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Show We don't know, he rushes now, we were out there, and the pigs were giving us trouble, and the vaccine wouldn 't open, Bill tried it, and Jerry wasn 't around, and Bill tried again, and then the black pig broke the corral, or at least tried to, and when we got that fixed, we couldn't find them. We looked but.... Find them, he says, and the matter is closed, like a barn door, the only sound heard at the table is the shriek of kernels torn from the cob. Which is how, in the waning hours of daylight, my father and brother find themselves scouring the reaches of the farm looking in vain for syringes they know lie broken and buried not twenty feet from the dinner table. When my father tells this story he always adds this coda: I looked so longand so hard for those syringes that I began to believe they were only lost, not broken, that somehow, if I looked long enough, I would find them, intact, nestled alongside one another, misplaced in a moment of inattention rather than destroyed by negligence. At some point in the night, he no longer knew what the truth was, so great was the need not to make a mistake. Plungers and shards, hurriedly buried in the bushes close to the house, and a boy who no longer remembers what happened. This, then, is how I will begin. Apt, I suppose, to begin the story of the discarded with glass buried in rich topsoil never to become syringes. But that was not my intention when I started. Instead I wanted a story about the pressure my father experienced as a very young boy to be perfect. Such a tale makes him vulnerable and helps me understand why, years down the road, he will expect the same, perfection that is, from his daughter. Again, I find the past that I need. Only later do I 13 |
