Dad's Truth Tale

DAD’S TRUTH TALE 

By Tyler Miclean 

My name is Durston Dursy Everett. My daddy, when he was alive, used to tell me this story as a kid. He didn’t just tell it to me the one time. He told it more often than any other story, and he told at least one or two most nights before I went to sleep. It was never exactly the same. He’d change bits of it here and there, points of view, locations, small details, but the end never really changed. One time, I asked him what it meant. All he would say is that a man’s gotta face the truth, even if the truth is horrible. 

***

There’s a patch of wild field where the kids trip. You run around it, that’s fine. You run through it, you won’t see it coming, but it’ll catch you and you’ll fall. From my porch, I’d see the kids look back and try to figure it out. They didn’t look long. There was nothing to see if you didn’t know what you’re looking for. 

I used to go down there when the kids weren’t around. I tripped there myself a ways back, and it happened more than a few times before I found out what was going on. It caught my eye, and then it was just a matter of clearing some of the wild weeds and stuff around it. Standing straight up out of the ground was somebody’s hand, the bones. But that things had no flex to it, none at all. It was stiff like a diamond, fingers spread out, locked in place, and waiting. 

I’d kicked it. I’d try to dig around it. Everything that touched that thing, within a few inches, had that same stiffness to it. Metal tools too, nothing got that thing to move. When I was done fooling around with it, I tried to conceal it so nobody’d freak, and I’d keep an eye on it. Kids still did come up, and they’d run around. The patch was not really mine, so there wasn’t too much I could do to stop em without calling attention to it or myself. At some point, I guess I supposed that some suspicion might fall on me if that thing was discovered. They’d remember the guy that was watching all the time, I thought. But something told me that if I kept watching, one day the whole thing would explain itself. 

I didn’t have anybody. There was no wife, no kids. I’d bought my house when I could afford to, moved in, and there had not been much trouble keeping it. Things only got harry a couple of times. Upstate, there wasn’t a lot of trouble for me. 

I didn’t know my parents too well, and besides them, I had never met much of anybody else related to me. I bring it up because I had this dream once that the bony hand in the field was my brother’s. I don’t have a brother. In the dream, this man had a face that seemed familiar to me, but I could’ve sworn I’d never seen it before. I wasn’t with it enough to make any kind of conversation with him or else maybe I would have. It was a dream though. 

I guess another reason for keeping an eye on things was for the kids. I wanted to rush out there if one of them took a real bad spill. I tried putting things up around it to deter people from running through there, but I gave up after losing two stakes, a sign, and a flag. They were stolen, I guess. That’s the only explanation. I’d put em up, and as soon as my back was turned, they’d just disappear. What other explanation exists? Somebody was building a birdhouse or something and liked my wood for it, I guess. I didn’t know. 

But I talk about the kids because there was this time when a kid had tripped and fallen. I was watching. He didn’t come up right away like every other kid that’d tripped on the hand. He was laying low down there, and after thirty seconds, or a minute, I went down to see if he was alright. He was lying face down in the dirt, not moving. I looked out over the field. There wasn’t anybody nearby, which was a little unusual. I noticed something though, and it was not the pleasantly curious or extraordinary thing I was hoping for. The hand had a grip on the boy’s ankle. I guess it was always trying to catch those kids. 

I ran inside and tried to use the landline phone to call somebody. That phone was all wired in, and I’d used it that morning to call the post office. But right then and there, it would not do a thing for me. There were none of the typical sounds or nothing, just nothing. When I got back out to the kid in the field, I almost had a heart attack. The hand had disappeared below the dirt, and half that boy’s leg was down there somewhere too. 

The boy was on his back now with his knee bent over the hole. Nothing happened as long as I kept my eye on him. I stayed with him, just hoping somebody’d come along, so I could tell them to go get help. Hours went by and the sun went down and nobody came through that field. 

My eyes closed once, and I heard dragging in the dirt. It wasn’t more than a couple inches, but now the boy’s knee was plugging the hole. Considering how small that hole was, I imagined how painful it would be for the boy if whatever was down there just starting pulling really hard. The boy wasn’t waking up either, but he had color in his cheeks, so I had hope he’d come to at some point. 

Staring down at that boy’s knee in the hole, I remembered this thing I’d seen out on the cliffs. These big, old cliffs were about a mile across that same field, north. There was a nest of eggs in a scraggly little tree right there at the edge, overlooking the valley. This squirrel had gone up there, and he was messing with those eggs. Then this bird, and I don’t even know if this bird was affiliated with that nest, just swooped down, grabbed the squirrel and they both went over the cliffs together. The bird wouldn’t let go and the squirrel was too heavy. They both just dropped into the valley. 

I laid down next to the hole, my foot right next to the boy’s. My eyes were still wide open at this point but, I laid back and closed em. There was nothing I could do but play with this thing. Maybe it’d prefer a bigger version of this kid. I was right. I felt that claw wrap around my ankle and start to drag me. I could feel it and I could think as clear as in the day, but I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed. I heard the boy stand up quickly and scream. The dragging stopped while the boy was there, but when he dashed off, the dragging continued. It wasn’t very painful. The earth opened a bit more as that thing pulled me down through the hole. 

My hand was left above the surface, and this cold liquid poured through me, up from my toes, and all the way to my fingertips. In a second, I felt my whole body tighten up, and that was it. I could still feel the hand that I’d seen, wrapped tightly around my ankle. Whatever this thing was, I was a part of it now. I imagined that from the earth’s core to the end of my hand stretched a long, long chain of men, hand to ankle. 

It’s funny. I had the same thought about it all, even at that point, as when I was watching it all ignorantly from my porch. I thought all I have to do is watch and wait, and it’ll explain itself. I’ve always been pretty good at waiting. 

***

The more I thought about it, especially after dad’s death, I think I began to understand that unlike the other stories dad would tell me, this was his story. It changed here and there because he was still figuring out how to tell it. He stopped telling it to me when I was seven. We never spoke about it after that. 

It was so frustrating to learn that my dad had passed without anybody telling me. It was a while afterwards that I went to visit his grave. It had been years since I was seven. I was in my thirties when this happened. I had a wife and two boys. I walked up to his grave, and saw that sitting on the grass in front of his stone, somebody had placed a plastic skeleton hand, reaching up. It was some Halloween decoration, I think. 

I hadn’t planned my next trip to visit dad. I hadn’t thought about that at all or even if that was something important to me to do. But I found myself thinking about the end of the story my dad had told me when I was little. 

All I have to do is watch and wait, and it’ll explain itself. 

I think my dad told that story to other people, people who understood it. In a sense, I felt like I could join the chain, as it were, the one that let to the center of the earth. I felt like I could choose to dig down into my dad’s mystery or just walk away from it. I felt like the man in the story. 

I did visit my dad’s grave again, and the next time it was with my boys. I feel now like that story, bless him, was the twisted way my dad found to tell me that love was an unbearable, consuming mystery, and that he loved me anyway.