We'd spent that late-70's summer like all the other 7 year-olds in my small southwestern Pennsylvania town: as executioners to ants and curl bugs living beneath backyard rocks; as apple tree astronauts surveying the Blue Ridge Mountains for invading Russians; or at the pool. When we weren't killing insects with our magnifying glass death ray or defending Western Pennsylvania land interests from Reds, we hid in my family's lilac bush, eavesdropping on the world of my father and His Men. Our knees bathed in dirt, our legs cut by sticks, we were surrounded by their cigarette butts and broken beer bottles, listening to and watching the tattered leaf and lilac patterns of the deck men standing so high above us.
"Way I see it, Sam," the fat man said to my father, "there had ta've been a nigger in the woodpile somewhere. Only way I can see."
"That or that Gabe Woods boy's rubbed off on 'im," the man in plaid added.
"Literally," agreed the fat man.
My father Sam's pudgy lips tightened. He leaned further forward on the railing and then, staring straight out ahead of him, he spoke, as if to the land itself, the way men do. "Must a been," my father said spitting a glob of chew onto the brown, August grass. "Then again, there's prob'ly a nigger in most wood piles if you dig down far enough."
"Prob'ly," the plaid man said, "but that son of yours has the kinkiest damned hair I ever seen on a white boy."
A glob of my father's tobacco flew from his mouth and landed on my leg like one of the kamikaze war planes on my bedroom posters. The wet, grainy saliva sidled down the crease behind my knee. That Gabriel Woods boy who'd rubbed off on me looked at me from his co-pilot post inside the lilac. I raised my finger to my lips. Then, slowly, stealthily, and being sure not to shake a single branch, I wiped the glob from my hairless leg and prayed to Jesus that my father hadn't detected us — or that if he had, he'd permit his tobacco juice to serve as a Fat-Man/Little-Boy message from afar and not bother to attack us like a frontline foot soldier.
"Get out of my yard, you god-damned nigger!" he suddenly yelled. "Or I'm gonna get my gun!"
Gabriel Woods, my nigger best friend, slowly crawled from the lilac bush. He walked in confused terror toward his house next door, moving tentatively at first but then breaking into a frantic, terrified run as he screamed at the top of his lungs for his mother.
I darted close behind him like a frantic animal running from a drunken and enraged hunter—hoping to run away to his family, hoping to remain there long enough for my father to forget my espionage and treason, hoping against hopes that my mother's spirit might come from the lilac bush like some blue fairy fairy godmother and save me. But after two steps, warm wetness spread down my legs and flooded my shoes, and I could not move.
My father hoisted me into the air by a single, seven year-old arm and then broke off what I knew without looking to be the thickest, longest lilac branch removable without a saw; he did not stop to shuck the budding flowers and leaves but dragged me into the pantry, where there were no windows, where darkness was barely held at bay by the weak insistence of a hanging, 25-watt bulb.
The deck boards outside wailed beneath the wide weight of my father's men. "Don't leave!" he called to them in his normal voice. "I'll just be a minute." And then, with the branch we'd ripped from the lilac planted in my mother's memory:
One. Two. Three. Four…Seven…Twelve. Thirteen.
"Tell me," he said in his most quiet, most frightening voice. Fourteen. Fifteen. "Tell me—right now—that you won't play with that Woods boy anymore!"
Yes Sir.
Sixteen.
"Promise me!"
Seventeen.
Yes Sir.
"Yeth thir," he said imitating my thin, unchanged voice, the lisp I'd had since my two front teeth had come out the year before. Eighteen. "You always say, ‘Yeth thir.' And then the next day I see you with 'im again. Now no more!" NINETEEN. TWENTY. "Say it!" Twenty-one.
Yes Sir.
"Damn you!" he screamed. TWENTY-TWO! "I'm gonna keep lickin' you Michael Stalling ‘til the kink in your hair goes straight!"
TWENTY-THREE. TWENTY-FOUR. TWENTY-FIVE.
On the filthy pantry walls, the falling whistle shadow of a large lilac branch severed abstract crayon and marker drawings created by a young, forgotten boy as his father Sam's cigarette smoke snaked in the weak overhead light. Twenty-six. Ash fell from Sam's mouth and hit the dirty, thin, blue carpet. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Outside, the floor boards cried again with His Men's stealthy, retreating footsteps. Thirty.
"Don't." Thirty-one "Leave," he said to them again.
Thirty-two…thirty-thr…
My Father, Sam as His Men called him, tossed me to the floor like a twice-read newspaper and rejoined his friends in the afternoon sun.
Lying motionless with soiled pants on the thin blue carpet strewn with cigarette ash, I listened to the thrashed lilac buds shriek beneath my father's shoes. I heard the back door slam accusatorily behind him. At his repeated urging, the men climbed back up the stairs and laughed their uncomfortable, manly laughter, while I lay quietly in the dimly-lit pantry. And outside, the lilac bush grew: cigarettes for soil; spit, beer and piss for water.