ABOUT THE AUTHOR

S. E. White teaches Composition and Creative Writing at Purdue University North Central. She is the author of A Murder of Crows and the website A Novel Blog. A native of Northwest Ohio, she loves to return to the area and enjoy its rich history.

Fallen Timbers

By S. E. White


In the ’80s, my father sold insurance, protection against those rainy days, but it wasn’t raining the night he came home from work four hours late. That night had been clear and dry. He didn’t speak for two full days. His suit that night (the blue pinstripe his father had wanted to be buried in but Grandma claimed had too much wear left) wasn’t even wrinkled when he seemingly strolled up the sidewalk to the back step, gingerly seated himself, and pulled a baby bird from his breast pocket. He cradled the bird, closed his hands as if to pray, and sobbed until my mother opened the screen door and hugged his shoulders. I stayed inside the house and watched my father through the glass window, his body distorted by a flaw in the panes. The sight of him is as clear to me now, a woman in her late thirties, as when I held my breath and watched my insurance salesman father weep over a baby bird who’d fallen from its nest.

Before that night and our eventual move to Oregon, my father built model ships in the room at the top of the stairs. He would close the door, hunch over the bench where he sat walled in by maritime books, exacto knives, and long tweezers, and slip bits of wood through the narrow neck of empty bottles of Southern Comfort. The wind chimes outside the window he ignored played a tune I’ve stopped dead in traffic remembering.    

“People are like ships in bottles,” he said once, scolding me for touching things in his hallowed room. He pushed up his wire-rim glasses and looked me squarely in the eyes. “The most beautiful part is what you can see but can never quite touch.” He held one of the bottles up to the window and whispered, “They’re too fragile to be touched.”

That night, after my father gave the bird to my mother as if it were as fragile as one of those model ships, he wandered up the stairs and smashed every ship in a bottle he’d spent weeks constructing. Splinters of glass sprayed the walls, ships floated on glistening shards, crunched beneath his leather wing-tip shoes. He grabbed one after the other by the neck and shattered them. Hulls, masts, decks no larger than a thumbnail sprinkled onto his desk. I stood at the base of the stairs. My mother was halfway up. She ran her fingers through her short, black hair, fumbled with the buttons on her business suit. She didn’t look down at me. I didn’t look past her. We both stood staring at the shadows flashing on the white, white ceiling of the room at the top of the stairs.

 

Two months later, we packed up our lives and drove from Ohio to Oregon where my father with the pale, smooth hands got a job as a logger. The beard he spent days growing was as full and black as the bruise on his right cheek. The only words he ever offered on that crescent slice were, “you should’ve seen the other guy.” I never cared what happened to “the other guy”; all I wanted to know is what happened to my father, the man I’d known. 

I was too young at the time, ten years old, to realize what my father might’ve been going through, and nobody in the early ’80s would have considered the idea of “rape,” much less of a tryst gone bad. The official statement my mother issued on the subject was that my father had been mugged. 

“If anyone asks,” she told me at breakfast the next morning, “your father was mugged.”    

Nobody asked. But the people I told at school believed me, or seemed to. I could tell a good lie when I knew it wasn’t the truth. The way my mother told me, stern-faced, hands wrapped around a steaming mug of coffee, made me think there was more to know. We moved to Oregon two months later. My father stopped selling insurance, stopped building model ships, and simply stopped being the man he was before. My mother grew her short, black hair long, long enough to braid, long enough for my father to touch and lose his hands in. She wore more dresses, quit her job working in a bank, and spent her days at home. From time to time, she would peer out the glass windows and rub her hands against the panes.

 

We sit, my father and I, on a bench, staring at a piece of land protected and preserved to commemorate a battle that took place across the road. A statue of three men stares off with us. Those men, enemies in the flesh, now stand as brothers in stone. A pioneer with a scraggly beard, a muscular native, General “Mad” Anthony Wayne: each looking properly grim. My father is old. Blue and violet veins are pronounced on his pale, scarred hands, each winding around cartilage and bone like the glimpse of a river we see flickering in the distance, beyond a snatch of road, and a field overgrown and weedy and not the place where the Battle of Fallen Timber was fought. But this is where it is remembered.

Ten years ago, my son Dane and I moved back to Ohio, brought my father with us. His beard is gone, shaved like it was before he was mugged. His chin juts; neck seems unnaturally long and vulnerable. He has little to say to the question I just asked him. Why did he want to stop here before he and Dane went fishing?    

My father rubs his chin. “Let’s just fish.”

Dane sits in the parking lot, barely visible beyond the distant glare of the car’s windshield; the boat is attached to the back of the car, poles in the backseat. He won’t come out of the car to sit with us on the bench. I know he didn’t want me to come on this fishing trip. Ever since he was charged with identity theft—using a fake ID, using other people’s credit cards—he keeps his distance from me. But, I knew that he would want to fish with his grandfather, so I had to come.

Slowly, I turn my head and stare at my father’s crescent scar, listening to sparrows and starlings chirp to one another. Songs of warning.    

“Then, let’s fish,” I reply, acquiescing. He only has a few hours before dinner at the nursing home and the time before I have to take him back.    

The muddy, undulating Maumee is close by. It is the river where Wayne’s forces camped before the Battle of Fallen Timbers. Rumors claim that Tecumseh had been there. Indians and soldiers fought each other in a grove where the trees had been felled by a tornado. The bark gnarled, scarred: the spot is scenic in a weather-beaten way. Sitting here all these years later, centuries now, that bloodshed feels senseless: bravery or greed? They fought for land that only truly belongs to itself—the weaving of earthworms, tunneling of ants. These trees wait here, as if to outlast us all.

The walk to the car feels like a long one for a man as seemingly fragile as my father. We pass Turkey Foot Rock where Little Turtle stood to rally his troops. Gourds and a few shucks of corn have been placed there as an offering to their memory. 

“I proposed to your mother here,” my father mumbles through his cracked lips.

I look at him. “I didn’t know that, Dad.” That’s not the story my mother told.

My father nods.

“I thought you popped the question in the middle of a dance floor on New Year’s Eve.”

His eyes cloud over. He grunts. We come to the parking lot, and he simply scratches at the crescent on his cheek.



Published October 2011