Coleman Hill by Kim Coleman Foote

Author:Kim Coleman Foote [Foote, Kim Coleman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

DADDIES AND SONS

c. 1953

The waters of Lake Hopatcong are still, almost like a mirror. Jeb Coleman and his buddy Booker lounge on Jeb’s boat, fanning themselves beneath the bright summer sun, not really caring if the fish bite. For hours, it seems, they’ve exchanged burps from their beers, comfortable with each other’s silence as usual, until Booker remembers the train of thought he lost that morning as they hitched the boat to Jeb’s pickup. “Say, man,” he says, elbowing Jeb.

“What’s up?”

Booker’s wife had come across one of those relationship columns in the Star-Ledger and it just riled him up, he says. It mentioned how some Austrian headshrinker several years ago postulated about sons being jealous of their fathers and wanting to kill them. “Buncha hogwash,” Booker says. “Leave it to white folks to come up with some sick shit like that.”

Jeb gives his friend a sidelong glance. Strangers mistake Booker—with the slick dark hair falling into his face—for Italian until the Jersey-tinted Georgia accent tumbles from his mouth, but Jeb eventually shrugs in solidarity. If anybody should be experts on killing, he thinks, it’s those Austrians—that was where Hitler came from before he started the war.

Booker guzzles his beer and shakes his head. “I mean, I ain’t always see eye to eye with my old man, but I ain’t wanna kill him. You hear me, slim? And what I’m gon be wantin my mama like a lady friend for?”

Jeb grunts. He doesn’t know about that wanting-your-mother part either, but when he was a little boy, he did want his daddy to die and get replaced. Not by Jeb, though, but by his uncle. Jeb hoped his uncle would somehow fall in love with his muh and marry her, even though he already had a wife, but Uncle Jack did nothing of the sort. Instead, he left New Jersey altogether soon after Jeb’s daddy died.

Jeb stares at the glassy water surrounding the boat, thinking about all those times his daddy would get drunk and start itching to punch everything in sight. Jeb took the brunt of it while his sisters would look on and cry. They could outfight Jeb—they brazenly did so in public—but when it came to standing up to their father at home, they were chickens, all three of them.

When Jeb was little, he used to sit around picking at the scabs on his knees and elbows, imagining ways his daddy would suffer before dying. His favorite method was strapping his daddy to a chair with the belt he used for sharpening his shaving knife, the one he preferred to beat Jeb with, then slicing him all over. Each time Jeb pried off a bit of scab with a gasp, revealing the whitish skin beneath that prickled with blood, he imagined that was what his daddy would feel.

As it turned out, his daddy’s death did involve prolonged suffering. The old man spent weeks coughing blood and struggling to breathe before the incident that took him to the hospital. He was delivered home in a box just before Christmas.

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