Most nights I couldn’t understand how the cops never showed. Momma would howl how Pop was a useless son of a bitch. She was done, she’d holler, was moving back to Grammy’s. He’d settle himself at the table with a bottle and a book – he prided himself a well-read man – initially still speaking calm-like as if he was trying to pacify a kid. Eventually she might end up stalking the sidewalk, at which point he’d be on the porch yelling for her to stop showing her ass and get back inside. “If you stay out much longer,” he’d warn, maybe licking his lips as he warmed to the evening’s promised retributions should this squall not subside, “you’ll test my patience too far.” 

  “Listen to the big, brave man!” she’d wail to a street of tutting windows and shaking heads. “I wish he’d put food on the table half as well as he makes threats!” 

I kept to my room, balled up and shivering. Often starving too as all the cussing would have started even before we’d sat down for dinner. My mind would project images of lamb dinners, roast chicken, pork belly against the pock-marked ceiling, waiting for when they’d stop spitting barbs and start slamming at each other. There were evidences throughout our house where a fist, a shoulder, a skull or whatever blunt object was closest, bounced against a wall. Those marks didn’t fade unlike the bruises on Momma’s arms or face, and the landlord never passed comment, perhaps unable to say which damage was ours from the cartography of holes, cracks, stains, and mould left through time. He was only waiting for what the smart folks called ‘urban renewal’.

That final Thursday the sun beat down on man and beast from an azure, cloudless sky, drawing steam off the macadam and leaving the leather seats on the bus home close to scalding. The exhaust fumes left me choking on the sidewalk as it pulled away, not a single hand raised in farewell and only the cicadas’ trill to welcome me home. Pop was slouched at the kitchen table, slugging from a half-bottle of Jim Beam, lighting one Lucky off the other. His eyes were drilling into that spot on the mantel where their wedding photo sat propped that morning. Now, shards of glass lay scattered across the hearth along with the busted frame. The photo’s scraps were small enough for bird feed. He clasped a hand on my shoulder, his thumb and fingers clenching the skin either side of my school satchel straps. Whiskey burps wrinkled my nose.

“Your bitch of a mother’s finally run out on us.”

Not him, mind you. Run out on us. 

He pulled me close and tried a hug. I remember his jaw stubble scrapped the skin just below my hairline in a not so disagreeable way. The salted damp of his rumpled work shirt pressed against the t-shirt I’d already worn three days that week – Momma said all the clothes were coming out of the machine stained again. 

There’s more to a hug than the physical contact, I’ve been brought to understand. It needs feeling. But Pop never took to physical stuff. Momma once said being courted by Clayton Thomas was like being wooed by a computer program. He’d learned the movements by watching TV, skulking in bars, spying on couples at the movies, but he’d never gained an affinity, a feeling of how two bodies synchronized. She said the same synchronicity for hugging applied to fucking, excuse her French. I was obviously too young to imagine what that meant ‘til much later. “I’d fair warning,” she sighed, “but I was too young and too dumb. Your Grammy said if someone looked me over twice and still smiled, I should be thankful, seeing I was dirt poor and not blessed with your Aunt Ginny’s looks.”

“You’re pretty, Momma,” I said. My arms would ring her waist then, a little boy who beyond instinct knew as much about physical beauty as he does the difference between a white lie and a flat-out porker.  She’d respond by ruffling my hair before pressing her lips against my forehead. 

Which shows I reckon I knew what expressing love required. Pop would say he loved us in his half-attentive, half-automated tone. But it was like he was casting a line down Kavanaugh’s brook or changing a tow-truck tire down at Joe’s. Pop had life figured out: meet a girl, get hitched, get her knocked-up, and get old sitting at the kitchen table or rocking on the front porch. The verbal and physical abuse came extra, like the tints on a Silverado’s windows.  

He scrubbed his latest Lucky out on the tabletop, tottered to the bookshelf, and when he flopped back down, he had a volume about as thick as the stretch from thumb to forefinger. “There’s not much that can’t be learned from the Good Book or from Billy Shakespeare.” He flipped it open at random and started reading, one forefinger tracing the sentences. “In here somewhere is how I coax your mother home.”

I studied those scraps of photo on the floor, thinking I might try taping together her part. Then I went into the kitchen and foraged for something to stay the hunger cramps. There wasn’t even any luncheon meat left.

Telling him about the meat was the epiphany of it all. He took a drag from his cigarette. Fixed me with a look intimating he was verging on something. “Get some ice cubes and a knife. A good, sharp one.”

The bread knife was sharp. The carving one sharper. I carried both out on the ice tray like an altar boy. Pop examined the blades. “Which is the sharpest?” I pointed. He nodded. He placed the bread one at the edge of his reach and traced a finger along the carving one’s blade. Thinking back, I can’t figure whether my silence was ‘cos of fright or if I was just dumb to things. Adults had their own moods, looks, syntax, and grammar. Even as an adult, I can’t say much about why people do what they do. Their motivations are often a mystery as deep as the cosmos, the Book of Revelations, or calculus. 

“She says she’ll be back for you tomorrow, and I’m to have you washed and ready,” he said, easing the blade against his forefinger tip, testing the truth of my observation about the knife. “She’s gotten some damn fool notion into her head she can separate a boy from his father.” A trickle of red dribbled down towards his wrist, like he might have been holding a raspberry popsicle stick on a hot summer’s day. I freely admit my mouth was fair watering. “Get a mirror. And some paper towels.”

I rushed into the kitchen. Momma used towels that morning to wrap those last sandwiches. I wondered if she knew then she’d have left by the time I got home. I remember wondering why she never waited. I guess she was already set on her own life, her mind’s eye already on that other town and her new family. On those white picket fences, clean gutters, and ensuite bathrooms I saw only that one visit. 

I tore out the Christmas paper lining the cutlery drawer. Blood spatters already surrounded the flesh stretched out on the tabletop. Pink dribbles were running into the neck of his shirt. He raised the knife back to his earlobe, his breath hissing with the blade tearing, the flesh pale yet the blood pulsing. “You know there was a Dutch artist cut an ear off for a whore as a love token. Do you think your mother would be satisfied with that? Or is she Salome to my John the Baptist and wanting my whole head?” His chuckling came forced and intermittent between gasped punctuations as the skin pared off until it dangled from his ear like apple peel. His face was livid with pain by then. His carving hand was trembling, his lips drawn back far enough I could see his metal fillings right to the back molars. That was when I started crying, my breath heaving out of me to die strangled by the bland humidity of that afternoon.

“Your mother says I never finish nothing. Says this dilapidated shithole, my dead-end job, even your troubles at school are the ruinations brought on by my idle, meandering mind. Well, I’m showing her, slice by goddamn slice.” The blade flicked through the dangling skin. He stretched it out alongside the other like twin pieces of jerky. Sweat was streaming into his eyes and tracking down his cheeks. 

“You could cook me in the skillet with some of the salt.” He tried winking but it came out like a spasm. “But this isn’t enough, so it falls to me as provider to supply more. To offer up my body. Us Thomas men aren’t selfish, are we boy?” 

I shook my head, my tears and snot running hot. Sobs racked out of me. I thought as how shutting my eyes I might convince myself this wasn’t real. I know now that was just a lousy trick. Blindness should offer no salve against the horror of proximity. I listened for passing cars, neighbors’ voices, even those clamoring cicadas. I wrestled with my mind for thoughts of comfort: baseball games on the TV, playing hooky with friends. I even thought of my teacher Ms. Baer, and how I’d blush whenever she brushed her hair over an ear. That just reminded me of the lesson about Confederate doctors using maggots to clean battlefield wounds.    

The base of the hilt poked my chest. One hand pressed my palm around the hilt and squeezed my fingers closed. Billows of sour, whiskey-ed breath wafted against my face. “Open your eyes, son. How else can you testify to how I served this family?”

I did as I was told. 

Pop pressed a half-melted ice cube up and down the wound, his eyes narrowing to slits.  “It’s both a father’s duty and honor to teach his boy about the world. Lesson one – tangible sacrifices retain a woman’s respect. You’ll never hear a woman say ‘I love you, but I don’t respect you.’” He tried gulping a slug of Jim, not heeding how more slopped down his shirt front. My hand didn’t tremble though Mom’s luncheon meat sandwiches were flashing red-hot and sour up my gullet. A keening noise came from deep in Pop’s throat. I wondered if Momma would be satisfied. I prayed it would persuade her home. 

I don’t think Pop knew how much cutting we’d do. “A pound of flesh, no more, no less,” he gasped out at one point before spluttering a half-giggle. I always respected Pop for his reading and learning. It was only on them correspondence courses that I realized this was Shakespeare. I read the rest of that story– Shylock, the spoilt rich kid, clever lawyer, and the whole trick of it. I guess a man can read plenty without really learning a damn thing. My Pop was forever just letting the words flow over him like a river, yet him never even getting wet.

There are four hundred and fifty-odd grams in a pound. That’s nearly the weight of a whole hand, but Pop would be afraid Momma would have mocked him for ruining something he needed for work. A human ear weighs fourteen. A pinky toe’s only about eight grams, a thumb much more. Bones in both, so there’s a need to cut and trim the meat, but then there’s cartilage in the ear anyways so – like with that moneylender – knowing it or not, Pop was cheating. Love handles can be good, but Pop was a skinny man. The tongue’s eighty: heavier than you’d think but then the tongue’s a complicated thing. Still, Pop was able to make himself understood without it. 

It was dark when he lost consciousness that final time, still unfinished. The piss, blood, and sweat soaking through the chair and pooling at his feet smelled of ammonia laced with iron. I thought about calling a doctor, the police, even just knocking for the neighbors. But then we weren’t on speaking terms with the Harbisons and Pop let the healthcare lapse before I was even through diapers, so an ambulance would’ve cost a king’s ransom.  I finished the last cuts, added that flesh reverentially to the table, my stomach cramping something fierce. Then I went and pulled Momma’s remaining clothes off the hangers, balled them up, and carried them out to the front lawn. Nobody was out and about, not even a soul walking their dog before bed. Even the damn cicadas had quit and gone to sleep. I squirted kerosene on the pile and lit it with Pop’s lighter. It was best to make a clean break; she would see how I had sided with my father over her. 

The flames took quickly, the crackle filling my ears, the acrid smoke stinging my eyes and blocking my nostrils. Specks of fire floated upwards, riding into the night sky on those billowing smoke clouds. Upwards towards the vast beyond and nothingness. I squinted, trying to trace out the Dipper or Orion’s belt like them ancient mariners once would. Then I got to wondering at what twinkled between those constellations, those lonely specks drawing breath that would never get considered a part of those recognised spaces. Stars much like our own sun, yet how could somebody ever know whether gods, monsters, or nothing at all lived up in that great expanse beyond man’s reach? 

As the last of the lights switched off up and down the street, I got to thinking over matters more terrestrial. Who might come knocking if Momma didn’t show like Pop said she would? Joe wondering why Pop was missing another shift? A teacher or truant officer? Whoever did, they’d find how Clayton Thomas’ boy helped his old man prove his mettle. They would see the meat set out along the table, with me shooing the flies off. No other food round the place. No money in the kitty neither, seeing as pay day was cash in hand on every second Friday. But I remembered Pop was right about there being salt. Tabasco too.

It’d be hospitable to offer up something to visitors. Why not let Joe, Ms. Baer, or whoever else came calling benefit from another’s passing? That thought of community, of togetherness prompted by the promise of a feast, of all those faces coated in the bright sheen reminiscent to the soon to be satiated hungry, brought a smile to my face. I sat watching the last of Momma’s clothes being consumed by those final dying embers, mapping out seating arrangements, imagining how I’d answer the door to each visitor and welcome them inside. Ms. Baer would sit to the right of me. Joe on the left. Maybe Mr. Harbison too if he wanted. And Momma, of course. We would eat, talk. I might even smoke a cigarette with Joe out on the porch afterwards as we felt the day’s heat dissipate. I could already hear Ms. Baer and Momma getting to know each other better as Joe wondered if I’d be looking for work now I was man of the house. 

I rose, realizing as I stood how dog-tired I was, and stepped back inside. Sleep could come later; first I had to start preparations. Tidy away the broken glass and photo scraps. Mop up around the table and set out the plates and cutlery. Here were the makings of both a fine meal and a chance for conversation about the workings of what made a man. We are hungry animals after all, both in appetite and in spirit, and it didn’t sit right with me that the feast Pop provided should be mine and mine alone.

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