The Architect of Flowers by William Lychack

Author:William Lychack
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

We weren’t driving far—little more than an hour to the farm in Franklin—the place where my father lived after he left. It’s interesting to me now, all these years later, to think how close he was to us on a map, yet how little we saw of him. I don’t remember, just for the record, ever really missing him, his absence not affecting me at all.

And no sooner does a sentence like that leave my lips than I feel that it’s just another lie I tell myself, which I’m sure it is, a lie like the lie about the trees I must still have to believe. I never felt I needed my father, yet here I am again, casting back like this out of some deep sense of loss or deprivation, as if still trying to find a way into my father’s heart, or still trying to make a place for him in mine.

I mean, why did we visit him only two times that I remember? Both occasions ending with me asleep on the couch in my clothes. A woodstove to my back. Their voices, my mother’s and father’s, all watery and distant in the next room. That swerve of her laugh. That can-do purr of his voice. That jib and jab of their voices lulling me to sleep.

And when I listen like this, I feel that even then they must have loved each other in their own way, just as I know somehow my father must have cared for me, the man slapping me upside the head, or showing me how to double-knot my shoes, or taking me fishing to the pond on the farm. I must have been six or seven years old—and perhaps I’m only dreaming this as well—the two of us standing in the dusk, watching as he attracted the bats with the whir of a fishing pole. He’d whip the pole, make the sound, and down swooped the bats.

It’s something, he’d say, the way they come down, isn’t it?

And the bats would dive toward us, thin and unsteady, the boy just watching, mouth open, the dusk making everything granular. And the man would toss stones into the air to show how the bats followed almost to the water, poor things pulling up at the last moment, the man play-swatting his son on the back of the legs with the pole. The boy’s eyes might betray him, might blur with tears, but his mouth he could keep pressed tight as a line.

His father could laugh—big throaty laugh of a man—and the boy could look away to the house, the windows, his mother behind those curtains somewhere. And where was she now? What was she doing all by herself in his house? Why wasn’t she with us? How was the boy here alone with his father?

C’mon, answer your old man, he’d say.

What d’you want me to say, Dad?

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