IN THE SHED BEHIND the barn there hangs a strap. It bears the scuffs and scratches of countless thrashings, mine and my brothers’ repentant and not-so-repentant arses ingrained in the leather. At one end of it there is an oily stain, an impression of my father’s hand, his fingers, his grasp. At the other end protrude two sharp, blackened furniture tacks, each bent back to form an iron ‘U’.
I don’t often come here anymore, and I wouldn’t have bothered if not for my brother Johnny’s insisting. If it had been either of the other two, I might have stayed back and let them sell the place without me, but I trust Johnny to know what to do. He always did know, right from the start.
Through the doorway I glimpse the shingled house, all traces of white paint stripped off by weather and time. Two of its three windows are broken, dirty sheers blocking the sun’s entry to the kitchen. This is the place where meals were cooked and devoured, lessons taught and learned. We boys took our first steps here, and at the kitchen table we read our first words from Mother’s cracked and thumbworn bible. We learned our prayers; and at meals and before bed, also before thrashings, we spoke them, words of forgiveness and redemption: Heavenly Father, forgive me for my sins… . We were taught how to use a gun.
My brothers and I learned to drive in the back lot, and in the barn we played hockey and learned about sex, rifling through ill-gotten Playboy magazines. We drank our first beer, smoked our first joint, and most of us groped our first adolescent-female breasts in the loft, enveloped in the sickly-sweet scent of hay and risk, always the risk of being caught.
This is the place of my birth, and of my father’s death. It was once my home.
We all bear the scars of risk.
Zinnia, my mother, walked with a crutch, her left leg ruined from being thrown by a horse. The leg was amputated at the knee, and an ill-fitting peg strapped to what remained.
My eldest brother, Matthew, has only one eye, the other destroyed by a wayward pellet. Johnny, the youngest of us, will only speak if he’s had enough to drink, which is sometimes to say far too much, and Luke, his twin, cannot control his mouth.
My wife sometimes traces the strap’s pathways across my back. As I grow older, she tells me, the shiny white trails are fading.
Luke and Johnny hated each other from an early age. With their dense black curls and startling blue eyes, they were a constant reminder to our mother of her only brother, Jean-Luc. Mother idolized Jean-Luc, who carried his lame sister on his shoulders and taught her how to ride again. He defended her honour against bullies and cads, and showed her how to plant her knee and to throw a snowball with deadly accuracy so that she might defend herself from the bullies during the winter he went to war.
Zinnia never recovered from her brother’s death overseas. She married one of the local bullies, a remote man named Wayne Frommer, and promptly gave him two boys. Matthew was first, blue-eyed and an easy child. I was next, a difficult birth and a colicky baby, as Mother often reminded me.
Sarah, our sister, died at six months of crib death. For four years Zinnia begged her husband for one more, desperate for the company of a girl. One drunken evening, Wayne gave in, and eight months later the twin boys were born. Mother buried her disappointment deep, considering it God’s wish that she find herself surrounded by five males, so she named the twins for her beloved brother.
Johnny and Luke didn’t stand a chance with her.
My father had a strict house rule, and that was that no one under the age of ten was allowed anywhere near his rifle collection, which he kept under lock-and-key in a cabinet over the Frigidaire, well out of reach of curious little hands. Every year he’d go off with his cousins into the bush for a week, and bag his deer quota to feed us for a while. Later on, he’d tell us of his hunting escapades. Matt and I were transfixed by his descriptions of the right moment, the second of absolute certainty when he had the deer lined up in his sights, and how the deer would glance his way as if it knew this was its last moment on earth.
Father never missed, and he never had an accident. Throughout our childhood, he would tantalize us by saying, “When you’re old enough, I’ll show you how it’s done.”
Matthew began his training at the age of ten. Every night after supper, Father would fish around on his key ring until he found the key to the rifle cabinet. With certain ceremony he’d open the glass door, and with both hands, lower the pellet gun. I watched, silent and burning with envy as Father worked with Matt, cleaning, loading, unloading, and cleaning, over and over again. I had all the steps memorized long before Matt could perform them properly. Secretly I ached for Father’s undivided attention, his unspoken approval as, over time, Matt’s small hands grew more proficient in their task. Finally, when Matt could clean, load, and unload blindfolded, Father took him out to the pasture behind the orchard, where he’d set up tin cans along the fence as targets. I wasn’t allowed to come along and watch, and when I raised my voice in protest, Father shouted that I’d better keep quiet and do as he said, if I ever wanted to learn how to shoot.
The mystery of Matt’s shooting sessions sent me into agonies of jealousy. At night while Matt snored in his bed opposite mine, I lay with my jaw clenched, imagining Father’s large hand tousling Matt’s hair with every successful firing of the gun.
“Well done, Son,” he might say through the pipe stem held firmly between his teeth. Matt would beam up at him, pride swelling his small chest and sending sparks of adoration from his enormous blue eyes. The reality was, after most shooting sessions they would return, first Matt rushing through the kitchen white-lipped, his reddened eyes avoiding the rest of us. Father would catch the door before it slammed shut, and slowly shake his head at the sound of Matt’s feet pounding up the stairs.
“He’s coming along, Zinn, but slowly,” he’d say to Mother, then he’d return the pellet gun to its place in the cabinet, help himself to a beer from the Frigidaire, and sit, brooding, on the easy chair.
This went on for a few weeks until finally, one day after a rifle practice, Matt wrenched the door open and stood there, his face white and his eyes red, a candle of snot dripping from his nose. Father followed close behind, holding the rifle pointed to the floor.
“Christ! Are you crying?” Father waited for an answer that wouldn’t come. “You don’t want to shoot? Well then, tell me what to do with you, Matthew. Just tell me!”
Matt sniffed back the snot and walked stiffly across the kitchen and up the stairs.
Father turned to my mother, who was sitting at the table with her hand on her crutch. I don’t know what he said next, because I then slipped up the stairs after Matt.
It seemed the days preceding my tenth birthday slowed to a crawl, and in fact had gone into reverse, but the day finally came when Father would show me how to clean the pellet gun. I hurried through the presents and the cake, barely noticing the triple layers Mother had glued together with my favourite chocolate frosting, and I absentmindedly spat out the wax-papered quarter.
“Aww, Dave always gets the quarter,” Luke whined.
“Hush, you, it’s his birthday, not yours.” The lines between Mother’s eyes deepened. Luke folded his arms and slumped in his chair.
“Well, boy, it’s time you learned how to clean a gun,” Father finally said, wiping his moustache and reaching for his pipe. Too eagerly, I jumped up from the table, knocking over my chair.
“Lord save us, David, would you for once slow down!”
“Sorry, Mother,” I said, righting the chair.
Father clinked his key ring until he found the right key. I was suddenly struck with the urge to pee, but passed it off as excitement as Father took an inordinate amount of time to unlock the cabinet and lower the gun to the kitchen table. He showed me the steps to cleaning the gun, steps I had memorized from Matt’s training and which whirled through my brain at ten times the speed Father was speaking. Finally it was my turn. Father placed the gun before me, its barrel glistening, waiting for me to dismantle and clean it. With sweating hands I reached for it, and as soon as I touched the cool metal, the need to pee became desperate.
“Just a minute,” I muttered, dashing from the kitchen.
“David? David!”
“I’ll be right back,” I yelled down the stairs. Once before the toilet, stage fright set in and nothing happened. I thought of the gun sitting, waiting on the table, and of Father’s certain growing impatience. I hopped up and down, and turned on the tap for inspiration. Finally, my bladder co-operated. I washed but did not dry my hands, and flew back down the stairs.
When I returned to the kitchen, Father was turning the key in the cabinet. The table was bare.
“Wait, I...”
“I need your undivided attention.” Father’s voice was cold.
“But I had to...”
“I don’t care if you had to put out a fire in the living room, David. Guns get your full attention.”
With that, he clamped his teeth around the pipe stem, and slammed out the door.
Father’s cancer helped itself to his liver long before the doctors found it, and only when he suddenly became diabetic did they realize it was also feasting on his pancreas. Mother bore the responsibility of his illness with a devotion that astounded us boys. Throughout our version of their marriage, we had only known a stiff, formal tolerance between them. At best, they agreed on things, but at worst, a terrible silence would descend, paralyzing the entire family and causing us to tiptoe around each other so as not to cause any friction that might ignite our parents’ tempers. Always the strap weighed on our minds; we brothers watched and waited until the silent storm was over, before resuming our usual push-and-shove banter.
She tended to him night and day, cooking more varied and simpler meals as his appetite waned, changing the sheets sometimes twice a day to ensure their freshness while he slept, and often sitting through the night, staring at a book, or at her mending. Once I saw her holding Father’s hand, smiling down at him while he spoke.
Father’s final task was to show the twins how to clean and load the pellet gun, their tenth birthday arriving on a slightly better day than he’d had in a while. There he sat, gaunt and yellow, trying to show the boys how to do it. Matt and I watched, appalled, as his thin and shaking fingers failed.
“I know! I know!” Luke cried out, grabbing at the barrel.
“Stop it, Luke.” Matt seized Luke’s wrist in his strong hand. Johnny sat back in his chair, hunched and miserable with an understanding of Father’s illness that neither Luke nor I possessed.
“But I know how to do it!”
“Never mind. Let Father show you.” Matt’s voice was a low growl.
Father looked at Matt from beneath his bruised-looking eyelids.
“Matthew, you’re the eldest. You show them,” he said, his voice hoarse with fatigue. Matt’s face was stricken.
“No, Dad. You know best, you do it.”
“Matthew...”
Matt turned away from the table, giving me a plain view of his face from my position at the door. He bit his lip. Shook his head.
There was a long silence, one I couldn’t do anything about as I stood there, frozen. My stomach lurched as I recognized rare tears springing up in Matt’s eyes, as they had done all those years ago when he didn’t want to learn to shoot. His face crumpled, but he kept his back straight and breathed evenly, so as not to let on to Father and the twins.
“David, then. Show the boys.”
“Me? Uh, sure, Dad.”
Somehow my voice co-operated along with the rest of me, as I moved to the table. I stared at the pellet gun, which for a long moment became a foreign object, something I’d never seen before in my life.
“C’mon, Dave, show us. Father said!” Luke’s high-pitched whine brought me back into the kitchen.
“David, you know your way,” said Father. I nodded my head, which sang with his approval, and sat between the boys. The words and the motions came easily. I knew my way.
Johnny was quickest, loading and unloading with dexterity and efficiency that belied his ten years, while Luke struggled and grew impatient, his voice finally rising in a wail.
“Johnny always does things first. It’s no fair!” he sobbed as, for the fifth time in a row, he bungled his task. Johnny looked at the floor, then slid out of his chair and dashed up the stairs. I might otherwise have cuffed Luke, but the strain on Father’s face kept me still and, at least outwardly, patient in my seat.
“Don’t worry about it, Luke,” Matt said from across the kitchen, his voice now restored to its seventeen-year-old baritone. “It took me a long time to get the hang of it, too, man. A lot longer than Dave, and he’s two years younger than me. I’ll show you a few tricks next time.”
“It’ll come soon enough, Lukey-boy. When you’re ready.”
Luke stared, open-mouthed, as Father reached over and touched his black curls, placing his large hand on the shiny jumble, and tousling. My eyes filled with unbidden, though not entirely unhappy tears.
He died one afternoon while we boys were at school. Luke arrived home first, followed by me and Johnny. The ambulance had come and gone, taking Father’s corpse but leaving behind the stench of his dying.
From her seat at the table Mother stared as we walked into the kitchen, the skin drawn tight like a wax membrane across her face. She grasped the crutch with both hands, her knuckles like bleached walnuts while Lukey stood nearby, silent and pale with his hands twisting over each other, moving from one foot to the other. A long silence filled the room until finally Mother spoke.
“He died, your father. He’s gone, now.”
My breath caught in my throat and the top of my head tingled in a complicated wave of shock and relief that left me speechless. Lukey sniffled and added a jiggling foot to his agitated dance, while Johnny walked calmly to our mother and put his arms around her. She sat rigid and looked for a moment as though she would shoo him off and scold him. Then her shoulders slumped and she leaned forward and put her face in her hands.
This was the scene that greeted Matt when he walked through the door. He must have known right away that Father had died, for he sank onto one of the kitchen chairs and without bothering to hide it, wept long, heaving sobs.
The sour scent of death hung off the walls for weeks, despite Mother’s leaving the windows open through the cold November. When the first snow came swirling through the kitchen, Johnny went quietly through the house and closed all the windows. Mother sat watching him, her hand on her crutch and her eyes flooded with sorrow.
I’ve never forgiven myself for taking over the twins’ training. Johnny never wanted to hunt, and Luke was too impetuous. I should have known better.
“Your father would want them to know how, David,” Mother said, and her word was good enough for me, so I took them out to the pasture behind the orchard, and lined up the tin cans along the fence. One after another, Johnny popped them off, more in an effort to be done with it than to show off. Luke, of course, didn’t see it that way, and when his turn came he missed every single can. I expected his usual screaming and whining, but he surprised me by laying the gun down and walking away.
“Luke? Hey, Lukey, c’mon back,” I called after him. “Let’s do it one more time. This time you’ll get it for sure.”
But Luke kept on walking. With his shoulders sagging and his head down, he looked more than ever like Johnny, who was by now sitting on a tree stump, hunched and miserable.
“Good job, buddy,” I said to him. “You’ve got a great shot.”
“I don’t want to shoot anymore,” Johnny replied, looking at the ground.
“S’okay, Johnny, you don’t have to. Come on, let’s go see if lunch is ready.”
I picked up the gun, and we made our way through the orchard.
Matt was talking to Luke while Mother dished up bowls of soup. She pursed her lips at Johnny as he took his place at the table.
“Luke says you were showing off, John.”
Johnny opened his mouth to speak, but then closed it.
“Not exactly, Mother,” I said carefully. I fished around in my pocket for the key to the gun cabinet. The key slipped from my grasp; I laid the gun down on the table to go at the key ring with both hands.
“Vanity is a sin,” she said sharply. “I’ll have none of it.”
“You did so show off,” Luke muttered. Johnny scowled.
“Yes, you did! You fired off every one of those cans just to bug me, just like this.”
Before I could react, Luke leapt from his chair and grabbed the pellet gun. Which, for the only time in my life, I had neglected to unload.
“Lukey...” I shouted, but he had already cocked it, and was pointing it out the window as Johnny grabbed his wrist. The barrel swung away from the window in slow motion, in an impossibly long moment during which I wondered why in hell I couldn’t seem to do anything useful or heroic, such as move. The time lapse between the explosion and Mother’s scream seemed almost ridiculous.
Then it all speeded up as Matt slumped to the floor, clutching his eye and groaning.
The twins’ screams ring in my mind as I stare at the strap. When Mother was finished beating them bloody, it was my turn, for refusing to beat them for her. In silence I removed my shirt and lowered my jeans, and knelt facing away from her. The words came easily.
“Heavenly Fath – uhh – Father, forgive me for my – ahh – for my sins...”
I accepted her harsh words, her accusations, and her thrashing, and afterward as I lay on my stomach, waiting for the sting to kick in, I thought of Matt lying in the hospital with half his face bandaged and his remaining blue eye swollen and bewildered.
My mother’s voice crept into my awareness:
“Heavenly Father, forgive me for my sins...”
I peered around behind me to see her kneeling painfully, with her peg-leg resting against the wall and the strap before her on the floor, and then I was bewildered.
The strap hangs before me now, stiff and cracked. I pull it off the wall, and place my palm over the darkened imprint of my father’s hand. But for my thumb, which is longer than his was, it’s a perfect fit.