A Quality of Light (22 page)

“Arrested!”

“Yes, son,” my mother said. “He’s been charged with assault, and assault causing bodily harm. He broke a bottle over Chris Hollingshead’s skull and beat Allen Begg severely before he was stopped. Mr. Holmes and Mr. Hughes had to wrestle him off.”

“Johnny’s in jail?”

“At least until we get this all sorted out,” my father said.

I tried to concentrate, to get a handle on how all this could have occurred, but the whiskey and the beating had taken their toll and I slipped down into sleep very quickly. When I awoke it was late morning. My mouth tasted sour, while my head and body thrummed with pain. The sounds of the hospital were hushed. My mother was asleep in a corner chair with my father’s overcoat pulled around her shoulders.

I could see myself crossing the darkened playing field and approaching the bleachers. In my ears the sounds of the dance behind me were gradually replaced by the rowdy banter of the group in the darkness — swearing, and throaty laughter. I saw Mary Ellen’s face. Worried. Scared, even. And then the spinning. The lights. The heavy blows to my body. The smell of the ground, the booze, my fear. I groaned, and immediately felt my mother’s hand on my brow. The tears came, thick and heavy, pushed by sobs rising from deep within me. I cried deep racking sobs while my mother lay her head gingerly across my chest and offered me the comfort of her presence.

I cried until my chest ached more with the effort of sobbing than from the bruises, until I felt a space open up within me, a release, a hollow that was filled quickly with the warmth of my mother, her tears on my face and neck. I swallowed hard and opened my eyes. My father stood in the doorway, dressed in his barn clothes and clutching a small pile of books and the tiny blue transistor radio we used in the stable, tears flowing down his face too. He set the items on the bedside table, then put a hand on my
mother’s back and one on my shoulder, looking down at the two of us. We stayed that way for a long, long time.

I
f I could rearrange that whole evening I’d have never let you walk out that door alone. It was stupid. I knew Hollingshead and Begg were up to something. The way Reid dumped you that night should have tipped me off. No way they were going to settle for making you look bad in front of everybody. I knew that but I also knew you needed to at least try to get an answer, some kind of explanation, because you were never one to believe that people are cruel and cold and hard without reason. You’d never seen that. I had to let you go. Why, if I knew it was a bad move? I guess because even then, Josh, I was kind of living through you. Some part of me wanted you to walk out there, confront the assholes and get an answer, wanted you to prove to me that the world and its people, even the kids, aren’t a collective slag heap, that the refined ones like you can still get through to them. To us. Maybe if you had succeeded that night, come back understanding that some people are unknowable, our lives would have been different. I would have been different.

After about ten minutes I knew I had to go out there. We heard the racket as we stepped out the back door. The closer we got to the bleachers, the more I felt something rising in me, until I saw you being kicked and punched.

I don’t remember anything about the fight. It was like I blacked out in anger. You don’t see red like they say. You see black. Makes sense to me. Black is the absence of color, of light. When you slip into that kind of anger, there is no color. No red of anger, no blue of sorrow, yellow of happiness, pink of peace. It’s like the black holes astronomers describe. Something that had the chance to shine so brightly suddenly collapses in upon itself and becomes so compacted, so dense that it won’t even allow light to escape. Blackness. That’s what I was swinging and kicking through that night, all the accumulated blackness. I was swinging at my father. I was kicking at every sick drunken night I had had to live through.
Punching at every midnight move, every laughing, scowling face in every new school I ever walked into, at every lousy, flea-bitten flop we had to call home, every name he ever called me, every slap, push, pinch, every mop I had to squeeze the puke out of and every piss-filled vodka bottle he left lying under the couch. I swung at all of it. And I swung at my mother for not being brave enough to get us out. The blackness won that fight, Josh. Not me.

I
had never experienced such anger. Oh, sure, I’d had my moods as all kids do — the self-righteous petulance over chores, mild resentments — but never anything approaching a malignant anger. When I walked out of the hospital three days later I could feel it roiling and churning inside me. At home, as I looked into my bedroom mirror at my blackened eyes and purplish torso, it grew thicker, churlish and weighty. I needed an explanation. I needed to make sense of all that had happened, to take this tangle of emotion and circumstance and set it into an order that I could understand. My best friend was in jail, I was a pariah in my own school — the brunt of a hatred I neither deserved nor understood — and no one had ever explained to me that the world could operate this way. I began to understand the heft and scope of vengeance, just as I began to understand, for the first time, that sin is a desire we can carry so easily within us.

My parents spoke in soothing tones, made all the right gestures and took great care to see that I was comfortable, but even their doting upset me. My parents took my reticence as concern for Johnny, who had been moved to the Galt School for Boys while he awaited his trial. They allowed me my distance and I used it to walk the fields.

I returned to the house and we sat for supper in silence except for the blessing. I kept my head down as I ate, seething. I felt that if I spoke, everything would erupt from within me and I would go
mad with the effort. But unable to restrain myself any longer, I laid my knife and fork down alongside my plate, moved my chair back from the table and looked up with tears streaming down my face. I shook as I told them everything about those first two weeks, allowing my voice its stridency, its pain, confusion and vitriol. When I reached the part about the beating I began slamming one hand down on the table, rattling dishes, spilling milk and water and crumbling the worried faces of my parents.

“Why?” I cried. “I didn’t do anything! Nothing! They hate me! They
hate me!”

“I don’t know, Joshua,” my mother said, softly.

I stood abruptly, my chair clattering to the floor. “You don’t
know?
You sent me out there! You sent me to that school! You sent me to get yelled at, screamed at, put down! You sent me to get beat up! You
sent
me!”

“Joshua,” my father said firmly, evenly. “Sit down.”

I stared at him hard. The first time in my life I ever gave him a look that wasn’t respectful, admiring, kind. The first time in my life he was ever the focus of anger. I clenched my fists in front of me and looked at him, his peaceful manner suddenly distasteful. The tears at the corners of my mouth were hot and acrid and I felt laughter building in my belly, a demonic laughter, frightening, fascinating, energizing.

“No!” I half screamed. “You sit down! All my life — Joshua, sit and listen. Joshua, sit and listen, here’s how the world works, Joshua,
you just sit and listen
, this is how God wants you to be, Joshua, here’s what you believe, Joshua,
you just sit and listen!
Well, where was God when this was happening to me? Why didn’t
He
just sit and listen? Why didn’t He listen to me?”

My father rose easily and stepped forward slowly to lay a hand on my quaking shoulder. “Easy, son,” he said.

“No!”
I swiped his hand away. “No! No more
easy, son!
They
beat me!”

“I know, son, I know. But you have to look past that. Look at how you can help them,” he said.

“Help them! I’ll help them. Me and Johnny, we’ll help them!” I said through clenched teeth. “We’ll help
them
feel how I feel. We’ll beat
them
up. We’ll kick them. We’ll slap them. We’ll laugh at them!”

“No, Joshua,” my mother said. “That will only make things worse. Johnny’s in enough trouble now and you don’t need any more either. Fighting won’t solve anything.” She reached out towards me, but pulled back and lay her hand on the table.

“Oh, yes, it will. Oh,
yes
, it will! They call me a savage, a wild Indian, an animal? Well, maybe I should act like one. Maybe I should be a warrior like Johnny says and give it right back to them. That’s what warriors do, you know. They fight!”

“John’s wrong, son,” my father said. “There’s more to being an Indian than just being a warrior.”

“What do you know?” I said, pointing a finger at his face. “What do you know about being Indian? All my life you never said one thing, one thing to let me know what I was supposed to be. One thing to tell me how I was supposed to behave — what people expected of me, what they thought of me. You never told me anything. You never told me that they could hate me, that they wouldn’t want me, that they’d beat me. You just let me believe that I was Joshua Kane and that everything would be all right. Well it’s not all right! I’m an
Indian!
I’m not a Kane, I’m an
Indian!
And I don’t even know what the means …”

“You’re Joshua Kane. You always have been. You always will be,” he said, reaching out to me slowly with both arms.

“Bullshit,” I cursed, slapping his arms away. “That’s bullshit. I wasn’t
always
Joshua Kane. My mother was
Indian. I’m
Indian. You know that, I know that, God knows that. The whole fuckin’ world knows that! But you … you wanna believe that takin’ me away from my mother doesn’t make me Indian any more. The growing up with you makes me like you — makes me
white
, makes me a Kane. Well, I’m not white, I’m not a Kane. I don’t know what I am.”

“You’re my son and … I love you.”

The laugh erupted finally, derisive, insane. “Love me? You love
me? Well, why didn’t you
protect
me! Why didn’t you tell me they would hate me? Why didn’t you tell me what to do? What to say? Why did you let me walk out there without knowing?”

I righted my chair and sat down heavily. I collapsed forward, my head settling on my crossed arms. The laugh robbed me of my energy and I felt drained of everything but a sudden sadness, deep and all-encompassing. I cried. Long wailing cries like thin screams, taut and brittle. When my sobs quieted we sat around the table, silent, wounded — a family confronting itself, its pains and failings, its future clouded, awaiting the hand of an absent God to guide it. We had entered a country without words. I looked at the people I had called my parents all my life and felt the coiling snake of anger slither across my belly once again. I needed away. I mumbled “Excuse me” and headed out the door. My parents sat in their chairs as silent and immobile as abandoned idols.

I walked the fields until the moon rose above the outbuildings. The anger roiling in my belly made me ashamed. When I entered the house my parents were sitting in the living room as silently as I had left them. We merely nodded at each other as I passed on my way to my room. I don’t know how long I lay awake in my bed that night, thoughts cascading over thoughts and images pouring through images, but I vaguely heard the creak of the floor as they went to bed themselves. There were no murmurs and chuckles that I would normally hear now and again, just the rustle of bedclothes and the silence they pulled over themselves like a comforter. Sleep, when it came, was deep and dreamless.