Excerpt From Compilation of Work, "Surrey"
2019-5-10
The Beating:
It was Charlie, unwilling to pull the surrey, that led to
the beating. Charlie, tied to a tree, my father
swung the leather straps. They cracked
the air and whipped against Charlie's hide.
I think I cried as I watched, but I can’t remember.
There was a place in my father that, if touched, could lead
to a beating. He never hit me in a
brutal way. I was his son. I got my ass tanned with belts, palms and boards,
but that was not so uncommon at the time, not considered at all violent. My grade school principal had a paddle patterned with round holes hanging on his wall and not just to scare.
But the beating my father unleashed upon his companion, Charlie,
was something to behold. Charlie was a big brown quarter
horse. But I had seen the love between
them. I had seen the adoration for my father in Charlie’s eye and
gate, and the admiration and love my father had for that horse in his cool tone
and soft hand on Charlie’s neck. I had
seen them, poetry in motion, blazing across a harvested cornfield on an early October
Sunday morning, the colors everywhere bursting red, yellow, orange and green,
as they kicked up thick black clots of mud into the azure sky and tore a hole clean
through the lush landscape.
He’d taken to biting his tongue on the side of his mouth,
Charlie, when he was nervous. Maybe it
was something he’d always done, but we began checking it after a few of his
blow-ups just to keep ourselves safe.
What is kind of crazy, and I’m just now thinking of this as I write this, my
father used to bite his tongue on the side of his mouth when he was focused on something
intently. So the two of them,
see, they were connected and they both would bite their tongues on the sides of
their mouths for different reasons.
And they both eventually had to accept the other for what
they were. And death being the black lacquer, big spoken wheeled surrey in my life, I can’t begrudge Charlie for taking
against it, sticking to the green grass and roving rivers. I love him for it.
At a distance, in the end, they were beautiful, hard and
brilliant, my father and that horse, without regret or remorse. The beating is just a simple little thing that
lights up the memory.
