The Goat Fish and the Lover's Knot by Jack Driscoll

Author:Jack Driscoll
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wayne State University Press

THE GOOD FATHER

MY DAD’S NAME is Philly Penwaydon and, meaning to be funny, he’s started addressing me, his estranged and only son, as Sam Lee P., like I’m part Korean or something. I’m not. I’m black Irish on my mom’s side, clear blue eyes and hair the color of onyx. On my dad’s, American mutt, and, from what I’ve been able to piece together, mostly pinscher and Rottweiler, minus the choke chain and rabies shots.

My mom and I live in Grand Rapids, where she teaches sign language at the school for the deaf. Which she is not, nor am I, though whenever she wants me to listen extra close to what she’s saying, she’ll talk in that patient, silent-slow dance of her fingers and hands. I understand some of what she says, but even those parts that I miss—I know they’re no less forgiving about my dad.

He’s been out of prison for a full year following his parole, long enough without incident to warrant this visit, my first, even against my mom’s repeated objections and appeals. “Okay, enough. I’m worn out, Sam Lee,” she eventually said and, legal adult or not, deferred the final decision to me. It took all of about two seconds because no matter how you argue it, you can’t train or command a kid like me away from his own flesh and blood.

I’m not exactly in partnership with him, not yet, though this morning he said, “Good job,” as I tramped down the grass and weeds on the side of the highway, a two-lane with no center stripe and tons of rubber. That’s so people driving by can read the telephone number on the Affordable Stump Grinding signs we staked every quarter mile all the way south to Mesick and back. Some within a few yards of those stark-white death crosses. There are way more than seems normal, like maybe it’s where the bored-crazy teenagers drag race or play chicken. The crosses are kind of eerie, all decorated with garlands and plastic wreaths and rosaries. And one with bright-yellow graduation tassels that fluttered in the breeze.

The way my dad first described it over the telephone, I imagined the stump grinder as some Godzilla-like monstrosity he’d junked together. Wheels and gears and saw-blade jawbones that could pulverize, in a matter of minutes, the ancient root balls of oaks, and ironwood, and black walnut. Or even the petrified deadfall in the shallow coves of Lake Tonawanda, where we used to walleye fish before my mom and me moved away when I was ten, that same year my dad began serving his sentence at Camp Pugsley. We never visited him, not once during all that time, and to my surprise and disappointment he has not violated the restraining order against him by hightailing it back to us. My mom swears that if he ever tries, she’ll press charges to the full extent of the law. And, as she admitted to me last night, it’s the price that men who’ve grimed up their lives like this pay in grief and shame for their freedom.

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