The child dreams:
He walks along a limpid brook in a Valley of lucent air. The dark brown soil perspires under his feet. The greenery overwhelms him. He thinks, I’ve never seen emerald leaves before, and this thought almost wakes him. A man, or perhaps a vision, rises under the green apple tree. Light surrounds or emanates from him, the child cannot tell. When the man speaks, the voice springs from the Valley itself. It’s a real Father’s voice. It speaks with the authority and tenderness his own father lacks, with the wisdom and hope his uncle disregards. It’s the voice of the Father.
“I’ve come to you,” the voice says. “When will you come to Me?”
The child awakes, and melancholy seizes him. In the moonless night, all candles spent, the hearth fire smothered, his father wheezes in a restless dream. His legless uncle’s ragged breathing punctuates his father’s in uneven stops and starts. The wooden cot they share creaks with every turn of a head and every jerk of a sleeping hand. Outside the frozen darkness shivers. A bear huffs along the east wall of their cabin, the snow crunching under its wide paws.
The child cannot fall back asleep.
As soon as morning breaks the child walks to his father and speaks.
“I wish to leave to pursue God.”
His father’s backhand catches him unsurprised. The full force of his father’s knuckles lands on the right side of his face with a cracking sound inside his skull. He tumbles sideways and breaks the fall with his left arm. As he’s rising to his feet with dizzy clumsiness, he slides his tongue over his inner cheek: it feels shredded and tastes of blood.
The child steadies his gaze on his father and repeats, “I wish to leave to pursue God.”
His father strikes the left side of his face, this time with an open palm. He staggers backwards but doesn’t fall. His father shouts and follows and shakes a finger near his eyes.
“If you leave we will starve, you little bastard. Do you wish to kill us all?”
His father raises his hand in a tight fist that darkens his fingers, and a hand reaches from below and pulls down his sleeve by the elbow. The legless uncle has dragged himself between the two of them.
“Stop!” The uncle cries. “If you beat him dead we’ll also starve.”
The child remains quiet as his father strolls away towards the white, naked forest.
Every morning after a new moon the child repeats his request: I wish to leave to pursue God. Every time his father returns blows to the head, strikes to the chin, punches to the liver, kicks to the kidneys. On every occasion his legless uncle intercedes, supplicates, pleads, interposes his own body when the child drops to the ground.
For two years, every morning after a new moon he insists until his father’s blows bring him to the ground, until he becomes a head taller, almost as tall as his father, until his father tires of hitting him or becomes afraid of the no longer child.
“Leave then,” his father says. “You killed Mother the day of your birth, now you kill us the day you leave. Come back one day, when we are bones, and put our bodies in the ground.”
When he’s walking away with a satchel and a hat, his legless uncle drags himself out of the cabin, calls his name.
“Pray for me,” his uncle begs. “Pray for a miracle, for that God of your dreams to give me my legs back, or for him to let me die. I haven’t killed myself yet. Don’t I deserve at least to die? You have legs. Use them. Walk away. I would if I could.”
✵ ✵ ✵
The child wanders south through clearing roads patched with earthy snow…