My Father, Remembered
by R.E. Bowse
We are, in fact, half brothers. It is, to me, the only interesting element of our biographies: I am tall, pearl-colored; he, even by prepubescent standards, is short, his skin is richly brown. Our fathers are unknown; we are unfathered, not privy to the language of men, between fathers and sons. There are five years between us. We bicker over food, the radio, fishing lures, but mostly food—I goof him into eating unusual things for tiny sums of money. Our voices enter a feral register. Mother is embarrassed for us; she ignores our tinny thrusts and parries. "Oh, you," she says, meaning us, meaning all men, the whole kinky lot of us. Mother dallied in men; I suspect an abortion, or two, a child that would have landed on the arid knoll of our boyhood. Our sister. We have other suspicions—I do, anyway—none of which, out of fealty to Mother, or gruesome shock, may be expressed. We are not an expressive family, much. She, like my brother, is short, and resentful for it; she is a terror. The cabin is her cabin, just as it was her mother's before her, though there is a room she won't enter, a humid room, one with a secret history. I understand Poppa (this is the name I have given him) through the photos I have found there: me on the undulating hood of his powder-blue Chevrolet; the two of us at some far-off beach; we three—Mother, Poppa, me—on an interminable flight of steps: Mother stands hipshot, her smile is small and fierce; I languish in the swing of my father's arm.
Mother says, "Your father was a supernova."In the photos, Poppa has a broad, military square to his shoulders: cantilevered, they sag under the weight of his heavy hands; the angle of his arms, his legs, the tilt of his head that makes his hair go a frightening platinum in the sun: there is a frightening geometry to him, like he might descend on me from everywhere, all at once, like a shroud, a fog: be about me, inside me: I am breathing him in now. Now he is coming for me, his face is mountainous—its crags and folds, its sweep—he is a range of peaks, his limbs, elbows and knees, are peaks; his skin is porous and smells of bay rum, and sweat, and desire, for me. His love for me is mathematical: it is studied; it can be attempted, proven. His hands come for me, his arms, I feel them: steady as timbers, impossibly heavy, they rest on my small shoulders like cables pulled taught across an enormous distance.
Mother knows I've seen the pictures.
"Listen," she says, "forget that man. You owe your future to me."
She says, "Respect me. Don't judge what you don't know."
She says to me, "Did it ever occur to you how beautiful I was?"
R. E. Bowse teaches at the University of Massachusetts—Amherst. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Florida Review, N.Y. Tyrant, Dislocate, Flashquake and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.