Peter Charles

Blood

I grew up in wide open spaces. Not just the countryside but real mountain-back country out where the roads stop. There were no other people, just me and my step-Pa, my little brother Cal and my sister Mel. We woke each day to the cockerel's domineering yell and our own particular chores stacked up like dishes everywhere around. I listened whilst I stripped the fat from that year's pig to the river in its fast spring pelt tumbling boulders across rock beds. I stared, jaw-dropped, at sunsets where pines waved in the warm wind against a blackening sky, and I'd say I wish I knew, yes I wish I knew. Pa set boundaries, no doubt, a stringent master of his own small piece of God's earth carved out of a valley-side worth nothing to anyone. How our mother went we never asked and whether she was gone-for-good we never knew. But a mossed-over cross in the garden on a high ledge fenced off from us marked something we knew we couldn't speak of. Now a boy gets towards manhood, feels the sap in him rise, sees hairs grow where he's desperate for them to grow, and gets a need to be his own self beyond the confines of whatever brought him to where he is. A need to break. That boy might ask questions and that boy might get whipped and that boy might strike back with the knife he sharpened all too well for his chores of butchery, and he might feel, in the night, with the wet blood drying, that he did right. But now, when the sun throws shadows onto the rough-wood floor and I see those hard bars of dark and bright light, I know, for all the justice in the world, I'll hang, and I'll never sit again on a pine needle bed or smell the forest spoor or jump into the river's rapid rush.