“I want to fight too.”
“You’re too little.”
“No! Let me fight.”
“Okay. Maybe. You just wait inside. Maybe you can help me.”
“You promise?”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling at me. “All right. I’ll probably need your help.”
I sat on the couch as he paced the small living room, stopping only to draw back the curtain and look out at the gravel driveway and the unlit road to the ferry landing. The man who was coming had worked for him and wanted money he didn’t deserve. My father had told me stories about fighting. He made it sound fun, and I was desperate to hit the man too.
“He’ll be here soon,” my father said and prowled back and forth, hunched like an angry dog. His rage burned into the air so that I breathed and tasted it.
But then I was opening my eyes, lifting my face from the cushion, rubbing my cheek.
My father had just come in the door, red gouges on the skin around his eyes, the collar of his shirt torn. He picked up the telephone’s black receiver. Blood covered his knuckles.
“He’s knocked out,” he told my mother. “I knocked him out.”
“What happened?”
“She jumped on my back. His girlfriend—she tried to scratch my eyes.”
“She’s out there?”
“I broke her jaw. I didn’t mean to. She jumped on my back.”
My mother just stared.
“I wanted to fight,” I shouted and began to cry.
She hurried to the couch and lay me back against the pillow.
“Go to sleep,” she told me, her voice stern. There was a tension in her that I knew from my father’s rages.
“I didn’t mean to,” he kept saying. He was holding the phone, repeating, “I didn’t mean to.”
I understood that outside the man and his girlfriend lay on the dark gravel.
My father dialed and spoke into the phone, telling what had happened, that two people had come onto his property.
Then I was waking again. Red and blue lights flashed outside, rippling in the folds of the curtains. My father was putting on his jacket, the door opening, cold night air and the smell of the river washing into the room.
At some point in the days or weeks afterward, there’d been a visit to court, my brother and I neatly dressed, our mother not wearing jeans or farm clothes but a dark outfit. She was grim and silent, trying to keep us quiet, giving us the candy she usually forbade, rotting out our teeth and bones.
Maybe the police had come to the valley because my father had beaten someone up again. For months now, my mother had been withdrawn, my father—when he was home—like a watchdog in the seconds before it snarled. Shouting woke me at night—slammed doors, my mother crossing the house, naked but for a blanket wrapped around her, telling him to leave her alone.
At times the fights were obvious: he got angry when she cooked strange meals like boiled oranges and rice, or he told her to stop harping on him for having shared his vodka with me. He’d let me have a swig on a fishing trip, and, proud of how much I could handle, I’d sneaked more, the bottle lifted above my face, a shimmering bubble rising with each gulp. My brother called out to my father, who snatched it from my hand. I became drowsy and passed out, but at school I bragged that my father had let me get drunk. My mother became furious when she heard me say this, and my father later reminded me that drinking was one of our secrets. But lately everything was becoming a secret.
✴
WE WERE DRIVING to get the mail, the five of us, my father at the wheel, my mother holding my sister on her lap, my brother and I wedged in between.
Large, distant mountains stood at the horizon, the highest already white. A few rusty leaves clung to the roadside trees, and as we drove, sunlight broke in along the clouds, flashing over the hood of the truck.
The post office was a two-story building next to the muddy slough near the house where I was born, just outside the valley. A brass bell rang when we opened the door. The owner, a bespectacled man who lived up a set of creaky stairs, was reading the paper. He got up from his stool, pushed his glasses high on the bridge of his nose, and gazed at the wooden pigeonholes on the wall. He took down a sheaf of letters.
I followed my father back outside and down the steps. He stood in the sunlight as he tore the envelopes open. One held a flowery card. He stared into it. I’d never seen him get mail like this, and I stepped in close but still couldn’t make out the words.
“What is it?”
My mother laughed. “It’s from his other family.”
The skin of his neck flushed. He didn’t appear to breathe.
“What other family?” I asked. I had no idea what she meant and tried to see inside the card. But he didn’t respond, and she stared at the ground and sighed. “It was just a joke. I was just joking.”
He folded the card and put it in his jacket pocket, and we got in the truck.
Though we often received cards from my mother’s parents in Pittsburgh, he almost never spoke of his family in Quebec, other than to say, “My brother and me, we beat up all the kids in our village, so you and your brother should stick together.” And then he’d look a little angry, probably because of all the fights he’d been in.
The only time I thought about where he came from was at school, because I spoke French there
