“If it was just me⦔
“Listen, Kettleson. I know the company's been thinking of making you foreman. That's what we need, somebody going from shop steward to shop foreman. That'd make the union really look strong, give the young ones someone to look up to. I'm telling you this in private, but it's the God's truth
.
“Now, if you quit as shop steward and they make you foreman how'll that look, huh? The guys'll figure you've turned into a company man. Your life wouldn't be worth dirt out on that floor, Kettleson. Think about that.”
“I've been thinking about it. But I can't take the risk with my kids. Foreman's job, shop steward, the whole works; none of it's worth having my kids get hurt.”
“Listen here, Kettleson. You're just all excited. You're not thinking clear. You got some vacation time comin'; I'll work it out so you can take a whole week off, right now. Don't worry, I'll arrange it, and with full pay; give this thing a chance to cool off. You disappear for a while. Then come back to me afterwards and we'll talk about it. Just let me work on this.”
I stand at the edge of the water and watch. Dad's swum straight into the ocean, almost out of sight. Then I see him roll over on his back. Mom's come up beside me and put her warm hand on my shoulder; her hand is shaking. We stand there watching as Dad disappears, seems to go deep down into the water and not come up. I'm holding my breath for him.
Then, just when I'm about to cry, he comes springing, flying up out of the water like a whale or a big hunting fish, splashing white way out there. He goes ducking under a few more times like a real fish, then begins stroking back toward us on the beach.
I look up and Mom's crying. She turns away and goes back to our blanket on the sand. I stand there at the edge of the water but Dad walks right past me without looking. He walks past Laurel, who's building sand castles just where the sand is wet enough but not too wet. He flops down in the sand next to the blanket Mom brought.
I go over and kneel beside Laurel. I start building a moat in front of her castle to stop the water when it comes in, and so we have soft sand for making turrets and steeples by dripping. I hear Mom even though I try not to.
“Dick, why do you do things like that?”
Dad doesn't say anything. I peek over and he's rolled over on his back. He's taking fistfuls of sand and pouring them over his face, over his eyes. He's all coated with sand. Then he starts lifting his arms and pouring sand so he's covering his whole body. He's gradually disappearing. Laurel looks up, then dashes back before I can stop her. She runs and jumps on Dad's sand-covered stomach, straddling him in the sand as if he were a horse.
“Come on, Daddy. Help us build a sand castle. Dickie and me are working on one but I know you can really make a beautiful castle, a palace. You can build anything.”
I really think for a minute he might kill her. I don't know what he'll do. What he does is sit up, shake all that sand from his eyes and hair, then brush it off his chest. He carefully dumps Laurel onto the sand beside him. Then he rolls over onto his hands and knees and shakes some more like a dog shaking water out of its fur. He begins slowly crawling along the beach ahead of Laurel, down to where we're building the castle. He crawls right past me into the waves, still on his hands and knees, out deeper into the water.
Big waves break over him. He turns back and dog paddles in, crawling again in the surf, back up the beach slant and onto the sand. Laurel's jumping up and down laughing. Dad shakes himself and water flies around exactly the way it does off a dog.
“Come on, you two. Let's build a castle for Cannibal. We'll call it Cannibal Castle.”
Dad starts digging in the wet sand with his hands, piling large loads of sand in the center while he continues my moat all around a large space.
“Laurie, you go get your sand bucket and shovel from Mother.”
Laurel runs up the beach, screeching as she goes. She comes back with the bucket in one hand and the other hand wobbling the shovel over her head.
In no time, Dad has a huge pile of sand surrounded by a deep moat; the moat's so deep you can hardly touch bottom, and it fills with water seeping in from the ocean. He shows Laurel and me how to make the castle walls, patting the sides with our shovel and using the shovel top to make windows. On the corners he builds towers, using Laurel's buckets. He packs the buckets so full and hard he can put one on top of the other without the sand collapsing. On top of the towers and around the walls we build places where you could shoot arrows through if you lived in this castle. It looks great. I run up and get Cannibal, who's asleep on one of the towels. I bring her down in her box but don't put her too close to the water. She climbs out and sits there, watching, sometimes dashing forward to swing a paw at somebody's hand or at some sand that flies near her. We're working fast but carefully.
Dad builds a door opening in the castle wall and a bridge over the moat. He puts towers for guards at each opening of the door. Then, inside the walls, in the middle, he builds a tower higher than the outside towers; he calls this a “keep.” He says it's where the king and queen and all their friends go when they're attacked. The soldiers would stand along the outside walls to shoot the enemy or pour boiling oil on them. It's so real-looking, and Dad tells the way it is so seriously, I can almost see it. On top of the keep Dad jams a Popsicle stick for a flag.
I get so busy helping, putting my head down on the sand to see the castle as if it's really big, that I forget all about Cannibal. When I remember and look up, she's down by the water. She's rearing up on her back paws in her fighting pose, fighting waves. The waves are coming up over her feet, but she's swinging away and hitting at the foam on the edge of the ripples. Cannibal must be the fightingest cat in the world, fighting a whole ocean.
When we've finished the castle, it's smooth and beautiful, I don't think there was ever a more beautiful castle built in the sand anywhere. Dad could probably be the best
architect
in the world if he'd only had a chance to go to school.
I'd love to live in our castle. First I'd change my name from Dickie to Richard. That's my real name and it's a good king name. I don't like being called Dickie anyway, and I don't want to be Dick Junior either because everybody starts calling you Junior. What I'd like to be called is Rich but I don't know how to start people doing it.
Dad's squatting and Laurie's nestled herself between his legs. She has two fingers in her mouth sucking on them; I don't know how she can do it with all the sand. Dad gently pulls her fingers out of her mouth. He reaches across to me.
“Dickie, now put our queen in her castle. Let's see how she likes it.”
I don't know how Dad knows Cannibal's a she. It stops me for a minute. Maybe he heard me calling her “her.” I pull Cannibal away from the war of the waves and put her in her box without its lid. Then I carefully lower the box into our castle courtyard just inside the doorway with its guard towers. We sit back and watch.
For the first minutes, Cannibal only looks up at us from her box. Then she climbs out and walks around the keep and back to her box. She looks out at us again. We're squatting around the castle and I think she's wondering what she's supposed to do. Then I expect she thinks it's a sandbox because she starts scratching on the courtyard floor and goes pee-pee.
Dad laughs so hard he falls back on his hands. After this, Cannibal walks around to the other side of the keep and lifts her front paws up onto the wall to look out. She knocks off two of the square bumps you're supposed to shoot arrows through, then gets down again and walks around to the front. Carefully, she looks out our door, past the guard posts and across the drawbridge. When you have your head down on the sand looking at her through the door she looks monstrous, big as a lion or maybe even an elephant.
Then she tucks her head back in and climbs up on her box and from there jumps onto the top of the keep. Some edges of sand slide off but the keep stays up O.K. Cannibal knocks down the Popsicle stick and then, because she's so small, settles herself down and makes herself comfortable right on top there. She tucks her little paws under her body and looks from one to the other of us. I know she's wanting to be good, to do what we want her to do, only she doesn't know what it is.
Dad's been chuckling and laughing all this time, and Laurie's jumping up and down or running around the castle, or getting so close she almost scares Cannibal.
Dad takes Laurie in his lap. I haven't sat on my dad's lap since we started building porches together. That's one of the sad parts about growing up. And I'm too big to sit on Mom's. Sometimes she pulls me next to her and runs her hands through my hair, puts her arms around me, but I don't get to sit on her lap. Those things seemed to stop, to end, without my hardly noticing them. I might never sit on anybody's lap again the rest of my life.
Finally Dad reaches over and picks up Cannibal. She doesn't even swing her paw at him. He puts her in the box and strokes with his big thumb between her ears. Already, after only one day not working, his hands look better, not all beaten up, maybe it's because of the water in the ocean and then scraping them in the sand.
Anyway, they look more like hands and not so much like animal paws. He's wearing the gold ring with his initials Mom gave him before they were married. He can't wear it at work because it might get caught in one of the big machines.
I look at the castle. Water has twice come all the way up and run into the moat.
“Gosh, Dad, the ocean's going to wash all this away.”
“That's right, Dickie, the tide's coming in.”
“Can't we build a sand wall and hold it back, save it somehow?”
“There's no way to hold back the ocean, Dickie. Our castle was fun building; we had a good time. Maybe if it stays we won't build one again but if it gets washed away by the ocean we can build another tomorrow, even better, with secret dungeons.”
Dad carries Laurie back up to Mom, swinging her back and forth as he goes, so she gets “tickle tummy” and laughs. I remember how that used to feel. Dad knows that when Laurie sucks her fingers she's usually tired, so he puts her on a towel and wraps a blanket around her. The sun is bright and it isn't cold but it's not the kind of sun you would get sunburnt by. I never heard of anybody getting sunburnt in October, but I never knew anybody who ever went to the shore in October, either.
I can't believe all the other kids are actually in school with that awful smell of floor wax, chalk, pencil wood, nuns, and damp wool. The back closets in those classrooms have sliding doors. Inside they smell of wet clothes and galoshes that are stored in there all winter long. It even smells that way at the beginning of a year
before
it gets cold and wet. That smell stays on in there right through the summer.
I do my homework
mostly
to be in the front of our class, away from those closets. The nuns sit the boys on the door side and girls by the window. The ones with the best report cards sit up front, except for John McGee and Joe Guerney, who always have to sit up front even though they get the worst report cards because they're so bad and dumb, too.
I wonder if anybody ever told
them
they have devils inside them?
In second grade, Sister Bernadette used to punish us by making us go in those back closets, and she'd close the sliding doors. I got shut in there once for making a paper airplane that I didn't even throw, and I vomited all over everything. That's the kind of smell it is.
I think these thoughts about school and squat in the sand watching the ocean licking our castle. Then I remember the other kids aren't in school anyway; it's Saturday.
I decide not to do anything to help the Cannibal Castle, not even fix it up when parts get washed over. I watch the front wall with the guard posts fall into the front moat and then the bottom of the keep gets washed out and the tower falls in. The sides of the moat begin collapsing, and then one giant wave comes up and goes over the whole works, splashing around and sliding back, leaving the castle as if it were a real castle and a thousand years old, ruined, washed over by sand and desert winds. I don't know why I enjoy watching things get ruined like that; it's almost like burning cats' tails. Maybe I do have some devil in me after all.
When I go back up to the family, Mom's sitting looking out at the ocean. Dad's on his stomach on a towel.
I put Cannibal down in her box and she doesn't come out; she has her eyes closed. I guess all that wave fighting and castle exploring wore her out. In her box, I put a small piece of liver I brought with me. Even the smell of that doesn't wake her up. I think Mom is beginning to like Cannibal because she smiles while I'm trying to feed her.
“Are you having a good time, Dickie? Isn't the ocean beautiful? I've never been to the shore when it wasn't hot, muggy, and too crowded. Now I can sit right out here in the sun without worrying about getting freckles.”
I walk around in back of her, and, as I'm going past Dad, he reaches out and grabs me by one of my feet.
“O.K., come on, Buster, let's you and me wrestle. I'll show you some of my old Jim Landon wrestling holds; you'll be the terror of the block when we get back.”