Now Is the Hour by Tom Spanbauer

family a new home, had kept the farm going, and now he had to take care of his two children. He didn’t like any of it. It was easy to see how awkward he felt, it was easy to see how sad he was at the death of his son. What I saw more than anything, though, was his anger. More anger than ever. He was a big man with rough hands and grease under his fingernails, but there he was cooking dinner — scrambling eggs and frying potatoes. Dad’s one of those frontier guys, John Wayne, a man of few words and a loaded gun in the pickup. He belonged outdoors, and there he was in the house doing the wash and folding his wife’s underwear, making sack lunches for Sis and me and getting us ready for school. And putting up with me. As soon as he could, he disappeared back outside to the farm work.
    As I look back on it, this was the time me and Sis could’ve got closer to my father. A shared death can do that, for some families. It would have been the perfect time to take me fishing. But not my family, not my dad. He was around the house, and we were underfoot more than any time in my life. But that didn’t mean he talked any more, and henever once talked about Russell or tried to. How he might feel about it. Or how we were supposed to feel about it.
    It seems pretty clear now he was determined not to feel anything, and even though day after day, night after night, we lived cheek by jowl with him, he kept his distance from us, however scared and alone we might feel. One ornery bastard. That’s what Mom said about Dad’s father once. So it was with my father. Cold, irritable, impatient. One ornery bastard.
    In a lot of ways, Sis and I were on our own. Any mistake, any sign of weakness, and it was the ornery old bastard we had to deal with.
    The trouble for me was I was afraid to fall asleep. That’s what Russell’d done — fallen asleep. And that’s the only explanation Sis and I had ever heard: Russell fell asleep and went to heaven.
    As soon as I’d get in bed, I could hear the faraway noise, wings of a big bird, faint and off-key. No matter how much I prayed, I couldn’t get the sound to stop. In our old house, Sis and I shared a bedroom, and I could sneak into her bed, and she’d hold me and tell me stories. Sis’s voice and being next to her always worked, and I’d be asleep in no time, getting up at first light so Mom and Dad wouldn’t find us together. But in the new house my bedroom was down in the basement, and the journey to Sis’s room through the quiet, dark house was fraught with peril because I had to pass by Mom and Dad’s room. Dad caught me soon enough. Maybe if he’d been another dad, he’d have asked why I had to be close to Sis. I probably couldn’t have told him but still it would’ve been nice to be asked. Maybe he might have taken me by the hand and walked with me to my room and then he’d sit on the end of my bed after he’d tucked me in. Maybe my father alone with me in the dark could’ve kept the faraway sound away. But Dad was not another dad. There was him cussing me out, then there were the spankings, and because I was headstrong and liked to make a spectacle of myself, there was the trips to the saddle room with the belt. Finally, there was a dead bolt on the outside of my door. I had to pee in a Mason jar.
    In Dad’s world, there is no fear. No room for it. If you don’t believe it’s there, you don’t have to deal with it. And if there’s no fear, then there’s no need for comforting fear. Too bad. Maybe in giving he could have got some comfort for himself. But there are some things that just aren’t allowed.
    Mom’s way of coping with the darkness that could descend at any moment was to fall back on what she’d always fallen back on. The Catholic religion. For her, it couldn’t be any other way.
    Mom started going to daily Mass. Every morning, even Saturday, Mom