Lyric Dysin Presents/ On the Brink!

Clip from Lyric’s upcoming novel: And All God’s Children Say, Amen!

Unlike any job Jack Simmons had ever had, with Eva’s house there was always an audience. Little kids especially would sneak off from their parents’ side and gather at the bottom of the hill. They’d lay in the grass, just awaiting to see the one legged man fall off the ladder. It would happen a few times and they would laugh so hard until you couldn’t hear their voices. 

      Jack knew he had become the kids’ primary source of entertainment.  He knew that they had rather see him fall than take a swim in the lake or skip rocks across the water. And they never grew tired of him, as they waited for him to slip and make them laugh so hard that they’d have to run off and take a piss behind the nearest bush. When they didn’t make it and hot pea soiled their clothes, Jack laughed.

       A few kids never wanted to go home, even when dinner was ready and the sheets on their bed were folded back. Instead, they preferred to stay and watch Jack work.  With hungry bellies and sleepy eyes, many of them waited with anticipation, until their parents came and dragged them off by the tip of the ears. Those parents would usually raise a greeting hand to Jack and apologize for their children’s behavior before heading home.

     “Just quit daddy. It isn’t just the little kids. Their parents are laughing at you too,” Eva said to Jack, after driving him home one evening, when his first week on the job was done. “Don’t you hear them laughing?” she asked.

     Jack wanted to ask his daughter the same question, when she would wear all of those provocative clothes and walk herself up and down the roads of town.

“You do hear the people laughing, don’t you daddy?” She’d say.

“For now,” Jack simply said. “But after they see I can still do the work, those same people will say nothing but the best things about me and this family.”

“And what if they don’t?”

“Then I guess I will have to build something else, something bigger. More important,” he said.

“And then what if they still laugh?”

     Jack had never thought that far ahead or that negative, and he wanted someone around him that didn’t either.

“You are taking Junior to work with you?” Gail laughed in her husband’s face saying, “If you do, people will think you’re just as retarded as he is,” his wife said.

“Our boy’s not retarded!”

“But you certainly are, if you think he will help you build that house.”

         Jack wanted that most of all. Since he had become a married man, he had always wished that he would have a son that he could teach how to hold a sledge hammer and how to use a saw to cut wood, how to measure and build the perfect house. He wished that his son’s mind could handle the complexity of it. However, the umbilical cord that strangled his son’s neck during child birth, assured Doctor Graves that he never could. Even as a grown man, his son would, at best, have the mental capacity of a seven year old, Jack remembered the Doctor telling him and his wife. Still, Jack named him Junior, hoping that his boy would one day follow in his footsteps.

      Junior, who was to turn thirteen in a few seasons, nearly walked the skin off of Jack’s heel as he followed him around the work site.  Quite sure, this is not what Jack had in mind. While there, the boy mostly mimicked the chirping sounds he heard the birds make, before mocking the children, who hid deep in the grass, laughing at him and his father. Jack ignored the children well and wished his son could do the same. He welcomed Junior to help with the ground work, hoping that his son would silence the laughter and, also, prove some people wrong.

     Gail felt Jack brought their son to work with him, because Junior was the only person he didn’t feel threatened by, and that if building Eva’s house would turn out to be a success, Jack knew that no one would give Junior any of the credit. Gail smiled as Jack swore she was wrong. She figured that he then uncrossed his fingers and attempted to make progress with his boy, while redeeming the good in his name.

      Jack gave Junior what he thought were simple tasks. He told his son to fetch the hammer and nails.

“Junior, No! No! Don’t play with that! It’s not a toy,” Jack hollered from the top of the roof, after seeing his son grab hold of the chainsaw, ready to crank it up and cut off a limb or two of those mocking children that began pissing out of fear.  By then, the kids’ laughter was long gone and Jack smiled, while grabbing hold of the ladder on the side of the pine boards.  He tried to get down to his son in a hurry, before his foot slipped a few of the ladder’s steps.          

     The last time it happened, Jack had thought he had broken his leg for sure. But a knee sprain was all. The injury, Doc predicted would keep him off the building site for a least a month, but Jack was determined to stay on schedule. He was determined that his injury wouldn’t hold him back.