Read More: A brief Q&A with James Braun
After Dad’s been gone long enough some of us swear we start seeing more of him around the house. We see him in the wallpaper in the shotgun hallway, a body blended into the floral patterned designs. He is an earlobe in the burnt swirls of the stovetop, or a freckle in the spotted countertop. Look, we say, an arm here, a nose there, see how that seam in the wall could be one of his veins? How that botched section of paint looks like the birthmark on his arm? We tell ourselves that might be stretching things a bit; that that might be going a little too far.
Some of us think his presence has moved outside the house as well. One day one of us swears on seeing a twisted version of his face in the knotted wood of pallets stacked in the yard. We’re not so sure about that one either. For certain, he is in the mailbox at the end of our drive, coming and going. This much we know for sure.
Ourselves, we are all of us blue-eyed and broken-tongued, towheaded and redheaded, ricketed with disease, living with our mother in this house in the middle of a windswept field. As of last week one of us is bloodied after a fall from the hayloft in the barn. As of today we are as we are: widow-peaked, long-haired or balding early, stunted in our growth or growing too fast. Last we checked, we are all of us our father’s children. Yet when one of us suggests seeing bits and pieces of our father in ourselves, that we are the same, we say, No way, nu uh, you’re adopted, and all of us decide that we need to calm down with all of this seeing.
When we say Dad’s gone we don’t mean Dad’s dead. He’s in Jamaica, in Cancún, in a deep jungle off the southeast coast of Malaysia. Let us say Borneo. Let us say Sri Lanka.
Okay, so we don’t know where he is.
We think Mom does, if anyone. She writes him on bits of stationery. She addresses the letters to the addresses written on the letters Dad sent last, which come in the form of his scrawled handwriting on hotel napkins, or cheap postcards stuffed into envelopes. This we know by watching Mom nightly, all of us taking sidelong looks at her through the window to the den, where she raises Dad’s letters to the light so she can better see where to address her next letter. Mom doesn’t let us read Dad’s letters, which is just as well, seeing how only one of us knows our letters to begin with.
Tonight is only more of the same. We pretend-play out in the yard so we can look in at Mom through the window. We raise the one of us who can read up to the sill so maybe he can tell us where Dad’s most recent letter came from. Unfortunately for us, our letter-reading brother weeble-wobbles back and forth on our shoulders as if blown by a wind, until we collapse in a heap on top of each other. I’m sorry, I did everything I could, we hear from somewhere inside the heap.
Above us, the light in the den goes dark, meaning Mom’s finished writing to Dad on her pieces of stationery and we’ll have to try again tomorrow.
In the morning Mom walks the long walk down our gravel drive and waits by the mailbox for the mailman to stop by in his mail truck. She walks out early, so early there is still dew on the grass, and waits there with the wind in her face, the sun not up yet. She waits and waits until the mail truck comes around the corner and makes its stop, and she hands the mailman her letter to Dad and he hands a letter from Dad to her. Then she turns back around to see us all standing there watching her from the other end of the drive, so we disperse to the house, the barn, the windswept field, pretending we were never watching any of it at all.
Somewhere in here there is a man named Mr. Jacobs. Mr. Jacobs lives down the road from us and likes to bring over bagfuls of corn that we help shuck off the front porch because Mom says we have to. We don’t like Mr. Jacobs. Not even the most trusting of us trust Mr. Jacobs. He knows Dad is away on business and so he comes over each day on his bicycle or riding his tractor because Mr. Jacobs doesn’t have a license.
Today it’s the bicycle. On the handlebars hang the bags of corn he will use to try to win Mom’s heart. The corn comes from Mr. Jacobs’s field, which Mr. Jacobs will soon be plowing. Soon we imagine he will hire some of us to pick up the rocks in his field that have surfaced after spring rains. It’s backbreaking work, picking up rocks out of Mr. Jacobs’s field, yet another reason for us to like him even less. Another reason being that the corn he brings us isn’t even fresh, it’s from last season, kept frozen in the freezer in his basement, the same freezer we think he keeps his bodies in.
We are all of us hanging out on the front porch, watching Mr. Jacobs lean his bike against the willow in our yard. He approaches us holding the bag of corn as one would flowers. Is your mother home? he asks. One of us spits a long hocker into the mulch and another of us tells him, I don’t know, Mr. Jacobs, let us go look for you, and none of us make a move to move.
Lucky for Mr. Jacobs that Mom steps out right then or else we’d have our way with him. We scatter. Mom guides him past us up the porch steps, and as she does we whisper to him, You better watch it, Mr. Jacobs. Dad’s watching, we say. From the walls, we say. The ceiling.
Mom takes the bag of corn from him and hands it off to one of us. Shuck Mr. Jacobs’s corn, kids, she says, so we start passing around the bag each of us takes a piece of corn from to shuck. When Mom opens the screen door to the house, Mr. Jacobs’s hair blows up and around in a draft of wind, all two strands of it. He spits in his hand and smooths the hairs back down.
They go inside. Between shucking, we take turns looking in at them through the window. Mr. Jacobs is sitting at our kitchen table drinking Mom’s iced tea, while Mom sits across the table talking about nothing any of us can make out. Mr. Jacobs nods his bald head to whatever Mom’s saying with his hands folded on our table. Next to his left wrist, one of us can just make out the knotted iris of Dad’s eye, staring up at Mr. Jacobs’s face like the eye is thinking of all the things it would like to do with Mr. Jacobs’s face.
They’re in there for quite some time, but no longer than how long it takes to shuck a bundle of corn. They step back out on the porch as we’re stacking the cobs in a reed basket. Before Mr. Jacobs says goodbye to Mom and gets his bike from the willow, all of us watch him stare out at the little pieces of cornsilk blowing across the yard. Mr. Jacobs raises a hand to his head and pats the two hairs he owns on it, as if the cornsilk reminds him of something he no longer has but would love to own again.
Most of all of us think we should send Dad a letter.
We want to send Dad a letter, we tell Mom.
We tell her to give us an hour with her stationery, her runny ink pens, her envelopes. We push the one of us that can read forward and say let him do it, let him write what it is we all have to say. We say, Do you know how long it’s been since we’ve seen or spoken with Dad? We tell her how long it has been. Six months, we say. That’s half a year, says the one of us that can count.
And all Mom keeps saying is, No, absolutely not, unnecessary, I already tell your father all that is happening.
What Mom does with Dad’s letters is no mystery to any of us. After walking out to the end of the drive to meet the mailman, she comes back into the house and sits down at the kitchen table with Dad’s most recent letter. She opens it up with a knife and reads whatever Dad wrote his letter on, and if she likes what the letter says then she’ll fold it in half and stick it in the lockbox she keeps on top of the bookshelf in the den. On days she doesn’t like what it says, she gets out a BIC lighter from one of the kitchen drawers, sets the letter aflame, and tosses it in the sink to burn. After she burns a letter, she won’t write to Dad for days because maybe she’s angry with him about what he said and thinks Dad doesn’t deserve a letter to tell him all that has been happening.
Meanwhile the rest of us gather around the sink to look at the burnt patterns Dad’s letter made. His eyebrows! His chin! An eyelash, a fingernail, his handprint! We go on like this until one of us says, I thought we were going to calm down with our seeing? and all of us decide that we need to calm down even further.
We guess sending Dad a letter doesn’t matter anymore because the one of us that can read and write gets some sort of disease, so Mom says we have to stay away from him. Where do we put him? is the question we ask ourselves. We make the diseased one of us stay out in the yard beneath the willow while we discuss the question of where to put him. One of us suggests making him walk to Mr. Jacobs’s place so he can get Mr. Jacobs sick, but then we remember Mr. Jacobs sees Mom and might get Mom sick and Mom might get the rest of us sick, so we decide against sending him to see Mr. Jacobs. Maybe we could banish him to the woods, another of us says. Make him live out there for a while, see what good that does him.
Naw, we say.
In the end we go with the barn. We are all of us bandits with bandanas and cloths covering our faces as we push the diseased one of us through the doors with a broom. Please! he says, this isn’t necessary! Once we’ve got him backed into one of the stalls, we shut the door and latch the latch. Then we throw him over a raincoat so he can shield himself against rainwater dripping from the leaky barn roof, as well as some pillows and blankets we’ll have to burn later on with Mom’s BIC.
After getting him settled we all press our ears to the stall door. We listen to him breathing among the pine straw and hay. We hear horse flies buzzing around and some slaps on skin, so we throw him over a flyswatter as well. Here, we say, this should help. While we’re at it we tell him to stop breathing so much, he’s getting his diseases all over the place with that breath of his. We hear him start breathing quieter.
That’s better, we say. Much better.
Lately we have noticed Mom burning more and more of Dad’s letters. It started at first with her burning them two or three days in a row but turned into more days from there. When she comes back in now after getting the mail from the mailman, she sets the other mail aside and takes Dad’s letter to burn in the sink, not even opening the letter to see what it says. What if there’s money inside? we say. What if there’s something important Dad needs us to know? Mom burns the letters anyway. She burns Dad’s letters so much we think Dad himself is going to rise up from the soot smeared on the sink’s steel, there being so much of him in there. We kind of hope he will, that way maybe he can put a stop to all that has been happening lately.
What has been happening lately: Besides the letter-burning getting worse, Mom has started seeing more and more of Mr. Jacobs. Instead of spending evenings in the den writing Dad, Mom uses that time to get herself ready for the night ahead. On this evening she sits before her vanity in her bedroom so she can apply makeup and eyeliner, a bit of eyeshadow. One by one we file into her room. What we want to know is, Why? Why see Mr. Jacobs when Dad is still out there, but also everywhere here in this house with us? He will soon be returning from his trip, we tell her. Why not keep writing Dad, why not read the letters the mailman drops off each morning?
Mom looks at us here in this room that we fill every inch of. We hang off her bedposts, hide behind drapes, hook ourselves around her legs. I’m tired, she says, of being alone.
Whenever Mr. Jacobs comes to pick up Mom he rides in on his tractor. It takes Mr. Jacobs just about forever to make it down our road and another forever for him to make it up our drive. Mom waits patiently with us on the porch, watching Mr. Jacobs putz along. When at last he does make it, he parks his tractor beneath the willow Mom runs out to meet him under. He helps her up onto the tractor seat so they can putz away down the drive, the road, taking forever to do it. He doesn’t even have any hair, we tell Mom before she runs off down the porch, away from us.
All of us know what to do. Back inside the house we bust down the den door. We stand like we know how to stand on each other’s shoulders, the one of us on top reaching up for the lockbox Mom keeps high on the bookshelf. Give it here! we say. Pass it down! The rest of us search the den for the key, but none of us can find it. We search for another way to break the lockbox open. In a toolbox in the barn we find Dad’s ball peen hammer. We think that will work well enough.
We are together in our thoughts on the ball peen hammer. Out in the yard we take turns smashing the lockbox, denting its sides, caving in its bottom. When the lockbox breaks open its contents spill out over the yard––sticky notes, index cards, pieces of construction paper get caught in the wind, catching in the ruts. All of us run after Dad’s letters, collecting as many as we can.
We bring the letters we catch back into the barn. One after another we slip them through the crack in the stable. All we hear in there is a groan and something like a whine along with a bubbling sound as if there is spittle on our brother’s lips, though the sounds he makes are mostly drowned out by ourselves. What do they say what do they say what do they say.
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James Braun’s work has appeared and is forthcoming in Fiction International, Laurel Review, the minnesota review, Camas, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the Herbert L. Hughes Short Story Award. Summers, James resides in Port Huron, Michigan.
Read More: A brief Q&A with James Braun