The smoke swirls around me... illuminating the dark, entering through my nose in white wisps and escaping through my mouth.
I smell the wood stove burning. My mother's footsteps are quick, light, with purpose. Somehow, they contain comfort. Happiness.
My father's footsteps are slow. Deliberate. Like the steady gait of a lumbering movie monster that you cannot escape no matter how you run. I peer over my blue-and-white-checked bedspread at the black outside the door and hope that he is not coming for me.
If places really do retain residual energy the pine logs and aspen paneling of this house, my father's handmade creation, are steeped in fear and loathing. I hear their voices. I hear his voice.
At the pinnacle of our pentagon-shaped living room, above the archaic television, hangs the robust head of a 7-point bull elk in full bugle. To his right, a pronghorn antelope above a chair and an old green rotary phone. My father's worn, rusty-orange recliner completes the wall... adjunct to one entrance to the kitchen and never far from the cheap beer in the refrigerator. Coors Light, then Keystone Light, and in the last years Black Label.
I don't remember a time when I didn't feel the fear. It's a deep, innate fear that feels as though it has been in this soul longer than this soul has been in this body. I know, as a child, that someday he will kill me.
Distance is all that buffers this feeling now.
The mist billows into clouds above my bed, storms of lightning sparking, too bright to be shut out by closed eyelids. It shows me, projecting on the scrim beyond my eyes.
my first angry taste of whiskey... I couldn't understand why it was all he did. Alone in this place, I grabbed the bottle of Jim Beam at 12 and drank a swallow I sputtered, my eyes watered and my throat burned. I knew then why he added water. To this day it tastes like regret.
praying that he wouldn't beat me in front of my friends on my birthday... his favorite mule attacked and trampled me, though he only saw the rock I threw at her. My hysteria and the hoofprints on my back perhaps saved me, though the screaming and bruising from his hands was embarrassing still.
he had a knack for hitting a pop fly straight to me... a skill I inherited, or perhaps learned, from him. He was able to restrain his insults when we played catch. He was a dad.
I could never recall the reason, but the "discipline" was frequent. The belt was his favorite implement; the extra terror it created with the dramatic snap-snap-snap through the belt loops... the irony of him beating me with large buckles I gave him for father's day was lost on me until years later.
when I was in third grade a visiting girl I couldn't stand let my crush on Josh Kealing slip. My father told me if I were dating a boy he would kill us both with his shotgun.
approaching our new home, face growing redder in both fear and shame as I slowly recognized my childhood belongings thrown into the snow on the lawn. He had perhaps felt bad about telling me "whin I DIE you will git your teddy bear"... but not that bad. I turned and looked around at the deserted street. I could feel his eyes on the back of my neck, watching me from somewhere as I herded my ruined childhood into my mother's house.
waiting. Waiting in those stained purple chairs in Pueblo Hospital to see if my mother was going to live or leave me.
sitting next to my niece at the foot of the guest-bedroom bed, Super Nintendo controllers clutched desperately in our hands. Our attention focused so completely on Mario, Yoshi, and their alien worlds, ignoring the anger and insanity. Not listening, not watching, forgetting when my brother threw her mother down the stairs of their trailer and broke her arm. I could not ignore my hatred for him.
the peace that existed on the back of a horse. Watching the Continental Divide jut through the cerulean blue sky... gazing into the mountain-top crater lakes, seeing every fish in the clear green water... looking down at the patchwork quilt of potato fields across the valley... stopping in silent prayer to the orange embers and heaven-bound sparks of the crackling camp fire... the horses were our hooved sentinels, snorting in the night...
In my small life I learned. I engaged my curiosities and absorbed the world around me. I dove into Zoobooks and Audobon illustrated guides to birds and rocks, reptiles and amphibians. I practiced with my bow and arrow, though not as much as my father would have liked. I tucked-and-rolled when thrown from the horses, but could not dodge and weave from his crushing hands. My door locked with much persistence and force, but more with luck. I became terribly ill and stayed that way for years, drowning in acid from my burning, nauseous stomach.
GoogleEarth tells me that the log house at 5315 County Road 14 still stands, as does the barn and tack-room. The six ponds across the street have nearly withered to dust. The boards of my tree-house are rotted and grown over. Surely he wooden slats of the bridge across Pinos Creek have long-since been replaced.
The dark, overgrown tunnel of foliage enveloping the river was ominous to 7-year olds. I told my friends a tale of a witch who lived beneath the boards that was purely farce but frightening enough to make me speed away with a look over my shoulder each time I rode past it on my bicycle.
But there were specters who followed me home. Spirits that clung to me as I escaped to far northeastern reaches. The boards and cement of this old cabin do not retain this haunting.
This haunting is mine.
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