This Census-Taker

16

There is a kind of thorned bush that thrives on the hill where I was born. I’ve never seen it anywhere else. It stands about a meter tall, with compact snarled branches that grow in dense near-cylinders so its copses are like low, snagging pillars. Its all-year berries are blue-gray but in the red light of sunset their luster makes them shine like black pupils.

I stood among the columnar bushes watched by their nasty vegetable eyes.

My father didn’t look at me. He dropped more stones upon a random-looking cairn. The townspeople were slow to get out of our sight. He waited and watched them and didn’t look at me and kept adding to the substance of the hill with the substance of the hill.

When Drobe looked back a last time his eyes and mouth widened in horror at my expression. He would have taken a step back toward me but the hunter put his hand on him, not cruelly but removing hope of escape. The man whispered to Drobe and Drobe made some sign for me with his hands but I didn’t know what he was saying.

When they were gone I stayed behind my perimeter of sentry bushes in the failing light.

“I’m not angry,” my father said.

I was full of the injustice of it; that that was how he tried to reassure me.

“It’ll be all right,” he said gently. He stepped closer. “I’m sorry about it all.”

I didn’t move: I had no moving left in me. My father stood with only one line of thorns between him and me. He held out a hand.

And I was alone with him on the cold hill and I could do nothing. I stayed still as long as I could as if something might happen but it didn’t, and when it didn’t I shuffled as slowly as I could out from the vegetation, I dragged my toes against the ground but it was as if there was nowhere to go but to him.

He smiled as I came. He looked as if he might cry.

“Hello again,” my father whispered.

He kept his hand out until I took it.

His skin was tough and warm. I felt sick to touch it.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll feed you. Come home.”