Thrall (4 page)

I see my father like this: raising his thumb

to feign hitchhiking—a stranger

passing through to somewhere else.

 

2.

 

At Wolf River my father is singing.

The sun is shining and there's a cooler

of Pabst in the shade. He is singing

and playing the guitar—the sad songs

I hide from each time: a man pining

for Irene or Clementine, a woman dead

on a slab at Saint James. I'm too young to know

this is foreshadowing. To get away from

the blues I don't understand, I wade in water

shallow enough to cross. On the bank

at the other side, I look back at him as if

across the years: he's smaller, his voice

lost in the distance between us.

 

3.

 

On the Gulf and Ship Island Line

my father and I walk the rails south

toward town. More than twenty years

gone, he's come back to see this place,

recollect what he's lost. What he recalls

of my childhood is here. We find it

in the brambles of blackberry, the coins

flattened on the tracks. We can't help it—

already, we're leaning too hard

toward metaphor: my father searching

for the railroad switch.
It was here, right

here,
he says, turning this way and that—

the rails vibrating now, a train coming.

After
De Albina y Español, Nace Torna Atrás (From Albino and Spaniard, a Return-Backwards Is Born),
anonymous, c. 1785–1790

 

The unknown artist has rendered the father a painter and so

we see him at his work: painting a portrait of his wife—

their dark child watching nearby, a servant grinding colors

in the corner. The woman poses just beyond his canvas

and cannot see her likeness, her less than mirror image

coming to life beneath his hand. He has rendered her

homely, so unlike the woman we see in this scene, dressed

in late-century fashion, a
chiqueador
—mark of beauty

in the shape of a crescent moon—affixed to her temple.

If I say his painting is unfinished, that he has yet to make her

beautiful, to match the elegant sweep of her hair,

the graceful tilt of her head, has yet to adorn her dress

with lace and trim, it is only one way to see it. You might see,

instead, that the artist—perhaps to show his own skill—

has made the father a dilettante, incapable of capturing

his wife's beauty. Or, that he cannot see it: his mind's eye

reducing her to what he's made as if to reveal the illusion

immanent in her flesh. If you consider the century's mythology

of the body—that a dark spot marked the genitals of anyone

with African blood—you might see how the black moon

on her white face recalls it: the
roseta
she passes to her child

marking him
torna atrás.
If I tell you such terms were born

in the Enlightenment's hallowed rooms, that the wages of empire

is myopia, you might see the father's vision as desire embodied

in paint, this rendering of his wife born of need to see himself

as architect of Truth, benevolent patriarch, father of uplift

ordering his domain. And you might see why, to understand

my father, I look again and again at this painting: how it is

that a man could love—and so diminish what he loves.

 

A gift,
you said, when we found it.

    And because my mother was dead,

 

I thought the cat had left it for me. The bird

    was black as omen, like a single crow

 

meaning sorrow. It was the year

    you'd remarried, summer—

 

the fields high and the pond reflecting

    everything: the willow, the small dock,

 

the crow overhead that—doubled—

    should have been an omen for joy.

 

Forgive me, Father, that I brought to that house

    my grief. You will not recall telling me

 

you could not understand my loss, not until

    your own mother died. Each night I'd wake

 

from a dream, my heart battering my rib cage—

    a trapped, wild bird. I did not know then

 

the cat had brought in a second grief: what was it

    but animal knowledge? Forgive me

 

that I searched for meaning in everything

    you did, that I watched you bury the bird

 

in the backyard—your back to me; I saw you

    flatten the mound, erasing it into the dirt.

 

As long as I can remember you kept the rifle—

    your grandfather's,
an antique
you called it—

 

in your study, propped against the tall shelves

    that held your many books. Upright,

 

beside those hard-worn spines, it was another

    backbone of your past, a remnant I studied

 

as if it might unlock—like the skeleton key

    its long body resembled—some door I had yet

 

to find. Peering into the dark muzzle, I imagined a bullet

    as you described: spiraling through the bore

 

and spinning straight for its target. It did not hit me

    then: the rifle I'd inherit showing me

 

how one life is bound to another, that hardship

    endures. For years I admired its slender profile,

 

until—late one night, somber with drink—you told me

    it still worked, that you kept it loaded
just in case,

 

and I saw the rifle for what it is: a relic

    sharp as sorrow, the barrel hollow as regret.

 

From the next room I hear my father's voice,

a groan at first, a sound so sad I think he must be

reliving a catalog of things lost: all the dead

come back to stand ringside, the glorious body

of his youth—a light heavyweight, fight-ready

and glistening—that beauty I see now in pictures.

Looking into the room, I half imagine I'll find him

shadowboxing the dark, arms and legs twitching

as a dog runs in sleep. Tonight, I've had to help him

into bed—stumbling up the stairs, his arm a weight

on my shoulders so heavy it nearly brought us down.

Now his distress cracks open the night; he is calling

my name. I could wake him, tell him it's only a dream,

that I am
here.
Here is the threshold I do not cross:

a sliver of light through the doorway finds his tattoo,

the anchor on his forearm tangled in its chain.

 

Like the moon that night, my father—

    a distant body, white and luminous.

How small I was back then,

    looking up as if from dark earth.

 

Distant, his body white and luminous,

    my father stood in the doorway.

Looking up as if from dark earth,

    I saw him outlined in a scrim of light.

 

My father stood in the doorway

    as if to watch over me as I dreamed.

When I saw him outlined—a scrim of light—

    he was already waning, turning to go.

 

Once, he watched over me as I dreamed.

    How small I was. Back then,

he was already turning to go, waning

    like the moon that night—my father.

Juan de Pareja, 1670

 

    He was not my father

though    he might have been

    I came to him

the mulatto son

            of a slave woman

    just that

as if    it took only my mother

    to make me

            a
mulatto

meaning

            any white man

could be my father

In his shop    bound

    to the muller

I ground his colors

    my hands dusted    black

with fired bone    stained

    blue    and flecked

with glass    my nails

edged vermilion    as if

    my fingertips bled

In this way    just as

    I'd turned the pages

of his books

    I meant to touch

            everything he did