I reach out a hand to touch the maple leaf, and I see light dotting my
fingers, but with my stomach suddenly full of breath the leaf retreats.
I grab the rope above my head instead, the backyard stopping still
into my father’s hands. (Why do I call him father; he has always been
dad.) I see mom in overalls and a ponytail, bright in sunlight and heat,
bending over the pond by the fence, stacking the turtles that live there.
And I feel his strength again. He pushes me and I swing in my harness,
straining the rope attached to the branch above, the sound of its
twisting, and I feel heavy and weightless in a moment. My father sings
a song I can never remember.
Steven, the father, smiled. His round face, his dying hair (the patch of
skin at the back of his head becoming barren), his large square glasses,
his dark slab of nose, eased, relaxed from the tightness common to
their experience; he ordinarily held his face tensed and wrinkled. That
day, he pushed his son in a homemade swing and sang. The swing was
a tie-dyed cloth, looped around the legs of Isaac, the toddler, like a
harness, its ends tied to a rope, the rope attached to a branch overhead.
It was summer. Fresno was hot. Roni, the mother, slung a net full of
muck from the turtle pond, a concrete oval filled with muddy water.
Her muscles were comfortable with the motion, trained from years of
hauling buckets of slippery trout for California Fish and Game. Isaac
laughed as he swung high, and at the apex of his swing he stretched
out his hand to snag a maple leaf. But gravity held it just out of reach.
Steven swung him a last time and then stopped the swing’s motion.
He stopped his own singing. His mouth a tight bundle, he walked into
the house and washed his hands in a porcelain sink till they bled.