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Show Red, drown the cats. My father tells another story from his teens-years of carrying the pet pig and gutted boots already behind him~involving another boy, and two cars, maybe some alcohol, and a fight that like most fights had a complicated history. At one point my father leapt from the car he had been driving, ran back to the boy in the other car, and drew his knife on him, held it, I suppose, to his neck, was ready to cut that boy's body open, kill that boy, that kitten, that pig, or wound him in a way he would never forget. Others in the car stopped my father, threw my father to the pavement and pried the blade from his hand, preventing an act that would have changed the course of his life. For me, the most scary part of the story is that my father does not remember any of it. Thsjage that took^hold^f him was so strong it caused him to blackout, a wave coming from inside and flooding consciousness. He does not remember trying to drive a knife into someone's throat. He held kittens under the water until they died. The same hands that rocked me to sleep as a baby ^know the feglof a skull when it gives. And this breaks my heart. What will happen down the road, years from now and miles away from the Plains, grows from the moments his father asked him, for whatever reason-a farm duty, a man's duty, because his father had asked the same of him-to commit acts of violence. If I knew more, I could maybe r 1 ' develop some compassiomfor my father's father, a man who spoke with his hands, a man who was sold as an apprentice to a maverick oil company at twelve, took a train from Kentucky to Texas and learned to work on oil wells as a welder even before his voice 23 |
