My father was so good-looking he induced certain sounds in a viewer. His sideburns boasted reverb. His crooked smile was outlaw country music. The calluses on his palms made them rough-hewn lumber that boomed and thudded. His arms were heavy and powerful like Les Paul guitars.
I called him Dad, and he worked swing shift, so I didn’t see him during the week. But on the weekends he told me stories in the driveway. I handed him tools while he hunched shirtless over his pickup that broke down a lot. He propped the hood open with a wooden stick, and I helped. It always took a long time.
After the note came home from my teacher, he told me different things than usual. He told me about the prisoners with shaved heads who weren’t allowed to speak. In the hills among the big trees. The sawmills and logging camps. Douglas fir one thousand years old. I listened carefully to every word. I pictured shoulders hunched over loud machines. Blood boiling inside silent bodies. Anger. Frustration. Thick, dark forests. Before all the trees were cut down. Way back. That first white baby born in Washington Territory—a crying infant with no home. Dad talked about steep hillsides. Old growth. Men in shackles and chains. The blades screeching and moaning. Mountain devils waiting. Lumber barons with evil hearts, heavy pockets, and mouths salivating as they watched the prisoners die on cold windy floors. Their chains caught in the machinery. Their shaved heads a bloody symbol. Their scalps shorn with dull straight razors to stop the spread of lice, demoralize their hearts, and help them forget they were human.
He told me the men worked in leg-irons, and if their fingers caught in the blades, they were sometimes cut off with common carpenter saws. Dad shook his head and let me know “they didn’t have doctors. Didn’t have real prisons. They had those work camps at first. Couple rich fuckers wanted to get richer.” He stared at me. A shotgun warning surged from his black Irish blue eyes before he said, “That’s what greed does.”
In my mind, the unspoken words huddled underneath the prisoners’ thirsty tongues. Frustration erupted in their tired bodies. It coiled and raced and circled in fierce, red blood. Their words did not come out through crooked, set teeth. Clenched jaws halted. The men were voiceless. And their tongues stumbled clumsily even when free.
“And what about later?” I asked him.
He was quiet before he spoke. “Later, they buried the men where they died. In shallow, unmarked graves. Broken chains, falling logs, and violence killed them.”
I imagined their blood mixing with the sawdust. I imagined them falling asleep to the phantom nighttime hooting and chattering of northern spotted owl. The trees looming far above. The rain pouring down.
When Mother came home and found me in the driveway with big, wild thoughts in my head, she scolded him. Dad told me these things because he saw something in my eyes. A hunger that would remain. A hardness that must have meaning. He saw how I strutted when I walked.
My life would be difficult. I was a fighter. And I was born for it.
He oiled his boots at the foot of my bed as he talked before bedtime. He caught my eye before speaking. Sometimes, when I stared straight into his eyes in the dark I heard a fiddler playing notes in the devil’s key. Sometimes, when I looked at how his black hair swept across his forehead, I heard wicked harmonicas telling secrets.
He told me that Wesley Everest was thrown off the bridge on Mellon Avenue three times before his neck finally snapped. And that young boys were taken out of town regularly and beaten one by one by men in city shoes. He told me that even as the workers’ faces were filled with purple bruises, the desperate boys asked what right the lumber barons had to the land in the first place. They asked how they could steal and exploit so decadently. Wesley Everest hung from the bridge all night. His teeth broken and bloody—caved in with the butt of a rifle. The men castrated him and shot his body repeatedly. Dad told me that neither coroner in town would take the dead man in the morning. And no one was prosecuted for the murder. His jailed friends were forced at gunpoint to dig the hole where he was buried.
He told me that in New England hundreds of years ago Irish, Scottish, and poor English servants conspired together with African-born slaves to escape to freedom. He described the rebellions. And how afterward the masters forbid them to interact. And they were not allowed to marry one another. He said runaway slaves with light skin used to shave their heads to blend in. He explained to me that white trash was a name created for those who lived in mixed neighborhoods. It was a name for the poverty that remained in spite of skin color. He told me how rednecks were workers of all skin colors who protested unfair treatment. “Those words shouldn’t hurt you.” He patted my feet and turned my light down low. He set his boots against the doorframe.
Mom lingered in the hallway and listened. He walked toward her, and I could hear her reprimanding and him sighing. Her words, “Giving her confused nightmares,” floated across my sleepy eyelids. I saw them spelled out. Colin snored lightly. My parents kissed in the dark.
Dad told me those things back when his truck still ran. When he was twenty-seven and good-looking. When he whistled and music played out of his radio in the driveway. When the future was bright and existed. Before we moved to Cota Street, I could fall asleep in the trailer in a clear-cut surrounded by other O’Neels. On those nights, I thought the wind chime was the rattling of the prisoners’ chains. And my dreams were of business owners who slept lightly— their billy clubs waiting.
But in my dreams, the men with shaved heads had brilliant eyes. Even though they were ensnared. Even though they were never allowed to speak.