by J. Camp Brown

 

My father was well versed in the lore of the Ozarks.  We’d left those mountains when I was just a couple days old, but he told me some of what his father had told him: that the persimmon’s shape can predict the kind of winter or that sweeping a body with a chicken-feather broom could heal it or that placing a skillet under the bed means you’ll conceive a girl.  He said he’d put a knife under my mother.

My mother said she was still in her hospital gown when he put us in a moving van and hauled us north to the flattest land she’d ever seen. 

He said it was a good job.  But after my mother and I left, he committed the slowest suicide and drank himself to death. 

He said he couldn’t sleep without drinking at least a couple beers, and my father truly did have awful nightmares.  Right after my parents split, during that first summer, I tried to sneak into his bed to snuggle.  But he yelled and kicked and cursed and thrashed.  I tried another night too, but he had put a chain on the door to keep me out.  He said it wasn’t safe.  He had attacked my mother before she banished him from their bed. 

“Like, you punched her?” I asked.

He said that it was worse.  He’d read news stories where one spouse kills the other because of dreams they’re having, and he just about did just that.

“What were you dreaming about?” I asked.

The dreams were always similar, he said.  He dreams he is in bed.  And someone who is no one but a dark shape comes into the bedroom, and it’s like he’s paralyzed.  Like he can’t wake up even though he knows he’s going to die if he doesn’t wake up.  And when he finally begins to fight, he’s moving too slow, like he’s wading through mud or molasses.  He said he’d been woken up by my mother more times than he could count while they were early married; she was always grabbing his arms and yelling at him to wake up.  Wake up.  Wake up. 

But the final straw, he said, was this: he nearly put his thumb through my mother’s eye.  She had to wear an eye patch for weeks.  He scratched her cornea and busted her lip too.  The doctor called the cops.  He thought my father beat my mother for real, and after that, my father slept on the couch. 

Maybe he was just afraid to sleep.

He told me that Daniel Boone shot and killed a howler in the Ozarks.  It’s a horned, red-eyed legend that haunts the woods.  He said he himself had seen one as big as a bear running beside the road when he was a boy.  It is an omen of death, his own father told him, and he cut a stick to my father’s exact height and put it under his bed for months until the boy outgrew it.  In the mountains where my father was from, that’s how you knew you’d live. 

 

J. Camp Brown is a bluegrass mandolinist with an MFA from the University of Arkansas.  His writing has appeared in Shenandoah, Nimrod, Carolina Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere.  He’s been a George Bennett Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter and an Arkansas Arts Council fellow.