Story of the Month: Hail

Carroll Edgar Hobbs, age 80, in his house, Niagra Falls, NY

My youngest, my boy…  I guess you know my boy’s in prison.  Goin’ on three years.  Not even halfway to where he could make parole.  It was an armed robbery did it.  A liquor store.  Kid never was original.  Only thing that eases me some about it is he wasn’t what you’d call the mastermind.  Drove the car.  Did a half-ass job of it, come to that.  Cops caught ’em ’cause he was speedin’.  Went right up the curb goin’ round a corner too fast. Took out a goddamn bus bench.

But, you know, he ever was a sweet kid, for all that.  Specially when he was young.  Too sweet, to my way of thinking.  His mother coddled him.  My girls, too.  Now, don’t get me wrong—I enjoy the comforts you can only get from a woman as much as the next guy—but a man ought not ever to be a woman’s pet.  Not even his mother’s or his big sisters’.

That’s why I did it, you see.  For his own good.  You don’t send a soldier out without a helmet, you don’t let a baby play with matches, you don’t drive in a snowstorm on bald tires.  And you sure as hell don’t let a boy carry himself into the world with too much sweetness in his nature, leastways not so much it’d show.  To save it for his own family later, that’s okay, I guess, but not as a general proposition, not if you want him to make somethin’ of himself.  I’m not a hard man, mind you.  I love my son.  I really do.  Him not wantin’ me to come see him, that’s his business.  But he can’t stop me thinkin’ on him and hopin’ he’s all right.  It’s how I remembered what happened all those years ago, thinkin’ about him one night lately when there was a hailstorm hammerin’ this old tin roof like there was devils dancin’ on it.  Used to scare the bejesus out of him, hailstorms.  Hailstorms and a lot of other things.  Got so I lost track of all he got shook over.

But that one night, I’d had enough.  I mean, there was my only son, like to pee himself like a puppy during that storm.  And him almost 13 at the time.  So I put him out.  Right out in that storm.  Tied him to that big tree out front so’s he wouldn’t try to take cover in the garage or nothin’.  Only left him 15 minutes or so, maybe half-hour.  Had a few cuts on him that his mother made a big fuss over, but there wasn’t much serious, really.  Hell, I was in Corregidor.  In a Jap prison camp after that.  For two years.  You think I’da made it through all that if somethin’ like a few hailstones could send me round the bend?  I’ve considered that camp almost every day since, but they didn’t break me.  No, sir.  What kind of father would I be if I didn’t give my son the stuff to face whatever might try to break him in his turn?

My wife said he turned after that night.  But if he never robbed that store, I don’t think she’d have call to say that or even to let it rise in her mind.  You can’t tie happenings together like that anyway, I don’t believe.  Still, when it’s visiting day and my wife and the girls go on up there, and I’m back here at home on my own, I do get to thinkin’ about that hailstorm.  About him throwin’ his head back and forth against the tree trunk dodgin’ hailstones.  Then stoppin’ and just takin’ it.  Like a man.  Or like a dumb animal.  Which, you gotta admit, is the only way a man can get by sometimes.

“Hail” appeared as part of a collage exhibited in the visual arts show, Peter Liashkov With Friends, at L. A. Artcore, in Los Angeles, 2013.