I Heard It In The Night
The house is quiet. No one is here but me tonight. For the first time since last summer, I hear the songs of crickets. They have returned, communicating to the world in concertos and reminding me of home. Of growing up in southern Alabama. Of playing outside as late as the sun would linger in the sky. Then, nighttime. Vast, blank spaces of land. The back porch of our house. The window in my room. Solitude. Rest. And my father.
He would sit outside in a cheap, plastic chair with a glass of sweet tea in one hand, turning his head to catch the slightest movements of the earth, but otherwise, staying as still and quiet as a rock. His black hair and eyes disappeared into the surrounding darkness and his red skin– that Cherokee Indian skin, which looked a burnt brown next to the night– made him look like a tree stump sunken into the grass. Meanwhile, the crickets made melodies all around him.
I could sit with him in that darkness and in that silence for hours, never say a word, never have much to say really. There was so much to hear: the wind mumbling in the trees and whispering in the grass, the crepitation of wooden doors and underground pipes, the sound of scurry in the bushes. "What was that, daddy?" I would ask him. "Probably an armadillo," he would reply after rising from his trance, then descend again, attuning his senses back to nature, letting his body lower down into the chair as if bowing down to gods I did not know. If I heard another noise, I would not ask him what it was. I could have. He was never unwilling to talk, just uninterested. And to break that silence which settled between us would have been like shattering the windows of a house. All that glass, which makes one feel safe inside, would have been gone.
From the very beginning, I was more his daughter than my mother's. I emerged from her womb with a head full of his thick, black hair and a pair of his black eyes – eyes, so deep and dark and wild that when my grandmother looked into them, she suggested that I be taken to a doctor. Only he could get me to sleep at night, so when I was an infant, he would rock me in his recliner until I drifted off, and when I grew to be a toddler, he would stretch himself out on the floor beside my bed and stick his hand through the rails so that I could clasp one of his fingers like a stuffed animal. No matter how long it took, he would stay there, lay there, until I slipped into a solid slumber.
I got his calm, quiet demeanor too, a loyalty to what I choose to love, a body that functions better in nature, and an otherworldly language that no one ever hears. My father's could only be heard at night. He would find a pocket of the night so dark that no human eye could penetrate it, and when inside, he would speak: "Al sha .. shee holala hay... Say ka-day... Ma uh ma... Mama, es-say, esh a mooma." It was a deep, rumbling noise that folded smoothly into the air, that seemed to fill any hole in the sky and anoint every star and cloud. Like the beating of a drum, a reddened palm pounding on rawhide, his tongue against his throat – I heard it in the night.
At social functions, my father found himself in conversations with people whom he could not understand, people who were using lofty words and political phrases, making references to social standards or jokes about popular culture. He was a mechanic who spent his days fixing air conditioners, spent his nights out in a workshop, which he built with his own hammers and hands. Grease stains and saw dust looked best on him, not silk ties and penny loafers. He never cared enough about topical knowledge to even seek it out.
From across the room, my mother would notice him staring blankly into another man's face, and she knew that he had gotten lost in the stranger's language; she knew that her husband needed her; and she knew exactly what to do. Drifting directly to my father's side, she could seize a conversation in mere moments with some compelling remark or just by her charming expressions. Daddy would stand there, nodding his head when he thought it was appropriate, feeling grateful for a wife who had liberated him once again, and wondering when she might be ready to go home.
About once a month, my mother made him go to church with us – made him scrub and shave his skin, polish his shoes with oil, and wear a button-up shirt she'd ironed for him the night before. When he finally walked into the kitchen where I sat eating breakfast, his tie would, without fail, be bulging out of his collar. "Come here, daddy," I would say. He knew what needed to be done and bent his body down so that I could stretch and smooth his shirt collar over his tie. Then off we would go, a family of four, to the Baptist church.
I didn't mind church as much when my father was there, because he seemed so calm about the whole thing. He wouldn't slap my hands if my fingers suddenly formed into dinosaurs that crawled, and sometimes even growled, along the pews, and he wouldn't pinch my leg if I were squirming to scratch all the mosquito bites that itched like feathers tickling my skin. Sometimes, my mother would reach over my father to pinch me with her fingernails so long that it looked like I had a ringworm for the rest of the week, or to mouth the words "Do I need to take you outside?" Oh no! That had happened before, and I never, ever wanted that to happen again. The belt against my backside did not compare with the sheer humiliation of being shoved up the aisle and out of the back door, of feeling her fierce grip on my arm, all five fingernails sinking into my skin, of seeing repressed laughter on the lips of every face in the congregation.
I would shake my head or mouth the word "no" back at her, then watch a pious glare instantly replace the scorn I had just seen in her face. That's when daddy would look down at me with his sideways grin, an Elvis-shaped smile that overtook only the left side of his face. He could neither rectify nor hide it – not in photographs or personal conversations – not in spats or in his sleep.
He looked strange sitting there in that steepled building. His fiery skin and dark features seemed to clash against all the white: the white walls and choir robes, the white faces of worshippers, the white hymnal books and the message about how "Jesus washes white as snow." And then there was my father, his herculean, black and brown frame sitting tall in the pews and towering above the crowd when it was time to stand and sing. Old hymns came cranking out of organs and opened mouths:
HE lives! HE lives! Christ Jesus lives today!
HE walks with me and talks with me along life's narrow way
HE lives! He lives!...
The multitude of voices and instruments teemed together, percolating over pews and filling the sanctuary with one song, one thought, two words to remember throughout the week: "He lives!" But my father's voice did not mix into these sorts of anthems. Out of him came a sound that was like a drop of oil in a large glass of water– separated, floating on top, a murkier shade, an altogether different consistency. I would look up at him, see him striving and sweating in that navy-blue suit, see the awkwardness and abashment it caused him, and I barely recognized him at all. Not until later that night, when we were back at home and he was wandering through the woods, gliding through the shards of grass like a ghost, did I remember who he was, did he remember who he was.