by Carolyn Pledge-Amaral

The house on Cottage Road came with its own soundtrack—a full LP, not a forty-five, or an eight-track. Our soundtrack couldn’t have fit on a pancaked-sized memory or limited itself to eight predictable songs. It had to capture the hiss of dump trucks and growl of backhoes, the crack and pop of angry gravel, the fury of slamming doors, and the thud of Kodiaks pacing the kitchen floor. But our LP also offered songs of sobriety and Cape Breton summers, both fleeting and sweet. Neil Diamond crooned his Song Sung Blue from our giant stereo and fiddle music giggled from counter radios against a chorus of crickets and the lonely drone of bagpipes that echoed over emerald highlands. And on the night my father set out to tear down our house, the score was a symphony of fear—a night of booming brass and the clash of discordant symbols.

A low rumble grew long before we could have possibly heard it, as if we’d somehow turned as bionic as our television heroes. The steady crescendo brought noses to glass as streetlights tracked the forward motion of my father’s yellow backhoe. The machine lumbered towards the “V”—the strip of land between Cottage Road and Champlain; a spot where home met great Canadian explorer.

After years of second chances and comings and goings, my mother had finally garnered a restraining order meant to keep my father away from Cottage Road. But Dad, who had built the house himself, wasn’t about to be told what he could and couldn’t do. And if he couldn’t live in the house—well, then no one else could either.

The backhoe charged down the road and plowed over the curb. It swerved to miss the hanging tree, the maple my father had hauled home from the job site at the county jail when my brother, Roy, was born. For years my father stood on that “V,” cigarette dancing on the edge of his lips, watering that skinny maple as if nothing else mattered. Now tall and thick with appreciation, the hanging tree bowed and ushered my father forward.

The backhoe moved with purpose across the long expanse of lawn, past the rusted swing set and through Mom’s garden where gladiolas briefly stood guard. With its front bucket raised like a monstrous mouth, the long dipper arm swayed like the inverted tail of a scorpion. Through the back door where I stood, I could make out my father’s freckled face, contorted from a day of Bacardi. His lips rolled like a little boy pushing a Matchbox truck.

“What’s he doing?” My older sister, Brenda, screamed. The backhoe clipped towards the back porch. “He’s coming for the house!”

My mother pushed us away from the screen and slammed the back door shut. “Stay away from the windows,” she said as she corralled my little sister and brother to the safety of the living room. I could hear her at the telephone table calling 911, and the scene becomes memory.

My father grabs the receiver from Brenda, rips the cord from the wall, and drifts the phone across the room. “Get off the Goddamned phone.”

Dad turns and charges towards mom with his arms extended back like a ski-jumper and his chest swollen forward like a scrappy red cock. Mom inches backwards until he finally pins her tight against the wall.

“Leave her alone!” Brenda yanks at his sleeve, but he bends his elbow and breaks free.

I pull his shirt. “Stop!”

Dad raises his right arm high, his knuckles white and readied.

Mom ducks, as Dad’s fist smashes drywall.

I freeze. He’s never done that before. He’s smashed plates of food, tossed chairs and pushed and shoved and ranted and raved, but he’s never actually tried to hit Mom. But everything has changed. Since he’d brought that shotgun home and slid it under the couch, it’s hard not to think of it hiding there, watching us. Waiting. Even though in my memory he never took it out, its presence had taken a firm hold.

Dad starts towards Mom again but pivots and picks up the coffee table from the living room.

Mom ducks again readying herself for impact, but he moves around her, props the front door open and drifts the table outside.

My mother pleads for him to stop, but he pushes her aside and heads back inside.

Brenda dashes upstairs to call for help from the bedroom phone, my little brother and sister following behind, crying. I watch as Dad, mustering some drunken Herculean strength, pushes every piece of our living room furniture through the front door and onto the frosted grass.

In the morning, the velvet loveseats, tables and lamps lay on their sides like bodies in a crime scene. Long after the police had left and the furniture came back inside, I imagined white chalk marking the spots where each piece had lain.

Outside the engine lulled, the backhoe bucked and then lurked forward again. From the corner of the kitchen window where I wasn’t supposed to be, I saw the bucket claw the clothesline into a tangle of gnarled wire. Unsatisfied, the machine reached higher, paused, and then smashed through the roof of the porch. Shingles splintered like shattered bones, and distant sirens signaled the soundtrack’s final outro. I would replay that soundtrack for years until, like any overplayed track, it finally lost its hold.

But sometimes in winter when I press my nose against cool glass, I’m riding with Dad in the frosted cocoon of the cab. Sitting on his lap, he lets me move the levers, guiding my mittens until the bucket lunges downwards and devours a huge pile of snow. He shifts my hands again and leads the bucket to a mountain where Brenda and I will later make forts and stock snowballs for neighbourhood wars. Behind me, the vibration of his lips keeps time with the engine. I look up and smile. Sometimes, he smiles back.

Carolyn Pledge-Amaral is a graduate of Florida International University with an MFA in Creative Writing. She was the winner of their 2016 Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and her work has also been published on the Be-a-Better-Writer website, Mason’s Road, Spry Literary Journal and Feathertale Magazine. A loyal island-girl raised on Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Carolyn has spent the better part of the past thirty years combing the beaches of Bermuda where she now lives with her husband. When she’s not slogging away at rewrites for her first novel, Full Hookup, she’s teaching English or working on completing a memoir entitled, Tailspin.