In The Beginning - Pt 6

In the dark hours of early morning, I awoke with a sharp chill rippling down my spine, the ghostly presence of the previous night lingering still in the space around me. Choking on that rasping air, I slid out from underneath the covers and stole away to the kitchen.

The door to the back porch was partly open. I saw him straight away, the reverend, just sitting there, worn out on the steps. For the briefest of moments, I thought the noise that came from him was laughter. But it quickly transformed into a convulsive sob, the sound of which I doubt I’ll ever forget. It was wretched. Like a desperate attempt to restrain the dullest of buried pain. I called out “Dad?” without realizing it. The word just escaped from my throat of its own accord.

He leapt up and spun around, his startled eyes ablaze in the dark, until he remembered himself and the light went out. And his eyes turned cold.

In the moments that followed, we simply looked at one another. I stared up into his anguished face and he stared back into mine. But somewhere in the silence between us, a trickle of sound began to reach me: the distant echo of his cruel bellowing. And a hint of memory began to flash in me: the vision of my mother trembling uncontrollably. The anguish I had seen in his face disintegrated. I saw only desolation in his dead features, and all my pity vanquished.

And that’s when I felt it. That’s when I knew just how profound was my propensity to hate, for my small body was suddenly riddled with the deepest of contempt for him. So intense was the animosity that rocked me, I felt it smoldering at the back of my throat. It engorged me, coursing through my veins with each heavy pound of my heart. I hated him. For what he’d done, for who he was, for all the things he’d changed in my life that night without my consent. I hated him. And he must have seen it in my eyes, for he flinched unexpectedly.

“Get back to bed!” he roared at me, shattering the silence at last. And the ferocity of his command sent me scampering wildly up the stairs. But from then on, he knew and so did I. We both knew what his eight year old son thought of him. And we both knew that neither of us was likely to forget it.

It must have shamed him to realize it – he didn’t utter a word to me for almost an entire week.