We Make Mud

Our Father Who Walks on Water Comes Home with Two Buckets of Fish

This is our father we are watching. We watch our father walk on water. He is walking across it, our father, he is crossing this dirty river that runs through this dirty river town. Our father is coming back now from the river’s other side. We see that he has, hanging from each of his muddy hands, a muddy bucket. When it is us, his sons, that he sees are the ones doing the watching, our father walks up to face us. He sets down those muddy buckets down onto the ground. Us brothers, we look down at those buckets. When we look down inside these buckets, we see that they are both filled up to the rusted brim with fish. Supper is what our father says to this. Us brothers, we shadow our father home. We are our father’s sons mudding our way back through the mud, walking in the mud-left tracks of our father’s muddy boots. When we get home, we watch our father walk into the kitchen without first taking off his boots. Us brothers, we do like our father. We walk inside, with our boots still on our feet. The floor, with mud all across it, it has never before looked so shiny. Mother, our father calls this word out. We listen to him call to our mother her name. Us brothers, we don’t say anything about our mother. We go and we fetch a frying pan out of the cupboard and sit it down on the stove. Our father sees us brothers and so he gets for himself a knife for him to gut the fish with. Maybe what our father figures is that our mother is out of the house shopping. Our father takes the fish out of the buckets and he goes at the fish with his knife. He cuts off first the head, the tail next, then he sticks the rusted blade up inside. What is inside of this fish comes slushing out onto the kitchen’s floor. We fry the fish up hard in sputtering hot butter, what our father likes to call lard. Boys, our father says, it’s good to be back home. Then he calls out for our mother to come eat. When he gets no answer, only the rivery echo of a house with no mother left inside it, he keeps on eating. We keep on eating. Us brothers, we do not say a word about our mother. Our mother, our mother. We do not know what to say about our mother that our father doesn’t already know. After we are done with this eating, it is us brothers who do the cleaning up. We take what is left off of our plates and we scrape what’s left into the trash. The dirty dishes, slick with fish and lard, we pile these into the kitchen’s sink. The parts of the fish that we do not eat — the guts, the heads, the bones — these we take outside, out back to the back of our backyard. The guts, the tails, these we bury, in holes that us brothers dig. The fish heads, with the fish eyes still staring out of them, these we hammer into the back-of-the-yard telephone pole that is studded with the heads of fish. It’s the sound of us brothers doing this hammering that brings our father outside. When he asks us brothers, Where is your mother, one of us brothers whispers, Fish, and the other one of us mutters, Moon. To this, these words, our father, he nods with his head, then he heads back down to the river. And without so much as a word or a wave from his goodbye, we watch our father walk back across the river’s muddy water, back to the river’s other side: walking and walking and walking on, until he is nothing but a sound that the river sometimes makes when a stone is skipped across it.