red an alarm signaling the dying of the day.

Sam lets his hands rest on the grass between splayed legs—small fingers toying with the star-patterned points of a crisp maple leaf—and stares up into the thickening blue. The hazy cycloptic eye of the interloper moon glares down, out-of-place in the late afternoon, boldly sharing the sky with its sallow counterpart. The sight of it confuses Sam. He knows—has been told—that the moon only shines in the nighttime, and its appearance throws him off balance, disturbs his way of thinking, pricks holes in his self-assurance of knowing the truth of things.

He will ask his father about this new burden, about the day-moon, and about the whereabouts of Tucker. All in a moment, after he cools off a bit, when his racing heart no longer thunders in his ears.

 

“WHY DID YOU HAVE TO yell at him?”

Charles rests his rear end against the countertop’s edge, arms folded defensively tight against his chest. His gaze pierces the old hardwood kitchen floor, searching for rationale in age-darkened cracks, hoping to find answers among the punctured black eyes of ancient nail heads.

I didn’t really yell.

I’ve been working too hard.

He surprised me, that’s all.

“I don’t know,” he says, settling for honesty. He shakes his head, lifts his eyes to meet the stern, beautiful face of his wife. “I don’t know,” he repeats, feeling stupid, but grateful for this feeling of humiliation, mistaking it for conscience.

Margaret and Charles have been together nearly a decade. What was seeded in Southern California, amidst her failed acting career and his nighttime profession as an uninspired bartender, eventually took root in the Northeast, at the house his father left them, where their child was born, where their respective, hard-earned professions as a public relations director for a local television station (her) and the manager of a semi-exclusive dining club (him) pumped oxygen into the shrunken lungs of their lives, and together—all of them, together—breathed deeply, as if for the first time.

“He’s just a little boy, a funny little boy who wants to run and yell and spin and dance ….” She stops, wanting to go on, to describe all the things her boy does. “And sometimes he makes a mistake.”

Charles nods and nods. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m gonna… Look, baby, I need to go finish the leaves. When I do ….” He rubs at his face, the scratch of growth on his cheeks and chin, feels older than his thirty-some years.

“I thought you finished the leaves yesterday.”

“I … yeah, I raked ’em honey, and I dragged them to the clearing. But I gotta burn the pile today. Too damn windy yesterday, that smoke ….”

“You men and your fires, I swear. Just throw them out with the trash. It’s what the neighbors do.”

Charles debates explaining how long and arduous a task it would be to bag their autumn refuse every season. But he lets it alone, something he’s grown quite good at: leaving arguments alone. Letting them dissolve and flow away like a rotten smell, a wisp of hot smoke. Charles can’t tell his wife that, when he was as a kid, he’d watch his dad rake a burn for hours, and how, when it was good and controlled, the two of them would sit at a distance and watch the pile smoke and whisper and glow. He can’t tell her how close he felt to his father in those times, or how the smell of burning leaves—what his dad called autumn sugar, because there was a sweetness underneath the sharp stench of soot—brought an aliveness to the thick autumn air, a physical pulse to the heavy column of black smoke; how that smoke swarmed with hot dancing sparks that made him think of his boys’ encyclopedia of outer space, filled with pictures of stars born deep within a galactic cloud within a faraway, chaotic nebula. The fire didn’t smell of life—not exactly—but the boy Charles once was thought it carried the heady aroma of creation, as if he and his father were sitting together, shoulder-to-shoulder in the grass, at the start of all things, watching the universe burn into being.

“Anyway, I’m gonna finish,” he says, feeling sullen, distant from all things that mattered. From his father, from that inspired little boy. “Then I’ll find Sam and we’ll have a talk. I’m sure he’s playing by the creek.” He turns away from her, focuses his stare out the thin glass of the windows—the original glass, the original frames, he thinks proudly, without reason. “I’ll go find him. We’ll have a chat about, hell, about ….”

“Not breaking your shit?” his wife says.

But he knows, without turning, that she’s smiling, one eyebrow playfully arched. Happy that her husband is soft, that he’s pliable. That he’s the kind of father who talks to his son after a fight, after a misunderstanding. A modern father who believes in hugs rather than the belt. To make him feel ….

“Yeah,” he says, and reaches his hand behind him where she can clasp it with her own, her fingers safe and warm. “About not breaking my shit.”

 

I’M SORRY, DADDY.

The thought floats out of his head and up, up into the leafless branches high above, where it tangles like drifting spider silk, wraps and sticks.

Sam is unsure of himself. Unsure of what to do. Find Tucker? Go back inside the house? Find his dad and ….

Sorry. Say you’re sorry.

He shakes his head. He’s afraid. Confused. He hated the yelling; how mad his father was. But what he hated most was the look in his daddy’s eyes.

Loveless. Empty. Hateful.

Sam cried when he saw that look—had screamed at the pain of it as if burned—hardly hearing the words his father bellowed as he stood, lifting the wet computer, pushing Sam away, pushing him hard …
and then ….

It was the look that undid him, that brought the tears, made him run run run from the room, screaming and crying and then pushing through the screen door and bursting outside, into the massive backyard. Tucker had followed at a sprint, excited, barking, not understanding. Thinking it was a game, maybe. A game of running. Of chasing. Of hiding.

And Sam, being a boy with a young boy’s elastic mind and volatile emotions, soon forgot about the laptop, about his dad’s angry words, that hateful glare, and instead began to run after Tucker. Laughing. Screaming with joy as the young Spaniel turned and lunged at his feet, snarling playfully, the dog’s body shivering with the excitement of play. Of freedom. Love unfiltered.

But then Tucker had stopped, cocked his head, as if he’d heard something Sam could not. Then the dog had run away, run into the trees, toward the little creek that passed through the woods, where Sam and his mom once built a dam, like beavers. Afterward they’d knocked it down, laughing while ankle-deep, and Sam remembered how very cold the water was on his bare feet and the feeling of life the river gave him as the water flowed past, and he imagined it was also laughing; rippling reflections dancing in the dazzling sunlight. He’d become lightheaded and then they released the stacked wood and watched it leap into the stream’s eager flow … rolling, spinning, flying away, away.

And now, beneath the tall trees, their limbs gold-tinged by a warped halo of dying sun—and with the sly one-eyed moon peeking through overhead— Sam weighs his options, surrounded by the scatter, the leftover remnants of shattered leaves.

 

CHARLES STEPS INTO THE COOL dusk. He wears a Carhart jacket the color of old canvas, stained and roughened from a decade of service, and a pair of broken, bone-white leather gloves, the webbed grooves between each finger bruised black by use. A blue ballcap is pulled low over his forehead, work boots laced over denim cuffs. He walks doggedly toward the shed, which won’t last three more winters, already sagging and rotted at the wide-planked seams (last summer’s whitewash doing little to improve its position as a long-term resident of their homestead).

As Charles trudges toward the old shed, he replays the events of that morning in his mind.

Having already wasted a good portion of his morning day working up a budget for the owners of Mackenzie Hall, the spreadsheet filled with best guesses for the upcoming quarter, he’d been mentally buried in numbers when Sam appeared from nowhere, yelling an incoherent cry of joyous ferocity and jumping into his lap, in doing so bumping the legs of the table (and scaring the shit out of his father). Charles’s hand had jerked, knocking over a glass, and spilling a pint of light beer over the keys of his MacBook, where the suds fizzled between letters and numbers like acid on flesh.

“Sam! God damn it!” he’d screamed, leaping to his feet, grabbing the laptop from the table and turning it over, shaking the beer out of whatever circuitry lay buried beneath the plastic surface, away from whatever made the thing work. The beer pooled on the smooth wood of the mahogany table before gently pointing its way—like a budding stream—toward the edge, where it dribbled over onto Margaret’s antique Oriental rug (the Great Splurge from a farmer’s market auction three years prior—the edges a floral border encased in beige, the rectangular middle red and ripe as a human heart centered by an ornate mandala, which the seller told them represented universal consciousness).

What his wife doesn’t know—what she can never know—is that Charles (instinctively and without malice or forethought) had struck out at his son with the back of one beer-drenched hand. His knuckles smacked the child’s soft temple, connected with enough force to send the boy face-down to the ground. Sam flipped over and looked up at his father, his only father, one palm pressed to the point of attack, blue eyes wide with horror, pain. Betrayal.

Charles, stupidly holding the dripping laptop, went pale. “Sam,” he said.

But then Sam had jumped to his feet and ran, ran howling through the hollow-roomed old Colonial like a banshee through the stone corridors of a Gothic castle, a specter made of stomping feet and cries of pain, chest-tearing bellows of impossible, unforgivable loss.

Now, after the passing of a few healing hours, he must mend the broken fence, the link of trust between him and his boy. But first he must finish the day’s work. He must…

The shed’s loose-hinged door creaks open as he steps inside and up onto the duck-board floor, distractedly brushing away a cobweb tickling his cheek as he reaches for the sturdy garden rake, hung on rusted hooks against the tool wall, then plucks a yellow metal can from a worm-eaten shelf, the liquid inside sloshing to-and-fro, as if awakening.

 

SAM HEARS THE SCREEN DOOR open and slap shut, the squeaking hinges a bird call, as welcoming and familiar as hearing his own name. From behind a jagged line of trees he watches his father step into the dusky light and walk brusquely toward the teetering shed, away from the house, away from him.

He waits for his dad to stop and look around, cup a hand to his mouth and yell: SAM!

Anticipating this call, Sam nervously grips the coarse bark of the tree he hides behind, waiting … waiting ….

But then his father is gone, slipping into nothingness beyond the shed.

He’s going to the leaf pile. Sam steps away from the tree to better see the distant clearing, ignores the icy teeth of the wind nibbling at his cheeks, its slim cold fingers curling around the back of his neck where the skin is chafed, but now dry. His heart has calmed down, doesn’t bounce against his ribs like a thing caged, a swollen and heavy THUMP THUMP THUMP in his chest. Now that he’s cooled off, it’s as if his heart has disappeared completely—comfortably vanished, leaving him clean and empty. The feeling carries to his mind, dulling the memory of his father’s rebuke, of striking him in the face, knocking him down. With the passage of time, Sam can think clearly of his daddy’s heated, hateful eyes, as if from a great distance, with an adult’s understanding that it had only been a moment, not a life.

Because life is not a single moment but all the other things—the love, the warmth, the eternity of goodnights and good mornings, the small kisses and the long hugs. The protection. The always being there.

Sam has a mad, painful rush of affection for his parents; a burst of such strong, raw emotion that he feels like soaring, flying across the earth to them, shouting out that he’s home! That he’s ready to be forgiven. That he’s ready to be loved.

Then, as if whispered to him by the fat, full moon, an idea springs into Sam’s head. A funny, wonderful idea of how he can win back his father’s affection, make things right again. Like they used to be—not in one lost moment, but in life. In his life.

Grinning, Sam scampers through the trees, careful to be quiet, to stay behind the tree line so his father will not see where he’s going, where he will hide. And then, when his dad comes close, comes to do the work, Sam will leap out, and maybe he will ROAR, bare finger-claws; or maybe he will run and jump into his kneeling father’s chest who will catch him and hold him and lift him, and together—together—they will go home, and it will all be okay.

It will be perfect.

 

MARGARET CALLS FOR SAM FROM the back door. Charles turns from his work, sweat beading his temples, and leans his weight on the worn handle of the rake. From a distance, Margaret appears to him as a doll, a living doll inside a child’s toy playhouse. So idyllic do they appear, this petite woman in her green sweater and dark blue jeans, a bright red scarf in her raven hair, the house seemingly unblemished by time, without rot, without decay. A flawlessness made true by the soft haze of burgeoning twilight.

He squints and his gaze leaves his wife, wanders the giant yard, the scattered beginnings of the woods that stretch back acres, some of it their land, most of it owned by the state, but left alone. A preserve.

Charles frowns at the darkening sky, the trees now rife with an army of shadows. Sam knows not to go past the creek, he assures himself. The creek is the boy’s boundary when playing outside alone, one he never crossed. Not to Charles’s knowledge, anyway. He’d been raised well, after all. He’d been ….

“Sam!” he bellows, not from fear, or anxiety. Only wanting to help. To parent. To be a good father, a good husband.

Margaret stands across the breadth of the yard as if pacing an opposing shoreline, the sea a blanket of thick Kentucky bluegrass; the expanse a rising swell of blue green between their two bodies, a rolling wave of stretched hillock that protrudes along the rear of the property. Charles once joked that it must have been an old burial mound…

“Charles! It’s getting dark!”

He lifts a weary, gloved hand and nods, showing that he understands the newfound severity of the situation. His wife turns and goes abruptly into the house.

Annoyed with me. With my damned temper. With her adventurous son.

He sighs, looks around the yard once more, watches the reddening sun cut through its middle, clinging to the horizon as if struggling against the oncoming night, the cunning moon, lengthening the already long shadows stretched like taffy from the trees. “Sam!” he yells, and in the distance hears barking.

“Tucker?” An unwelcome flutter fills his chest. A jingling bell of worry, the early pangs of panic. “Shit,” he says, surprised to see the white mist of his breath. He sets the rake against the low cinderblock wall surrounding the burn patch and heads for the sound.

As he walks toward the woods, he calls for the dog. The barking comes and goes but doesn’t appear to be moving, and Charles can’t help but wonder what the dog is going on about. Maybe he’s chased a raccoon up a tree, or a woodchuck into its winter burrow.

Or maybe he found Sam. Maybe the boy is hurt. Or face-down in the creek, head bloodied, cracked open by a wet rock when he’d slipped, slipped and fallen, and was even now breathing in the rough cold water.

“Sam! Tucker!” Charles quickens his pace toward the trees.

 

AS SAM WATCHED HIS FATHER rake leaves into a giant pile, he once more debated going home. Forgetting the game.

He’d remained quiet when his mom called for him, felt bad ignoring her, for pretending not to hear. Instead, he stayed hunched behind the little wall next to the clearing while his dad worked the rake, piling the leaves he’d brought over the day before.

Now Sam waits, quiet and unmoving—not even daring to breathe—as his father walks off toward the woods, calling for him, calling for Tucker. That’s when he knows it’s time.

He climbs up and over the low wall of scratchy cinderblocks, crawls across the dirt and plows head-first into the massive pile, as broad and tall as any he’s ever seen.

Upon entering the dark pyre, the leaves whisper crossly in his ears, as if angered, or disturbed. But he ignores their complaints and crawls deeper, the sickly-sweet aroma filling his senses as leaves crumble to mush and powder beneath his pudgy, dirty palms and hard knees; cling to the rough fabric of his sweater, fill his hair.

Finally, he stops, deep enough to not be seen when his father returns.

It’s dark beneath the pile and his eyes sting so he closes them tight. His breathing is heavy. There’s a sick feeling in his stomach from inhaling the cloying, syrupy taste of the air, thick with the aroma of ripe decay. But his dad will be back soon, and then he will spring from the pile and surprise him. They’ll laugh like madmen, best friends once more, then go inside for dinner. Later, they’ll read another chapter of their nighttime book, a story Sam adores, filled with pirates and magic and great adventure. They’ll lie together in his bedroom, the room his mother painted the color of a summer sky, decorated with fluffy white clouds high up along the walls; always floating, floating…

A few minutes pass and Sam allows himself to sink sideways into the densely packed leaves, which catch his weight easily, happily. They are barely whispering now, no longer upset. Just tired.

Relax, Sam, they say as they absorb him, cushion his small body like a pillow, like the soft, perfumed hand of God. Relax now.

 

MARGARET IS CHOPPING POTATOES WHEN Charles comes into the kitchen. His face is rugged with exertion, darkened by a shadow of beard he will shave clean in the morning before he goes to the club. His eyes are dark, as if brooding, or lost.

“Did you find him?” she asks, focusing on her task, feigning apathy. Margaret doesn’t want to be one of those young mothers. The ones who over-worry. The ones with only one child who carry around a fraught disposition like a cheap purse.

“No,” he says. “But I did rescue a jackrabbit Tucker trapped inside a Maple hollow. I had to chase the dog across half the damn yard before catching him. Tied him up by the shed, gave him a few of the biscuits.”

“Jesus, Charles, what about Sam?”

“Relax, I’ll find him. You worry too much.”

Margaret says nothing to this. The sound of the knife hitting the wooden cutting board—THUMP THUMP THUMP—fills the small room like a dying heart.

Outside, by the shed, Tucker is barking to raise hell.

“Anyway, just came in for a beer. Gonna go watch the burn. I used a little fluid…” He smiles sadly. “My father would have hated that.”

Margaret nods, not liking the currents of despair beneath his words. “Dinner will be ready in a half-hour. Please find Sam while you’re out there, you know…” she waves the knife through the air pointedly, “watching your manly inferno.”

As she goes back to cutting, she says: “And for what it’s worth, I think your father would be proud.”

Charles smiles, kisses his wife softly behind the ear, enjoying the way her neck reddens in pleasure. “You know, sometimes I think he’s still here. Lingering. Watching me. Us. A lonely old man…”

“Please don’t be morbid,” Margaret says.

He puts his arms around her waist, squeezes her tight. “You should grab a beer and join me. It’s a beautiful night.”

“Maybe I will,” she says. “I just want to get the meat in the oven and then we’ll see. Now go on, before you torch the whole forest.”

But Charles is already halfway out the door.

Margaret turns, face strained, and watches him through the wavy glass of the old window, walking away across the humped mound of green grass, through the twilight, toward a rising pillar of black smoke that she knows, from experience, reeks of death.

In the window’s reflection she sees a small shadow standing behind her, hovering at the kitchen door. “You better get cleaned up,” she says.

But the shadow does not move and does not answer.

“Sam?” she says, and frowns, the air sour, thick with the stench of burnt leaves.