Walk like a Man by Robert J. Wiersema Page A

hid myself away with my books and my pencils. I think of the hayloft in my grandmother’s barn, kittens from the barn cats hiding in the eaves behind the bales, mewing and just out of reach. I think of the forest behind our house, carved with well-beaten trails and bike paths, and of the woods behind my grandmother’s place, which were endless, magical, and only slightly terrifying. I think of the tiny elementary school I went to for first and second grades, building forts at lunchtime, kissing Karen in the schoolyard in the spring, and I think of my high school, and the number of times I wanted to burn it to the ground.
    Mostly, though, I think of that road.
    Our house was on the south side of the road, down a short driveway that looped around a chestnut tree. My father—who was a carpenter—built it from the shell of the old bungalow he and my mother had bought a couple of years after they got married. Some of my earliest memories—little more than fragments, really—are about the gradual emergence of the new house: the way the crumbling patio off the kitchen got covered over by the floorboards of the new family room; an afternoon with my father and his friends and my mother’s brothers raising the walls and roof over the second floor; the agonizing process of my father hand-cutting hundreds of angled slats to pattern the walls and floors, the heartbreak, the anger, the beauty. I get my temper from my father. And my propensity for obscenities. The smell of fresh-cut lumber is magical for me; I can’t go into a hardware store without feeling like a child again.
    My father kept up his industrial first aid certification to give him an edge in the rough job market of the seventies. He worked on a lot of big projects, including one of the prisons they built outside of town, and he was away a lot, weeks at work camps punctuated by weekend visits home.
    My mother stayed home with us boys—my two younger brothers, Dave and Jon, and me—until Jon was two, and then she got a job in the accounting office at the Harrison Hotel. Money was tight since my dad was often out of work.
    Once the three of us were in school, we would catch the bus to school every morning down at the corner. Mornings were ritualized, in the way that a tight schedule demands: breakfast—the birthday party call-in show on chwk radio out of Chilliwack— washing up—school bags packed—coats on—out the door by 7:55. We would wait for the bus with the Doran kids from down the road, the Bazan boys, whose parents ran the Kent Hotel, and a few others.
    When we got home in the afternoon, it was just the three of us. There was a window at the front of the house, hidden by a shrub, and every day after school we would sneak into the flower bed, slide the window open, and pull ourselves in, closing the window behind us. We were supposed to drop our stuff off, then walk down the road to my grandmother’s house, where we would stay until Mom picked us up after work. Some days, though, Dave, Jon, and I would call Mom with a reason to avoid making that trek: maybe it was raining, or one of us wasn’t feeling well. Sometimes our excuse actually worked, and we’d stay at the house by ourselves, have a snack, maybe turn on the TV, and occupy ourselves until Mom got home. I usually read. Or wrote.
    Most days, though, we would head down the highway at about 3:30. My grandmother would call to check in if we were too late.
    Every step of that walk is ingrained in my brain, every foot of that half-mile imbued with memory. We would walk it in all seasons, in all weather. We explored the ditch—looking for frogs and otters when it was full of water, collecting bottles and cans when it was dry, picking blackberries in the summer, pushing each other into the snowy depths in winter. We used the ditch to avoid the big yellow dog that lived—unchained—at the halfway point, sneaking along in silence like a