by Richard Denoncourt
  

My father, Pablo Narvaez Guerra, built our house in the middle of the woods. Ever since then his hands were hard and brown, like tree roots. He explained some years later that it was the view of the mountains that drew him to that small clearing far away from the pueblo. The smell of the forest hinted at what it truly meant to be free. The tips of the mountains, visible above the tree line, reminded him of his past, which he didn’t speak of. I never knew why he stared so solemnly up at those mountains. Had he climbed them once, or was he remembering some greatness he’d since tumbled down from?

He built the house farther away from town than my mother, Elsa Maria, was comfortable with. She agreed because she knew his father had done the same. It was a Guerra tradition for the men to raise their children away from a world of alienation and unhappiness, where man no longer knew the meaning of working the land, of fighting the good fight against fierce, unrelenting Mother Nature, whose impartial breath could freeze his livelihood in the winter and just as easily warm it to life again in the spring. My mother’s will was much more predictable but just as unyielding when you were held in its grip. In the winter her tongue could be as sharp as an icicle.

“Fetch the wood already. What am I, the maid? Que carajo!”  

My mother worried very little but made up for it by complaining about everything. Hers was a life of duty and tradition, of raising fine children and destroying the evil habits in them. She complained about my father’s flights of intuition, about the distant expression—cara de idiota—that creased his brow when he looked away at the sinking sun or sat, speechless, at dinner. He once decided not to work for an entire day after finding a worn book of poems in the pueblo. Afterwards, he spoke for days in rhyme and iambic pentameter. Even then my mother wasn’t worried. She rolled her eyes up at God, as if he was playing some kind of joke on her.

It wasn't until he started building the platform that Elsa Maria felt the dread wrap itself around her.

“Que carajo haces? What in the hell are you doing?” She yelled at him for days. He never explained. He only looked at us through narrowed, thoughtful eyes and continued with the grinding of the saw into the beams of wood he’d purchased from a coffin maker.

Eventually my mother understood, but never spoke of it. Her tongue softened and her hands became more rigid. More and more, she began to spill the sancocho over the edges of the pot. She took less notice of the dynamics of heat and the increments of time that she once observed as natural laws in her kitchen. The potatoes became harder, the broth less potent.

“When will you be leaving?” she asked him one day, her shoulders sagging in defeat. In one year her posture had dropped as if ten years had passed.

"Ya casi," he replied. “Soon.”

His hands shook as he sipped the mug of water boiled with mint leaves. He swore off coffee, followed by his pipe, earlier that year. I didn’t know at the time, but judging from the way they looked at each other as if from across a giant chasm, I know now that my father had by then given up much more than simple luxuries.

The wooden platform towered above the small shack as if it had sprung from the earth to keep vigil over us. On certain nights I stared out my window at the way the beams seemed to cut the moon into different shapes. The towering platform frightened me and I was able to sleep only after I remembered father's words. "Only through extremes can one really appreciate the beauty of life. This will be very difficult for all of us, but we must be strong. Don’t worry, hijo mio. I’ll always watch over you."

He looked out the window and swallowed. His Adam’s apple bobbed somewhere inside his flourishing beard. He told me once that in the face of battle brave men swallow to taste their fear one last time before suppressing it. Without fear we cannot know courage.

When I didn’t understand, he smiled down at me and told me it was only a matter of time. It’s alright to be afraid, he said, stroking my hair.

My father climbed the platform on a windy day in October when I was fourteen years old. He took only a bucket with which to dump waste over the side and another to collect rain water. He also brought a thick cloak to protect himself from the wind. His feet were wrapped in strips of potato sacks and tied with the cords that always made my fingers itch.

I thought I knew the reasons behind his decision, but I knew only as much as my mother, who understood that her husband was a brave man. I cried for him to come down and then climbed after him, letting my shoes fall to the ground. Father smiled as he watched mother pull me down and hush me. She cried only a single tear; a lesson I didn’t understand. I know now that one cannot be happy for another without acknowledging one's own sadness.

I remember hearing the rush of wind through leaves when I walked back into the house that day. The fire cast flickering shadows over the bare walls. Through my tears they looked like marionettes wildly dancing, mocking me. My mother closed the door behind me and whispered in my ear.

“Your father is either a great man, or a very stupid one.”

Over the next few weeks, frost crept up the windows and with it the realization that father was not coming down. I had heard stories of Jack Frost from the colorful books he used to give me—Yak Fross, my mother called him. Sometimes I imagined that my father was Yak Fross. Pablo Yak Narvaez Guerra Fross, rogue of the forest and keeper of the snow.

During the day, father’s voice accompanied me as I chopped and gathered the wood. “Mi hijo,” he would say, repeating the words again and again. “My dear son, my only son. How much are you willing to give up?”

He recited poetry and sang songs that had been passed down to him from his ancestors. He told stories of great men who had sacrificed everything for their ideals. I asked what those ideals were and he never answered, saying only that it was the end that mattered.

At night, I listened to the beams bend with the trees. I tried to think of every possible motive behind my father’s actions. I called upon logic, reason, and speculation, all unsuccessful in their attempts to see what really bared itself on that tower every day and every night. The creaking of the boards left me each night with the uneasy feeling that everything was on the verge of breaking. It was only a matter of time.

As the first year passed, father spoke less and less. His words became more abstract, as if he was speaking from somewhere deep within. They carried an unnatural weight that left out any error or lack of conviction. When the second year came to a close and the orange leaves fell and swept the forest floor of summer's carelessness, I decided I wanted to go to school in the village. Mother agreed that one could never have too much education. She hired a poor man named Francisco to help her with the menial activities around the house while I was away. He did so respectfully in exchange for a bed and food. The man had the same brown hands as my father except that Francisco’s skin looked like paper instead of wet soil. I imagined them tearing into tiny pieces if he ever tried to build anything with them. But he was nice enough, and spoke very little. He smoked too much from an old black pipe and it was the only thing about him my mother couldn’t stand. Maybe she missed the smell of my father’s tobacco, though to me they smelled the same.

Father watched from his platform as mother adjusted my backpack. She didn't look up at her husband who, after two years, had ceased to exist except as one of her duties. She acknowledged him when it was time to send up his sparse meals using the simple pulley attached to the side of the beams.

I vowed to learn as much as I could so I could tell father stories of my own. I wanted to be like him someday; a storyteller, always detached and forever observant. I fantasized about traveling the world and telling those stories to anyone who would listen. Villagers from far away would whistle in awe and clap as I passed.

He raised a hand and saluted me like a soldier. His large eyes and sunken cheeks frightened me. I jogged shamefully down the path, promising myself that one day I would make him proud.

The schooldays were long and boring. I often looked out the window of the stuffy, one-room building and dreamed about faraway places and all the adventures that awaited. But I always thought of my father and how he might never leave the clearing again. I wondered if maybe he was going somewhere better. But how could he possibly know where? I was plagued with guilt every time I looked out the window at the mountains and what I imagined lay beyond them. I felt bound by a sense of duty that I couldn’t put into words.

Francisco seemed to understand my father very well. He often looked up at him and smiled knowingly, as if to say, Si, mi amigo. I know. I do not understand either, but it feels right.

Sometimes I came back from school and saw Francisco kneeling at the foot of the tower. He’d smoke and look down at the ground as if he could see something there that no one else could.

Over time, we grew accustomed to the looming shadow. The sun chased it perpetually around the clearing, measuring out the time of each day for us. With every sweep of that dark shape, I became less hopeful and less eager to dream of better things. Three years after I started school father still sat up there, a dry bundle of propped up sticks huddled around a few glowing embers of life. Everyday his eyes followed me in and out of the house. There was a light in those eyes, a ferocious insight that seemed capable of burning down the tower and the woods around it. When I asked my mother if he ever came down, ever at all, even just to stretch, she silenced me and said it was the way things were, that I had to find the good in them. Then she would turn away from me and rock in her rocking chair by the window.

I never knew what she thought about our situation except that she felt one way in the morning, when her simple tasks kept her busy and humming contentedly, and a different way at night, when the forest was silent and she had only herself for company. I stopped asking about father and readied myself for graduation in the spring. The ceremony was small and when I came home to celebrate with Francisco and my mother, father only stared at me. His hair had turned gray and hung over the sides of the platform in curtains. His deflated body had browned almost to the color of coffee without cream. The lines on his weathered face seemed etched in wood. Sometimes I found teeth scattered around the beams of the platform. I imagined that was why he never smiled.

Once, Francisco came by the house with a few campesinos that lived farther out in the country. These practical men and women helped in the daily labors in exchange for a few moments with father. He preached to them in a very eloquent Spanish and spoke of people he had known and places he’d traveled to beyond the mountains. I’d never heard of any of them, and I wondered how much truth there was in his memories. It didn’t matter. His voice was a force that erased any line between fantasy and reality.

He spoke mostly of me and the days when I would exceed his virtues a thousand-fold. I didn’t know what he meant. I only knew that I was not virtuous. I once stole some tobacco from Francisco and smoked it behind the schoolhouse using my father’s old pipe so that I could be like the other boys.

“He is a hero,” Francisco once told me. His eyes were moist and there were brown stains between his teeth.

Birds perched with my father in the summer and were replaced by icicles in the winter. Year after year, I never knew how he survived the cold. I used to cry and throw extra blankets up to the platform only to find them the next day, half buried in snow. I even thought of lighting a small fire underneath the platform but decided against it when I saw my mother roasting a piece of meat one night.

The months following my graduation the ice receded and his hair was left white as the dead, winter sky. His skin had cracked like hardened mud and his rail-thin body, curled up against the side, seemed a gruesome appendage of the platform.

Months passed and more and more of Francisco’s people came by the house. They sometimes kneeled in front of the tower and wept. Some of the women grabbed and kissed me as I walked by, gazing at me hopefully. The attention made me uncomfortable, and sometimes at night I dreamed about those women, their strong brown arms, and the handwoven baskets they carried on their backs.

In time, I began to dream about women with long legs the color of milk chocolate and tired, almond eyes. I once saw one of the campesinas breast feed an infant while gazing up at my father. The image haunted me, not because of the reverent look in her eyes but because of the brown nipple that emerged glistening when the baby pulled its tiny mouth away. I dreamed of my father frowning at me and telling me that such thoughts were dirty and wrong, that I was un pervertido. Most nights, I couldn’t sleep.

My mother must have sensed the restlessness in me. Now that I was no longer a teenager, she took me to the village every Sunday dressed in our finest clothes. It took a few weeks before I understood what she was doing. Women, she told me, look to the man’s treatment of his mother before they can consider him. She paraded me around the village square, her arm wrapped around mine. She secretly passed me money and told me to buy fruits from the vendor. When I did, she ate them delicately, slurping away at her fingers and thanking me for being such a kind son. She told me not to mention father. When the women of the village asked, she told them he had passed on, which was half true. Eventually, sthey began to glance at me from across the church pews and smile.

Her name was Isabelle, but everyone called her Isa. Her father owned a small bakery in the village and sometimes she left work early to go to the lake with me. Her hair was a deep black like the water and just as easy to pass my hands through. I felt very little guilt the first time we kissed, and even less when I watched her undress to go into the water.

“There are bigger lakes beyond the mountains,” she would say. “The ocean isn’t far away either. Ay Dios,” she would sigh. “My father’s bakery is too small and hot.”

As her legs disappeared in the water, followed by her bare hips and girlish breasts, I felt the sickening fear that she would slip away into the darkness like a half-forgotten dream.

I built my own house in a small clearing next to a gurgling stream. It wasn’t far from my father's and I often brought my mother fruits and dried meat. Francisco remained in the house, himself a withered old man, and my mother endured year after year like a rock being cracked by ice. Isa gave me that image when she once called my mother a piedra vieja, which means “old stone.”

She had nicknames for everything. She called our son cansón because of his restless and sometimes aggravating spirit. At four years old, Pablito Fross Guerra came home with snakes, worms, and frogs bursting from his pockets. His tiny hands gripped the wriggling bodies as if the very essence of life was tucked inside each one. He sought to understand it through his senses and once I caught him licking a toad. I could only imagine the paths his curiosity would lead him down.

At night, my wife and I made love like teenagers. During the day we spoke of our son and the education he would receive in the faraway cities. When I mentioned my father, she smiled and kissed my neck until I smiled with her. Her own father had sold the bakery, and now sat by the radio all day, much to her mother’s arrechera.

I always felt the need to see my father, to pay him a silent tribute even though there was so much I wanted to ask. I wasn’t ready for his answers yet. By then father had stopped speaking altogether and didn’t seem to notice anyone below him. I spent more time with my family and visited less and less. The small matters of daily life filled my thoughts and it became easier to forget that he was still up there. But somewhere underneath all of that ran a current of despair and confusion; a secret fear that I might never have the answers I craved.

On my son’s seventh birthday I approached the tower that seemed as tall as ever. I asked father to tell me what it all meant, what the final lesson was. He pulled himself to the edge, his body dragging across the splintered wood like dead weight. His fingernails curved over the planks like claws. A few remaining wisps of hair floated around his face, an evanescent white against the solid, earthy brown.

"You came to see me.” His voice echoed out of his throat as if from an ancient tomb deep beneath the ground. “I taught you well, hijo mio. All these years and you never forgot about you’re your old man, your viejito. Let me ask you something.”

I swallowed, tasting my fear. “Go ahead, papa.”

“Do you love your wife and son?”

“Yes.”

“Would you do anything for them, even die?”

“Yes. I love them, father. As I love you.”

He sucked his lips into his toothless mouth and mused. The sky was painfully bright behind him so that he was nothing more than a dark shape. His eyes were two pinpoints of light that threw sparks into the obscurity of his face.

“Great men release their strength, hijo mio. They let it flow back to where it came from. Otherwise, it will corrupt them.”

I thought of my wife and son back home, of my mother who now sat inside my father’s house and watched, expressionless, through the window. Francisco leaned against the side of the shack, puffing away on his pipe. His eyes narrowed and he watched me. Behind him, behind the bushes and hanging leaves, I saw the faces of the campesinos, dark ovals watching and waiting, hoping for something they did not understand.

“What do you want me to do?” I looked up at him and already knew the answer. He looked up at the sky and his face filled with light. Tears glistened in the corners of his eyes.

“You’re finally ready, my son."

He lifted one crooked finger and pointed to the tiny shed, where his tools sat rusting in the dark. December frost crept up the soiled windows and promised a harsh winter. Francisco pulled an old key out of his pocket and walked towards me.

I backed away from the tower and the grinning face, the smile where teeth should have been. I thought of my son, of my wife’s delicate arms. I imagined my hands turning into tree roots in the infinite hideousness of a quiet forest. The campesinos smiled at me. Already I saw them kneeling.

The leaves scraped against each other and the wind was a maddening howl. I didn’t look over my shoulder as I ran away from them. I could hear Francisco’s labored breaths. My father’s stare followed me like a cold breeze.

Three months later, mother came to me with the news of his death. He had frozen to the platform and it would take some time to thaw him out. His body was so worn and frail at that point that Francisco had been afraid to scrape him off the wood. He feared snapping off one of my father’s limbs. 

"He was a good man," said my mother. "He never cared for worldly things.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Caiga quien caiga. That’s just the way things fall."

My mother and I buried him in early February, when the earth was hardest. He would have wanted it that way. Francisco and the campesinos had moved on weeks before, back to their camps and tiny pueblos. Mother cried silently throughout the solemn procession, her tears falling on the tattered cloak she clutched to her chest. I let a single tear fall on the mound of dirt.

“I wanted to make you proud,” I said to the mound. “But you can’t follow the dead.”

I placed a clump of weeds over his grave.

My mother watched later that evening as I tore down my father's tower and burned it. The next day I told her that my wife and son and I were moving to the village. Mother rocked in her chair by the window and watched the cold sun dip behind the frosted mountains.

“Come here,” she said. “You’re a man now. You’re ready for lessons your father and I could never teach you. After all, I’m not the maid. You see for yourself how unfair the world is.”

“That’s no excuse not to live in it.”

I kissed her soft, lined cheek and asked her to come with us. She responded with an angry ¡que va! and turned back to her mountains. I walked out of my father’s house and into the crisp air. Isa collected her shawl from the wind and smiled.

“Father?” Pablito tugged on my sleeve. “Where are we going?”

“To the village,” I said, smiling.

“And then what?”

“I don’t know, hijo mio. I don’t know.”

I took their hands and led them down the path, away from the charred heap of the tower.