Feeding Nights

I watched as the flames ate through the bright stitching of the collar. The sun had at last withdrawn, and the fire now furnished nearly all that remained of the visible world around me, its light advancing and receding across the ground with every movement of the flames.

I sensed my father behind me before I turned to see him. He cast a bloodied rag into the fire and watched in silence as its edges curled and blackened. Then he laid one hand upon my shoulder.

“Anything else?”

I shook my head.

He answered with the faintest suggestion of a smile. It was not, of course, a true smile. We did very little genuine smiling on nights such as this—feeding nights, I mean.

By then I had been helping my father with them for several years. In the beginning he had hated bringing me along. I think some part of him still entertained the notion that I might be spared from it, though what precisely he imagined could still be preserved in me I never quite understood. I persisted nonetheless, until at last he appeared to concede what both of us had probably known from the beginning: sooner or later there would come a night when he could no longer put it off. He would have to teach me.

But that night was by no means my first. Far from it.

It had taken only two or three feeding nights for me to learn that one ought to wear whatever clothes were valued least: old shirts, bad jeans, shoes already approaching ruin. The principle was not altogether different from painting a room, except that afterward one burned whatever one had worn.

I should explain that burning was not always necessary. If we managed to find a deer or coyote, there was ordinarily little reason for it, though even then we sometimes burned our clothes if one of us had gotten blood on them by accident. On other occasions, I suspect, we burned simply because the habit had established itself. It was easier to sacrifice a shirt than spend the remainder of the night wondering whether some trace had survived the washing.

But if we had been obliged to use somebody’s pet, we always burned afterward—just in case we had been seen. And in the most desperate circumstances, when what we used was a person, we burned everything.

My father made one rule absolute where people were concerned: I was never to take too intimate a part in those feedings. I obeyed him, though for years I resented both the rule and the man who had made it. Even now I am not entirely sure what he thought he was protecting me from. By then I had already seen enough that innocence, if that was the concern, had mostly ceased to apply. Still, the distinction mattered to him, and because it mattered to him, I learned to respect it.

I cannot remember the last time we were forced to resort to a person. It is possible he has done so within the past year, but if he has, I was never told. My father did not consider ignorance of a deed a form of dishonesty, particularly once he had convinced himself that the truth belonged to him alone. Even so, I do not believe he has done such a thing recently.

But I know he has done it before.

There are things one comes to understand about a parent without confession, testimony, or the certainty of having witnessed them firsthand. They gather elsewhere—in silences and evasions, in expressions that close too quickly, in precautions whose purpose becomes clear only once one is old enough to recognize what they were meant to prevent. No single piece amounts to proof. But together, they acquire the weight of it.

On this matter, at least, I have no uncertainty—my father has fed with people. And tonight, unfortunately, we could not procure any sort of wild game, so we had to settle for a dog. I do not know its name. I made a point of never looking too closely at collars.

Father and I had developed a system after he taught me how to track deer and foxes. Sometimes we struck gold and found a feral hog, which could keep us supplied for longer than almost anything else. On ordinary nights I went into the woods while Father went toward town. His task began where mine failed. If he found an unattended animal, or someone out walking one, he decided whether it could be taken without trouble. Meanwhile I tracked whatever I could find.

I always felt the pressure of that division. Every empty trail and broken track, every hour without movement meant Father had more reason to continue looking in town. So I became good at finding things. Better than I otherwise might have been. On particularly fortunate nights I could bring back several animals and we would have enough put away that neither of us needed to hunt again for some time.

But the stockpile was gone, and winter had begun closing the woods.

I found nothing.

So Father returned after dark with a dog he had tranquilized. And we spoke nothing of where it came from.

The collar was my responsibility. I removed it without reading the tag and carried it straight to the fire. Behind me, Father dealt with the animal as mercifully as circumstances allowed.

I watched the little metal tags disappear into the flames before they could tell me anything I would have been obliged to remember.

“It’s time,” Father said, taking his hand from my shoulder.

I understood why he wanted me within earshot, but I still resented him for making me come along for this part. The old disagreement between reason and sympathy had once caused me genuine pain. There were nights when I could feel it somewhere beneath my ribs, the strain of understanding why something had to be done while hating it all the same.

It took me years to understand that the two feelings did not cancel each other out. I could accept the necessity of a thing without forgiving it. In time, I learned to live with both conclusions at once.

Eventually the pain diminished, and what remained was mostly irritation and resentment.

I had been taught. I knew the procedure. I knew what had to happen and why. Surely Father could perform the actual feed alone.

That was what troubled me. He had spent years trying to shield me from certain parts of our life, withholding details even after I had learned to accept the larger horror of it, and yet this was apparently something I needed to hear.

I followed him toward the house without speaking.

We lived on an acreage far enough from town that privacy came cheaply. No neighbors close enough to notice strange lights after dark. No one to hear an animal cry out unless the night carried the sound farther than usual. I might say we were fortunate in this respect, but very little about our life had ever persuaded me to use that word seriously.

At the cellar stairs, Father adjusted the dead weight of the dog across his shoulder. Then he started down.

We shared a look before he disappeared into the darkness below. A moment later came the scrape of metal against concrete as he dragged the cellar door open.

Then my brother laughed.

The sound rose out of the dark wet and distorted, too deep in places and strangely thin in others, as though whatever produced it had never quite learned how a human voice was supposed to work. There were words inside it, or something close enough that my mind had long since learned to supply what the sound itself could not.

“Dad-ee!”

That was how I heard it.

Not “Daddy” exactly. The two syllables came apart unevenly, like something still learning how speech was meant to fit inside a mouth. Whether my brother was actually saying the word hardly mattered anymore. I had been hearing those sounds as “Dad-ee” for so long that I no longer knew what they sounded like before my mind arranged them that way.

He was greeting Father. And he knew it was feeding time.

For a time, I listened to the wet sounds of eating rise from the stairwell.

I have never actually watched a feeding happen. In fact, I have never really seen my brother. Not fully. The closest I came was years ago, during one of the feeds. Father opened the cellar door, and for a moment the light bleeding down the stairs caught some small portion of what waited beyond it.

I saw his eyes—or perhaps only one of them properly. They were bulbous and disgusting in a way I still have difficulty improving upon with better language. One had collapsed inward, almost swallowed by the ruin of its socket. The other remained: pale, swollen, pushed obscenely forward, a great wet pearl that appeared blind or nearly so and yet seemed, for that very reason, to stare with greater concentration.

That eye has followed me much farther through life than my brother ever has. In memory it seems nearly the size of my head, though I know nightmares are generous with dimensions. Even now, when I close my eyes, I sometimes see it suspended in the darkness behind my lids. And when the feeding begins—when I hear the slopping of meat, the wet collision of teeth, whatever chewing has become inside that cellar—my imagination performs the cruelty my father once tried to spare me. From that single remembered eye, it builds the rest of him.

I looked away from the stairwell and fixed my attention on the peeling wallpaper in the kitchen.

Our house was dirty. Nothing seemed neglected at first. Father and I were trying. Then one day there was grease above the stove that would not quite come off, dust worked into the edges of the baseboards, a film over surfaces neither of us could remember last having wiped. By then some things had simply become part of the house.

We lacked what Father sometimes called a woman’s touch, though even as a boy I understood that the phrase concealed more than it explained.

Father never dated.

How could he?

Whatever was wrong with my brother had shaped the whole arrangement of our lives around itself. We did not have company. We did not invite neighbors inside. We did not leave for long. There were doors in the house that remained locked and questions that remained unanswered, and after a while the two began to serve much the same purpose.

I barely remembered my mother—I had always been told that she died giving birth to my brother, and for years I accepted the story without much thought.

As I grew older, it became harder to believe.

I stared at the wallpaper and tried not to pursue that thought any farther. I wanted something ordinary. Anything. I studied one loose strip near the corner and considered whether it would come away cleanly if I pulled it. I counted the little faded flowers in the pattern. I tried to remember whether we had milk and butter. Anything louder and kinder than the liquid working of my brother’s mouth below.

My father’s hand landed on my shoulder, and I nearly came out of the chair.

“We should head out,” he said. “I set him up with a movie, but he’s going to be cranky for more food.”

I nodded.

Outside, we returned to the fire. Father stripped beside it and fed his clothes piece by piece into the flames. He had packed clean things in a bag and dressed there in the dark, illuminated only when the fire reached high enough to find him.

From inside the house came the faint cries of my brother. Neither of us looked toward them. We knew they would stop within the hour.

Father did not notice at first, but on our way out I had taken a bottle of bourbon from the kitchen desk. It was nearly full. I do not remember deciding to take it. My hand seems simply to have done so. We were both so tired. That night especially, there was a heaviness between us that seemed to require something before either of us could pretend the evening was over.

I was still a little shy of the legal age, but not by much, and I supposed Father might permit me this kindness.

When he finally noticed the bottle, his first expression was disapproval. Then he looked at me again, and I watched the objection diminish as he took in my height, my face, whatever gathering of years had apparently escaped his notice until that moment. There was something faintly absurd in his hesitation over this that I think we both recognized.

Father held out his hand, and I gave him the bottle.

We drank in silence for a while.

It was not my first time with liquor. I had stolen enough from cabinets and bottles over the years to know the general business of it, though beside my father I still drank like an amateur. My pulls were small and cautious. His were not. If the bourbon burned him, he concealed it with an ease I found almost insulting.

The silence changed almost instantly. At first it was quiet—the kind we were used to. Then something wistful entered it, though I could not have said from where. After that came sadness, heavy and unmistakable sadness.

I watched my father cry.

He did it quietly. There was no collapse, no dramatic covering of the face. His chest simply began to heave beneath his shirt, and every so often a small gasp escaped him, sharp enough that I pretended not to hear it.

I could not cry. Or more truthfully, I did not want to. I was angry.

For a little while I blamed the bourbon. I thought perhaps this was simply the kind of drunk I was destined to become. But the explanation did not survive much inspection. I had been angry sober. I had been angry for years. The booze had not manufactured anything. It had only removed whatever manners had kept the anger from speaking.

So I began asking him things I had never before possessed the stones to ask plainly.

He did not answer everything. And eventually some line was crossed, and I watched the softness leave him. My father gathered himself almost visibly. His voice hardened. The old authority returned, and with it the familiar arrangement between us: he was the father, I was the son. Even so, he told me more than I expected.

Much more.

I was surprised, at first, by how openly my father spoke. He had always been a guarded man. Life had probably hardened him further, but I suspect the hardness predated most of what happened to us. I could imagine him possessing some version of it even as a boy. Tonight, however, something had loosened.

There was relief in the way he spoke. I recognized that much, though I did not like recognizing it. He seemed almost grateful to be telling someone, even if that someone happened to be the very person from whom he had spent years trying to conceal the worst of it.

Perhaps the bourbon had relieved him of some portion of the guilt. Perhaps it had only enlarged the guilt until keeping it private became harder than confessing it.

I could not tell. What I knew was that the man beside me no longer felt entirely like my father. Not the father I understood, anyway. He had become too exposed. Too human in some way I was not prepared to forgive him for. And I hate admitting this now, but I respected him a little less.

He began with my brother’s birth.

My mother had gone into labor too quickly for them to reach the hospital. They called emergency services, but we lived far enough out that help was still some distance away when it became obvious the baby would not wait.

So my father delivered him himself.

He seemed surprised that I remembered none of this. I was three, perhaps a little younger, and whatever remains of that day in me has long since lost its shape. I could not summon a room, a voice, a single clear image. Still, there was enough in the way he told it that I never seriously doubted him.

He said the delivery had been impossible.

My brother came out gray and cold, without movement or sound. Neither of them had prepared themselves for a dead child because no one had given them reason to. The appointments had raised no alarms. The pregnancy, so far as either of them knew, had been ordinary.

Then suddenly there was this small, lifeless thing in my father’s hands and my mother screaming for him to give it to her.

By then, according to Father, I had begun crying too.

He described the room as all noise. My mother shouting. Me somewhere nearby, frightened by whatever frightened her. Father trying to speak over both of us while holding a son he believed had been born dead.

Eventually he placed my brother in my mother’s arms and took me out of the room.

He said he calmed me down and put me to bed for a nap. Perhaps he did. But even as he told me this, I had the peculiar sense that he was tidying the memory for both our sakes. I could more easily imagine him carrying me into another room, shutting the door, and leaving me there while whatever happened next began without me.

This was where my father began to drift away from me.

His voice flattened. The details grew fewer. Whether this was the bourbon or shame or simply the point beyond which memory had become too ugly to handle directly, I could not tell.

He said that when he returned to my mother, she was nursing my brother, and she was smiling. That detail has always disturbed me more than almost anything else he told me. She sat there cradling the little gray thing against her chest, happy because her child was alive.

Only it was not milk he was taking from her.

It was blood.

Blood and flesh.

My father said the boy had chewed into her breast and was feeding from the wound. He was devouring her, little by little, and my mother did not scream. She did not push him away. She held him closer. She kept saying that he was alive. Her baby was alive. If this was what he needed, then she could give it to him.

Even now I have difficulty imagining such love without also imagining madness.

My father tried to stop her. At least, that is what he told me.

But she begged him not to take the child away. She begged him to forgive her, and then to forgive the baby, though what forgiveness could possibly have meant in that room I cannot say.

She already understood, somehow, that she would not survive.

What mattered to her was that he did, so she made my father promise—keep him alive.

Feed him.

Do not let him die with me.

Father said she pleaded until he had no choice but to agree.

No choice.

That was how he put it.

From stories I heard, ge had always been a pushover where my mother was concerned, and perhaps in another life I might have found something tender in that. Sitting beside the fire that night, I found nothing. Whatever existed beneath our house—whatever portion of it deserved to be called my brother—had killed my mother before I was old enough even to remember her properly.

It had taken her.

After that, it had taken the shape of our entire lives.

My father had allowed it. Worse still, he had maintained it. And now I assisted.

I could feel the anger coming off me by then, and Father could see it too. He began trying to explain himself, to put some human proportion back around a decision that had ceased to seem human to me.

“You’ll understand when you have a wife and child of your own.” He said it almost automatically. Then his face changed. It was only for a moment, but I saw the regret arrive. Because even he must have understood how unlikely such a life had become for me.

Anyway, he kept my brother a secret.

Some people received fragments of the truth and some considerably more. Others were paid simply to leave questions unasked. There were records that had to agree closely enough with one another, officials who had to be satisfied, neighbors who could never be permitted too much curiosity. My father learned which explanations people accepted because accepting them was easier, and which people required money before they stopped looking. It was a delicate arrangement, always in need of tending and correction, and I think it aged him faster than the years alone would have. A man may carry a lie for a very long time. It was the maintenance that wore him down.

I could see that he was hurting. And I think I relished it a little.

I am not proud of that. Even then I understood, logically, that he had never asked for any of this. But logic had ceased to be the strongest thing in me. There was something gratifying in seeing his anguish finally made visible, in watching the private weight he had imposed upon our lives bend him where I could see it.

So I twisted the knife, so to speak, and asked about the man.

Then I corrected myself.

The men.

My father did not want to answer. But I could feel the balance between us altering with every drink. The drunker he became, the less force there was in his refusals, and some ugly portion of me seemed to acquire precisely what he was surrendering.

His authority diminished, and mine rose to occupy the space it left behind. For once I could press him, and he could not end the matter merely by becoming my father.

Eventually I overcame whatever remained of his resistance, though what he gave me afterward scarcely amounted to a story. It came in fragments: facts interrupted by excuses, long silences, and occasional sobbing.

The fullest account began with Uncle Terry.

The first, that is, apart from my mother.

These were not my father’s words, but they were the conclusion I drew from what he told me: Terry was a loser.

There was very little in his life that seemed, at least from my father’s account, to possess much worth. He had no family of his own, no profession worth mentioning, no particular ambition, and hardly any enduring attachment beyond his brother.

I suspect these details were offered with a purpose.

Terry possessed less. Fewer people depended upon him. His life therefore seemed to occupy less space in the world. Once that premise was accepted, what happened to him became easier to excuse.

My father explained that feeding my brother properly had required a period of trial and error. When the boy was very small, raw meat had apparently been enough. As he grew, however, whatever appetite governed him grew also, and ordinary meat ceased to satisfy it.

Then came what my father called a tantrum.

The word hardly seems adequate.

He claimed that my brother, though not yet a year old, had swollen—or perhaps unfolded—until he stood nearly the height of a grown man. Five feet, maybe a little more.

My father was drunk when he told me this, and I cannot pretend to know how literally that measurement should be taken. But on the larger point he never wavered. He swore my brother had nearly leveled the house.

He had called Terry over for help, at first under the pretense that the two of them might go hunting. By the time Terry arrived, however, hunting was no longer the immediate concern. The problem was to calm my brother before he destroyed anything else.

Terry was a large man, and a strong one. My father was no weakling either. Yet from the way he described what followed, neither of them held much advantage.

He spoke of my brother as one might speak of a bear or an ox driven past restraint—something far stronger than its age or size had any right to allow.

Together they tried to confine him. But during the struggle, Uncle Terry’s arm was torn from the shoulder.

My father said there was scarcely time for either man to comprehend what had happened before my brother seized the severed limb and began feeding upon it.

The effect was immediate. Even as Terry bled beside him, my brother grew quieter with every mouthful.

My father began weeping when he reached this part of the story.

Terry bled to death before anything could be done for him. What Father did afterward was considerably harder to forgive. Having already seen the effect Terry’s arm produced, he used the rest of his brother’s body to feed his son. It was through this obscenity, apparently, that he learned what my brother actually wanted.

Meat alone was not enough.

He wanted blood.

Warm blood.

Fresh blood.

After Terry, Father shackled my brother in the basement. The restraints were fixed into the concrete and heavy enough that my father claimed he could not break them, though the chains themselves were long. My brother could move through much of the cellar, reach his bed and television, and approach the door when someone entered. What he could not do was climb the stairs.

For years that distinction constituted most of our safety. But Terry had been an accident. I wanted to know about the murders.

By then my father was in shambles, so thoroughly overcome by drink that much of what he said arrived broken apart by repetition, weeping, and long intervals in which I could scarcely understand him. Yet from those fragments I gathered something worse.

Terry had taught him not only what my brother preferred but what human blood did to him. It was not that one body could physically be rationed for a year. The effect of the feeding lasted. A deer might quiet him for days. A good stockpile of animal meat could stretch that longer. But after feeding on Terry, my brother remained calm for months.

Father claimed it was nearly a year before the old hunger truly returned. And that knowledge entered into his calculations every time hunting became difficult. He spoke of it with a practicality that disgusted me even then, as though balancing some household expense: so much risk now against so many months without another feed. A person had become not merely a life, but a period of time.

When circumstances seemed to justify the danger, he said, he would lure men away with him.

Our part of the world had never been especially merciful toward queers, and I suspect my father carried some share of that prejudice himself. And I should admit that I inherited more of it than I am comfortable remembering. Even so, long before I possessed the language to examine such thinking properly, I understood the cruelty of what he was describing.

He would meet men, encourage their interest, and offer whatever promise was necessary to make them believe the night would end somewhere private. Then he would take them home.

Through his weeping, he pleaded with me to understand.

He swore he had always done his best to choose men of the worst character—men without families, without friends, men whose disappearance might pass unnoticed or even, in his estimation, leave the world marginally improved.

I have no reason to believe those judgments were true. But it seemed he needed them to be true.

Perhaps some of the men were cruel. Perhaps some were not. By then my father had spent so many years deciding which lives could be sacrificed that I do not trust the categories he invented to make the decision bearable. What mattered was that he had found people whom he believed the world would not defend.

In this way he persuaded himself that necessity could be made virtuous. If someone had to die, then better that it should be someone who would not be missed. Better still if he could convince himself that the world might somehow be improved by the absence. He had converted murder into a species of mercy, and mercy into one more instrument by which he could endure himself.

I fear I pushed him too far. Not long afterward he lurched from his chair and stumbled toward the house.

I could hear his breathing as he went—ragged and broken, interrupted by sobs that had by then made speech almost impossible—until the door closed behind him and I was left alone.

I cannot say what persuaded me that I ought to follow.

Nothing he had said gave me definite cause for alarm, and yet I felt almost immediately that I should not permit him to remain alone.

I resisted the feeling.

God knows I did not want to follow him.

After everything he had confessed, I wanted only to remain by the fire and let whatever grief possessed him exhaust itself beyond my hearing.

That hesitation has troubled me ever since.

Memory is cruel in such matters. Give it half a minute in which something dreadful might have been prevented and it will spend the remainder of a life dividing those seconds into smaller and smaller portions, discovering in each another moment when one ought to have moved.

Had I risen immediately.

Had I been ten paces nearer.

Had I reached the door before he crossed whatever distance remained beyond it.

I have rehearsed every variation often enough to know that none can alter what occurred. But I resisted the impulse to follow him. And for those few moments, he was alone.

I was perhaps twenty yards from the house when I heard the shotgun.

The report was impossibly loud in the open air. For an instant it seemed to empty the world of every other sound. Then, from somewhere beneath the house, there arose the wet bawling of my brother.

I had never heard him make such a sound.

The cries were deep and prolonged beyond what seemed possible for any human throat, violent enough that I imagined I could feel them through the ground beneath my feet.

Whatever hesitation had detained me vanished. And I ran into the house and down the basement stairs without thinking, scarcely aware of the old repulsion that had always seized me at the sight of the metal door.

Before I reached it, I heard something articulated within the wailing. A voice—wet, broken, barely manageable as speech—was crying the same words again and again.

“Dad-ee night-night! Dad-ee night-night!”

My brother was crouched over him when I entered.

He had not begun to feed. No—he was touching Father.

Poking at his shoulder and chest with enormous fingers, perhaps trying to provoke some familiar response from a body whose sudden stillness he could neither understand nor accept.

“Dad-ee night-night!”

Father did not move.

The shotgun lay several feet away on the concrete.

For some moments I could make nothing coherent of what I saw. Even now, I cannot reconstruct with certainty what happened in the basement between Father leaving me and the discharge of the gun.

My first thought was the obvious one—he had gone below to kill himself. But almost immediately another question intruded. Why there? Why descend into that room to do it?

Then I looked at my brother, still crouched over him and bawling with that terrible infantile grief, and another possibility occurred to me. Perhaps Father had not gone into the basement intending to shoot himself. Perhaps he had gone down there to shoot my brother. Perhaps he had stood within the reach of those chains, raised the gun, and found my brother looking back at him with the same simple adoration he had shown every feeding night of his life. Perhaps Father could not do it.

I will never know.

“Dad-ee night-night! Dad-ee night-night!”

It was then that I finally saw my brother in full. Even hunched over, with his shoulders pitched forward and his head held low, he was easily eight feet tall, perhaps more. The impression of his size was so far beyond anything I had imagined that for several seconds I simply stared.

Then he saw me, recoiling as he did. There was fear in his face—plain, unmistakable fear—and with a clumsy backward movement he pressed himself into the corner as though I were the thing that had entered the room monstrous.

His face was deformed, though even now I am not certain that deformed is the proper word. Unfinished, perhaps. It had the appearance of something assembled from an imperfect recollection of the human countenance, as though whatever had shaped him remembered the general arrangement of a face while neglecting the finer obligations of proportion and completion. God, perhaps—if one could imagine God responsible for such a thing.

I could not.

Skin was missing across broad patches of his face, exposing mottled flesh and bone beneath. His nose had collapsed almost flat, leaving two ragged openings at its center. What remained of his eyes sat unevenly within the ruined anatomy, one little more than a sunken socket, the other pale and swollen and pushed too far forward.

I recognized it immediately.

The eye from my nightmares.

His mouth was worse. There was scarcely a mouth left in the human sense, only an irregular opening torn through the lower face. The lips had receded or been destroyed, leaving the teeth exposed in crooked ranks. Several jutted outward at incompatible angles from swollen red tissue. The jaw hung heavier on one side, dragged downward by scarred flesh.

I vomited.

His whole face possessed a terrible asymmetry. Nothing met where it ought to meet. Bone pressed through places that should have been soft. Gray-white skin clung in patches between dark red tissue. Old blood had blackened in the deeper folds while fresher wetness shone across the exposed surfaces. Behind his head, coarse black hair stood out in tangled clumps.

What remained recognizably human only made him worse to look at. There was still the suggestion of a brow, a cheek, an eye, a mouth—the basic arrangement preserved just well enough that the mind kept trying to make a face from it. Yet it never quite could.

That, I think, was the true horror of seeing him at last. He was not wholly unrecognizable. Had he been, perhaps I could have accepted him more easily as something else. Instead he remained close enough to human that every feature invited recognition, yet wrong enough that recognition failed each time. And yet he was my brother. I knew this with a certainty no reasoning had supplied and no deformity in him could diminish. I had only to look at him.

My mind went blank.

For a while I stood there with Father dead between us and my brother crying in the corner.
Then another thought came.

Father was gone.

Until that moment I had never understood how much of our life depended upon those two words never becoming true.

Father hunted.

Father kept the records.

Father knew how much food was enough and how long it would last.

Father knew which lies had already been told and to whom.

Father knew the locks, the chains, the medicines, the routines.

And now all of it belonged to me.

My brother continued calling for him. “Dad-ee! Dad-ee!”

For the first time I understood that if I remained in that house, there would be another feeding night. Then another. Sooner or later there would be another dog. Perhaps another person. I would inherit every calculation I had spent the evening condemning.

I backed out of the cellar.

Afterward I remember moving through the house, but not deciding to move. I passed from room to room gathering what few things I meant to take.

Then I found the kerosene.

All my life, after a feeding, Father had taught me the same lesson: if something had been bloodied badly enough, if it carried too much risk, if it could not safely be cleaned or explained, we burned it.

I poured kerosene across the floors. Across the furniture. Up the stairs and along the walls. Everywhere the liquid would run or soak or cling. All the while my brother cried out for our father beneath me.

I remember striking the flame. After that there is another vacancy.

By the time I became properly aware of myself again, I was driving nearly forty miles an hour with the house burning behind me, its light diminishing in the mirror with every turn of the road.

I had gone some distance before I realized that I was crying. Soon I was too far away to hear my brother over the roar of the fire. My mind supplied the sound nevertheless.

It placed him beside me in the car and filled the dark with those same appalling cries, so vividly that for several miles I could not persuade myself they were memory rather than sound.

I do not know whether he lived. I also do not know whether anyone will come looking for me, or whether I will be taken somewhere and made to answer for what happened in that house.

Surely there will be questions. I have tried to imagine what I will tell them.

That my father was dead.

That something impossible lived beneath our house.

That I was afraid of becoming the man who would have to keep it alive.

None of those explanations seems sufficient. The only one that feels true is the one Father taught me years ago.

When something terrible could no longer be carried forward, we burned it.

Credit: Del Malocchio