hamilton craig – the strongest man in the world

        
        My father was a real man. He held terror over me in the old style. Winters, when the fire was low, he would reach among the embers with his unprotected hand, make a swift adjustment, and the flames burst up bright. In his study, a desk with brass feet held walnuts, a deer knife, and a pouch of Cherokee Red. Angry, he would purse his lips and widen his eyes so he looked like a fierce owl. When he swatted me his hand was like a trap springing on a soft meringue of baby fat. I dreamed of growing big and strong. 
        My mother was fifteen years younger. I think of her belly damp with sink-water, cool to press my stinging cheek against. He found her working at her grandfather’s garden supply store in Vermont, she being 17 with both parents in the grave. She was biting her nails at the counter when he walked up and swung two sacks of topsoil down with one hand. He would take her from her grandfather within a year. The old man fought against it but was weak. As the old man predicted, my father let his wife work for them both. I grew up waiting for the sound of her tires crushing the pebbles of our dirt road, coming back from a shift. 
        Our family had one friend of sorts, a man named Louis who lived in at the edge of a field a quarter-mile down the road. Louis was much poorer than we were. The house he grew up in was bursting with mice and garter snakes. The rain poured in and turned the walls into swollen sponges. With no money for repairs he let himself be pushed out–bought a Class B Roadtrek with no engine from a man in town and had it towed onto the field, carried what he could into it, and left the rest to rot. He would sit out by a cold charcoal grill and play guitar until late. He came to our house regularly asking to charge his phone, or for a ride into town. My father loved having him around. “Well, Lou, you need a ride again is it? Jesus what is that, the third time this week? Drank all that beer up already I guess? You ever think if you didn’t drink all the damn beer you could get a vehicle with an engine in it?”
        Louis would look at the moldy toes of his boots and keep quiet. 
        “Anyway, my wife’s got the car. She’s at work, something you ought to think about trying.”
        My father leaned back and puffed on his pipe in aristocratic fashion. 
        “Come back in three hours and I’ll see what I can do for you.”
        My mother was probably the only woman that Louis had spoken to in long years. She was kind to him. When she walked past his van she said hello and would even permit him to play his guitar for her if she wasn’t in a hurry. I never saw Louis without him telling me my mother was a wonderful woman. 
        Sometimes my father would ask him, “What do you think of my wife?” Louis would grit his teeth as he told my father how lucky he was. 
        “That’s what you think,” my father would say, “truth is she’s a hell of a pain in my ass. You can take her.” As if Louis could ever take anything from my father. 
        In the summer when I was 12, I began to be awoken in the night by my father cursing through the dark past my door. He was going to piss–first one, then two, then three or four times every night. The morning would find him in his big chair, eyes dull and hot. He had me take over his outdoor jobs, painting the fence, fertilizing the peas, with him shuffling out to glare over me with his fist pressed against his back. 
        In early August, my mother told me had cancer. He had cancer very badly. The cancer had metastasized from his prostate into the bones of his pelvis and lumbar, and all the lymph nodes around his hips and groin. The cancer could not be cured. However, with a very serious surgery, he could greatly improve his chances of living for some more years.
        One Sunday, as I stood behind the hutch, my mother and father came out onto the porch and, taking no notice of me, proceeded to the car. As my mother drove off to the hospital with my father in the passenger seat, a breeze came up and the old willow shook down a cup of rain.  I watched after the car until it turned behind the high wall of pine and listened after it until the engine died down to silence.
        When my father came back two days later, I could tell he was different. The current that used to emanate from him, that made my shoulders hunch when he entered the room, was gone. I saw a difference in my mother too. She would talk on the phone, long hard-laughing talks with her friends. When he saw she was going to be on the phone for some time he would close himself in the study. Then at some point he stopped leaving the study at all. 
        My mother asked Louis to take over some of the tasks my father had been wont to do, until my father felt up to them again. In exchange, he got all the cold beers he could drink. 
        Louis now showed an unguessed at eagerness to work. It was Louis who laid in the radishes and mustard greens, digging furrows into the beds of perfect straightness, dropping in the tiny seeds with just the right of amount of space between them. Louis pulled up the the old rotted stakes of the badger fence and pounded in stiff new timber, prying up the hard-set rocks to make way. He trimmed back the dying limbs of the willow for the good of the tree. 
        Then, one afternoon, my father called me into his study. It had been a place forbidden to me, and I had not entered it since early childhood. When I came in the door I was enclosed in an atmosphere like that of an old shop on some forgotten side-street, selling nothing in particular. My father lay on the futon against the back wall looking at me through a curtain of sunlit dust. Dust covered the fishing rods leaning in the corner. The framed prints of bear-hunts and tossing ships were filmed with greasy dust. 
        “Come on, get over here buddy,” he called me in a cheerful voice I couldn’t remember hearing. 
        “Look here,” he said, “I’ve got something to show you.” He glanced at the door at put a finger to his lips. He reached under the comforter and pulled out a big book with a flimsy cardboard cover. The cover showed a man with teeth pressed together in brutal, crazy grin. Veins like bloated worms writhed across his shining forehead. Against the back of his neck he held a steel bar with three truck-wheels on either end. The title of the book, in raised letters, was SUPERHEAVYWEIGHT: CHAMPION POWERLIFTERS OF THE WORLD. 
        “What do you think of that?” he prompted, looking at me like we had a thrilling secret between us. 
        “Who is that guy?” I asked.
        “That’s Stu Rawlins,” he said, with gravity. “The strongest man in the world.”
        He flipped the book open to a page in the middle. There was Stu Rawlins holding two lengths of chain attached to the fender of a schoolbus, leaning back like an oarsman in a storm with the same terrible look on his face. 
        “How’d you like to be able to do that?” he said, cuffing me gently on the forearm. I didn’t know how to answer. 
        “Listen,” he said, “as soon as I’m feeling a little better you and me are gonna head down to the Y in town. I’m get back into the shape I was in before this crap happened. And we’re gonna build you up too. We’ll show them a thing or two then, won’t we.”
        Suddenly his face sank and he fell back on the pillow. 
        “Ok, ok,” he said, “that’s enough for now. Go on.”
        As I got to the door he put his finger up and pressed it to his lips.
        The cancer started spreading agressively again in the fall, and my father died before winter. 
        All the times I saw him before he went back to the hospital were in that dusty study, over the pages of CHAMPION POWERLIFTERS OF THE WORLD. He would show me pictures of men raising up the front ends of Volkswagens and swinging huge iron balls over their heads. He would tell me their names: Tim Geary “The Ox,” Michael Kablowski, “The Monster.” He would talk about how we were going to go to the gym soon, what exercises we would do. Then there would be changes, big changes.  
        I wish I could say that this time brought me closer to my father, but it only filled me with a sense of strangeness. For the first time, I could tell my father wanted something from me, desperately, and I didn’t know how to respond. I would wait and nod until I could leave the room and always, as I put my hand to the door he pressed his finger to his lips, meaning don’t tell, don’t tell.


HAMILTON CRAIG is a writer and historian living in New York City. His fiction and essays have appeared in various magazines and journals, including Compact and Countere. He teaches at CUNY.


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