annalee fairley / essay

When the Father is in Absentia

He went for the knife. He did not grab the knife. He went for the knife. My mother plays with the meaning of this. She does not want him to be taken away again. She wants my father with his pain with his unpredictability with his episodes to live with her even if it means that sometimes he reaches for knives, for rope, for his daughter’s car keys which he was able to find, was able to crash her car, but was not able to kill himself. I feel that I have more love in me for that Toyota Corolla than my own father, and this I close away in myself like a California poppy refusing to bloom at night. I remember getting up early enough in the misty northern California mornings to see the poppies open their faces to the sun’s early rays, a slow opening, distrustful and uncertain of the reliability of this morning light. I began to distrust my father’s hidden words in my early teens. I think it had to do with the things he loved. I couldn’t find myself in them. The psychiatrist told my mom he has multiple personalities, and I like to hope that one of his personalities still believes in being a father. 

*

As a child, spending time with my father meant doing things for him that were mostly unappealing. In the Mississippi Delta, where I learned about growing up, I would battle the seed ticks that swarmed my father’s bushy legs after mowing the lawn. The process of removing these freckle-sized specimens took time and a 6-year-old’s bravery because they hid in the thick hair which covered them like kudzu. I hated ticks, but seed ticks were more grotesque. Their pinpoint size created more fear because it was hard to discern if the spot belonged to my father’s body or to an invading parasite. The tweezers would sometimes pinch a freckle instead of the invader, and my father would yelp at my incapability. At 6, I did not know I was capable of living without a father so I would shave his wolverine back with those dollar plastic razors which were mostly dull-bladed. I had to be careful not to cut him while balancing on the small tip of my child size toes not yet tall enough to reach my father. I would fold his socks, clean his bathroom, or make his egg sandwiches that he would consume in seconds every Sunday night: the one night my mother wasn’t required to cook for him. I would do anything that meant finding favor with my father, but I never found the father’s love I searched for in the piles of leaves I helped him rake or the prickly pinecones I meticulously collected for his large blue bucket.

*

The first time I remember him threatening to kill himself I was seven. I was sitting with my sister at our child-sized art table paint-by-number and the horse I watched appear with each newly painted number was something I felt proud of and I wanted my dad to see how it could be something he could be proud of too, but he was intoxicated on the side of the road and not in our kitchen. The kitchen phone rang and mom picked it up. I could hear my father’s cries through the receiver and received them with the sensitivity a child has when they hear their father cry babylike. I lost my awareness and let loose droplets of water from my washed paintbrush onto the horse’s face I was once proud of, and the painting blurred into an illegible muddiness, and I cried at the pride I lost, at my father’s whimper through the phone, and at my mother leaving the room, a throat full of spiders knitting webs her voice got caught in. He has a voice like distant thunder mixed with gales. It overpowers even what is true. This is the beginning of a life learning to live with a multiplicity of this father. He isn’t all bad just as the sky isn’t always predictable. There are sometimes pink or red streaks hiding in my father’s blues. 

*

  He bought me my first pair of running shoes. This gift was given to me so that I could run 5ks with my father in a Saturday’s pale morning. We won trophies and I learned to be something he was proud of, but my body became weary with miles and I forgot what I was running for. Maybe I forgot what I was running from. He let go of my future as a professional runner and I let go of running the common ground with my father. Two distant islands that cannot merge because we don’t know how big the space is. Sometimes I approached that space between us. Learned that a void is still something I could walk over and survive. I wanted to live with him in the blank spaces even if it meant letting go of memory. 

I don’t want to hold this remembering that condemns my father. Because sometimes he listened to my music and remembered how much I loved it. He bought tickets to John Paul White concerts and we drank beer together and we got drunk together and we laughed together. One time after a concert he sincerely hugged me like a father might do and I imagined with a childlike faith that what my father was could never be again. I filed away the blues of my father and kept the pleasant pinks of him when he came to play with his children on the fresh cut lawn with arms outstretched toward us and eyes closed trusting that we were there to be with him to guide him when he got too close to dangerous ditches or brittle bark. We screamed with delight when he got near us and sometimes I purposely got near him so that I could be the first child he caught and held close even if it meant losing the game. 

*

My childhood could be more forgiving. Adulthood tripped on the bitter roots where my father grew wilder with sickness. I felt guilt. I still feel guilt. I will feel guilt. Guilt for the blame I harbored because down underneath this earth, I know he was sick and there was no present cure I could have gifted him besides maybe answering the phone and listening to his stretched-out voice that was threadbare from the year spent on cures to the multiple beings inside his brain.

I know out of all of them he would have chosen father if he could. I felt guilt for not answering him anymore because it became too hard to acquaint myself with all the voices inside my father who eventually left with a single shot that took multiple tries and I think several of those misfires chose father.

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Originally from Mississippi, Annalee Fairley is a queer poet that now lives in the Inland Northwest. Her most recent publications have been in Apricity Magazine, The Black Fork Review, Hellbender Mag, Chapter House Journal, and the Good Life Review. During her writing career, she has been awarded the Gager Fellowship, Neill James Creative Writing Scholarship, and the Betty Killebrew Literary Award for her work in poetry and fiction. She is currently pursuing an MFA at Eastern Washington University.