The Hour Before Dark by Douglas Clegg Page A

arms, embracing and kissing us all over. In the dream, our father hugged us as well. It’s only natural for children to want to see their parents reunited, even if those same children know that it’s like wishing there were an Easter Bunny, or that birthday candles release some magic when they’re blown out. I sometimes wonder if we don’t long for precisely what we know in truth we can never have.
    I dreamed about a silver crescent, too, like the moon. Like a crown that our mother would wear when she returned to us from the man she’d run off with so many years ago. The shadow man we’d never known, but who had come into our mother’s life and stolen her from us.
    My father had been taken by a different kind of shadow man.
    Viciously.
    “A peculiar ferocity,” wrote Harry Withers, who reported for the Burnley Gazette , but whom I knew primarily from the playground of my childhood. “One does not associate this sort of crime with the peaceful island of Burnley, Massachusetts, known primarily for its plover shelter in the wetlands and its role in the Revolutionary War. The bogs and woods and meadows no longer seem benign. The hunt is on for the person or persons who committed this heinous act upon a war hero, upon a father, upon a man who stood for everything that was good in Burnley.”
    The first I knew that my father had been tortured in a war was in second grade when that boy I had only just met named Harry Withers taunted me with, “Your daddy’s got only one ball! The other got cut off and fed to snakes! Your daddy’s a freak!”

     
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    It never occurred to me at that age that just because my father had always been missing two fingers on his right hand, he might have had something happen to him that caused it. Or that other parts of him might be missing as well. Since I was only dimly aware of what balls were at that age, I wasn’t sure if it mattered how many my father possessed.
    Harry Withers seemed to think it mattered a hell of a lot. There was something in the nature of both challenge and humiliation for him to say it out on the blacktop during recess. I ended up in a fistfight, which got me to the principal’s office, then to the nurse’s office, and then a note to my parents about how I’d nearly bitten Harry’s ear off.
    I had barely snipped at his ear with my teeth, but it did bleed a lot. I was afraid I’d mutilated Harry, that I’d be thrown in jail for having done it, and that poor one-eared Harry would haunt me forever. As it turned out, Harry’s ear would heal within days. Not so my troubled heart. Why did my father have only one ball and eight fingers?
    I went home nearly in tears and angry enough to cuss. I asked my mother what this was all about, after she’d given me the disappointed treatment from reading the principal’s note.
    Modest though she was, she had no problem setting me straight on my father’s testicular health. This was followed by a bit of birds-and-bees, and how loving, legally wed people lay very close together and then nearly a year later, a baby would be born. Even with my father’s condition, apparently he had no problem fathering three children.
    My father, she told me, did indeed have one “testicle, and yes, some bad things happened to him over there,” and she took me in the library of our home—a dusty room that had always seemed misshapen to me, packed with shelves and books—and brought down a photo album. She went through my father’s childhood, his parents, the war, his capture, the news clippings, and finally said to me, “So two of his fingers are gone, and yes, his testicle was also taken, but it doesn’t make him less of a man. You just remember that. There are a lot of men who walk around with no balls whatsoever.”
    I learned most of what I knew of my father’s heroics by the time I was nine.
    He had fought in a war before I was born. He’d been taken captive for twenty months, had tried to escape from his captors twice, had