The Outlaw Album: Stories

            Father’s breathing could be heard beyond the fence line, up the road, the hoarse snatching after breath, rattling inhalations. He was raw beneath the robe, his skin ashen and his blood thinned by medications. The broken spots on his ankles and hips quickly turned blue and leaky. He held on to the oxygen tube with one hand, holding it still and inhaling, as if there might be a trapped bubble of pure oxygen his lungs could burst and pull through in shreds. Fogged eyeglasses hung from a cord around his neck, and his glum white private hair and forlorn flopping parts were open to the cold. He lay there weak as a babe, but a babe who’d already snuck a drink this morning, scotch, and chased it with a forbidden cigarette.

            Across the mud and downslope he spotted Harky and his fog of hair scuttling from the field at the far end, plunging over the wire fence and into the thicket. Six foot two of man, with a jostling cloud riding his back and a blackened baseball bat in one hand.

            Father rose to his knees, gasping, then stood and wobbled his way back to the road, legs too limber for firm strides, blood from his broken spots making lazy trails down his skin. Our father, the joking drunk who was so bitter when sober, shuffled past the edge of the fallow field, toward the big hunkered old house of glowering white that had been the home of our mother’s family for three generations before recent inheritance delivered it down to us Dewlins. Mother waited near the door, pacing between the four-sided pillars on the veranda where she’d played jacks as a girl, hopscotch, her eyes glistening and rounded with anger. Her hair was a carefully selected chestnut hue, girlishly long and casually brushed, and she wore a winter coat belted over her bed clothes. She watched our father limp to the house and did not reach out to help him until he climbed the steps. They both paused on the veranda and looked across the road, toward the flames dancing on the shiny new log cottage of the only close neighbor, a man named Gordon Mather Adams, a retired schoolteacher of some sort, a man I’d never spoken to, busy beside his eastern wall with a yellow garden hose and a panicked air, the excess water running from the flames down the slope of winter grass toward the river behind his house.

            They stared for a few minutes, then she said, “I should’ve called in the fire, but…”

            Father opened the door, crossed the threshold, and stepped onto the rug. He was bleeding from blue places, bleeding down his ankles, over that knob of bone, onto the large and intricate heirloom rug mother’s people had always spread just inside the door, drop after drop.

            Harky had waited for the holidays to fashion a torch and commit his spectacular act of penance, waited for me to be in the house, on the scene, his witness. Over the fence he’d gone, that fog bouncing about his head, into the forest, and I did not chase hard, did not even hurry, but let him spend his energy fleeing for a while. The trees stood towering gray and numb over us both, shorn of green uplift, the bark bared to the heavy sky and chapping wind. I suspect some stark limbs attempted to point Harky toward escape, others to wag in admonishment, blaming him for palming his pills and drinking whisky again. He hopped onto rocks in the creek to cross the stream, missed only one, and pushed up the slope with his left boot splashed and a sock growing soggy, choosing not to realize how the near future would treat a wet sock on a freezing day. The limb he’d trust most gestured this way, onto the animal path that curled around the hill in a spiral rising to the crest. He knocked aside branches and winter brambles with the baseball bat, and his feet crunched across wastes of leaves and twigs.

            Harky is running toward places that aren’t there anymore. That limb aimed him in the direction of the vanished cabin our mother’s family first squatted in after they’d followed game trails west from Kentucky to claim these acres. He knows the general whereabouts of the old hearthstone, but the four walls have fallen and become mulch, and the yard is grown over with woods, blended again with the forest. One tree, many trees, where did the cabin sit? The rocks of the chimney were taken down and carted to the next house the Humphrieses built—high, wide, and white, across the creek on richer ground. In spring warmth the original spot might be found by looking for brighter colors paraded amidst the bland grasses: irises, daffodils, columbine. Great-great-great-grandma with the first name blown from her headstone and lost for good was quick to put down flowers near the house, dollops of cultivation in the yard that meant we live here now, inside this wilderness, and those common perennials are the only remains of a family place abandoned.