Joshua Hren
Horseradish

<< continued from Part 1

While he stared at the burning bush, the porch creaked a little with his slunk, contemplative weight until, tossing some caught rainwater and putting out the fire, he stood there like a pugilist luring me to other purpled memories, better things to fight for. (He and I used to box bare-fisted in the basement, unseen by Mati, though she saw the undeniable bruises later during my nighttime baths. And then they'd fight, mom and dad, throwing whistling whispers like punches across their cramped bedroom as I strained to hear through the wall what they said. As though in inversion of the natural order, he stopped boxing me when I turned thirteen.) I understood his aversion, his tactic of letting me rattle on and on until I got tired of his duck and weave when I wanted to really talk (which is to say, when I wanted, and believe me when I say this, I really wanted to fight). After all, half the time we had talked in the last ten years I had ended up raising my voice and hands and throwing big heapfuls of my college-cooked thoughts about how the world works, dousing them around the house with surefire abandon. And once, when we sat there in silence, unable to dredge up a single non-controversial sentence but fully capable of chewing and relishing the klobasa, I threw some salt and pepper shakers, the strangely unbreakable ceramic ones he'd thrown at the TV when I was three. All of this, also, while my little brother did his homework at the kitchen table. He was away this weekend, my little brother. Some kind of boyscout-facsimile called the Troops of St. George. ( They slay dragons, I said to myself, concocting my spiel with utter cleverness, preening my superior hipness, all to spare old dad a few barbs, so filled I am with goodwill, and tie altar boy cinctures instead of learning how to put out regular fires and tying regular-old knots.) The wit was not working as I watched the last thin plumes of the now drenched bush conjoin mid-air and bloom into a terrifying, several-headed angel who headed heavenward without pausing to explain.

"Shit dad. Tell me. Why'd you stop? Why didn't you paddle me once or twice, keep me tame. Show me. Really show me." Halfway through my sentence I spotted the comet coming over our roof. It descended, as far as my eyes could see, into our garden, this stray cat of the cosmos, except for a flicked-off pebble of it, which dropped down our chimney, and I took some small comfort in knowing how warm the house would be whenever we would manage to head back in. But there was no comfort in what came next.

The branches of the burning horseradish bush parted like fingers and caught the comet, couching its reckless, chaotic thrust, and crushed it into harmless and heatless elementary particles that fell like a crushed clod of soil from a Babica's gardening hand. The bush stopped burning. And then it lit again, an orb of mandarin orange around an eye of lapis lazuli, though the blow had shaken the nails of fresh horseradish from its fingery branches and they lay there in the glow of the neighbor's security light, which the whole ordeal had set off.

There was no way dad can dodge this one, I said to myself. And then he, stretching his lower back, he said, "I should really get another can of All-White exterior," picking at the exposed parts of the porch, where the glossed white gave way to rotted brown wood. Beautiful wood, really, after a little sanding. "This is some good wood," he went on. "If we were to take the power sander to it. Nah. If we were to take a half a Saturday. Anyway, Blaise, it'd be some work, but not a lot. Not too much. Not more than we've been capable of in the past. And worth it," he said, smiling, his yellow incisors jutting out in all their glorious crookedness. "This house will be yours, you know. You'll get the gift of an unpaid mortgage too."

But what he was asking for wasn't the porch. That was easy enough to see. More like time, maybe, or, proud as it sounds, what he wanted was me. I wanted desperately to help him, to offer my body entirely, like Isaac under Abraham's knife. I wanted to move back into my old room, which glowed with the last gasp aftermath of the comet crumb that had come into our house. Home. My wife and I were on stilts far less sturdy than those my father and I stood on. I had thrown our salt and pepper shaker and shattered the built-in stained glass that had been there since the house had, and, I wondered in light of her sputtering spite, her "I despise you" repeated three times, maybe even before the house. I could see the stained window, dangling there in transcendent weightlessness, waiting for the house to be built around it, gathering light and giving off superfluous beauty. Beer bottle brown and sunflower yellow pieced into a roaring, sharp-angled star, or a comet, you could say. Or, as Babica had once observed, "The center of the kozmos, that thing. Spektakularno, Blaise, can't you see you thick-head? You don't even know. To have that kind of beauty in the middle of your house. A cruciform star-don't you see?"

"Mom's not doing any better?" I asked.

"She spent her whole life waiting on these people without memories, with amnesias and dementias and that. How long? Since you were two, so, thirty-five years. And now she's. Well. What. It's like, what, I'm not superstitious but it's like if she caught what they had. At sixty-one. That's far too young to forget who you are," he said, "It never happened to the old in our old neighborhood. We should have stayed there I say." And he stood on his toes, trying, I suspected, to scout out the high rise hospital she had been frequenting, as patient rather than nurse, of late.

The bush, still bloomed, had stopped burning. Or never had. (Though, once again I asked myself, how else to explain? I'd done one does of psilocybin mushrooms but that was ten years ago. No. Not that. No.) Or, as with a younger sibling who plants himself before you, insisting upon a staring contest, you just pretend he's not there for fifteen minutes and he disappears, and you get on with your nice afternoon of doing nothing at all.

Dad looked at me and I let him. I did not avert his eyes, did not turn toward some suddenly- discovered, hackneyed novelty to the left or to the right. Nor did I scramble backwards and paw away at the earthy obfuscations surrounding some dragging, melancholy memory. I looked at him and he let me. He did not avert his eyes, turn toward some suddenly discovered, hackneyed novelty to the left or to the right. Nor did he scramble backwards and paw away at the earthy obfuscations surrounding some silly, sallied memory.

"Why I did not kick the crap out of you," he said, rushing his palms up and down his arms, his forearm hair thicker than ever. But relaxed, quitting all comet-watching pretenses. "You ask. You like to ask questions," he said, matter of fact, not breathy, without the burden I first read into it. "I should ask you what you did to deserve the outing you got. Why you're here, out of nowhere, wanting to sleep in your old bed like a little baby. Strange, Blaise. You always are a strange soul. But I let you in the house. I did not kick you out. Even though you came here without your wife. Without Sophia. But I didn't ask you where your wife is. I just did what I do these nights, none of you kids coming round here anymore. Watched TV and let you be." (After he broke the family TV with salt and pepper shakers, the replacement was not forthcoming, not for many years. Over a decade, during which his sole comfort, which he made us kept our lips sewn concerning, was the scalding hot baths mom made for him in the evenings, especially hot when he was in late, slaving half-happily, half-wearily over an important client's car. Mom steeped seven tea bags in the baths, lavender and chamomile, and this is what we were to never tell, the sweet yellow flower smell sneaking under the bathroom door and into our little noses as we lay in wait for him to wrestle with us, his hands still reeking of that irremovable grease that still when I catch a whiff has a sweetness more metaphysical than secret baths of boiled and buoyant lavender. Still I have some of the spent teabags I snagged from the trash, buried in some drawer of nonsensical nostalgia.)
"I'll tell you," I said, as though tossing down a few poker chips. "If you'll tell me why. Why you did not beat the crap out of me for all the bullshit I pulled. Namely for escaping by the very porch you taught me how to build. Why dad?"

"I may just beat you yet," he said, simmering a smile across his face. And then he crouched down, squatted really, his burly back against the now-shaky two-by-fours keeping us from falling overboard. "When I was ten," he said, "my dad left our house," he said. He had never said this before, even if I had figured it, sketched it roughly, siphoned it from tipsy Babica when she had just one glass of wine. "He left our family . Left Babica. Left Mati. Me, my brothers and sisters."

I started to squat too, but, losing balance, I fell on my legs and stayed there, letting them twist and hurt. Knowing not to move, like an animal playing dead. " Dad ," I proclaimed, said it as though it were my last breath.

"Up until then," he said, "maybe four maybe six maybe seven nights a week my brother Damjan and me we would wake up-our room being closest to mom and dad's-and rush in. This was at maybe two or three in the morning. And pull my dad off her. Two kids. Can you imagine it? The other four slept through it. Used to the loud trains passing in the night I don't know. He would have her wrapped in the sheets and blankets, wrapped up tight, his hand over her mouth. Her curlers still in. His hand over her mouth! But we could hear her," he said, and he could see her, now, salmon-colored curlers choked by tightening sheets, she seeming the monster not the one on top of her, hammering into her his hundred little agonies. "Half the time half naked too, but we had no idea what he was doing, his pink rear in the air. Vsemogocni Bog. God. "

And I heard, five miles away in the heart of the city, in the houses of the Slovenian Ghetto, half of them hunkered-in by newly-arrived Mexicans, the winter wind whip in and slam a thousand closet doors closed, the jams busting off like buttons on a fat man's suit. Grandmothers woke without knowing why and kneeled before Guadalupe, lighting pink candles and praying for the repose of their dead and all who come here coiled with mortality.

The neighbor's garage door grinded open and I watched my father listen to the gears, wheels, pulleys squealing, watched him think how foolish they were for not taking ten minutes to oil the damn thing. Watched him check his weekend schedule for an open slot, for an hour during which he would come over there with a joke and a bag from the hardware store and fix their problems.

"He never laid a hand on us," he went on, his voice without saliva, rasping, every other word coming out with a high pitch. "But. But I wish he would have."

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

>> back to Issue 22, 2019