Steve Tem - Ugly Behavior

That was me and my wife and my girls. Our blood knot. I loved them and I hated them and then I loved them so much I couldn’t be without them, couldn’t let them out of my sight. It was like I had the taste of them in my mouth all the time and I was liking that taste more and more, and I just couldn’t live without it, no way.

If they’d stayed home more often things probably would’ve turned out okay. Maybe I would get tired of them, tired of the taste and smell of them, and I’d get tired of it all like I did when they first wanted to date and then I’d just let them do what they damn well pleased. Julie could have made them stay home if she’d had the mind, but I married her too young and she was just too damned dumb. A good mother in every other way but too dumb for my girls I’m sorry to say.

I loved my girls, I loved them dear. I started trying to tell them that so maybe they’d stay at home but it didn’t work.

My youngest, my baby Ann, she even laughed at me and what’s a man supposed to do with that? I would’ve hit her real hard right then and there but at that point I still couldn’t hit my baby girl. The other two, but not her.

I should’ve had boys, should’ve made Julie give me boys but I never could’ve loved boys that way. I don’t know if that’s a good thing, or a bad thing.

Let me explain something: I know I wasn’t always the best father and husband. If I had been I wouldn’t have let things get so far. A good father and husband keeps a lid on things, keeps things from going so far. Keeping things from going so far—with his kids, his wife, with the neighbors—that’s the main thing a father’s supposed to be doing. And I know I failed at that one.

Things collect, and they don’t go away. Things get together, you get too many of them, and then things go too far.

Knots get untied. Blood gets spilled on the old, dry wooden floors and the floor soaks it up so fast you can’t believe it, lots faster than you can clean it up and pretty soon the whole floor is stained red and everything you look at looks red.

I think they all four must have been having their period. They weren’t complaining about it but the whole house smelled like it and I tasted it in every meal for two days and I breathed that blood in every time I opened my mouth and all my clothes smelled like it and even the newspaper and two nights running my dreams were so red I couldn’t make out a thing in them.

Marcie had come back from one of her “dates.” Fuck fests more like it but a father can’t say that in front of his daughters and still be a good father. I just smiled at her and asked, “Have a nice time?” And she just stared at me looking scared. There was no point in that—I loved her—didn’t she know that?

Then I saw that my baby Ann was with her.

“What the fuck!” I yelled and immediately felt bad, saying the F word in front of my girls but it was already out there and I couldn’t get it back inside.

“Had me my first date, Daddy!” Ann piped up with her little dollie’s voice. “Mom said it was okay with her. Me and Marcie, we doubled.”

I couldn’t say a damn thing, just stared at the two of them all made up like models, or whores. They’d put me down in a box, and I couldn’t see a way to climb my way out. I turned around and went into the bedroom and closed the door, sat down to think. Once you got a family, you don’t get too much time to think.

I felt all loose with myself. I felt untied. The women in a family, they have a way of doing that to their men.

Being in a family is like being in a dream. You don’t know if it’s a good dream, or a bad dream. You don’t know if you’re up or down. Everything moves sideways, until before you know it you’re back where you started again, like you hadn’t moved anywhere at all. That’s where I was, moving sideways so fast but not going nowhere.

My girls, they started the untying. It wasn’t me that did that part. My beautiful, beautiful girls. I just finished what they started.

But when you start untying that blood knot, it’s more blood than anyone could imagine. It goes back forever, that blood. You taste it and you breathe it and it stains the floor and it stains the walls and it stains the skin until you’re some kind of cartoon running around stabbing and chopping and tasting.

My babies’ breasts like apples, like sweet onions, like tomatoes.

Once they were all in the blood it was like they were being born again, crying out “I love you daddy,” and I could kiss them and there was not a damn thing wrong with any of it, cause daddies are supposed to love their babies.

Because they’re your blood, you see. And you’re tied to them forever.

She’d told her friends how they’d met, how after a week’s courtship they’d married.

True in part but there’d been no courtship. She’d fallen for this man, for the strength and sureness of his hands, and she’d asked him to marry her. And because he was the man he was, needing an ordered place where art might happen, he’d said yes. Two years later the baby was born, and she’d set out to make this strange artist love his only child.

Out on the deck his exacting hands sent into wood chisels as sharp as dread. Flakes rose into bright air and fluttered the long descent to the rocks below. He did not mark the wood, did not reduce it with machinery before his preliminary cuts. Outlines, he said, were no use for freeing the true shapes within.

Their boy always played near his father’s working, even when the man’s careless indifference brought him pain. For the boy knew that the carver could not keep his hands off the thing he had made, the thing he had freed from unfeeling matter, and in this way the boy got his hugs and impromptu dances and a quick toss in the air that made him believe in wings.

A steady thok as steel parted wood a hundred years old. She imagined their son sitting patiently, watching those steady hands, waiting for his toss.

Her friends said he was too self-absorbed, that life with such a man would leave her empty and desperate for talk. But she knew what her son knew: there could be no greater love than that which the artist bore for the thing he had freed from the world.

Such unshakable focus, she thought, opening the door that led out onto the deck and her husband’s working. The steady rhythm of hammer and hand uplifted her in just the hearing, so that she, too, felt winged and freed from a mundane world. She looked for her son, expecting him there waiting for his little toss, but her son was not there.

Her husband sat hunched over his work. For a moment she was furious about his lack of care. Where was their son? Then following the flight of chips, white and red and trailing, over the railing’s edge and down onto the rocks, she saw the fallen form, the exquisite work so carelessly tossed aside, the delicate shape spread and broken, their son.

She turned to the master carver, her mouth working at an uncontrolled sentence. And saw him with the hammer, the bloody chisel, the glistening hand slowly freed, dropping away from the ragged wrist.

This man, her husband, looked up, eyes dark knots in the rough bole of face. “I could not hold him,” he gasped. “Wind or his own imagination. Once loose, I could not keep him here.”

And then he looked away, back straining into the work of removing the tool that had failed him.

All the mommas cry when the sackman comes.

It was the neighborhood fairytale, the nursery rhyme, the cautionary fable meant to scare the children just enough that they wouldn’t stray too far, talk to strangers, or cross the wrong borders. He’d been hearing the stories for forty years, from the beginning of it all. And at one time the image of the large man (but not tall, not fat) with the huge, sure hands, walking the night streets with the voluminous gray sack across his back—a sack that sighed and cried, wriggled and shook as if there were small animals inside—had an almost romantic appeal. He felt flattered, and in fact the image hadn’t been that far from the truth.