Finding Father II

A Memory of Rabbits

 

The day my father killed the rabbits was humid. Wet. Uncomfortable.

My parents are ritualistic in their waking. My mother sounds her arrival to the house deliberately, shouting to the animals, making mom-smells in the kitchen. But dad is softer. He paces. Opens doors, then closes them, and opens them again, searching for hypothetical intruders in the garden.

The sound of my parents talking in the early morning makes me feel home.

My father mumbled to my mother, made something clang as he moved, and moved outside. I watched him from my bedroom window, silent in the purple light of dawn. His eyes were tired. I remember turning away, terrified that, for the first time, my protector-dad may be afraid of something.

Mom was smoking in the kitchen. My pyjamas had grown moist in the heat of sleep, and my hair wormed its way across my childchubby cheek. She pursed her lips and clicked her tongue at me, trying to better my appearance. Then she ordered me to carry breakfast cereals through to the table.

We were put to work all morning. My brother, sister and I stole concerned glances to each other, each acknowledging, but misunderstanding the tension in our home.
We wanted to know why all the curtains were drawn. We wanted to play with our rabbits.

Finally, as the last surface had been polished and the sausages put out for eating, my father entered the house. He was carrying a shovel. His brow was sandy, crusted by sweat. He nodded to my mother and left the room.
She said they loved us, but the rabbits were sick. They had to go.

 

Henry

While our mothers were taking tea beneath the oak trees overlooking the cricket pitch, we, that being my gang and I, would wait, pout-faced and aggressive, below the iron grate of Henry’s tuck shop window with our pocket money savings thrust out to stuff our mouths with niggerballs and cold Sparletta. Henry regarded us with disdain. Dressed up in our smocked-gingham-tulle-billowing party outfits, made and forced on us by mothers devoted to the fashions of Your Family magazines, we would glower at him as our mouths blackened around the edges in our sweet-sucking frenzy. His hands moved between sweet rack and cash tin, to the Niknaks and back again, and Henry would deliver his lecture on “the problem with little girls.” Knowing that to endure his preaching meant access to sweets, we tugged on our hemlines to mask our grazed knees and muddied sandals and grimaced through his contempt for our behaviour. Eventually, with the first team matches over, our mothers dragged our older brothers toward home to clean the grass stains off their pants. We followed, scooting our neon BMX bicycles away from Henry as he roared behind us, noticing the Chelsea bun which we had conspired to steal. We spotted Henry on the beachfront once, teaching his son to fish for shad on the shoreline, golf peak pulled low over his eyes so he would not be distracted by the pigeons and joggers and setting day around him. I cried as he spoke with my parents. The day had grown too long for a seven-year-old loaded with ice cream and a real-life meeting with Harry, my oversized dog hero from Harry’s House, the programme that introduced me to traffic rules and respect for my elders. Henry handed me a niggerball and wagged a finger in my face. It was in the years long after trips to the tuck shop, when I understood what it meant for a little white girl to demand a niggerball from an Indian man, that we learnt of Henry’s death. My brother, sister and I were taken to Henry’s home and as my father spoke with his brothers on the lawn, we were silenced by women who smothered us in their reams of sari material and fleshy arms and lashings of lavender oil. They shovelled food into us and fussed over my sister’s natural curl and green eyes. I recall sitting on a car tyre cut into a swing, mouth loaded with breyani and cream soda, as I watched my mother hold onto Henry’s wife while she wept over his coffin in the centre of their sitting room.

Finding Father I: Scottburgh

 

Seaside towns hold secrets. Something in my father changes as we approach Scottburgh. He speaks softly, with less authority than in our home. He is moving into his past. To his boyhood. He is searching his memories, and, it seems, leaving us behind. He is looking for his own father.

The gates to the Scottburgh cemetery have rusted over. There is no area to park our car, so we leave it straddling the roadside and grass verge. People visit their dead on foot here.

Dad unlatches the gate and ushers us in. We are afraid to break the silence, not wanting to offend those resting. We are the only visitors.

His father rests in a lot under the family name with his wife, as requested. They lie proud but not showy. No porcelain statues, no angels or banners to intimidate. Simply their names. Tasteful. Modest enough to know that memory is marked by the mind and experience.

We walk to his childhood home. It has been destroyed and rebuilt and he describes the original structure for us. Over here is where he and his cousin were put to work as punishment for stealing mangoes from the neighbour’s tree. Here where he was made to smoke an entire box of cigarettes, and then promise he’d never do it again. Here, where he broke his arm by falling over the verandah railing, practising his Elvis impersonation for the town’s Christmas pageant.

Here his mother sat by the record player and cried, listening to Billie Holiday on the day of my grandfather’s death, until they made the music stop and put her to sleep.

Here he hid bottles from her as she drank more and more in the weeks that followed the death.

It is time to leave. My sister complains about the heat. Mom wants to get home to the dogs. My father stands in his seaside town. His eyes narrow. He turns away and takes a breath. Then he returns his focus to us, with a smile. I smile back and wish I did not understand him as much as I do right now.