Back before the Reckoning, he recalled that sound of the old oak out front cleaving off the big elbow branch when a storm ripped through the valley.
It broke right above where his dad had hitched the swing. Sparing the swing but severely wounding the great oak.
His dad had plucked an old shutter off one of the barn windows for the swing seat. Mom protested from the porch, “you’re gonna replace that, I assume?”
She liked things to match.
Maybe it was the twins. She said God gave her hips for triplets, so it was no bother. That always seemed real odd to him. What her hips had to do with it.
When she told him about having sisters, she said they were a surprise. That part he understood. Being he had been practically grown before they filled the house with their wailing and giggling and pitter-pattering about, he was indeed surprised.
That old shutter was now smooth as a honey rail. The grit of the kids’ overalls under their constant wiggling had tamed the roughhewn plank down to slippery record of their own olden times in the making.
At first, the girls rode side by side. They insisted. A twin thing, he reckoned.
But soon enough they were forced to take turns. He was glad about that. They could push each other for a change. Their demands for “more!” and “higher!” had him worn through on feeding the insatiable appetite of the giggling goslings.
He had taken to calling the twins GooseGoose.
He figured they looked most like American Buffs. Porcelain skin and golden headed and full of honk. A bit clumsy under foot, but then with a grace beyond their years. Like goslings stumbling down to the pond for the first time, they would find their element.
He loved them more than sunshine. A rare thing in the valley for a good portion of the year.
He loved being a brother. He supposed it helped being much older. And yet he was still a kid himself. Not quite physically ready for the crew. But certainly, learned enough to be in the field with the men.
He and his friends were the bewteeners. The summer boys. Those in the bittersweet nowhere of young men in the making. One hand firmly on childhood, the other searching for purchase.
So, when he wasn’t pushing GooseGoose, he’d often hop on that old swing between chores and school and time with the summer boys in the longhouse and pump his legs until that funny place below his stomach felt like stretched taffy.
Then he’d eject.
The pain of landing was the good kind of pain. Childhood pain. The sort that you laugh through. Even when a little blood leaks out.
The young think the way that gravity smiles on them will never end. But it always does. Often with suddenness. It’s a wry smile, after all.
He could feel his own lightness leaving him as he was taking on the inevitable weight of life. His distance record marked with the white rock he had pulled from the bottom of the quarry pond on a bet held up even though he was getting bigger and stronger.
Somehow the air underfoot was nothing like it was not that long back.
He was becoming the shape of his dad, something he hoped for, but thought was impossible due to his dad’s chest resembling one of the feed barrels in the hay barn.
His dad told him he was due for his ‘spring shoot’ any day now.
He was smaller than most of the boys. And boys being boys meant he was made aware of this fact on the regular. He knew he wouldn’t be tall, as both his parents had a bit of the “shire curse” as his mom called it.
But he just wanted to be bigger. Like his dad, who had forearms like smoked hams and shoulders like a bull.
Nobody in the Valley ever thought of his dad as short.
His dad took up a lot of space, but somehow without being overly imposing. Like the old oak in the yard, it was impossible to imagine it as a seedling, struggling to find its footing. Or what the yard would be like without its generous shade.
He was always just there.
The boy had his mom’s eyes. They called it Hazel. Which didn’t even sound like a color to him. Shoot, even the girls got blue eyes somehow.
He wanted his dad’s. Ice blue. Made icier by the year-round patina of a life worked outside.
The summer sun and the winter wind took turns painting his face the color of the river bottom through the oxbows. Ruddy, brown, but with a softness that could be coaxed out by those he loved.
His mom would cup his dad’s chiseled jaw with her tiny hands every morning for a kiss on his way out. That steely face of his would melt into her dainty fingers and shine like the glossy old photo of their wedding day up on Independence pass.
Boot leather into suede. His wrinkles would melt between her hands. All but the three lines in his forehead. Those seemed to have been there since birth.
The boy liked to trace them with his tiny fingers while his dad held him up in one arm.
“Daddy how did you get your ‘thinking lines’?”, using his dads name for them.
“They have always been there”, to which the boy would furiously crinkle his eyes and nose in all matters searching for his own thinking lines in the mirror.
His dad failed to contain his smile while lathering his face with the snowy bristles he would knock around inside an old mug filled with a bar of soap.
A sound the boy found to be incredibly pleasing.
“Don’t worry son, yours are in there. It just takes time”, he assured him.
His dad shaved every day even though most men in the Valley took to beards easily. His dad understood. One fewer task.
But his dad stayed true to some other life he wasn’t prepared to fully leave behind. He kept a handful of rituals as a reminder of something. Another time before now.
After the Reckoning, but before people started calling it that, the boy with sleep in his eyes had watched his dad through his bedroom window put his crisp blue uniform, the one he kept in the cloudy plastic bag in the back of the closet, into the burn barrel. Colorful ribbons and all.
His dad was sitting in the old wicker chair. The one that was always grey from the constant onslaught of wet air off the Pacific. He had his head in his hands.
The trees behind him were dancing in the light of the flames, throwing shadows into a moving chaos. Celebrating. Or mocking. The boy was uneasy.
His dad didn’t talk much about his life before the Valley. So of course that made it even more interesting to the boy. But he knew at that moment that his dad carried a deep sorrow for what he put in that barrel.
So, whenever his urge to pry was piqued, it was quickly quenched by that image of his dad by that fire. The flames darting up like a basket of serpents in their death throes.
A lot of men who came to the valley carried that sorrow with them. Nobody bothered to make a name for it. There was simply too much to do.
