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Dancing for My
   Mother

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Thomas E. Kennedy
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          The Brockton Blockbuster is your hero from that night on. You will follow his career until his last pro fight in New York, September 21, 1955, when Archie Moore knocks him down, but Marciano comes back to stop Moore in nine rounds and retires afterward with forty-nine wins, no losses, 46 knockouts. You will be devastated in 1969, August 31, when your hero dies in a plane crash in Iowa. But that was a long way off the night Pappas and you listened to Louis and Marciano going at it. The one thing you and your stepfather will have in common from then on is that you both like listening to the fights and discussing the pros and cons of the fighters you follow. The two of you will box with the gloves and you will get stronger and better. Pappas will let you hit him a few times before he invariably plants you on your ass. He will tell you numerous times that you are lucky to have him for a father because he is making a man out of you. Maybe there is some truth in that?

          Just before Christmas 1951 some of the boys in your class get to kiss Mrs. Cima under the mistletoe hung over the doorjamb. They stand on a chair and she allows them to kiss her cheek. You are too shy to get in line and you hate your shyness afterwards when she calls a halt by reaching up and pulling the mistletoe down and saying, That’s enough, you boys. Laughing but meaning it. This is the last day you see her—ever.

          For Christmas you get a Red Ryder Air Rifle and a cylinder of BBs. Pappas tells you not to use your mouth to load the BBs into the magazine. To illustrate what could happen, he sticks out his tongue and tells you to feel it top and bottom. He guides your fingers to his tongue and you feel something round and hard inside. Pappas claims it is a BB that he shot into his own tongue by accident. He was loading the chamber and the gun went off. He wasn’t able to get the BB out. He never went to a doctor to have it removed. Why should he? After the first day or two the wound didn’t hurt anymore. He tells you the BB in his tongue is a button pusher. He says that someday you’ll know what he means.

          Soon you are dressed and out the door, into the snowy fields nearby to hunt rabbits. You don’t find any, but you shoot a starling in a tree whose yellow eye is watching you the whole time. It falls onto the snow fluttering. You pounce on it. Take it home to show everyone your trophy. Grandma Inez is sitting at the table smoking a cigarette when you come in starling in hand. What did you do? she asks. I shot the thing right out of a tree, Grandma. What for did you shoot it? What does she mean what for? You don’t know what for. She asks if you’re going to eat it. No way am I going to eat it, you say. The bird is still alive, not struggling, lying calm in your palm. You can feel its heart beating very fast. You tell Grandma Inez that you will let it go. You take it outside and throw it into the air, but it drops like a rag onto the snow. Can you make it well, Grandma? She says she will try. She gets an empty coffee can out of the trash and tears up some newspaper to make a nest. You put the bird in the can with bits of bread. You try to feed it by hand, but it refuses to eat. Its yellow eye looks at you, not with anger or hatred or even confusion, but with a sort of resignation. It is a you-got-me eye. You keep the bird in your shirt pocket all day, stroking it with your finger, trying to feed it, trying to get it to drink water from a cup. You dip the beak in the water, but can’t tell if the bird drinks any or not. That night you take it and your BB gun to bed. In the morning the bird is dead in the can. You bury it in snow below the rails that run past the house. You feel bad for a day or two. Then go hunting for more birds to shoot.

          After New Year’s Day Grandma Inez catches the train for Colorado and the family moves to Urbana to a two-bedroom house on a corner lot, not far from the municipal swimming pool and Washington grade school. The house has an attic loft where you sleep and a basement with a fierce coal-fired furnace. It is your job to feed the furnace until winter is over. The roar of the furnace is frightening. It is the roar of a lion. When you go down there twice a day, you move as fast as you can, scooping the coal and throwing it into the flames and rushing up the stairs, all the while feeling something coming after you, something that would pick you up like a toy, throw you into the fire and slam the door.

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