In three bursts, Danielle Cadena Deulen’s “Our Fathers Leave Us” offers an unnervingly visceral study of the patriline and the violence and neglect that haunt it. Slipping between the surreal and the immediate, the universal and the personal, the vignettes that comprise this collection speak to the many forms—biological, philosophical, spiritual—that fathers and their legacies take. As it sorts through traditions and memories, this astonishing triptych considers not only how our fathers leave us but also what our fathers leave us.—The Editors and the Fiction Staff
Our Fathers Leave Us (1)
By the campfire, our fathers stop playing their guitars, say, “Listen to that wind through the pines,” and we fall for it, close our eyes because we are dutiful children—testaments to our fathers’ will. The sky glimmers like onyx cufflinks, like the dull eyes of donkeys, and while we are listening, our fathers scuffle into the shrubbery, lie down, and begin to die. Out of the ferns and wild witch hazel grow plastic tubes puncturing the veins in their arms, saline bags hanging high in the pines, and we wonder how we could have missed it—the erratic notes of the pulse machines and the doctors pounding on their chests, saying “dammit” and “hold on,” a light dew on their foreheads.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” we demand from our mothers, but they only shake their heads in unison, say, “You know how they are.” For the first time, we realize we don’t know how they are. The undertakers arrive early in beat-up trucks, appraise us with silent bombast. They smoke cigars, are lovelorn—used to be our fathers’ best friends “before the accident,” they tell us.
“What accident?” we try to ask, but a sad, muscular teenager walks into our periphery, breathing hard through his nostrils. “This is our bastard brother,” our sisters tell us, hanging from the shoulders of their recent ex-boyfriends, the keys of smashed cars in their soft fists. “He’s our fathers’ namesake,” they say. We are also namesakes.
At this point, our fathers tremble up from their deathbeds of wild mulch and moss, ask us to forgive them:
“If you don’t forgive me, I’ll never survive this,” they say. “The doctors are done. You’re the only one who can save me now—please forgive me. Please, please forgive me….” Their eyes are weak and wet, and because we can’t bear to listen to what they say, we forgive them.
They die anyway.
Their wake is a long parade of strangers with casseroles and banal anecdotes. Some try to make us eat what they’ve brought, placing their hands on our shoulders and offering up forks of indiscernible food. We dip our fingers into the tepid Spinach Florentine, thinking of our fathers’ last words to us, wondering if it was just another setup for a fall, like the time he told us that we’d find Santa Claus up our inoperable chimney if only we climbed far enough. Our mothers were at their mothers’ houses that Christmas. We didn’t know why. After a comely nurse gave us a dose of antibiotics and sutured our elbows shut, our fathers took us home to their liquor cabinets, said we were adults now, we were disillusioned, and made us Rusty Nails until we slipped into blackout.
We sip bourbon as our fathers’ lovers, all dark, long-limbed women, walk in. Unlike the other strangers, the lovers all bring the same dish: green olives rolled in cold slices of prosciutto. They say it was our fathers’ favorite after making love.
Our Fathers Leave Us (2)
Our fathers come home from a hard day at the Vatican, announce they will be flying south for winter. They unbutton their cassocks, swirl their scotch on the counter, stare deep into the ice.
“The women are more beautiful there,” they admit. “Those large, dark eyes.” They assure us this doesn’t mean the end of our relationship, “only the end of language, and perhaps”—if we’re lucky, they imply with a pause—“the end of the Inquisition.”
We don’t protest because we have no power, and we are exhausted from caretaking Freud night and day as he lay in his bed, the inoperable tumor eating its way through his cheek. The autumn rain beats against his window. He’s been sick with love for Vienna—the Vienna he always hated, but now…. Trembling and exiled, the open sore consuming his face, he asks his doctor for a dose of morphine to ease him out. The doctor nods.
“Have you been paying attention to a single word I’ve said?” our fathers demand, grabbing our wrists a bit too tightly, their eyelids heavy from drink and the inexorable march of time. “You don’t listen. You never listen. That’s the problem with you.” We nod our heads to keep peace, pluck the dry, brown leaves from our mother’s flower arrangement, thinking of poor Saussure down the hall, murmuring chair when he means to say water, leave me alone when he wants the balcony open. The cancer has crept into the language center of his brain, and now nothing in this world corresponds to his voice. Last night, we saw a black owl swooping through the leaves and thought it was a sign, but we weren’t sure of what. Saussure gestured for a wet cloth to blot his mouth, shivered as the heat rushed away from his body.
Now our fathers have begun to pack their suitcases, stumbling into their closets, fondling the long doorjambs, singing to themselves. Their white collars are askance, and they wear one shoe, pull out a gun from the top drawer of the bureau, lay it down on their mauve carpet. “What’s the song, kid? Can you guess this song?” Their knuckles knock the rhythm on the barrel of the gun, but we lean back. “Aw common,” they say, “don’t be like that! Give your old man a break!” They pick up the gun, aim it at our heads, laugh, put the gun down again. “Just a joke, just a joke,” they slur. When we don’t laugh, they tell us we’re uptight.
It’s dark in the room now. Our fathers flick on the light. We can see the slightly slack skin around their mouths, the unstable dark matter gathering under their eyes like smoke from the seasonal fires in Los Alamos—chamisa and piñon burning and burning toward Oppenheimer’s lab, what he dreamed of in the middle of February after another inconclusive surgery, radiation, chemotherapy. Nothing curative. The tumor had spread to his palate, affecting his breathing. Before closing his eyes, he recalled, again, the words of the Bhagavad Gita.
“Pay attention. I’m leaving now,” our fathers say in the threshold, cold air pouring into the house through the open doorway. Their faces are sober, sallow, and just shaved. They fiddle with their keys. Outside, each lit window and streetlight like a needle in our minds. Our hearts thump wildly, weighted by debt. We feel an electromagnetic tug toward the east, where spires rise out of stone atriums, vaulted ceilings and arched doorways aching. The plazas cobbled together.
“But who will raise us?” we ask.
Our fathers give us a wry smile, squeeze our palms together.
“Pray for someone better,” they say.
We blink and when we open our eyes, our fathers are gone. We step outside, into the space they left, trying to catch a last glimpse, but it’s dark, cold. The weather has changed. We stand there in the snow, falling.
Our Fathers Leave Us (3)
The day my father left, I didn’t even notice. He’d been absent for so long anyway, spending most nights out, and when he came home in the mornings, he just stared into his coffee cup, or out the windows, or at the palms of his hands, or flipped through old photo albums, newspaper clippings, yearbooks, and faded letters scrawled in a handwriting I didn’t recognize, smelling faintly of a man’s cologne that wasn’t his—pine, tobacco, leather.
“What are you looking for?” I tried to ask him, once, and another time, “What are you thinking about?” But my questions only pierced his reverie briefly, just enough for him to look up in my direction, confused at my presence.
“What?” he might have said, or “Huh?” looking around the room. Once he looked directly at me and said “nothing” in a tone I couldn’t quite interpret. He might have meant “nothing” as in it doesn’t matter anymore—I know that, or I don’t know who I am now, maybe I never knew, or all of this feels like a dream—less than a dream—a dream of a dream, which is really nothing. I’m nothing. Everything is nothing.
When I think of him, I have a vague memory of a Hemingway story I read for English class that had some guy saying “nada y nada y nada” toward the end. I didn’t look up the Spanish but knew it couldn’t mean anything good. The guy was sad. The rhythm of the words both thrilled and depressed me. I tried to write a paper on it and got a B+, which pissed me off because I thought I did better.
“We both deserve better.” I think I remember him saying something like that in the doorway on the day he left. I was avoiding my homework, watching a show on the tube, a crass cartoon, and I almost didn’t hear him say it over myself laughing at the buffoon-father on screen.
“What?” I said, when my laughter fell away and his statement finally registered. The light was so sharp behind him in the doorway that his face was hard to see, like he was all shadow. When I asked what, he shook his head (I knew because of the way the light wobbled) and said again his go-to response: “Nothing.” I remember that part for sure. I definitely remember that. So, I shrugged and turned back to the cartoon until it was time to eat.
At dinner, mom looked more tired than usual, her red hair a little dull in the dining room light, but she didn’t say anything about my father’s empty chair, and I didn’t ask because it happened enough that I stopped asking. Later that night, hunched over my desk, my metal lamp blaring over my Literature anthology, I felt tired, dizzy. My eyes hurt. I kept reading the same sentence over and over, not really understanding what it meant.