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FIRSTS
Two-by-sixes puzzle together in the foundation of a railroad worker’s hands, air where the red fruit of an adult summer would plop up, circled in scrawny pine atop waterfront clay. Five-year-old son splashing more primer on himself than the wood, useful in company and father-love, a Fisher-Price carpenter. A winter, then a cottage where air once steeped. Red stain barn fits its shape atop old farmland harvested in neat fractions by young couples from the city - Northumberland now salting a subtle new monument. ... The shelf is two skyscrapers too high, books topping the open doorway to bunks and the poorly masked smell of Porta-Flush; the son, seven years tall but far from grown enough, dreams of the pisan stack glowing there in a reflection of picture window sun. Dad and M’nuncle Petes trade them often, this dazzle of red cars, green army men, and yellow dinosaurs wafered in newsprint fourtone. Imagination races with glossy covers until slammed to the brick wall of their brotherly smiles -- ‘you’re too young,’ they say, while flipping away in a betrayal of eagerness. ... A hand reaches down from between ceiling cracks, spaces left between a master bedroom floor and the angular barn roof, deliberate oozing holes for stove-warmth on cold nights. His arm spans a half-stack too short, but even partial paper treasure exceeds the hoped rewards for kid cleverness. These holes, pre-assembled robber trenches, had been spied two days prior; 60-watt inspiration suggested a predator’s swoop, swift hawk’s dive from the lofted beam skies. He fidgeted, a little snack of impatience, until parents beachwalked into an hour’s absence. Then, up the fold-down ladder he zoomed. ... The books are spread Crowleyesque, paper ring deliberate in splay to keep the order intact, incantive protection of son from father’s wrath and the knowledge of his trespass. For a stopwatch of time, the boy is lost to the covers, hypnotized by thrill of taboo and their colourwash call. But urgency sounds in its paranoian key, and he stabs randomly, diving in. Chance opens the hybrid of dadly interests, war and the supernatural - G.I. Combat explodes his eyes in the clanking tracks of a Haunted Tank, and dying messages shrapneled with finger pens, indelible blood ink. ... The unfinished picture book nightmares shell him for weeks, red letters curdling on and on the wall of everywhere. Confession is a no man’s line, so he thanks the god of beaches for more parental wanderlust, pulleystrings down his ladder to the forbidden, memorizes again each loop on nail to mask his plunder with the art of restoration. Courage rewards both troubled spirits - boy and story are appeased with a happier ending, underdog-tagged heroes whose recipe for survival is never forsaking their good guy ways. Another book, then another, and ink-lust newsreels him in, eager now. ... They are gone one day, maybe a week before school and the re-move to parish suburbia. He panics as to what gave him away, the ladder mis-tucked or the pile not quite the right angle of crooked. Maybe it was the peanut butter - a tiny stain in a House of Mystery, glopped through careless hunger for scary stories and a sandwich. Not a word from the parents, though, and the young plunder ace wonders he is not punished, a prisoner of war books. It is months, in a supermarket’s safety, before he dares ask for one, a ‘comic book’. A crack of smile through beard shows no hint of surprise, and up and away to the rack they slink. No guns or horror screams there, but a super man. “This will be good enough,” Dad says. 2002 -- (c) Frank "damonk" Cormier |