Kindling, and: An Empty House

Abstract

Kindling, and: An Empty House Ángel García (bio) Kindling When your father wanders deeper into the fields,pitchfork in hand, he fades slowly into silhouette. What you cannot see, you strain to hear beyondthe crackle and spit of the bonfire you sit beside: each of his footsteps rustling through desert tea,each scrape of every tine when they pierce soil. The fire begins to wane, as it does. Without fail,the dark encroaches. What you cannot fathom, in the embers of waiting for your father to returnis how they'll burn from this day forward, always, or how smoke, the scent of it, will forever obscuretime. Long before the fields you sit in cease to be: red sand verbena and cheatgrass, the rib-thin cowsand their starving calves, what your father brings back on his pitchfork is lost somewhere betweenwhat you remember and what you imagine when he smothers one, sometimes two tumbleweed ontop of the fire. Through the billow of smoke you [End Page 141] hear stems snap and then watch as seed podsblaze into a whirlwind of reddened starlight, watch them float and fade into the black sky, the colora father fades into in this story while fireside a boy waits for his father to gather kindling from a field—only, it's me. I was the boy, not you. Through the smoke that drifted, farther and closer, betweenus I watched my father's face: his incandescent eyes, his cheeks soot-smeared, a thin grin inch along hislips … how else can I say it, except to say my father became a boy again, and sitting across from me, hewas someone I could not recognize. The boy myfather once was, was a stranger. I didn't need him to remind me that he loved me, then, because hesaid it often: in our backyard back home, the two of us seated on the living room sofa, during hours-long trips we took, tumbleweed stumbling across the roads that brought us here. I watched him, thatnight, tend to the fire that kept us warm all through the night into the early hours of the morning, howhe seemed to know exactly what it needed, when it needed it: more kindling, another piece of wood,blowing on the embers to make them breathe. I admit, I was jealous of fire. What I could not havesaid then, and what I'm certain of now, is that what [End Page 142] we shared between us in the quiet, was mostly quiet,when all I wanted was older than fire itself: the stories my father never told of who he was and where wecame from, stories I feared, he was unable, or worse, unwilling to tell. This is not a complaint, understand,but even then, just a boy, silence was something I did not want to inherit, or pass down to my son, should Ione day have one, because I don't want you to live with a fervent ache of knowing so little about the manyou love. I want you, instead, to hear the stories from me: not in a letter, not in a poem, not from the smallcrowd of mourners at a wake who'll whisper about the man your father once was, the man you will oneday, God forbid, mourn forever as a stranger. I want you to hear the stories from me, while we sit acrossthe shadows of a fire we've made, smoke lingering on both our bodies, contented to sleep beside each otherlong after the fire has burned off and the morning has grown cold because you know not only how to tend afire, but how to stoke it with story. Maybe one day, when you are the age I was, I'll say the word tumble-weed, and you'll see my father emerge from the dark to tend the fire we will sit beside. I'll tell you, in thatmoment, how afraid I was, with so little to say between [End Page 143] us, of one day losing my father. I'll...