Read Online Man V. Nature: Stories by Diane Cook - Free Book Online

six.
    She likes to walk, he said, as if explaining her hair. He thrust the bag into the girl’s arms and nodded to the child seat. Grab that handle and hold tight. You’re gonna help your mom get your brother home. She doesn’t look like she can walk too steady.
    Beatrice and the man stared at Linda, as if waiting for her to speak, or maybe just to leave.
    Linda had expected something more dramatic. A struggle, maybe. She tightened her grip on her purse where the knife lay cozy in a rag. Something more than this. This, she imagined, was what it would feel like if she had to pick her kids up from a sitter she hated leaving them with. Aren’t you going to apologize? she finally asked.
    The man laughed, but not meanly. For what? It’s just how I am. And I did right by them. He placed a hand on Beatrice’s head and smiled down at her. What does an owl say, girl?
    Beatrice cocked her head. Hoo hoo. Hoo hoo, she called, slow and serious.
    Correct, the man said, and hobbled past Linda. She followed him into a dining room stuffed with tables made from plywood across sawhorses, a few appliances lining the walls. The tables stretched in rows, benches flanking each. It looked like a cafeteria, and easily could seat a hundred.
    Photos of the man with different children covered the plywood walls. In one he was a young man helping a small boy hold up a fish almost as long as the boy was tall. The boy showed hugely gapped teeth, and the man himself was caught midlaugh. In another, the man, older, stood in front of the house, before all the serpentine additions. Gathered around him, in one big hug, were children of all ages, maybe forty in all. Everyone smiled. Between the poster boards were tacked wrinkled, aged letters. Dear Dad , they all began. Taped to some were pictures of other families, and Linda understood that these children had become adults and wrote home to the man as any child would write home to a father. But did the pictures show their own families, or ones they had stolen from whatever neighborhood they now lived behind? Had they grown up to be like the man? Or were they just regular people?
    She watched the man stoop into one of the refrigerators and fill a tote bag with apples. He was mostly bald, with drooping ears and gnarled elbows. He looked so much older than he had in her yard, though that was only a few months ago. He creaked back upright and walked the bag of apples over to her.
    And of course you’ll take the others, he said. Then, already lost in his own nostalgia, he murmured, My children.
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    Through the woods, Linda led a procession of strange little faces of varying ages, the bigger ones carrying the crawlers. Each time she tried to count them, they muddled and mixed themselves. She thought there were at least a couple dozen. They were all smudged with dirt and smelled like a horde.
    Beatrice walked beside Linda, swinging Lewis’s chair wildly. The girl should look familiar, but Linda thought her the strangest of all. She watched Linda out of the corner of her eye, and seemed ready to flinch should Linda reach for her. So Linda didn’t.
    As they left the house, many of the children, crying, had embraced the man, and he had cried too. Most called him Dad, but she heard a few call him Kevin. Kevin , she repeated to herself, and she almost laughed at how ordinary it all began to seem. At the head of the trail the man had worn through the woods, Linda looked back. The man was slumped on the porch, already yellow and dead.
    What if the man hadn’t been ill? Would he have fought her for the children? Linda wasn’t sure anymore. Perhaps he’d never intended to keep them, to become caretaker to untold numbers of children throughout his life. Maybe he’d had other plans but long ago had given in to a sick impulse. And the defeated young women thought this must be what motherhood is, and they let it continue. They learned to expect—and so, accept—certain