Thomas J Crowe

A Knock At The Door

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My dad froze to death in the winter of 2022.  His car was totaled and in the shop, so he had to walk.  Mom pretended she didn't understand why he couldn't drink at home.  We had alcohol in the house.  Of course, she knew perfectly well why.  She'd said so herself: wine, women, and song.  Why'd she stay if she knew the truth?  Can't answer that.  Same goes for the other question: Why did she stay after her head was dashed against the green wall of the kitchen?  Blood on the tile, and some blood running in thin rivulets down the wall, and my dad standing drunkenly over her, swaying a little, and weeping, saying her name over and over: mary mary mary; I could have killed him that night, but I didn't.  I waited, thought of all sorts of ways: poisoning him maybe, or getting one of the guns out of the safe, a piece at a time, squirreling each piece away—the slide, the trigger, each individual bullet, the clip itself,—squirreling them all away in my drawer amidst the folds of my socks and underwear, and then putting all the pieces together, assembling a pistol, loading it, and going out one of those nights when I know he'll be home late, and crawling under the porch, in the close shadows where I lie still, looking through the slats and waiting in the evening coolness for headlights to appear at the entrance of the drive.  The engine will rumble closer and the brakes will squeal slightly as the car comes to a stop before the door of our ancestral home and the driver side door will open; and I, while all this is transpiring, will reach forward and find that one slat that is coming loose and push it to the side, allowing for a perfect line of sight, the ideal angle.  With infinite patience and care, as he steps from the car and begins his stumbling drunken walk up to the front door, I will aim the pistol, careful to keep the muzzle enveloped in shadow, slowly curl my finger around the trigger till the pistol jumps in my hand and a blinding flash lights up the boards over my head and an ear-shattering report resounds in that close space.  And my dad will go down in the walk.  I will have got him in the leg, maybe, or in the shoulder.  He will not have died all at once.  So I will crawl out from underneath the porch and walk up to where he is squirming and bleeding and screaming, just as mom had when she came too on the kitchen floor and realized that her skull was probably cracked and that she was bleeding all over her new summer dress, and I will stand over him and aim and fire and fire and fire again until he lies still and dead.

 

I didn't have to go through all that trouble.  The weather did it for me.  Dad made it to the door and fumbled with his keys, enough to drop them, and when they dropped, they fell in between the boards, in the frigid darkness walled in by snowdrifts.  He actually tried to dig his way under the porch, all the while bellowing for one of us to come out and help, but we were both asleep and the wind had been howling that night and stolen his voice away.  I like to imagine flecks of spittle from his mouth freezing in the air, born away in the blizzard to blow among the ice-covered trees of Twistfoot Orchard, the family business.  We found him in the morning curled up in a snowdrift, frozen solid.  And the sun shone brightly and warm that morning and no more did I feel that terrible weight I had known from my first memory.  Freedom.

 

So we buried my father, and I told some lies to spare the living.  There were some who thought the world of that man, who counted themselves fortunate for having known such a good and generous human being.  Such a luxury for them, to only know that side of the man, the side of the mask, the mask shown to all the world, concealing the truth of what happened behind that door locked against him, the door that trapped him in the storm.  Almost as though the house itself conspired against him for our sake, knowing the secret thoughts we nursed against our tormenter, the house itself grew weary of his violent ways.

 

So he was buried and my mother and I came home, just the two of us, and we both felt it, saying nothing, for we did not know the word that described the feeling.  Freedom?  I suppose that word is as good as another, and yet, so great was the sensation, running deep, blazing bright in our minds, it eluded even that defining term.  The nightmares intruded into that momentary bliss.  Always the same.

  

I awake in my bed to the sound of a knocking at the door downstairs and I go out into the hall and the air is cold, so cold, the kind of cold where the gravediggers need picks to break through the frozen ground.  Down the steps to where I can see the door through the banister, and a bang, as of a fist striking the door, but no cries or shouts: his mouth is frozen shut. 

 

This went on for three weeks.  Every night I woke myself up with a scream, and mom would come to my door and she would talk to me until I fell asleep again.  And there was about her a tautness that came through in her voice, a desperate fear of every uncertainty, my wellbeing included.  To put her mind at ease, I sat down with her one morning and said they were only dreams, that they would pass in time.  She said:

 

—I wish I could change things.  This isn't fair to you.

 

—Fair?  What are you talking about?

 

—A son should have a father.

 

—Even a father like him?  Is that what you are going to say?

 

—Yes.

 

—I'm not that cut up about it, to tell you the truth.

 

—How can you not be?

 

And I told her how I'd always wanted him dead.  Definitely after the summer of '20, when he beat her so badly that she had to stay indoors for three weeks till the bruises subsided.  She still had to deal with the headaches though.

 

—You don't mean that.

 

—Why don't you believe me?

 

—Because it isn't natural.

 

—Most natural thing in the world.  Even gods kill their fathers, or want to.

 

—You don't mean that.

 

So I told her my plan to take a pistol out of the safe a piece at a time and shoot him from underneath the porch.

 

—But the storm did that for me, almost like the house was listening.  And the keys too.  He dropped his keys.  I heard him drop his keys.

 

—You were asleep.

 

—Oh no, Mom.  I heard him out there shouting for help and I stood at the front door out of sight and listened, and when he tried to get in some other way, I went as quietly as I could to lock him out, be it the window or the back door.  Of course, he couldn't get to the backdoor.  The snow was too high, and he couldn't get the side-gate open, and as for climbing...well, drunk as he was, he fell a couple times and gave up, came back to the front door, demanding to be let in, but I stood in the darkness, kept silent, made sure the curtains were drawn on the front window, and I waited until he stopped shouting.  That's when I knew he was dying.  And even if he had gotten wise and walked back to the road, to go see if he could crash at one of his friends' houses: he'd come back in the morning and demand why no one had let him in and we could just say that we were both asleep.  He'd have to accept it.  Hit us both a couple times maybe, break a tooth or a nose.  But he'd accept it.  Honest, Mom—I thought that was what he would do.  I didn't expect to find him like that.  But I won't lie either and say that it wasn't what I wanted.

 

—You killed him.

 

—So what if I did?  It had to happen.  Nothing was going to change otherwise.  You know I'm right.

 

She didn't refute me.

 

—It's alright now.  Things are the way they should be.

 

She hasn't told anyone the truth.  I have no reason to think that she will: she knows I'm right; she couldn't have done what I did.  And I'll live here until I graduate high school and I'll move out and get a job somewhere, find a nice girl, get married, have kids, and I'll treat them better than I was treated and I'll treat her right, better than how my mom was treated.  She won't have to worry.  I made the decision a long time ago, never to be like him.

 

Still, I'll wake up on a windy night and I'll hear it, knocking on the door, someone demanding entry down below in the dark, and for a terrible moment I'll think that the latch on the door is coming undone.  I'll hear his frozen steps thumping leadenly against the wood floor, tracking in snow that will not melt.  He is swathed in cold and darkness, and he is coming up the stairs now.  He will be at the door of my room.  The incantation begins repeating in my head: I am not you, I am nothing like you, I am not you—

 

Thomas J. Crowe is an American writer living in Santa Fe, New Mexico and he is currently pursuing a degree in Classical Studies from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.  One of his stories "Winter Woods" was published last year in Volume V, Issue I of the Signal Mountain Review at the University of Tennessee. Bienvenue au Danse, Thomas.

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