The Night My Nephew Called Me

And then it came out, in pieces, the way the truth comes out of somebody who has been holding it a long time.

It had not been the first time. That was the part that took the wind out of me. It had been going on the better part of a year. Wayne had a temper that came out when Sharon was not in the room, which was a smart temper, a calculating temper, the kind that knows exactly who is watching. He would grab Cody by the arm and wrench him around. He shoved him into the door frame once and told Sharon the boy tripped. There had been a split lip in the spring that got explained as a basketball to the face. There was a way Wayne had of grabbing the back of the boy’s neck, hard, in the guise of steering him somewhere, that left marks Cody hid under his collar.

That night it had gone further than usual. There had been a fight, a real one, and it was about the farm. I will come back to the farm. Wayne had grabbed Cody’s wrist and twisted it up behind his back to march him to his room, the way you would twist a grown man’s arm, and something in the wrist gave. Cody heard it go. And even then, even with the bone snapped, Wayne stood in the boy’s bedroom doorway and told him what the story was going to be. The bike. The creek bridge. The handlebars. He told Cody that if the boy said anything else, anything at all, then Wayne would tell everyone Cody was a troubled kid making up lies since his dad died, and everyone would believe Wayne, because Wayne was the calm one and Cody was the one who cried, and who does a small town believe, the steady man or the crying boy.

“He said you’d believe him too,” Cody told me. “He said everybody believes him. He said Dad’s gone and nobody’s on my side.”

I had to look away for a second. I looked at the blue curtain and I made myself breathe the way I have made myself breathe at a hundred scenes, in through the nose, hold, out slow, because if I let the boy see what was rising up in me he would have thought it was aimed at him.

“Cody,” I said, when I could trust my voice. “Look at me. I am on your side. I was on your side the day you were born and I am on your side right now and I will be on your side when I’m an old man in a chair. Wayne was wrong about that. He was wrong about everything, but he was most wrong about that.”