The Arm of the Lord

I was seven years old, maybe eight, and my father and I were staying at a strange house again. How long had we been driving? The days spun loose behind us, and I didn’t bother counting. I remember his right hand on the wheel, his voice speaking in fragments. I’d wake up in a new city, a new state. He would smile and say, “Not much longer.”

This new house — I don’t remember exactly where — smelled of motor oil. The carpet on the porch ran black with it, a mark as big as a body. I remember that much. And the movie on the rabbit-eared TV. A man talked about how they were coming, they would be there soon. Back then something would appear on the TV, and then it would vanish and you’d never see it again. You were left with a few afterimages, like the milky residue of a dream, a longing to find the thing and make sense of it. So you paid attention harder when it happened, because you had to hold it in your mind. I remember the voice from the box nudging everything close to normal. It was almost like we were home on the farm, in the smallest bedroom, where my mother and I sometimes watched game shows on the little black-and-white.

“That one,” she’d say, as she predicted the winner. “What do you think he’s going to spend all that money on?”

Dogs barked around back, many dogs, although that could have been another house, a different day. My father and his friend stood out there talking about the best way to get to the highway, or greyhound racing, or hunting, or politics. I remember my father saying something about people — that day or some other, to this friend or that, or right then as I watched the movie. There was no bravado in his voice. He was stating a simple fact. Sara Jane Moore had just tried it. Squeaky Fromme too. All women instinctively hated that man, he said. If Kennedy had been the one they wanted to fuck, then Ford was the husband every woman loathed, the potato-stuffed dope falling asleep in a chair on a Sunday afternoon.

I wasn’t exactly sure what was happening on the TV, but I found comfort in plots, in beginnings, middles, and ends. I reached out, turned the volume down, and let the mouths move without sound as I thought of my mother watching the bedroom TV as I watched mine. She was always telling you to shut the fridge door or turn off the faucet. In the summer the windowsills would end up spotted with flies no matter how often she cleaned them. She moved from room to room with a rag, face pinched, fighting skirmish after skirmish. So when my father took me from that place, my first thought was that I was leaving that scolding voice, that small body fighting its little wars. The TV in the back room was his one compromise and hers, too, her yielding to frivolity. Foolishness, she called it with a smallest hint of a smile, as if she were parent and child both. Her age seems ridiculous to me now. She was twenty-six years old, five years younger than my father, but sometimes it seemed as if she had arrived at the end of her life.

So I sat there listening to my father and his friend discussing how they might do such a thing and not botch it. It would take at least two people, two rifles, and a steadiness of purpose. I remember this because they were laughing in the sunshine, and because of the smell of motor oil, and because of the heat. The air felt heavy; my limbs felt heavy. My father said, “I have the guts. Don’t think I don’t.” Something like that. He was always saying things like that, but then he’d laugh to let you know he wasn’t anybody’s martyr. I believe he was making it up as he went...