Cascade by Craig Davidson

Author:Craig Davidson [Davidson, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2020-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Copper sulfate is a mean-ass chemical. Has the look of table salt, only blue. Eats through things slowly but endlessly like an itch you can’t get rid of.

Dad killed our neighbour’s tree with the stuff, and Charlie helped. The tree’s branches had risen over the fence, and were dropping crabapples in our yard. Dad asked our neighbour to prune it. The neighbour said no. Dad said, “Well, I asked nice.”

They did it at after dark, as I watched at the window. It was the night of the first frost: the moon lit the grass with an icy glow. Two shapes stole across the fenceline, Dad with a hacksaw, Charlie with a pair of paintbrushes. Dad gashed the tree with the saw. The two of them spat on the paintbrushes and dipped them into a pot of sulfate. They painted the gashes with poison and came home, eyes blazing with their devilry.

Soon gravity began to treat the tree differently than before—punishing it, it seemed; pushing it hard to the earth. I took a bite of one of its apples and…well, I remembered how I’d once found a D-cell battery in the garage, busted open and furred with green acid. Curious, I’d touched my tongue to it—and the apple tasted a lot like that battery.

They say Dad’s stomach was eaten all to hell by the same stuff. His intestines, too. A surgeon sliced him open and tugged out, like, fifteen feet of tubing. It was riddled with holes. I’ve read that intestines are pretty durable—stronger than plain old skin or muscle. But then again, that copper sulphate ate a tree to death.

Somehow, Dad was drinking it—that was everyone’s best guess, anyway. Little specks—“trace residue,” the cops called it—were found inside his Proof Whisky bottles. The forensic team barely noticed it at first—until they found it other places, too. Dad’s shampoo bottle. His foot powder. Everything he touched or put on.

Dad was in pretty bad shape even before the sulfate. Around that time a Children’s Aid worker had shown up at the house. The week before, Dad had dragged me to the animal shelter to pick up a dog. Dad’s eyes were radishy and bloodshot, and the woman at the shelter not only refused to let him have the dog he’d picked out—an old, sick-looking beagle—she said she didn’t think Dad could be trusted to keep a goldfish alive. Dad got pissed and pointed at me—as if the fact that I was breathing proved her wrong.

The Children’s Aid worker’s report said that if Dad didn’t pull his shit together, Charlie and I would go into care. But by that time, there wasn’t much of anything left of Dad to pull together.

The idea of being taken away scared me, but it scared Charlie even more—the social worker said there was a good chance we’d be separated. That happened a lot, she said, because foster families could only take one kid into their homes.

After that, Dad got sick. One afternoon I found him throwing up in the toilet, and what I saw in the bowl was red and pulpy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.