The Assembler of Parts: A Novel by Raoul Wientzen Read Free Book Online Page A

flu. She wasn’t very sick, but Father demanded she stay in bed through the night so she would be well rested for the day. He fed me bottles of pumped breast milk. I woke at two and again at five. The ceiling loomed over me with the green-glowing stars like angel eyes staring down at me. I tracked them left to right across my crib, waiting for a blink or a wink, and then I cried when my hunger grew hard. Father came with milk just too warm and rocked me in the chair. He sang “Amazing Grace” in his song voice that had marbles in it while I sucked. He burped me twice and each loud eructation took his quiet blessing. Quiet blessing. Twice again, no loud, hollow casting of words for Mother to hear. Simply a soft and full “Bless you, Jess” for each bubble I brought. It was good to see the solid quietness come off his lips. Unbidden that night, he took my hand. By the light of the corner lamp, I took his eyes and, unbidden, he took my hand, the whiskeyed one. I burped again. For three nights Mother rested and Father’s grasp and stare grew stronger in the semidark.
    I feel a debt of gratitude to influenza for giving me Father’s hands and eyes, even though at seven, it would steal my breath.
    “How did she do?” Mother asked when he returned to bed at two thirty that first night.
    “You should be asleep,” he said. “Four ounces and a smidge,” he added proudly.
    “Did you burp her?”
    “Jesus, naw, I held her upside down and squeezed the gas out. Did I burp her!”
    They lay quietly for a full minute, and he said, “I shouldn’t have put those mittens on her for church. I, you know, all the people going in and out, gawking . . . I thought it would be better. And the guests and all.” He sighed in the dark.
    “Ford, it was cold in the church. And back home you took them off. And look what went on. Everyone loves her. I felt so . . . so good when they were passing her around, stepping out to Cassidy’s songs.”
    “It was him that suggested we take ’em off. She was sweating and hot, he said. So off they come. I did one. He did one. And now everybody’s seen it. Seen them.”
    “Yes. Yes, they have.” She lay quiet again for three breaths and moved her hand to his chest. His hair fit between her fingers in thick rows. “Thank you for that,” she said tugging a little. “It’s not what she is. Just how. They all know that, Ford. We do, too.”
    “Just how,” he repeated. But the darkness in their bedroom, the place of my incomplete conception, again got him to thinking, “Just how is she going to learn a trade or make friends or wipe her own ass? Christ, just how?”
    He awoke at five for the next feed and again he spoke in a half whisper, and I sucked and burped and presented him with a stool the size of a twenty-dollar roll of stamps. “Whew,” he said at the changing table. “What did Uncle Joe feed you at the party, missy? Whew-ee!” I stared at him with my hand in my mouth.
    My father’s hollow words were a full year in filling in. The words at two and at five in the dim room grew solid night over night as if we only built in blackness with the dark as cement. Softer grew his song, and solid too, in those hours of passing dark rocking. He had a fair voice for a tune, if rough and grumbly and not as stretched as Cassidy’s, which could pull a note taut till it seemed to break and then wrap the torn ends around your heart and pull that to a tear. Cassidy sang “Dark Eyed Molly” at my funeral mass with not a drink in him to steady his nerves, and in the end Father Larrie had to wait until the noise from blown noses had settled before he could proceed. “Peace be wit’ you, too, Father,” Cassidy mumbled when finally the priest could continue the service.
    But Father’s voice, what I could feel of it, was nice in the nights. He never made me cry and his rendition of “Toura-loura-loura” cured my hiccups more than once. Days were different, though. On weekends and in the evenings,