Read Online One Day the Wind Changed by Tracy Daugherty - Free Book Online

him, “What’s ‘shanty Irish’?”
    â€œOur name. O’Doherty,” he said. “Our ancestors-your great-great-great-great-grandfather-and before him-came from a far-off place called Ireland. Green and pretty, with a wild, cold ocean.”
    â€œHave you been to it?” I asked.
    â€œNope.”
    â€œMama?”
    â€œNever.”
    â€œWould she be happy there?”
    â€œWell.” He pulled the sheet to my chin. “We’ll have to work on her, won’t we?” As he bent to kiss my cheek, I smelled the beer on his breath, and wondered if he’d hurt his brain.
    When he left the room, I turned away from the clown. I settled into my imaginary canyon, breathed delicately, and waited to see if the bells would cut through the steam.
    Not the tink-tink of Mama’s shoes, but the clattering of a spoon on a glass. I sat up in bed. The jester grinned at me. Something at the window: waves of wind. The night wanted to add my body’s air to its own. My breathing shallowed-out.
    I threw off the sheet, placed one foot then the other on the cold linoleum floor. I crept down the hall to the kitchen. At the table, stirring sugar into a frosty tumbler of tea, sat a headless man in a business suit-one of my father’s suits. I tried to scream.
    Two nights later, I had another dream about my dad. I was sitting on the back porch watching him plant rosebushes by the house. “I don’t think they’ll grow in this soil and terrible heat, but we’ll give them a shot,” he said. “Your Mama’ll like them.” I glimpsed a black blur near my leg. A spider, no, a tarantula crawling toward me, getting fatter as it moved! I leaped up, screamed. It covered the porch now. Hairy. Writhing like an octopus. “Not to worry,” my father said. He slipped past the creature, into the house, and returned with a double-barreled shotgun.
    The threat in these dreams seemed part of the atmosphere of the house. A dusty penetration. My mother’s emptiness had crept into my night life. What was the source of her misery? West Texas? Our home? Motherhood? My father’s job? I didn’t know. I’ll never know. I loved her. I shared a house with her. I felt her despair like a presence in our midst. That’s all I can claim.
    My father continued to wear a cheery face, bringing food for us in the evenings, singing to Roy Orbison on the radio, trying to coax my mother to swing-dance in the kitchen (she wouldn’t), and bringing the stars to life for me in colorful stories as we stood together in the alley. But I noticed that, more and more, he avoided whichever room my mother occupied. He no longer painted. His homemade easel (nailed together one afternoon in the driveway), his oils, canvases, and brushes were stored now in the back of a closet. In the past, before my bedtime, he’d turn the light on in my room so my ceiling stars would soak it up and glow for hours, once the bulb was out. Often, now, he forgot to do this. The stars remained shapeless, as though time had not yet commenced.
    The lethargy that settled over our house made Reginald’s vitality all the more attractive to me. “Shanty Irish!” he called to my father over the back fence one night as we returned from our trip to the alley. Supper was finished, but Reginald convinced my father to share a beer with him. “Let me show you my drums,” he said, lightly tapping a beat on my back.
    This was the first I’d heard of drums. On our way to his house, I also heard, for the first time, the story of Reginald’s plane. Like Papa Casbeer, he hauled oil field equipment from Dallas to El Paso, but he did it in a Piper Cub, not in a filthy old truck. All at once, the words “oil field equipment” acquired an air of adventure I’d not linked to them before.
    Reginald’s house smelled of fried chicken. I’d never been here. Dark wallpaper, cross-hatched