Story for performance #428
webcast from London at 08:09PM, 22 Aug 06

He has my eyes.

His was a difficult birth. Twenty hours and six stitches later it was forgotten as I held him in my arms. A perfect nose, his father’s hair, and the smell…I’ll never forget the smell. It was my own smell made sweet—a flawless thing. The only thing I’d ever done to be proud of. It had taken me four years and as many miscarriages to fall pregnant, and so his was an entry into the world much awaited. The nursery was the colour of a robin’s eggshell, pale blue—and I chose every toy and item in his wardrobe to strive for perfection, read every book about child rearing and infancy I could get my hands on. After that I couldn’t remember whether to go to him when he cried after nursing or to leave him, or to wait five minutes then send his father in.

He was a child who did not want for love.

But he cried a great deal, and there were times when I just wanted to throw up my hands and plug my ears against the sound. And once he learned to walk he had a mind of his own, so that I had to keep an eye on him every minute of the day. If I didn’t, well, there was the time I found him standing on a chair sticking a fork into the toaster. Or the time he ripped pages from the family Bible I’d left sitting on the coffee table. I didn’t tell his father about that one, how could the child know what book he was destroying? I said I’d lost the old one after bringing it to church to show the pastor. After that I started keeping him on a leash sometimes, you know those baby leashes that you swear you’ll never use until you have a child of your own.

He has his father’s temper.

It’s a slow building fury that simmers away like an egg being boiled you forgot to prick. It’s perfect and smooth one moment, but then the pressure becomes too much and it cracks, the white bubbling out of the shell, ruining everything. The first time I sent him to his room he came out sweet and docile, didn’t say anything to make me believe otherwise. But that night at dinner his daddy told him to finish up his vegetables and he threw his plate against the wall, just like that, shards of crockery skittering across the kitchen linoleum. And then he sat there, purple, not saying anything to anyone no matter how we yelled and scolded. His jaw set tight just the way you see it now in those jail photos, chin sticking straight out in the profile shots. There was no getting through to him when one of those moods came on, no talking sense or reason. His daddy even tried the belt a few times, but grew frustrated after the boy just didn’t respond. No use trying to hit someone if they’re not going to cry.

He always has to be right.

He was a character in high school. Had his own opinions and way of doing things and there wasn’t anyone going to talk him out of it. For the first time he had friends, though, other kids he would meet with after school and they’d trade books and play video games. Some of these kids got him into the drugs and the drinking, I’m sure of it, because we wouldn’t tolerate any of that in our household. The first time I knew about it was when I found his flask in his coat pocket. Silver with his initials engraved in it, and filled to the brim with whiskey. He’d been taking it to school! We thought about sending him to military school there and then, probably should have, but he swore to us he’d walk the straight and narrow.

He stopped coming home.

He still called sometimes, and we knew where he was. Downtown we’d sometimes see him. He said he was staying with friends. He was too proud to say, but later I learned he sometimes slept in an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of town. There wasn’t much we could do at this point, he wasn’t a little boy anymore. I don’t know when he started the petty crimes, but the arrest for the robbery was the first time he was caught. It was an armed robbery, which scared me, but his daddy always did have guns around the house. Gave him a .45 for his eighteenth birthday, said part of being a man is knowing how and when to fire a gun.

He found a way out.

I still don’t know how he escaped from jail. But there was a manhunt across four counties, and they had us under 24-hour watch in case he tried coming home. I knew he wouldn’t do that, I knew he wasn’t that dumb. They found him a day later in the abandoned warehouse outside town. There were shots fired and one of the police officers was wounded, fatally. A man we go to church with—a man whose wife just had a baby of her own. Now when I go to see him the prison officers pat me down to make sure I’m not smuggling any drugs. Then we sit with glass between us and there’s a contraption he speaks in. My own son, and I can’t even touch him. We talk about his daddy, the court case, which plants are blooming in my garden. I can’t bring myself to ask him why. I’m scared that he won’t have a good answer, that there was no reason. I’m scared I’ll forgive him anyway, his smell carrying over the thick glass and blurring my senses.

He has my eyes.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Eleanor Limprecht.