Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward Page B

choking us. We darted away. My father played with us until we grew frazzled in the hot room. The sweat ran down our small bodies, our hair alive on our heads, standing in dense halos. At the end of the night, my father snatched us both under the covers with him and tickled us. We yelled for mercy.
    On weekday mornings before my father went to work at the glass factory in Gulfport, the family would have breakfast together. My father would turn up the radio in the kitchen.It was 1982 and my mother was pregnant with my sister Nerissa. New Edition crooned; Joshua and I loved New Edition. My father would grab my hand, and then he’d grab Joshua’s, and I’d grab Joshua’s small moist palm in my own, and we’d dance in a ring in the middle of the kitchen. My mother shook her head at us, smiled, waved my father away when he tried to get her to dance with him. She would have been feeling pressure then as her family grew, as my father continued to cheat and plead his innocence and devotion and cheat more. She was afraid of what she saw on the horizon. She could not dance in the kitchen. She fried our eggs sunny side up, and as a family, we sat at the table and ate.
    But my father could be dark, too. He was attracted to violence, to the basic beauty of fighting, the way it turned his body and those he fought into meticulously constructed machines. He taught his purebred pit bull to fight with deflated bike tires. Alternately he coddled his dog, treated it as tenderly as one of his children, but the dog’s ability to fight was paramount, and my father had little mercy for him in his quest to make him harder to kill. Like my brother, my father’s dog required a hard hand if he would be his toughest.
    My father stood in the doorway of the house with a machete in his hand, the blade so dark gray it looked black. He held it lightly, loosely. My mother was in her room watching television, and Joshua and I crowded around my father’s legs, looking out at the yard, at Homeboy, squat and as finely muscled as my father. Homeboy gleamed black and panted with his tongue out. He smiled at us.
    â€œStay inside,” my father said, and he trotted down the steps. Joshua and I dug into the door jamb, waited until Daddy walked around the house, leading Homeboy by his studded collar, to lean far out. We were determined to watch. One of my father’s first cousins, also shirtless in white shorts, grabbed Homeboy’s tail, held it down still and tight over a pillar of cinder blocks. Homeboy waited patiently, quietly, glanced back over his shoulder, and then snapped at a gnat. He trusted my father. Daddy whipped the machete up and brought it down hard on Homeboy’s tail, inches below where the tail merged into his backside. Blood spurted across the gray cinder in a steady gush. Homeboy yelped and jerked. My father dropped the machete and tied a bandage around Homeboy’s stump, and then smoothed his sides. Homeboy whimpered and quieted.
    â€œGood boy,” my father said. Homeboy licked my father’s hand, butted him with his head.
    Later, Joshua and I lay in our room, a room that was still decorated only for me; there were Cinderella curtains at the windows, and a rough Cinderella bedspread on my twin bed. When we moved in, Joshua had had his own room, but when my father decided he wanted a room for his weight bench and his kung-fu weapons, they moved Joshua into my room. This made me angry for a week or so because I felt territorial; this was my space. But that night Joshua and I lay quietly in our small beds, Joshua breathing softly, almost snoring, while I lay awake and listened to my father and his cousin in the other room, listened to them take smoking pipes down off the wall where my father had mounted them for decoration,listened to the clink of the weights, all this drifting down the hot hallway in the dark. The wind blew my curtains; they wafted out and stilled. The humid air coming into all