Penumbra

A night walk with my father

Photo by Irina Iriser on Unsplash.

The house past the hump at the end of the dirt road. Near the shredded-newspaper-alfalfa-fields and beveled slopes of the South Umpqua. Near the black walnut groves and hay fields past the old mill. A quarter mile down the road past county maintenance.

I wake up next to my dad. A boy’s crayon picture hanging from the door of the closet that houses board games. A stacked Sony stereo in the corner, action-movie posters pinned to the ceiling and walls. The sun pours from a wide mouth goblet that illuminates cobwebs on the sliding glass window.

The night has been hungry. Taken all it needed and eaten its fill. What’s left is dewy grass and silence and yawning light. It will be long cat’s-tail-day until night falls again. Daytime is for regular people seeing regular things. Night is for people who see what others do not.

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We call them night walks. When the day is silent and people are put away in matchbook beds. The wind moves faster. Whines a whistle like an arrow by your ear. Yellow eyes appear through the night. I learn to control fear and harness imagination. Make it work for me.

We cross the apple orchard beneath the moon, lupine over soft grass. I step where dad steps. Accidentally break a stick. He shushes me, tells me to watch for broken patterns. Shows me how to step softly. How to keep good and quiet and be one with the animals I ain’t ever seen. Tells me we’re bound to see some but can’t be scared when we see em.

This star-bright-sky is different. Unwrecked by city lights. The moon’s a soft pat of butter in cast iron. My eyes track after my father, my feet step where he steps. We continue like that until we reach the briers grown along the dyke. Vines where my grandfather plucked blackberries. Dad knows the deer trails and we slip into a slice of pulmonary black. Walk the ups and downs beneath tree canopy.

Straight line distance we’re close to the water now. I hear a beaver launch but he’s far away. The tree canopy has sheltered us from the bright sky. We keep with the peaks and valleys until dad tells me stop. Quiet. I listen but it’s sniffing he tells me to do. Smell that he says. The scent of campfire. Then he steers me another direction, over a carpet of pine, grass, and sod.

Dad tells me, watch out for people. Some strange types down by the river at night. People who come down beneath cover of night to do things they shouldn’t. But I know. They’re just people. Can’t fear people just cause they sit with darkness. Otherwise you’ll spend your life doing more fearing than living.

I feel the night like a cloak. And wear it the same. Terrors are everywhere but I keep my eyes straightforward and don’t look at none of em. Pretty much like walking through life. Mind your own business and keep stepping and don’t let the fright keep you from going where you need to go.

We find an old fire, mostly put out. We stop to shower sand over the coals, then keep walking until we hit a dirt road I recognize even in the dark. The river is sixty yards away. Real close but we don’t take that path. Instead we walk a circumference to keep from running into any homeless. Dad says people can be unpredictable. Especially at night.

When we reach the river I feel summer night for the first time. It’s warm. My ears are alive with the sound of water over rocks. Leftover cobwebs stick to my face. A light sweat runs down my boy’s chest. It’s like the world has gasped and slumped over and I’ve broken past an unseen barrier, able to breathe again. All the world’s shapes and boundaries, its usual geometry. Here none of that matters. At night, shape gives way to form. Dark, light, and the space in-between.

I tell my father I don’t understand. So he tells me about the light from the street lamp by the old mill. He tells me how the street lamp casts a shadow. I nod my head yes, follow along. But he says there’s another space between the two. Between light and dark. Sits on the border between shadow and light. Says this is where animals hide, where spirits enter and exit the world. If I can go into the between I’ll see things other people don’t see.

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I didn’t think much about those words until years later. Creeping through the woods with a rifle in my hand, tired as hell, with a heavy rucksack on my shoulders, staring at the gawping moon. As an infantryman you get a lot of time to stare at the moon and stars. All infantrymen become astronomers. It’s another thing you learn about life. When you don’t have much you become expert at the things you’re given.

Then in Afghanistan. Largest damn moon I’ve ever seen. Over the endless plains and it’s like Kipling said: “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.”

I shake my head, savor a tremor ‘neath my skin. These days it’s tough to know when I’m the prey and when I’m doing the preying. Tough to know what’s sneaking on me. Going through a divorce from Afghanistan it’s tough to know where the enemy is. Everything looks blank as night. I reflect on dad’s words and look for the in-between. Heck, you can’t always find the light but you can find the sliver boundary.

Sobs ache differently when you’re comfortably alone. They just roll and roll and roll in timpani barrages. Crashing waves breaking over a sweaty body, setting you free.

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One of the best gifts he ever gave me was a lesson about fear. There ain’t no reason to be afraid. Nothing in that fuzzy dark wants anything to do with you, son. It’s why you always gotta keep a little bit of monster inside you. Anytime you start feeling afraid of that darkness, pull out that monster and remind em who they talking to.

So I done that. Held onto it always. Kept it close in Afghanistan. Held it on patrols. I kept that little bit of monster in some real dark places.

Some people glimpse that monster and get scared, but they just don’t know about walking through dark nights. They don’t know finding that monster was its own journey. I had to fight to make that monster. I suffered for it. Not just gonna disappear him now.

My father has always been a lesson in seeing. Seeing absent fear because everyone wants a person to witness their truth. I can breathe again. I listen to the swiftly flowing river, water over rocks. I smell old campfire. Look up at silver-dollar-Afghan-moon. I think about long walks at midnight and being awake when tomorrow becomes today.

Strange how a thin margin can be more expansive than the pages on either side. How it can hold in its thin crevasse endless depth and eternal space. I look up and think of my father. Look around at the dunes, towering mountains, the sky. There is light. And dark. But there is also space in-between.

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Roman Newell is hard at work on his debut novel — 20XX — a work in magical realism, which explores the complexities and conflicts in modern day societies amid confusing social norms, rapidly evolving technology, and impact traumas. Follow Roman’s Substack to be added to the 20XX contact list.