holding me by the hair and marching me across the yard toward the stream, when he was leaning down and filling up the bucket, I often had the sense from my father that he didn’t actually want to do what he was doing. That it was Pastor Schect’s idea, or my mother’s, not his. That he was only following instructions in the hope of not being punished himself in the afterlife. My mother showed an occasional spark of feeling aboutit, too. If it was an especially cold day, she might heat up a can of soup for me to eat when I came out of the shower, or let me have two or three sips from her coffee mug as soon as I stepped into the house.
But boying seemed to stimulate an evil humor inside them. It was almost like a game they played together, and it was a ritual they seemed to need to perform every few months in order to release something from their troubled hearts. When I was being boyed, I had the feeling that a whole nest of snakes was crawling inside me, slithering around, moving up toward the inside of my skull, where they would swarm and swirl and writhe. And on the day after being boyed, if I had school, I found it was difficult to look anyone in the eye, even my friend Cindy; even Aaron Patanauk, who had taken to talking with me more and more often, and not making fun of the way I spoke. He’d even given me a few compliments on the way my body looked. When the day of boying was over with, my mother would take the clothes I’d been wearing and put them in the pile she took to the Laundromat, “to wash off the Majie in them,” she said, and I would go to bed in just my underwear, lying on my side staring at the dark wall. I’d push my hands down inside my underwear but not do anything with them there, just hold myself that way until I fell asleep.
I n the morning after our pizza dinner, I woke up thinking about school and work and the new boots, and then I saw that my mother had set a pair of my father’s briefs out on the end of my bed, and his work pants with pins inserted to hold the cuffs up on the legs, and a length of rope for a belt. She’d put one of his white T-shirts on the pile, a flannel shirt, socks, and an old, worn-out pair of boots he never used anymore and that were so big I knew I’d have to struggle all day not to fall over myself in them.
On boying days there would always be a job to do, a house repair project usually, something my father had been putting off for a long while and that I knew he’d have trouble completing once he started. Itwas almost as if he really did want a son there to help him. That day the job was roof repair. During the winter a leak had appeared in the living room ceiling, staining the old Sheetrock with coppery circles. When I was eating my oatmeal, my father came to the door wearing a tool belt with a hammer hanging down against his thigh, and nails—squat, wide-headed roofing nails—overflowing the pocket. “Fetch on the ladder, boy,” he said.
On my way to the sink, walking sloppily in the too-big boots, I spooned the last of the oatmeal into my mouth. I rinsed out the bowl and hurried outside to the doorless shed where my father kept his traps and chain saw and cans of gasoline and oil. The summer before, he’d worked for a whole week to fashion a homemade ladder out of two saplings and arm-thick oak branches, all lashed together with elaborate knots and nailed for good measure. The ladder was leaning sideways against the shed. I carried it over to where he stood near the front steps and he took it from me and rested it against the edge of the roof.
I watched him, the rungs roped on unevenly and bending beneath his weight, the roofing nails dripping out of the pouch as he climbed. “Handen me up what tar paper, boy,” he called when he reached the top of the ladder.
I went back to the shed and found the roll of black paper, tall as my waist and heavier than a basket of wet laundry. I hoisted it onto my shoulder and carried it over to the house,
But boying seemed to stimulate an evil humor inside them. It was almost like a game they played together, and it was a ritual they seemed to need to perform every few months in order to release something from their troubled hearts. When I was being boyed, I had the feeling that a whole nest of snakes was crawling inside me, slithering around, moving up toward the inside of my skull, where they would swarm and swirl and writhe. And on the day after being boyed, if I had school, I found it was difficult to look anyone in the eye, even my friend Cindy; even Aaron Patanauk, who had taken to talking with me more and more often, and not making fun of the way I spoke. He’d even given me a few compliments on the way my body looked. When the day of boying was over with, my mother would take the clothes I’d been wearing and put them in the pile she took to the Laundromat, “to wash off the Majie in them,” she said, and I would go to bed in just my underwear, lying on my side staring at the dark wall. I’d push my hands down inside my underwear but not do anything with them there, just hold myself that way until I fell asleep.
I n the morning after our pizza dinner, I woke up thinking about school and work and the new boots, and then I saw that my mother had set a pair of my father’s briefs out on the end of my bed, and his work pants with pins inserted to hold the cuffs up on the legs, and a length of rope for a belt. She’d put one of his white T-shirts on the pile, a flannel shirt, socks, and an old, worn-out pair of boots he never used anymore and that were so big I knew I’d have to struggle all day not to fall over myself in them.
On boying days there would always be a job to do, a house repair project usually, something my father had been putting off for a long while and that I knew he’d have trouble completing once he started. Itwas almost as if he really did want a son there to help him. That day the job was roof repair. During the winter a leak had appeared in the living room ceiling, staining the old Sheetrock with coppery circles. When I was eating my oatmeal, my father came to the door wearing a tool belt with a hammer hanging down against his thigh, and nails—squat, wide-headed roofing nails—overflowing the pocket. “Fetch on the ladder, boy,” he said.
On my way to the sink, walking sloppily in the too-big boots, I spooned the last of the oatmeal into my mouth. I rinsed out the bowl and hurried outside to the doorless shed where my father kept his traps and chain saw and cans of gasoline and oil. The summer before, he’d worked for a whole week to fashion a homemade ladder out of two saplings and arm-thick oak branches, all lashed together with elaborate knots and nailed for good measure. The ladder was leaning sideways against the shed. I carried it over to where he stood near the front steps and he took it from me and rested it against the edge of the roof.
I watched him, the rungs roped on unevenly and bending beneath his weight, the roofing nails dripping out of the pouch as he climbed. “Handen me up what tar paper, boy,” he called when he reached the top of the ladder.
I went back to the shed and found the roll of black paper, tall as my waist and heavier than a basket of wet laundry. I hoisted it onto my shoulder and carried it over to the house,
Similar Books
