by Ian Hall
My mother’s father was a fount
of cockeyed wisdom. Wooed by the far
flung & farther fetched, he left
my mother & her own sainted mother
in an ungentlemanly lurch. Said he was fishing
for dignified work. Something that wouldn’t just
make ends meet, but knock
the socks clean off his naysayers. Instead
he spent the next quarter-century warming
the ache out of his hands at the trash fire of first one
& then another roustabout, wheeling & dealing
under that big arch in St. Louis. He held
a jester’s court among the hyena
cackles of the hitchhikers, hoods, & scarcely
employed while his wife & children waited
in line for government cheese. He turned tail
when my mother was six, so her memories of him
are mostly acid-washed. But one sticks out
like a beach-going albino: he was huddled over
the sink, pretending to do dishes. Every so often, he’d toss
a glance back at her in her highchair, pantomime
a rag across some crumb-spangled tableware, then peer
performatively around the corner of the alcoved kitchen
into the den. Her mother was out there battling
the landline. All this tomfooling sent my own mother
into a laughcry fit. Against the floor tile
her chair made wispy clatter. This mustn’t have sat right
with her father, cause the clownlines on his face
all vanished. For some fruitcake reason, he held up
two pieces of fine china, padlocked his
eyes to hers, & let them sail. By the legs of her chair
they made landfall. In her haste, my mother’s
mother got lassoed up in the phone cord, & laid
waste to a hunk of wall. What on earth? Her mother said, tripping
into the kitchen. Her father was already sweeping up
the commotion. Why that girl there got a wild hair
& started playing frisbee, he said. Stark
raving, my grandmother administered some frontier
justice for the first & last time in her life. Then tucked
my mother back in her highchair with a strawberry
rump. She bumbled back to the den all
flush-faced. & once again it was simply
father & daughter. Cozied up with them in the kitchen: burly
silence. The only sound was the ominous
plink of the faucet. Her father was throwing long
looks out the window overtop the sink. Through pinched
sobs, my mother could see his vast Jutland back
ciphering against cheap polyester. Now little
girl—he finally said, still ogling the window glass—there’re
just two keys to a successful life. The first: don’t blab
everything you know.
Ian Hall was born and reared in the coalfields of Southeastern Kentucky. His work is featured in Narrative, Mississippi Review, The Journal, Southeast Review, and elsewhere.