Chapter 2
James’ scrawny neck seemed like it had tightness within itself. This tightness was a vortex that sucked the goo made from rainbow rings of sweet dry cereal, whole milk, and spit in an uncomfortable-looking way. This tightness propelled the browning goo to his stomach with a force that almost shook him, like an old machine. He was looking out of the window from an angle that led the white morning light to wash every fleck of blue out of his eyes. His story would have remained silent and untold if it were not for the sun’s echo on the clouds that day. The beauty of the lights outside reached into the eight years of his life and lit the core of his existence.
To James, the sun on this day appeared no different that the sun every day before. Though, it was different this day. It illuminated the undercurrent of his humanity that lives in everyone, but is veiled by age. There was brightness that rose with him during the sun’s ascent that placed him under the watching eyes of those who lived before him. Death is a great mystery, and though all men go through times of fearing it, many men find immortality through their sons. What happened to James was important because he was all that was left of his father. James was living memory of his parent’s love. Also, like all future generations of immigrant children, he was getting closer to their dream of what their afterlife could be. Of course he would own property, of course he would read. All their eyes tracked the light inside him from that morning on.
James was in a constant state of motion at this point in his life, his legs were always swinging in chairs that were too big for him, and he would pick at the ends of his scruff-brown hair, smooth at the iron lines of his clothes, or scrape under his fingernails to expose clumps of sticky dirt from a thousand sources. While the bright light of the coming winter day struck through the kitchen window, the house itself radiated with warmth of its own. James began to slurp at the browning milk in his cereal bowl.
He heard his mother’s wedding and engagement rings clinking against one another on a gold chain around her neck before he heard her voice that day. The hum of her voice was muted like the light in the corners of the kitchen where the window could not fully reach. He was sitting at the kitchen table looking at the grey world in the morning light. It had not snowed yet that year. The air outside was growing colder, and the weatherman on television warned of its approach. Where they lived, it would only snow twice a year at most, but school would always be canceled for it.
She put her left hand on his shoulder. Before looking at her face, he looked at the tan wrinkles across her knuckles and all five ring-less fingers. He watched them move down and loop gently around his arm. She used his arm to pivot him gently away from the window towards her, and he smiled at her.
“I don’t want you to wear your red coat today, I had a dream that you wore your red coat to school, but slammed your hand in the door on the way out- and I came to help you but there was so much blood everywhere, and all your fingers just fell off and you were screaming so loud I couldn’t help you.” James blinked.
“That’s a really bad dream- I don’t need to wear a coat today, it isn’t even snowing,” James’ eyes were still blanched out. He tried not to look afraid when he talked to his mother.
“It’s cold enough to. It’s going to snow a lot tomorrow, I can smell it,”
“Maybe I’ll get off school, Fridays are the worst,”
“What do you mean? Are your friends picking on you, again?” She let go of his arm and bent back up, placing her hands on her hips. He remembered the last time he answered yes to this question, how even the gentlest of nudging from his mom to the other parents only increased the meanness of the other kids. She had a way of coming back from PTA meetings in tears for the past few months which caused furious taunts the next school day for James. The frizz of brown hair at her shoulders gave way to scraps of white that collected behind her ears. James’ mother had not colored her hair in months. She looked into his eyes,
“The other boys are so much bigger than you are, don’t you ever fight them, or anyone, even if they say something about-”
“No Mom. No. I’m eight, I know how to deal with anyone being mean to me, I’d just go to the teacher like you told me. We’re all getting along really well after you talked to their parents- it’s just that I... I get so bored on Fridays.”
“Well, just think about where what you are learning can get you- and it’ll snow by the weekend, that should be fun.”
“Do you think I’ll get off school tomorrow, do you think it’ll snow that much?”
“Wear your dad’s coat today, not his work coat- the one he used to wear while shoveling the walk,”
James nodded and looked down at his empty bowl. There was a chip on the lip of it, and he ran his thumb over the exposed ceramic. The chip felt like the way teeth sounded when they were accidently ground together.
“It’ll snow.” She looked out of the window. “It will snow more than you want,” she tightened her robe, ignoring the blooms of coffee stains that began at the neck. She walked to her bedroom to lie back down. The coffee she drank made her move like she was haunted and did nothing to quiet the circles under her eyes. James knew she was tired, even though she did not do any more work around the house than before it happened. It weighed more upon her than it did before. Everything pushed her father into the ground. His mother reminded him of the stories of people who were frostbitten and had to carry around a part of their body they knew they would lose.
James put his bowl in the sink and ran water on it. He walked out of the kitchen and into the front hall. This was the best part of his day. He shuffled his dirty white socks across the blue carpet to get enough charge to-
“Ow!” He could see the static leap from his fingers to the metal door knob of the front hall closet. Sparks and static electricity are considered lucky in many cultures, and for James they did bring him a dose of strange good fortune that day. James was never aware of it. He laughed while opening the door. James did not know he was lucky. He reached for his red coat and then remembered what his mother told him. James let go and scooped it over to the right on the pole that held the hangers, then he did the same with his mother’s blue coat, and her faux fur coat she used to wear to Military Balls with his father. James remembered the way they looked like living fairytales when they left for those formals, driving off into the starlight, leaving plumes of steam and smiles as they accelerated into their romantic evening. James always thought his mom looked like a Disney princess who got married and started wearing jeans. He thought she looked that way before she started looking the way she did now- so tired. The other coats were in a clear zip-up bag, and hung to the very left of the other coats.
James unzipped it to the lapel, where he saw his own last name stitched in tight black thread on a green canvas backing. He ran his fingers over the black loops of the J-A-N-S-E-N. He finished unzipping it and reached behind to pull out a thick green plaid coat. He zipped it back up and put the coat on.
The coat slipped down past his knees and he began to sweat while he found his shoes, his lunch, and his back pack. He could smell his father’s stale pipe smoke rustling off into his clothes all the way to school.
James’ breath showed up opaque against the grey sky. The sky looked fuzzy like gauze over a scab. It looked like there was something dark behind it. He brought his ungloved hand to his mouth like he was holding a pipe and drew in a cold breath that pinched the base of his lungs.
He held it in like the naked trees along the street stubbornly held onto the grandest and proudest of their leaves even as the threat of snow protruded, and then he purposely blew hot air from the deep of his lungs. He curled his mouth to form an ‘O’ while doing this, but the structure of his breath was only as thick as the air around it. His staccato puffs outward collapsed into nothing and shattered upwards before becoming part of the grey sky itself.
He wondered if when people prayed out loud at church if their words became some invisible solid, intangible
to those looking at their eyelids. James wondered if when he spoke, if his words would become part of God. He thought about how everyone closed their eyes to pray, and if everyone was good and did not peek, maybe God was standing right there with them. It would be like a refrigerator door was closed and small penguins got to work on the slick, dried, frozen juice spills on the highest shelf.
His mom was never that religious, but she still went to the church across town even after James’ father died. The church was called The Garage, was housed in an old auto shop, and had clever flyers pinned up on every community board in town. They were evangelical. It only took them weeks to disable the garage doors and put boards over the floor. They also removed the mechanism that would have lifted worshipers up to the ceiling like cars that needed their brakes checked out. They always kept the neon sign that blared ‘open,’ on 24 hours a day, he wondered if there was always somebody there, or if it was just for show.
Even after his father died, his mother still stuck her miserly frame in a puffed coat every Sunday and spent the morning opening and closing her eyes in that garage. When James’ dad was still alive, James would sometimes go to church with his mother, and sometimes stay home with his dad. He split it up evenly, so that neither of his parents would think he loved the other one more. He was always surprised by the firm grip of his mother’s pastor and how he never failed to say We missed you last week. The pastor’s tone made James feel accused. He could not feel bad because his mom let him stay home with his dad whenever he wanted. James felt sorry for the desperate hand shake each week from the pastor. It felt like the man was trying to reach in and grab something from out of James. After the greeting, he would walk gently boards that lay a foot or so above the cement work. The hollow noise seemed old; as the boards were reclaimed from an old church when it was remodeled and nobody else wanted the one hundred-year-old wood. During the service, James stared at the pastor and smiled if he smiled, frowned if he frowned. He would think about the windows on the garage doors surrounding them, how they were painted to look like stained glass but they were not, not really.
Other times, he would stay home with his father. On these mornings, James would play with minuscule toy soldiers that were olive drab from their identically parted hair, to their wrinkled outfits, to their twistable guns. James had hundreds of toy soldiers in only a few poses. He would line up the opposing identical regiments under the great canopy of his dining room table. His father would sometimes knock one regiment over with his nodding foot on accident. He would always lean under the table, sure to keep his pipe upright, and say with smoke pouring out of his mouth;
“Sorry about that, just a casualty of war, I suppose,” and they would both laugh. Through battle, James could hear his father rustling his newspaper, occasionally saying ‘hmm,’ and refilling his pipe with sweet-smelling house tobacco he bought from the smoke shop downtown. When he got to the crosswords, it meant James’ mom was returning from church soon.
“What’s a nine letter word for something precious offered to a deity?” James never knew the answers to the questions his father asked. He would shrug his shoulders under the table, say he did not know, and begin spelling half the words he did know in his head to counteract feeling stupid.
Walking to school, James felt an aligned comfort in his father’s jacket and knowing that there would always be some things that neither of them knew. He pulled his arms tighter to the sides of his body and thought about the coat he was wearing. It went down to his knees, but fit his father as well as his army coat. His father could wear both coats, and the things he would do in each were different. The coat James was wearing held his father when he shoveled the snow, drove to the store, and played hockey with his buddies from high school down at the rink. James only saw his dad wearing his army coat in the mornings and evenings, and he could not imagine what his father did while he wore that coat. To the world, James thought, you were one person. When his dad was deployed, James would go to church with his mom every Sunday. Since he heard the news, he spent his Sunday mornings laying under the kitchen table and tracing the wood canopy above him with his eyes.
“Your mom talks to her God, I talk to mine,” his father would say while releasing the delicious smoke from his lungs and letting it settle on the walls and in the carpet. He chuckled.
The walk to school was not far, and the boxed-brick building rose unimpressively from the hill he was traversing. James inhaled the specific smell of school on a cold morning. The diesel of the school bus collided with the fermenting leaves he crushed beneath his feet. It was palatable; he pulled it into himself and expelled the warmth of his lungs to God.