{"id":339,"date":"2017-07-16T20:16:17","date_gmt":"2017-07-16T20:16:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/?p=339"},"modified":"2017-07-16T20:16:17","modified_gmt":"2017-07-16T20:16:17","slug":"story-of-the-month-hail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/?p=339","title":{"rendered":"Story of the Month: Hail"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Carroll Edgar Hobbs, age 80, in his house, Niagra Falls, NY<\/b><\/p>\n

My youngest, my boy\u2026\u00a0 I guess you know my boy\u2019s in prison.\u00a0 Goin\u2019 on three years.\u00a0 Not even halfway to where he could make parole.\u00a0 It was an armed robbery did it.\u00a0 A liquor store.\u00a0 Kid never was original.\u00a0 Only thing that eases me some about it is he wasn\u2019t what you\u2019d call the mastermind.\u00a0 Drove the car.\u00a0 Did a half-ass job of it, come to that.\u00a0 Cops caught \u2019em \u2019cause he was speedin\u2019.\u00a0 Went right up the curb goin\u2019 round a corner too fast. Took out a goddamn bus bench.<\/p>\n

But, you know, he ever was a sweet kid, for all that.\u00a0 Specially when he was young.\u00a0 Too sweet, to my way of thinking.\u00a0 His mother coddled him.\u00a0 My girls, too.\u00a0 Now, don\u2019t get me wrong\u2014I enjoy the comforts you can only get from a woman as much as the next guy\u2014but a man ought not ever to be a woman\u2019s pet.\u00a0 Not even his mother\u2019s or his big sisters\u2019.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why I did it, you see.\u00a0 For his own good.\u00a0 You don\u2019t send a soldier out without a helmet, you don\u2019t let a baby play with matches, you don\u2019t drive in a snowstorm on bald tires.\u00a0 And you sure as hell don\u2019t let a boy carry himself into the world with too much sweetness in his nature, leastways not so much it\u2019d show.\u00a0 To save it for his own family later, that\u2019s okay, I guess, but not as a general proposition, not if you want him to make somethin\u2019 of himself.\u00a0 I\u2019m not a hard man, mind you.\u00a0 I love my son.\u00a0 I really do.\u00a0 Him not wantin\u2019 me to come see him, that\u2019s his business.\u00a0 But he can\u2019t stop me thinkin\u2019 on him and hopin\u2019 he\u2019s all right.\u00a0 It\u2019s how I remembered what happened all those years ago, thinkin\u2019 about him one night lately when there was a hailstorm hammerin\u2019 this old tin roof like there was devils dancin\u2019 on it.\u00a0 Used to scare the bejesus out of him, hailstorms.\u00a0 Hailstorms and a lot of other things.\u00a0 Got so I lost track of all he got shook over.<\/p>\n

But that one night, I\u2019d had enough.\u00a0 I mean, there was my only son, like to pee himself like a puppy during that storm.\u00a0 And him almost 13 at the time.\u00a0 So I put him out.\u00a0 Right out in that storm.\u00a0 Tied him to that big tree out front so\u2019s he wouldn\u2019t try to take cover in the garage or nothin\u2019.\u00a0 Only left him 15 minutes or so, maybe half-hour.\u00a0 Had a few cuts on him that his mother made a big fuss over, but there wasn\u2019t much serious, really.\u00a0 Hell, I was in Corregidor.\u00a0 In a Jap prison camp after that.\u00a0 For two years.\u00a0 You think I\u2019da made it through all that if somethin\u2019 like a few hailstones could send me round the bend?\u00a0 I\u2019ve considered that camp almost every day since, but they didn\u2019t break me.\u00a0 No, sir.\u00a0 What kind of father would I be if I didn\u2019t give my son the stuff to face whatever might try to break him in his turn?<\/p>\n

My wife said he turned after that night.\u00a0 But if he never robbed that store, I don\u2019t think she\u2019d have call to say that or even to let it rise in her mind.\u00a0 You can\u2019t tie happenings together like that anyway, I don\u2019t believe.\u00a0 Still, when it\u2019s visiting day and my wife and the girls go on up there, and I\u2019m back here at home on my own, I do get to thinkin\u2019 about that hailstorm.\u00a0 About him throwin\u2019 his head back and forth against the tree trunk dodgin\u2019 hailstones.\u00a0 Then stoppin\u2019 and just takin\u2019 it.\u00a0 Like a man.\u00a0 Or like a dumb animal.\u00a0 Which, you gotta admit, is the only way a man can get by sometimes.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

“Hail” appeared as part of a collage exhibited in the visual arts show, Peter Liashkov With Friends,\u00a0<\/em>at L. A. Artcore, in Los Angeles, 2013.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carroll Edgar Hobbs, age 80, in his house, Niagra Falls, NY My youngest, my boy\u2026\u00a0 I guess you know my […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-noellesickelswp","post-339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-allposts","category-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=339"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":342,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions\/342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}