After
Tax Season
Dreams in the red, he yelped where other men
snored,
threw the telephone out the door, swearing something
about squeaky wheels and what they could do with their grease.
Next to, of course, April, January is the cruelest
month
with profit and loss statements and payroll reports
all due by the calendar year and the days being so short
it was already dark by the time he got home, pencil
smears upon his white cuffs, his hard black shoes
waking us as he paced the hall, chain-smoking, tortured.
But after the deadline, time changed and pencils
turned into crayons, presents and trips, laughter and music;
we watched our father dance with our mother to "Don't Be Cruel,"
the twist his only move in months that didn't involve
tapping on a ten-key, pushing paper around on a desk.
This man won the money for my first bicycle in a Christmas Eve poker
game, taking sixty dollars from other number crunchers
who spanked their children if they caught them counting.
Though he told the jokes, that was never his style.
When I was two years old I was attacked by a one-eyed
rooster. For therapy, my father let me watch him
kill that rooster, let me help Grandma fry him up
then they told me to eat him. Sometimes it doesn't pay to write
things down but with adding machine
tape
curling as one of the first toys in my memory, the
numbers always add up, and if they don't, what is the
first thing you check for? We knew it then; we all know it still.
The important things happen after tax season.
Once, the robins that came back and nested
every year in our oak tree came flying to the patio door
screeching, and when my father went out to see
what the commotion was about, they flew around
his head, like they were asking for help. He looked
up at their nest and saw the giant blacksnake,
menacing and thick, preparing to wrap itself
around the nest. My father shot that snake;
we saw it fall from the tree branch to the ground.
The next year, when the robins returned, my brother
had reached puberty and gotten a .22 for his birthday
so he shot the birds. Things like that stuck with my
father, like the answer to the question that preserves us:
check to see if your balance is divisible by nine,
then look for a transposition. Some of us are looking
still, searching for a balance of zero, divisible by everything,
the answer always nothing.
—B.
D. Bruner