My Fathers

Far worse. Terrifying. Fiction by Micah Muldowney

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

My dad was a hard man. Angry and lost. Understand I don’t blame him for it. Oh no. I loved my father, and he had redeeming qualities too. My mother left early, you see before I can remember and I can’t help but think he never got over it, the poor man. It was the story of his life in microcosm. It was hard and without reward, carting lint from one factory floor to another twelve hours a day, coughing, always coughing, always under somebody’s thumb. There was always some menial little thing that had to be done, over and over, forever. And I was the trap set of that horrible world. I think if I weren’t there he could have just run away or died and been happy. But I was there, and all he could do about it was drink.

When he was sober he was distant, hard-bitten, prone to sudden anger over little things. Or sometimes he’d sulk, or give way to a muttering secretiveness that I could never understand—I don’t think he had anything worse inside to hide than what he showed me. But when he was in a mood, he’d watch me out the corner of his eye and complain and protest about what I’d done to him, how I’d ruined his life, driven her away, how he always had to pick up the pieces and what was there in it for him? And he’d be after me with his belt at the slightest imagined provocation, or even without it.

But when he drank it was worse. Far worse. Terrifying. At first, right when he started he’d relax; He’d loosen up and smile and talk sweet to me, hold me on his knee, kiss my hair, and tell me stories about when he was a kid. A part of me lived for those first moments, to see that piece of him he’d tucked away against the harshness of his life, to feel real tenderness, like I was his real daughter and not just some Cinderella skulking around the house of almighty god, making his food and taking his whippings. But I also hated and feared those moments most of all because of what I knew was going to come. Because after a few drinks, he was no longer happy. I could feel it creeping in along the hairs of my neck. First, he would grow petulant, then angry, then cruel. I’ve never seen such hard eyes, such pleasure in suffering, and he was far too strong for me to ever escape. To this day I cannot see good things happen without feeling a pang of fear, like an episode of vertigo, that the other foot is about to come down. Those awful rages, after the drink had gotten to him, the violence of it, I won’t tell you more than this; he was cleverer mad than he was in his right mind. He never did anything that could be tied back to him, never hurt me but he tied me with a thousand invisible strings not to tell. He’d cut my wrists and laugh and watch me scream and bleed, and I had to scream for him or he wouldn’t stop. I just didn’t have it in me to harden myself against it, to grit my teeth and stay the course, even though I hated to see the pleasure he took in it. It burned me to see it flare up and leave my father for a moment before seared to ashes. I could see that he was dead then. That someone else was there behind his eyes.

He cut my wrists because it could be explained. I was troubled, he’d say, suicidal. A danger to myself. Not to be trusted. They kept me away from other kids. I think they were afraid I’d be a bad influence. That they’d see something and it’d rub off. I was alone a lot, even at school, and it hurt me. I love to be with other people. That was maybe the cruelest thing my father did, the way he erased my life to cover up what he did to me. Not that it was the worst thing he did, mind you. I mean the worst actions. There are worse things you can do than that. But somehow it was the cruelest.

That’s when I started to read. To escape, at first. To connect. To live as long as I could in the imaginary world between the pages where life was hard maybe, but also beautiful and held meaning. I read every minute I could, though I would never let my father see. He would never let me keep anything that was my own, anything that pleased me. So I’d hide library books under the floorboards and read them before he got home from work or after a row when he was passed out drunk and I knew he wouldn’t see the light. They kept me alive.

I was never the type to be angry. I don’t know why—maybe I was afraid when I saw what it did to my father all those years—but I was often afraid and always heartbroken. I felt wounded to the soul with a hurt I thought could never be recovered until I started to have the dreams. They started before my dad died, after I left his house, but got more frequent and vivid after he was gone. In these dreams I would be sitting in my room, only it was a beautiful room, and all the things I loved were in it out where anyone could see them and be happy. He would come, and knock on the door and ask me if he could come in, and I would let him. He’d come in, careful as he never was in life, and he’d kneel and hold my face in my hands and look at me with these beautiful eyes like I had never seen, filled with joy and deep sorrow and regret and hope for the future, all at once, and he’d tell me he how sorry he was, and how much he loved me and what he would do to make it better. Or sometimes he’d tell me funny stories about when he was a boy and promise me that my life would be just as carefree, just as good. That he’d take me there, protect me. No one would hurt me ever again. And he’d rock and cry and kiss my hair, only with clear eyes and in his right mind, and sing to me songs from his hill country childhood that I had never heard in waking.

I thought about those dreams for a long time. Why would he come to me like that? What did it mean? Was it simple wish fulfillment? I don’t think that it was. Slowly, the conviction grew inside me that that was my real dad. That the father who shook the house wasn’t a real person at all, that everything real about him had been stripped slowly away under the weight of broken dreams and heartache and the endless grind of meaningless toil. His body, his husk, had become as unreal as the world it lived in. But my dad existed, always would exist somewhere else. In my dreams maybe, but not from me or by my design. After all, the songs were real—I looked them up. That song, Poor Wayfaring Stranger, was one of them. He was independent of me, you see. The dream was the place where he was restored to life, to being, to personhood.

And my world opened up.

I started to see and feel traces of the dreams that others dreamed of everywhere I looked. Poets long for it. Children run to it when the world holds too much tedium for them to bear. I used to do it myself without knowing when I was shut behind closed doors at school with nothing but a sleeping classroom aid, and I’d fly far away and live the day dancing behind my eyelids. Sometimes I’ll still see someone on a bus or walking the street, smiling and looking around and whispering words to people I cannot see, lost in the dream. Because I know what they may not—that the things they commune with are more real, maybe than the seat at their back or the post in their hand.

And I’m not saying that I don’t know that there is a world we live in, or that I don’t believe that it exists. I just know that it isn’t the only thing, the only place that is real, and it’s certainly not the realest. I see my dad’s face, and it is the man from my dreams. Gentle. And I can move on. I can smile and laugh and breathe deeply and go to University or to work and write this to you now because the man in my dream is real, and I know that there is another world right alongside this one, just out of reach except when we need it, where it is all going to be alright, even if was not alright then, and I can forgive and I can love him anyway. That’s what parting the veil has been to me, and this is what I intend to do: shake people until they can see and hear it.

---

Micah Muldowney is the author of the collection Q-Drive and Other Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2022). His fiction and poetry have been featured in The New England Review, Cleaver, Descant, West Trade Review, and many others. He currently lives in greater Philadelphia where he is working on a novel.