James Donlon
When the Lord first appeared to me, he was in a blue mechanic’s coverall with a rifle on his shoulder. In the winter, my Daddy’s farm got desperate cold. We would work out in the field for hours, working to set up oil-lamp heaters every six feet or so. The tomatoes were green and hard in December. You could crack them between your fingers like glass.
My mother spun old records on cold days like that. Dusted vinyl crooned out of every window. God himself approached the gate alongside Yellowbird Road on the west side of the farm. My brother and I worked at the heaters while my Daddy approached the Almighty. The conversation was brief and sacred with both men huddled in intense recollection. My mother’s records faded from song to song, the needle nodding along the ridges. My Daddy didn’t move much in his enunciations. He was a short and respectful man in holy company. I’ll never forget the loose skin draped over the stranger’s bones. It seemed to sway into the breeze like cloth.
The sun was fixing to set and when we gathered for dinner that evening the house was damp and silent. My father told us the man with the gun used to live nearby and wanted to see how things held up. He said they had been friends as kids. My father called him Jim. He told us not to mind the rifle, said he wouldn’t be coming back any time soon. He lived the next month on the edge of his nerve, watching the road while we worked. He glazed over the dirt with long and deliberate breath, lungs keeping time with the music from inside. Records faded in and out from song to song just about all winter long, with each pause a dead stress lingered about the farm like a stale mist. My brother and I counted the clouds above and called out their shapes. Bears, bowling pins, old men in rocking chairs. Vapor gave way to the wind. Heavy shapes formed, stretched, and thinned out across our horizon. A baby, a bride, an old grandfather clock stuck at noon.
My brother and I are two years apart. As the oldest, I was expected to do half the teaching that my parents didn’t have the energy for. Connor is a sweet kid, but painfully eager and gullible. When the cops brought him home one night for drinking with his friends in the high school parking lot, we were both thankful I was the only one there. Hot temper and heavy drinking was a family affair, taught young and hidden well. He always got mixed up in things. Connor and Dick, the Agnoson boys, the Wild Dogs of Yellowbird Road.
I carried my accent through college. A wistful disregard for finishing certain words and a chipper twang that holds the vowels in the top-back of my throat. I love my voice. My mother’s pacing, my father’s dialect. Overtime, my father’s tongue faded into my own. We had a tense time before I went off on my way. He would’ve kept me locked up there forever if he had the heart. I didn’t know what it was like to see your son age into the best and worst parts of you. I didn’t know much back then.
I can’t find exactly where to start with the sad bits of this whole thing. I’ve repeated it so much in my head. I get lost now. It’s real tough to feel it all at the same intensity I felt it before. I’m jealous of it. That instinctual passion opens up for a more dramatic retelling of what happened. Tears have some kaleidoscopic effect on the past. The boring details, when you jumble them up, have a way of settling into a story of their own.
My father is memorialized in the vague phrases people say in reference to exactly how he died. No one takes time to mention who he was, what he was like. I’ve found the whole affair to be a mess. I can’t figure all the details and I’m not confident in the ones I have. There are some police reports I’ve kept if you need them. The short of it is this: Jeb Agnoson was found in his Cadillac with two holes poked out of him. Blood on the dashboard, blood in the weeds. That’s what the pictures showed, anyway.
A year before I left for school, some northern company bought up all the land surrounding our farm and hired us to work for them. My father used the money to make the house real nice for my mother. White panel walls and a new porch. Dad called it his castle. Connor and I just call it “The Yellowbird House.” It sat in a clearing of an unnamed forest. Trees tapered off to either side of a long stretch of grass. The house was an old hunting shack from the 1800s that my parents bought and redesigned every three years or so. As a toddler, the place was a charming farmhouse with wallpaper and refurbished farm equipment on the walls. At one time it was a minimalist, art deco nightmare. Today the structure is a Frankenstein’s monster of 20th century architectural movements. One room is feathered with ornate, faux-gold trimming and dark oak, another is a plush, white-cotton dream. No amount of money could fix the tackiness that was my mother’s taste. Her vision was confined to a three-bedroom in the middle of nowhere. She tended to her animals and her garden. No lilies, she’d say, too much dead around here already. When she passed away, he kept everything isolated and untouched, leaving everything as if it was the day before she died. He slept on the couch for months as not to disrupt the order she set in stone in their bed.
Jeanette Agnoson stayed whole til the end. The lump in her throat grew and grew and wrapped itself around her windpipe like ivy. We all watched her change, watched her solidify details of her life and how she’d want to be remembered. She’d say I was never a looker to begin with and don’t tell people I was kind. The records rung out of the house until March of 1972.
At my mother’s funeral, my father didn’t cry. He held my brother together as they lowered her into the ground. I tried to fight away feeling any particular way about it. I wanted to look strong or something. We had known for a while this was coming. I spoke after the priest did. She was my mother. She was kind. I said some sweet things about her cooking and compassion for animals. There’s no brilliant way to eulogize anyone. In the coffin, they painted her face up with reds and pinks and a bitter pale death. They don’t tell you how much the dead change all gussied up. I suppose it makes it easier to pour dirt on a face you don’t recognize. I suppose it’s sadder to witness the way death hits people than it is to be hit yourself. Sort of like a car crash.
In 1954, our dad was a ghost to us. The company gave him more work across the state. He was some big farm overseer. A boss with a boss with a boss, lost in the web of corporate bureaucracy. We’d find things shuffled up, half eaten, and left open, but we’d rarely find him. He’d take us shooting sometimes or drive down to a plot of land to get some dirt under our fingernails. I could tell the other kids at school had more involved parents. I could tell they were told to be nicer than usual to Connor and I.
Darcy-Ann was a rare image in my life before then. It wasn’t long after my mother went cold she started sticking her nose in my father’s private life. She would show up on his hip at church dinners. She had red, rotten hair that flew from her scalp like feathers. Her earrings were cracked pearls. She wore tight dresses that tucked in under her loose hanging belly, full of corporate finger foods and flavors she could only earn on her knees. She kept her lips scarlet and throbbing. Even now I have to admit, she was beautiful in a fleeting way. Like a stranger on the train platform, blurred and grotesque and awe-droppingly memorable.
Once, I drove her to get her hair done. Darcy-Ann never drove, she never learned how. Georgia summers were hot and dry in our neck of the woods. She asked that I sit with her through the performance. The woman doing the trimming spoke like a fortune teller; through her gum-smacking and nail clicking she wove gossip and bitterness into Darcy-Ann’s hair. I learned about the mutual friends Darcy-Ann and the hairdresser had. Thomas was out of work. Betty was a gapped-tooth slut. Henrietta’s husband had an acquired taste for women who were not Henrietta. None of these women were in my parent’s friend group. My father only ever saw his friends at funerals. It was like a secret society of creeps had been in our town, right under our noses, and we never crossed paths with any of them.
In the back of the parlor was a man who I would come to know as Yahweh. The same man with the loose skin and rifle all those years before. He swept up the hair after the cutting was done and collected it in canvas bags before disappearing behind the lime-green curtain. In 1974 his teeth were gray and crooked like tombstones. He smiled at me from the dim back office of the salon and faded out the back door.
Darcy-Ann had tired eyes and hip bones that jutted out like clothes hangers in a trash bag, but my father found her remarkable. Look at this woman he said the spark of my life. She was young in body and spirit. She got my father off the couch. She made us dinner on special occasion. The two of them argued twice a week. Once when she’d come home late, heels in hand, after a night at The Fitz. Again when she’d return from the department store, complaining about money or the house or my father’s low burnt wick.
Darcy-Ann bided her time until the will came. They would eat and drink and smoke all day. She was rolling him toward the trash shoot one sip at a time. She wrote herself into the cracks of our broken family and slid out when her mercy ran dry. Connor and I watched from a distance as our father’s tired skin folded into a smile. Darcy, her sex and her perfume, were the last relief my father’s worn body could handle. He cuddled up to the first piece of comfort available to him and held on until the end. And who was I to blame him.
In 1976, my father left Yellowbird in his Cadillac with Darcy-Ann in the passenger seat. The police told me that after a full dinner at Gio’s, the couple headed toward the bridge over Sugarcane Creek. At some point, Darcy-Ann had asked to drive home. It was at that point, a man entered the car and shot out two holes in my father. One in his brain and one near his liver. After a brief and unsatisfying investigation, the case went cold. My father carried dirt to the underworld on his chest. This time, my brother didn’t cry. It was a Monday. At the service I saw the Lord in the back row, with dry eyes and a smirk under his nose.
Two teenagers had been wading in the creek when the shots went off. When the police showed me a sketch of the man who shot my father, I already knew who it was. His eyes were sunken and beating. The Lord’s hairline recedes. White, thick yarn diving back toward his neck. His chin was wide and swollen. I remembered his baggy skin and the liquid mass mixed up underneath it. He looked like a monster from an old horror flick.
I looked for him. In the dark space under the Sugarcane bridge I found matchboxes and sewing kits but nothing that led me to the man who killed my father. The police called the murder a random act of terror. Despite no apparent bruising, Darcy-Ann claimed to have been knocked out for the whole affair. Connor and I knew better.
Whatever wrath Darcy-Ann had was sucked dry after that. In the living room that night, after the police left and the sun set and the street lights out on the distant highway that padded the empty night between the trees had reached their brightest, she sat alone in the living room and cried. Whatever she wanted, whatever she saw in that car that night had peeled her eyelids into an open state of shock. On October 31st, 1976 she drove my father’s car off the Sugarcane bridge into the black shallow water. They found a clump of red-yarn hair spun up in a beaver dam three miles south. Her body, however, must’ve sank somewhere far below the river bed.
My own life flashed by in images. ‘Til 18, Connor was put under my care. Whatever poison that had found its way into our home had killed the people my parents raised. Connor finished high school and we both got sympathy jobs at my father’s old company. Some people Connor said see such a concentrated amount of life as kids that the rest of their lives are unremarkable as atonement.
A baby, a wedding, an old clock in the den that never chimes. I moved west until the smell of the morning was dry. For a long time I was bitter and angry and broke. Connor and I put the house up for sale but left it abandoned after rumors of ghosts and curses and ancient burial grounds made their way around the town and killed the market value.
I tried, for a time, to be more than broken and, for a long while, I was. A husband, a father, a lawyer. I fought it off, those titles and faces people fashion when you make yourself vulnerable to them. In a way, Connor was right about the un-remarkability of life after what we had seen. I was colder then. Empty. My own son grew away from me, as I had from my father. The good fathers die early, before they see their sons grow into strangers.
I returned to the Yellowbird House only once. In 1994 I was an old man, the same age my father was when the Lord took him home. I drove up Yellowbird as the sun settled down into dusk. The fields were layered in a lilac rotten haze. Dead tomato plants whispered above the mist. The castle was wet and grey and sinking into the earth. The wind picked up a low constant tune, humming and buzzing through shattered windows. I saw the house as it was in my memories. White paneled walls, gaudy floral wallpaper, memories in the hallway pinned behind glass. Things had changed over time. The windows were blown out, the roof caved in at parts, and over the front door a black hand print, pressed with charcoal, stretched it’s fingers up toward the gutters. There were papers and things on the dining room table. Dirty dishes, wet in the sink. Someone was home.
I first heard the hymns echoing through the forest. A shoeless pilgrimage made its way from the distance blur of the streetlights, up the dirt path, and gathered on the lawn. Leading the group, a familiar silhouette filled the doorway, soaking in everything through his shallow eyes. I noticed the round divot in the center-right of his forehead. A smile smoldering beneath a familiar skin. My Daddy’s pelt swaddled another man’s bones.
When God entered the room the wind got louder outside, the sky ran wildly passed the ears of the congregation who had gathered in the wake of our misery. Beneath the floorboards I heard my Daddy’s heartbeat pumping up through the walls. Before me, the Lord stood naked, draped in my Daddy’s skin. The fires had no heat. The music was tasteless. I noticed a hole through his torso. He offered me cake and coffee and invited me to stick around for the party. I was told I would be lending a hand in the evening’s ceremony, that they had been expecting me. One by one, the people came in and shook our crooked hands. They sat on our tables and the floor and filed in anywhere they could.
The house began to bulge out of its sides. Moaning, creaking under the pressure. Each one got a number and a call time. On a marble altar he had bashed into the floor, we would take them, one by one, and fillet their skin into wide ribbons. He carved their eyes out with careful serrated lunges. The moon lit up the room like a spotlight. People traded small talk. This or that, the trip over, the weather. With folded legs, children mumbled and giggled from the floor. Over a metal rack he dried out each figure’s flesh. We took notes on the lives of each stray on their way out the door. On heavy paper, I wrote out notes for each one in plum-colored ink. Next-of-kin, loose assets, the address of the person they’d be leaving behind. I remember how strange I felt at how clinical it all was, how organized and taught the labor appeared to be. The skinless bodies hunched out into the rain, into the forest, into vapor.
In an hour, no bloodied shadows remained in the house. We stitched the skin together, one line at a time. Each character had directions, specified locations, a deadline.
He snipped each wire holding my father’s figure to his own and allowed his dark purple shoulders to stretch out across the ceiling. With calloused hands, he split my stomach and crawled inside my gut. We left the house in my skin. His bones became neighbors to my own and when he laughs his teeth scrape my liver.
JAMES DONLON is a graduate of the University of North Florida where he studied Journalism. He received the Amy Wainwright Endowment for short fiction and his work has appeared in The Talon Review.
Our one-hundred-and-ninth issue is something of an anomaly, as it contains much loss and destruction—of the environment, of others, of the self. Yet as the nettle’s sting is soothed by the jewelweed that grows alongside it, each piece holds some key ingredient that makes its burdens easier to bear: beauty, laughter, resilience.