Fallen

by Kerry Petrichek

“Where are you?” He stumbled as he yelled into the darkness. The scent of manure in the neighbor’s pasture oozed through the cracks of the decaying barn walls. Hay, wet with my sweat, clung to my cheek.
I crouched below the one thing large enough to become my escape when I ran into the barn – an old rusty tractor. I barely missed the open trapdoor in the floor, which dropped seven feet to the cellar below, but I managed to jump over it and run to the wall. There, I hid behind the tractor and the bale of hay that leaned against it.

“I’m not joking around this time. I know you’re in there, and when I get my hands on you, you’ll be sorry!” my father yelled. He was standing just outside the barn, under a bright light above the door. He was drunk again, and I prayed he wouldn’t find me. If he took a few more steps, and pulled the cord hanging from the light on the beam overhead, I would be discovered. The darkness was keeping me safe.
But he was in the light, and I could see him holding his belt. The silver bull on his belt-buckle shone brightly. I watched it fight to throw its rider – rising into the air, then diving forward into my father’s hand. He lifted the belt again, but then somehow his grip loosened, and it fell to the ground. He saw it fall, but never attempted to catch it. It lay there, partly covered by the grass.

The barn was quiet. We no longer used it to house animals. Its towering ancient walls were weak and had begun to lean to one side. Now it just held items that were no longer needed, like the tractor in front of me.

I breathed as softly as I could. My father was getting tired. He had been drinking all day and would pass out soon. I just had to wait.

Then he spoke again. “Nobody kicks my dog and gets away with it.” He was speaking of our collie. I hadn’t kicked her; I tripped over her. She was sleeping near the basement steps, hidden by my mother’s wash pile, and I didn’t see her. I couldn’t see anything past his faded over-alls and flannel shirts lying in a heap on the floor. When I stepped over the clothes, I fell. That’s all. I fell.

He turned his attention toward the dimly lit ladder leading to the loft not far from the barn door. The first two rungs were missing; he couldn’t possibly think I had gone up there. I waited. Sure enough, his eyes began climbing the shadowy rungs, one by one until they faded near the top. He strained to see, but the loft was just full of nameless objects hiding in the night.

“Go on up, Dad,” I whispered. “Come on, you can do it.” If he made it to the top, I could run. I could run far away. His eyes darted in my direction. “What’s that?” he asked. But then something else took his attention. The belt buckle that was resting by his feet flickered when he moved. It startled him for an instant, but he smiled slightly when he realized it was his own and reached down slowly, gingerly, to pick up the belt.

“You know,” he was talking again, mumbling, so that I could barely hear him. “When you do somethin’ wrong, you have to be punished. Do you think my daddy would have ever let me get away with the things you do?”

When he said that, I recalled the only memory I ever had of my grandfather. He was a tired old farmer in a nursing home, and I only saw him once. My mother had been scheduled to visit him, and she couldn’t find anyone to babysit me, so she took me along. She explained to me that Grandpa was sick and that he might say some things I didn’t understand. She told me just to smile and be polite.

On the way to the hospital, I looked outside at the passing evergreens and tried to picture what he would look like. My father had told me he was very big and strong. But when I saw him, I realized he wasn’t. He was weak, and old, and saliva slid from the side of his mouth. He wasn’t strong like Dad had said, at all.

“You can’t hide forever,” he was speaking even more softly now. He took a step into the barn. The floor squeaked. Or maybe it was a mouse. Or, perhaps, it was one of the stray kittens in the cellar. The sound made him stop, but only for a moment. Soon he would find the hanging cord and his search for me would be over. My chest tightened, squeezing my lungs. Tiny wisps of hay on the bail in front of me vibrated as a shiver dashed through my leg.

He took a few steps forward and a shadow took his face. “I’m coming,” he sighed and took one more step.

I knew it was there; I could have warned him, but I didn’t. It was barely visible in the night, and in his drunkenness, he didn’t see it. I heard a thud and then a groan. The open trap door had grabbed the giant man and thrown him to the floor below. Suddenly there was silence.

I exhaled loudly. I listened and heard nothing – nothing but the wind sneaking through the cracks in the walls. Again, I waited, not sure if I should move. Still nothing. The wind continued its journey into the barn and I could feel the coolness of it. I hadn’t noticed the wind before.

Still crouched low, I listened for movement. The kittens below were crying, frightened from the noise they had heard; their mother was meowing, calling them to safety. The barn creaked, awakened by the intrusion of the fallen man, but my father remained silent.

Slowly, I lifted myself to my knees, then to my feet, and turned toward the large open door leading outside. I wanted to run and never look back, but I didn’t. Carefully, I took a step forward, then another, until I came to the hole in the floor. Below, my father was lying quiet and still. My chest ached. Again I thought of running. It would be so easy now.

But then I began to wonder if he was hurt. The air became cold and I pulled the flaps of my jacket together and wrapped them tightly around my body. I was frightened at first, but then my body relaxed and I let go of my jacket. I wouldn’t have to run.

I could walk out of the barn and not be afraid. I felt my foot move. I had taken a step toward the door. But I stopped. I remembered the times my father had left me on the floor, covering my face, after one of his anger outbursts. He did not hesitate to walk away from me then, but I hesitated now.

Taking a step back, I pulled the cord, and the light directly above the trap door shone into the cellar. Peering down the hole, I saw him lying motionless on his side. His belt had landed on a shelf next to a jar full of bent and rusted nails he had removed from an old shed when we tore it down.

I felt the chill in the air again – the air that had been suffocating when I had been hiding. I worried that I had killed him by not warning him of the hole. I had to find out if he was still alive. Slowly, I slid my body through the opening in the floor and onto the ladder that descended into the cellar. With each step I took, my heart beat louder. When I reached the bottom, I turned on the light in the cellar, chasing away the remaining darkness. Relief overwhelmed me when I saw his chest move up and down as he breathed. My father was alive, but unconscious. Suddenly exhausted, I sat heavily on the ground.

I tried to decide what to do. My father couldn’t hurt me now. I finally had the opportunity to run away. Should I leave him alone in the barn? Now was my chance to run and never come back.

I studied the man lying next to me curled up like an infant. I realized I had seen him in that position before. He curled up on the floor with a beer in his hand the day his brother Joe died at twenty-five-years-old.
Joe had drifted in and out of our lives for as long as I could remember. He would live with my randmother for a while, get a part-time job at the Save Mart or Al’s Garage or someplace like that, but he would lose his job after a month or so, because he would go to work drunk, and then, just not go at all. My mother told me he was troubled and that he needed to find his way. But he never did.

One day he got arrested for stealing from the gas station where he worked and got sent to jail. After he was released, he hid away in a tent in the woods and days later was found lying outside on a blanket, with empty beer cans on the ground and pills in his hand. He was dead. At the time I was told that Uncle Joe died in his sleep, but a few years later I overheard my mother and father talking about him in another room, and I learned the truth. The door was closed, but I stood silently outside and listened. My father told my mother that he would never forgive himself for giving Uncle Joe his first beer when they were kids.
I slid my hand across a rung on the ladder and felt the roughness of it on my fingertips. I began to remember other times I had seen my father passed out on the floor.

On the day of my grandmother’s funeral, he took a case of beer from the cellar, sat on the living room carpet and leaned his head against the couch. A few days earlier, when they found her collapsed from a heart attack, he went into his bedroom and came out with red, swollen eyes and a face that had dried but still shone where the tears had been. My mother put her hand on his. He rested his head on her shoulder. She told him it was okay to cry, but he insisted he hadn’t been crying. He said death was just a fact of life – nothing to cry about. When he finished the beer, he slid from his place against the couch and lay slumped on the floor.

He accidentally hurt himself the day my cousin, Jack, who was in the army, got sent overseas. He passed out on the bathroom floor after he drank some wine, slipped and hit his head on the side of the tub. After Jack came to the house and told him of his upcoming departure, my father went to the attic and dug my grandfather’s uniform out of an old leather trunk. He told me never to wear one because my mother would die if I went away and never came back. She took him to the emergency room that night. He needed ten stitches on the side of his head.

I remembered the time the big storm ravaged the fields and killed all our corn. My father and I were picking beans when it started. Out of nowhere, hail fired from the sky and stung our arms and legs as we ran for the house. A fierce wind charged us from behind and knocked me into a row of plants. My father grabbed my hand and lifted me to my feet. It fought us until we reached the back door and ran inside. We watched from the window as it ripped the roof from the garage and skipped it across the yard. He led my mother and me, hearts thumping, into the basement. A tornado never came, but the hail had trampled the corn and left it broken on the ground. That night my father went to the bar in town, and when he came home he turned on the TV and passed out on the couch.

And now here he was, drunk and out-cold, again. But this time was different. I began to feel sorry for him, even after everything he had put me through. I closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them again and took another look at the man on the floor. My eyes were drawn to his face. I had never seen him so closely before. I saw worn skin and deep lines that began at the corners of his eyes and etched their way to either side of his mouth. I noticed, then, that my father looked just like my grandfather had in the nursing home – frail and small and powerless. Leaning forward, I removed my jacket and laid it across his chest. I would go to the house and call for an ambulance. My father had fallen, and I would not leave him on the ground.