The Distance and the Damage by Trent Lewin

I am your boy, he said to the photograph at the end of the hallway. Wooden boards creaking, Deckard leaned his head on the wall. Put his hand on the glass of the photo frame. Whispered words, a remembered prayer, the fragment of a stray poem. I am your boy, he repeated, a deep reckoning of a father long gone and sent away.

            Deckard found his way to the boy’s room. He was still asleep.

            “Time,” he said, opening the curtains. “Come now.”

            “Morning already?” said the boy.

            “Come over here. Let me dress you with my own hands.” Deckard took the suit from the cupboard and dusted it clear. Little puffs like busted angels wafted to the window, into the flow of the morning light. The suit was too small for the boy. The pants came up past his ankles. The jacket scarcely reached his wrists.

            “But the tie, that’ll work,” said Deckard, as he twisted the black and grey thing through knots. He’d forgotten how to do it. Kept trying and failing, as though the morning were meant for him to stand there forever.

            “You never showed me how to do that,” said the boy.

            “Never saw the need. Don’t see it now, either.”

            “Someone’s going to teach me, though? Some day? I’d like to learn it.” A pause. “I’d like to learn it from you.”

            Deckard’s head split. His body tightened until he was knotted up, and scarcely believed that he was going to slip loose, ever. His hands fiddled with the tie, touching the skin of this ten-year-old boy whose life he had witnessed in its entirety, every moment.

            “Someone will teach you,” he said, when the tie hung on his boy, the boy who stood surrounded by sunlight in a suit that would not fit, his feet bare, his eyes searching out the face of a father who had to look away. Everywhere but at him, thought Deckard, taking in the ruins of the room, the gaps in the wood panels, the insects sneaking in through the cracks in the window frame.

            Downstairs, they ate boiled eggs topped with coarse salt, with a lump of cream and beans that had been cooked yesterday. “The last of the cream. The salt, too,” said Deckard, smiling. The boy nodded and licked his plate clean. “I have bread, too.”

            Table was quiet. The house groaned. Deckard fancied he could hear whispers upstairs, the ghosts of days past talking about the illusions they saw in the lives of those who remained.

            “Are you going to take me all the way?” asked the boy.

            “Every step,” promised Deckard. “Every step.”

            “And then you’re going to come back here?”

            “It’s home.”

            “But it’ll just be you.”

            Deckard nodded. “I’ll have the work. Plenty to be done in the fields. The house needs fixing, too.” He stared at the blue of the boy’s eyes, the mist in them lifting as he realized that this was the day, the first of one thing, the last of another, not just another day, not just another few minutes in a tired old house with a tired old man, but something else - something that had just come down the road and over the dusty lane onto a sagging porch, to have done with its business.

            They finished the bread. At the front door, the boy was breathing hard. He looked up at his father. “Don’t want to leave. Want to stay here.”

            “Be brave about it, and maybe you’ll feel otherwise.”

            “I won’t,” he said. One hand clung to the door. The other held the hand of his father.

            “Poor house to raise a child. All those drafts, and the bugs. And the stuff that don’t work. This will be better. This will be fine.”

            “It’s my house,” said the boy. “With the drafts and the bugs and the stuff that don’t work, and those stones we put in the ground out back. And the pictures, and the radio. The radio most of all.”

            Deckard shook his head and squeezed tighter. Porch creaked. Down the steps. Onto the lane, and then the road. It’s time to walk, thought Deckard. Today is not a day for the car. Today is not a day for walking quickly.

            Fields they passed. Birds that lurked in trees that watched. A little parcel of breeze brought by the morning heat. Sunlight, the same as from when the world was born, just a little older, a bit more tired. And the words between a boy and his father, as they kicked stones into the ditch, or pitched them at the fence posts. The names of two brothers and a mother recited as though they had made their way into a song fit for the morning, for these moments. A hand in a hand. A pulsing of life and heartbeats, coming from the same source, risen from the same ground, the hardness of the earth. The sound of love. The whisper of ghosts. One step after another, leading down a road a last time.

            The town came out of nowhere. It rose as though the breeze had pulled it from the packed earth, nourished by sunlight to be all these colours and all these sounds. Deckard drew his boy into the streets, and nodded at people who knew him, people who might have wondered why the boy was dressed in that suit on this day.

            In front of the smithy’s, a truck was parked. The engine was running.

            “Could go back with you,” said the boy. His voice was done. Ruined.

            “I would if it could be,” said Deckard, words not the equal of what he needed to say, what he had to get out before it became too late. He tried. The words came, familiar ones, practiced ones about how it would be okay, how the future was still bright, how there were so many possibilities in this life.

            No more ghosts whispering. No more wind blowing. The small sound that came to Deckard pleaded to stay, first for forever, then just for another year, then finally just for another day, one last day in the house if it could be, the radio on, the wood creaking, going to rest in the bedroom with the window open. “You be brave about it,” returned Deckard. “You be brave, for you are my boy. You be whole, and proud of yourself and what you will be, and you think on me, your dad, when you look at the world. For I’ll be here, and I’ll think on you for the rest of my life. I promise it to you.”

            “This him?” growled Chad. The old man was sweating, and there was food in his beard. He hobbled around the boy, tugging at the suit. “No need for this finery. Simple clothes would have been fine.”

            “It’s the best he has.”

            Chad frowned. “I bet it is. But he’ll have no use for a tie and jacket. I’ll sell them later. Buy him a better cot, maybe.”

            Deckard stopped him. “You’ll take care of him. You will. You promise that to me here, while you’re in front of me.”

            “I made you all the advertisements I’m going to. There’s no more to be had. You understand that, Deckard.” He didn’t wait for a response. “Listen now. You’ll write no letters. If you do, they’ll be burned. You’ll never try to visit. If you do, you’ll be shot as a trespasser. You’ll not raise hell with the authorities. If you do, something may happen to this boy. What you should try to do is forget. Go drink it out. Work it away. Find something, Deckard. Best advice I have for you.”

            Chad turned to the boy. “Listen, and carefully. I want you to climb into that truck now. And I want you to look down at the floorboards. Don’t you look back at this man, your daddy. Don’t you dare stare out the corner of your eye for a last look. You don’t do that. You keep this moment, your hand in his, as your last of him. That’ll stand you in good stead. I figure in a few years, you’ll lose even that. You’ll forget it, what his hand feels like. Do as I say now. Let go and get in the truck.”

            The hesitation was only a second, but a lifetime in the making. Deckard felt the fingers slip out of his, leaving a trace of heat. He watched a small back and tight clothes climb the steps into the back of the truck. A head staring at the boards, not moving.

            “There, it’s done,” said Chad. The fat man tugged at his beard and spat. “Your debt’s paid off, and you’re alone. Do yourself a kindness. Go to the pub. No one cares if you go down that road again. There’s nothing more to lose, Deckard.”

            “Debt’s paid,” croaked Deckard.

            “It is. All that you owe, we forgive. You’re a free man. Free.”

            Deckard stood there, in the silence of a breeze and within the scrutiny of a sun that judged his every breath. People may have been looking at him, but he wouldn’t have known it. The next thing, diesel fumes gathered as an engine roared. Wheels groaned into motion. Don’t look up, he told himself, only be with yourself and the hardness of the ground on which you stand - for there is nothing else left to consider, nothing at all. But his eyes rose anyway, to watch the truck move down the street, belching fumes into the air of the new morning. And there in the back of that truck, a little figure sitting there in a suit too small, with a heart too big, with a life too new, given commands not to look back - but looking back anyway. Blue eyes staring down the road, and a small hand waving a goodbye, the last treasure Deckard was ever going to know.

##

            In truth, Deckard walked to the steps of the pub. People inside saw him coming and a few called him over. He made it as far as the porch.

            The road was hard. Cars and horses mingled with each other in a dance that was only heading in one direction, but he was the only one walking. At the edge of the buildings, the breeze picked up.

The whole way home, he saw no one. Not even a ghost. He kicked a stone into the ditch. He grabbed others and threw them as far as he could into the crisped fields.

            The porch creaked. The door opened. He went through the house to the other side, into the garden and then beyond, to a plot where three graves had been dug. One small and so old he couldn’t remember having done it. The second small, too, but newer. And the third, a place where he had put his love not long ago.

            “It’s done,” he said to her. “You told me what it would cost to do the things I did. But you didn’t know. You didn’t. I hope you can’t see what’s become of us. I never meant to bring this. Truth is, I don’t know how it happened. All I know is that I’m here, alone. Seemed not long ago. Seemed not that long ago.”

            That night, the house was quiet. Lights were dimmed. And if there were any sifting to be done of starlight or other things belonging to the ether, they were for people far away from that sagging little house. Heat had come, as it would. Breezes had mixed with it, as they were wont to do. And upstairs, at the end of a hallway, Deckard rested his forehead against a wall, one hand touching the glass of a picture frame as his words whispered the night through, I am your boy. I am your boy. I am.