Not My Father's Son by Alan Cumming Page B

told him.
    “Dad’s drunk.”
    “Drunk?” said Tom. “In the afternoon?”
    “He’s been at Mr. Shaw’s house and now they’ve come here because they ran out of whisky.”
    Suddenly the voices from the other end of the house grew louder and the front door opened and closed. I waited for the usual ensuing draft of cold air to slide through to us under the living room door. Mr. Shaw must have gone home. Now the voices of my parents rose to a crescendo and they both entered the living room, my mother enraged at the behavior of her husband, my father bleary and blurry and bemused.
    “Get upstairs, boys,” he slurred.
    “What makes you think you can come in about here and shout at me like that, asking for whisky like I’m your servant,” I heard my mum say, strong and indignant, as the kitchen door closed on us.
    “I’ll come in here whatever way I want to,” began my father. “This is my house.”
    Tom raced me up the stairs, and won as usual. The “Big Room” where we went to do our homework and to play games was freezing. We tried to occupy our time, reading and messing about, but we were both silently agitated about what was going on downstairs.
    It was unusual for Mum to be so feisty. It signaled something changing in her, and her attitude towards our father, and although it made me nervous, I liked it. She had recently started working in the office of a grain mill in the local village. She was finding herself again.
    Initially my father was very against her taking the job. For several years previously she had been taking night classes at Tom’s high school to gain qualifications that would enable her to return to the workforce. This had not sat well with my father either, who constantly made attempts to sabotage or undermine her progress.
    The most glaring and brutal example of this was one spring evening when my father had ordered Tom and me to accompany him out to the field below our house and help him catch one of our sheep that was about to lamb. As was usual on these sorts of occasions, our father would tell us to stand behind a hedgerow and then chase the stressed ewe towards us, screaming obscenities if we failed to grab its horns and wrestle it to the ground as it ran past us in fear of its life. He treated us basically as sheepdogs, often even whistling commands and expecting us to understand what he meant. That particular night we eventually caught the poor sheep and were just about to close the pen to give it some peace when our mother appeared at the top of the field, dressed for her night class.
    “That’s me away!” she called out, and swiftly turned on her heels to go back through the garden gates and into her car. I could sense my father’s mood shifting, seeing her like this, and it came as no surprise when I heard him yell out to my mother’s back, “Get down here! We need a hand!”
    “I have my classes, Ali,” she half stated, half pleaded.
    “This animal is in distress. Get down here!”
    It struck me that any stress was probably due to the fact that the sheep was heavily pregnant and we had just been making it run madly around the field for the past half an hour. I could tell that all it needed was to relax, lie down, and continue its labor.
    Our mother arrived at the pen, navigating the mud and mounds of sheep feces.
    “I’ll be late, Ali,” she implored.
    My father ignored her and turned towards us and the poor sheep.
    “Get in here and help us hold down this beast,” he said calmly and scarily. Tom and I looked at Mum and wondered what she’d do. What could she do? She put down her folders and notebooks and climbed over the gate to join us.
    Our father made us hold down the sheep and commanded my mother to help it give birth. This meant she had to put her arm up its uterus and pull out the baby lamb. This is not an uncommon practice in the country. Often it came to me to do this because I had the smallest hands. But this time we all knew it wasn’t necessary at