Joshua Hren
Horseradish

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? — T.S. Eliot, “Gerontion”

Earlier this evening, when cold-blooded clouds still walled off the sky, my dad and I leaned against the uneven railing of our second floor porch, the one we built together way back. The one that balances on two rickety legs like a low-budget circus act on stilts. Or, that's how he puts it, never a grudge or rib-nudge reminding that it was my own unsteady hands made the thing come out rickety. His hot whispers, punctuated by "Money!" and "God help us all," sent spittle against the wall as he cranked at the old bolt, unlocking and opening the inside door that led to the porch. I sprained my back helping him peel away the gray tape that covered the cracks around the frame to keep the heating bill down.

We had been watching talking heads interpret reality and argue interminably, taking turns kicking the floor to tip the antennae, shift the picture into focus, when the weatherman told us to get outside and see the comet. I suggested the porch and my father, down-to-earth as he is, said, "What's the big deal; its a comet. Twenty some feet aren't going to matter an inch."

But, half an hour later, there we were, our bodies closer than they had been in years, herded together by the chipped boards he and I had measured and sawed and covered in several coats of a standard white some twenty years earlier.

When the overcast, cowing clouds continued to mosey in their near-motionless graze across the sky, when dad's cocked gaze set off the swell of muscle and nerve that writhed in his neck, when the comet didn't come, or, if it came, it did so secretly or beyond what our perched eyes could see, he started jumping up and down in place. I was onto him. He had left his greasy gray sweatshirt on the living room floor, where it kept warm the cancerous laminate.

(Actually, not metaphorically cancerous along the lines of an eye sore, as the floor in fact possessed all the grainy beauties of genuine wood and dad, who was keeping it while awaiting the verdict of a class-action lawsuit involving a Dutch lumber company based in China, brought the toxic faux floor up regularly, mostly as a joke along the lines of "Watch where you step we're all gonna die!" but once, while I tiptoed to the edge of one of these punitive planks like a condemned man he fumbled through the tangle of poorly-molded plastic rosaries with glow-in-the-dark, flesh-colored Christs that mom picked up-each time bringing a new one-from the chapel and, finding his glasses, propped his weighty body up and said: "Well, we're so far in debt if I die by floor-boards is about the only way you'll have an inheritance").

Anyway. Anyway, dad was wearing only the same V-neck T-shirt he'd worn for decades, in the evenings, shedding as he did his formal work clothes as a falsely-accused prisoner puts off the old orange on the day of release, so that, it being November and not far from freezing, he could cut inside after a couple minutes, and I'd having nothing to say about that, it being incumbent upon humankind to pity the chilly.

So I stalled. I brought up one of those old sores that still burns but tickles too. I asked him if he remembered when he grounded me for dressing up like the Statue of Liberty and using my torch to light the crown on fire. I spoke of the memory as though it would have been natural for him to forget it, as though, in the heap of juvenile pranks and delinquent pleas for help, this one could have been misplaced or lost entirely. How, at six am the morning after my incarceration, doused in an expired, pasty pain cream that only made the burns worse, I drew upon the unfailing wisdom of those grim fairytales that Babica read me through her belly-laughs, tying my sheets together and then anchoring one end to the bed leg while I lowered myself out the window. More farcical fairytale than finesse, I fell another ten feet from where the sheet ran out, looking both ways through an awful flinch, amplifying the aspects of his portrait that made my father the wicked overseer, myself the young righteous in distress. Then I took off, picking up my work check at Maxwell's Meats (where each day after school I swept discarded animal fat into an incinerator and doused the floor with a mild bleach cleaner that smelled like the surgery floor of a hospital), and acquired other unpaid wages in the form of stealing enough packs of cigarettes for smoking and selling to underage kids outside of Casimir Pulaski Middle-School. How this means of income seemed so right, so bright, as though it'd carry me into retirement. And then I had enough bus fare to ride the whole routes all day, so winter did not force me to come shivering back home.

How dad happened to see me boarding that bus on the way home from work. It must have been two hours he followed the slow, screeching, capsule of my escape, waiting for me to get off. And then, after a speechless car ride home, the duration of incarceration increased without recourse to a defendant or even a plea deal.

"But," I said, still straining to see the comet, "No more sheet ropes for me! I had my friends bring a ladder and prop it to the edge of the old porch at the old house-you remember that porch, really rickety, way more ready-to-fall than this one. And there I went-off into the night. The first of some twenty times. D'you know, too, I'd be back at first light? You did, dad, didn't you? Knew it all," and here I pried my hands from my pockets and felt them fold clumsily together. "But did you know I did nothing but walk and walk and walk? No secret drug dens. You must have or you would've stopped me, right?"

Or was it, I now wondered for the first time, that he knew that I knew that he knew, and this alone was a heavy enough hand upon me.

"You just didn't want mom to die of tossing and turning not knowing where her child was. I need to know," I assured, almost aching over my artifice, "Soon enough Soph and I'll have a little one. Who'll turn into a big one. Soon enough we'll have our own runaway God help us. Why didn't you beat the crap out of me when I defied you? Why'd you unlock the door in the middle of the night? Why let me in without letting me in? Why all'd you did was make me refinish those chairs and table for Mrs. Wojtik, with a dash of silence for what, a whole awful month? I can still feel the sawdust between my fingers. The world in a grain of sand! And the lemon-lacquer. I loved that work. Good work. Should have kept doing it. Shouldn't have fled when I showed up at the carpentry apprenticeship conference without a toolbox. But no. I let that foreman's wizened, wise fat face scare me away. Wished I hadn't showered or something. Wished I had the lacquer on my hands still. See, I can do what you do, but I couldn't. Though I could've. And now what, another sham liberal arts BA doing work that a rat could if well-trained."

He looked at the floor as though little marbles from my mind had scattered there and were rolling in disparate directions. He looked at the porch door, which was left open slightly, hopefully, and, bereft of dissimulation, he extended his wiry-haired, fungal-toed, slipperless foot, and shoved it shut. "You remember when we were camping, the four of us, at Kettle Moraine? When was that? You remember?" he asked. "When we moved into this house. And you had your friends do your paper route but forgot to leave them the carrier-bags-those dirty ones you never cleaned, you crazy kid? They brought that same ladder out and lifted it up to the porch. And by the time they came out with the bags some half hour later . . . I still don't know where in the high heck you stored those things to make it so hard on them . . . the cops were there, waking the neighborhood at six am on a Sunday morning. How a boy from the Slovenian Ghetto ever ended up in a neighborhood like this, where three squads come for horseplay, don't ask," he said.

(The "Slovenian Ghetto," by the way, was no solicitation of sympathy. It was the paradise he'd lost, the measure of everything that came after, which meant that all hours spent beyond it were fraught with profane disappointment. The Slovenian Ghetto was a point of pride. He lifted it regularly, daily even, like a wide flag, careful never to let its edges touch the tainted, fully-fertilized suburban grass. In his mind he still was there. In his mind neighborhoods still mattered, and being without one, being, say, in the homogenous safety of a sprawl, was something near anathema.)

Dad dipped inside, reappearing in a half-minute, sweatshirted and holding the basket that Babica had made, weaved of dried palms in her last days. Setting it on the tilting TV tray that had been banished to porch corner, he reached into the egg-round basket and pulled out a shriveled horseradish root, holding it high, looming it over me with his right hand so help him God as he took my right hand in his left. I looked at his laughless lips. "You want me to give you the wounds of Jezus Kristus or what ? " he asked, stabbing the horseradish into my peeled-open palm. "Still it would be not enough," he said, " It would be enough to cover all you did to us, to your Mati especially when you were young. (You are still young, Blaise, still.) It would be enough but you would not be enough," he said, shaking his head like a newly-widowed inebriated spouse unable to apologize for all the things left unsaid.

Then, cupping against the wind, he started the root on fire with an aged, rusty Zippo that still shot blue-orange, shot it in an incandescent arc into the little fenced garden that mom and Babica had dug and tended for ten years until last. Ten years it yielded half our family's sustenance. The horseradish nailed into the hard November soil, between the metal tomato cages and the little lifeless chicken cage that I'd failed to come and tend in spite of what I promised Babica as she pelted me with stoic pleadings from her deathbed. Immediately the fiery root snuffed out, hidden behind the smoke until it bloomed into a burning bush of bitter herbs, dangling nails of horseradish ready for Babica's harvesting hands, ready to be minced and mixed with vinegar and eggs, all to be eaten solemnly during Holy Week, a little each day, each day a little taste of His pain as the mixture of Slovenian suffering lit up your nostrils and eyes, agonizing your whole mind with its pungent fire, reminding you of the Passion, cleansing sinus cavities of professing and doubting souls alike until Easter brings one relief: no more need to eat the horseradish but now dunking them, drowning in the omnipotent spirits of dandelion wine and then hanging them out to dry for little feasts of penance peppered throughout the coming year. But Babica was dead and mom was sick and so who would do the harvesting, who the preparations, who the penances that seemed to me so archaic, arching as it did painfully backward to the Passover Seder-the five bitter herbs chewed in silence while some patriarch read the Haggadah? As though the Angel of Death hovered atop the copper lestenec that dedek made in in the old country with his own fat and fireproof hands. As though they brought their devils with them, and their Savior too. As though they could smuggle such superstitions and expect them to take root in the New World.

But there it was, the bush, burning regardless, giving off the heaviest heat I'd ever felt, a kind that invites you into a sleep that will drowse away all of your hungover aches.

>> click to read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

>> back to Issue 22, 2019