Not revenge—I don’t mean revenge. I mean fairness. It’s a pleasure as true as any other of the body or soul, because believing in a fair world is the only thing that makes life livable.
Yet dinner went by, and Eddy was all right, and the next day he woke up just the same as always. Elias was in the front room, cleaning out the fireplace from the winter. He had a plastic sheet spread out over part of the room, with the grate and the poker sitting on it, and himself halfway up in the chimney trying to knock out all the wood ash. Well, Eddy came downstairs, took one look at Eli and said, “Boy, what in the hell are you doing?”
Elias crouched down to look out at his father and said, “What does it look like I’m doing?”
That made Eddy turn that plum-red color of his. “Don’t you start smart-mouthing. You see all that ash you’re getting all over the furniture? The floor? You didn’t think to drape anything?”
Elias ran a hand under his nose, leaving a streak of lighter gray. “Like anyone’ll be able to tell anyway. I’ll vacuum after I’m done.”
“Come here.”
“I’m working.”
“I told you to come here.”
Elias ducked out from the fireplace and came over. He wasn’t even all the way to his father when Eddy grabbed a big bunch of the front of his shirt and got right up in his face. Oh, and then the yelling started. Eddy in that barking voice shouting about how he’d paid for all this and Elias was lazy and didn’t care to do a job right, that’s why he was a failure—all that manner of hollering. My son, he just stood there and took it. He and his father were the same height and built alike, though his father wasn’t as heavy. Then Eddy shoved him in the chest, back toward the fireplace, and Elias shuffled back over and started to get back to work. But when he knelt down again Eddy shoved him in the hip with his boot, starting that yelling all over again, pushing Elias’s head with the flat of his hand. Elias, I guess he got fed up, because he said, “Knock it off,” though with another word in there I won’t say. Eddy shouted at him not to curse at him, but then when he bent over to get in Elias’s face again, he staggered to the side and fell into a chair.
At first neither Elias nor I moved to help him. We both just watched, like rabbits in their holes watching a mad dog get taken down. Eddy tried to stand up, but fell farther down instead, and slumped there on the floor. It wasn’t in his vocabulary to try and call for help. His body was powdered with ash down one side, where he’d slid onto the plastic sheeting, and there was a streak of it across his cheekbone. He pulled himself to the middle of the floor on his left arm, while his right just hung there. I wasn’t stupid, now. I knew what was happening. But half an Eddy, especially when angry, was still powerful. He was a mad dog wounded.
“Dad, what’s the matter?” asked Elias. Eddy just lay there, breathing in a stuttering sort of way. Elias looked at him, then at me. “What should I do? You think I should drive him to the hospital or something?”
“If he’ll go.”
Neither of us proposed calling 911. All the fuss Eddy had made over the years about how we don’t call 911, nobody was going to even float that idea right then, when he was still conscious and maybe up to making us pay for it. So Elias got on one side of him and I got on the other, and together we hoisted him into the Jeep and took him down to the hospital that way. It cost him a lot of time. Elias didn’t really realize how serious it was, and I didn’t say much. Probably I should have, but that kernel was back inside me again and it gave me a sense of calm. This didn’t feel like an emergency. It only felt like what was inevitable, like a harvest.
My first thought, when the doctor confirmed to us that he’d had a stroke, was Praise God, he’ll never hit my son again. That is God’s honest truth, too.
But Elias left for boot camp just a couple of months after that. It turned out he’d had that