Again, the peg was there.
He slept with it, it never left him.
Some mornings, after lying on it through the night, he examined his leg in the bathroom—like a drawing, stenciled to his thigh. Sometimes he wished he would come to him in the dark, and reef him, awake, from his bed. If only our dad would have hauled him through the house, out the back; he wouldn’t care if he was only in underpants, with the peg tucked in at the elastic.
Maybe then he could be just a kid again.
He could be skinny arms and boyish legs; he’d hit the clothesline pole so hard. His body would catch the handle. The metal in his ribs. He’d look up and inside those lines up there—the silent ranks of pegs. The darkness wouldn’t matter; he’d see only shape and color. For hours he could let it happen, beaten gladly through till morning, when the pegs could eclipse the city—till they took on the sun, and won.
But that was exactly the thing.
Our father never came and took him like that.
There was nothing but the measure of increments.
Michael Dunbar was soon to leave us.
But first he left us alone.
* * *
—
By the end it was almost six months to the day since her death:
Autumn was winter, then spring, and he left us barely saying anything.
It was a Saturday.
It was in that
crossover between very late, and very early.
We still had the triple bunk at that stage, and Clay was asleep in the middle. Around quarter to four, he awoke. He saw him beside the bedsides; he spoke to the shirt and torso.
“Dad?”
“Go back to sleep.”
The moon was in the curtains. The man stood motionless, and Clay knew, he closed his eyes, he did what he was told, but talked on. “You’re leaving, Dad, aren’t you?”
“Be quiet.”
For the first time in months, he touched him.
Our father leaned in and touched him, both hands—and they were hangman’s hands, sure enough—on his head and over his back. They were powdery and hard. Warm but worn-out. Loving but cruel, and loveless.
For a long time, he stayed, but when Clay opened his eyes again, he was gone; the job was officially done. Somehow he still felt the hands, though, who had held and touched his head.
There were five of us in that house then.
We dreamed in our rooms and slept.
We were boys but also miraculous:
We lay there, living and breathing—
For that was the night he’d killed us.