Chapter 26 Samson
I wake up shivering.
Dad’s over by the fire removing ashes.
“Snore like a steam locomotive, you do.”
I stretch. Yawn. Climb out of bed.
“Like a freight train going through a tunnel.”
I smile.
“Nothing to grin about, boy. Am I grinning?”
“I’ve got a cold coming.”
“You’ll have something coming.”
He tips ashes into the box.
“Have you eaten breakfast, Dad?”
“Nothing in.”
“Nothing?”
He stands up straight, pushes his chest out.
“Do I look like your mother? You want something, you get it. And anyway, you got a Milky Way, I’ve seen it.”
“I’m saving it.”
He steps outside with the ashes, cursing under his breath.
I wash my face and brush my teeth. The bathroom is so cold I almost expect an icicle to be dangling from the showerhead.
“What you looking for?” he says.
“My boxers. Clean ones.”
He scratches his chin.
“Do we need to wash some clothes, Dad?”
He shrugs. “You need to stop snoring is what you need to do. How am I supposed to write anything decent with you sniffing all night?”
“I’ll use some Vicks.”
“If this book doesn’t turn out how I see it in my head it’ll do us no good, you understand? Your mother will be back and the book will have fallen to pieces, the noise you make.”
I pull on yesterday’s boxers.
“We’ll clean clothes tonight. Tomorrow, maybe. You’ll live. Bit of grime never hurt anybody.”
The milk is off so I have a glass of water.
An ache in my stomach.
I can feel my ribs in a way I never have before. Like, I can almost push my fingers around them.
“Go easy on that water, Samson. I don’t want to be filling the tank up every five minutes. Think about it, boy. Costs me fuel every time. Drink like a camel, you do, just like your mother.”
I open our pantry cupboard. “There’s nothing to take for lunch, Dad.”
She would have made sure we had something.
“You think this is a hotel?”
“I just wanted a sandwich or something.”
“Just wanted a sandwich or something. Me working overtime, writing at night while you’re in your pit dreaming. Just want a sandwich or something.”
I pull on my uniform. The shirt collar is yellow.
“Do you think Mom’s all right?”
“What?”
“I said do you think she’s getting better?”
“How do I know?”
I pull on my jacket and shoes. The laces are fraying.
“She’s getting better,” he says, softening, scratching his head. “Medicine’s kicking in. She’ll be back soon, you’ll see.”
“Before Christmas Eve?
He sniffs. “We’ll see.”
“Can you ask again if we can visit her?”
He nods and then he puts his hand down deep inside his jeans pocket. There are gray flecks of wood ash hovering on his arm hairs, held in place by static.
“Three bucks for your lunch. Breakfast, whatever you want. Now, go.”
I walk past the lichen-covered oak that marks the mooring spot where Mr. Turner died.
Every time I pass it I look up into the speckled canopy, at whatever sky is visible through the limbs, and I think about its roots drawing water and its bark protecting the sapwood, and about how the tree grows a new ring with every passing year.
The cycles of life and growth, and demise.
The manner in which trees like this one watch on silently.
They see us emerge, and grow old, and wither, and then they observe it happen all over again. Standing witness.
Math. English lit. British poets of the Great War.
The awful, delicate carnage of their words.
Dad talked about them one time. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.
“Dulce et Decorum Est.” Poetry forged like new elements in those filthy, freezing trenches.
Warfare so bogged down and hellish the men scribed verses to make sense of existence.
Make sense of the end of everything they thought they knew.
At lunch I go to chess club. I’m halfway through a game, winning, protecting my queen having taken my opponent’s, when the teacher is called away.
Minutes later three boys run in and drag me out by my jacket.
I kick and fight back but they lift me and cajole me and dump me out by trash cans behind the computer room.
I am acutely aware of time. Safety margins. There’s still fifteen minutes until the bell rings.
They can do a lot in fifteen minutes.
“Tell us,” one says.
I look from side to side in the hope that Paul Pricklett might walk past.
“Your mom’s in the nuthouse. She’s British, yeah? Scottish or some shit? Tell us. Is she mental, Noodles? Has she completely lost it?”
I shake my head.
“Liar,” says the tall one, grinning. “She’s locked in the psych ward, my aunt’s neighbor said. Your mom was hearing voices, boy. Fucking possessed or something. Demons. Your mom, Noodles, is batshit crazy.”
“No, she isn’t.”
“Oh,” says the blond one. “She isn’t, eh?
Then why is she locked up with the other mentals?
I went in there to sing carols once at elementary school.
‘Good King Wenceslas.’ One old guy pissed himself.
Pulled his pants down and stood there with his dick out.
Your mom’s in with them now, locked in with old men like him, you realize what that means? ”
“I’ve got to go.”
I start to walk away.
They block me.
“Your mom’s mad, Noodles, you got to accept it. She’ll be in there for years, little man. Next time you see her she won’t know who the fuck you are. She’ll look at you all vacant, spaced out, and she won’t even remember your name.”
They all laugh.
“She’ll be getting lots of attention, though, there’s that at least. All the filthy pillheads, the psychos, probably a group of ’em. Meth heads. You might get a crazy little brother out of it.”
“Shut up.”
They laugh again.
“Right now, Noodles. There’ll be half a dozen of them with her. All dribbling and screeching. Locked up real tight together. You can picture it, can’t you? I’m glad my mom isn’t crazy.”
It comes from deep down inside. Incandescent rage the likes of which I never knew I had.
I charge at him. I hold my hands tight around his neck and I push him to the ground and the other two start punching and kicking me, dragging me off, but I keep attacking.
Squeezing. Punching. Other boys chant fight but then everything blurs.
Elbows to my ribs. My jacket rips. Blood spurts from his busted lip.
Two teachers arrive and break us up. It is over in seconds.
The tall one has his shirt ripped open. We are sent, panting, to the principal’s office.
We each receive double detention, and we have to write essays about the history of the Federal Reserve. The principal didn’t listen to me. It was three against one and he never even listened.
On the bus everyone stares. Ripped jacket, the school badge on my breast pocket hanging down, my shirt collar scuffed, a hole on my knee. My blood is still boiling. And now I have to return home to him.
I step off the bus and a fine drizzle moves across the sky in waves.
A truck driver hits his horn warning me to walk on the shoulder and not on the road.
I ignore him.
The back of my neck is soaking wet, rain running down my face, hiding my tears, the wind gusting, trees rustling overhead.
Headlights bleed into the horizon.
I stagger toward the middle of the highway.
I stay there for a long time.
In the middle.
White lines.
Car horns, and one man shouts something unintelligible, his words stolen by the wind.
I wander farther across.
Into traffic.