DIMINUTIVES by Gabriela Valencia
Like most divine relics I own, I have no memory of where my keychain came from. Was it college, high school, earlier than that? Joined in a loop to my home, my shed, my office, is a tarnished pewter scroll with a miniature relief of the Antigua Basilica de Guadalupe, windows tiny dashes below its crested rooftop. Behind the basilica, on the other side of the scroll, is an egg—poured resin the size and amber color of an immature desert beetle. If you look closely, into the body, there is an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The Virgin Mary? I suppose. Dusky face, head turned slight. At the bottom of the scroll, a raised script says, Virgencita Cuidanos. How funny that is. That way of saying it in Spanish. Not Virgen—Virgencita. The emphatic diminutive. How it calls upon a little virgin to look after us. Or no. A more tender virgin? A virgin so familiar as to be called upon as intimate?
§
My mother, in an idle moment, will sometimes pinch my breast. Snapping her arm out, almost as if milking a nipple once and quick, but just to the side of it, on the fleshy part, enough to suggest I watch out, that she might have really done it if she wanted to. She will squeeze any lump of fat, lift a shirt to expose a stomach, or stick a finger in an armpit and run away like a child playing tag, ravished by delight.
Where did this come from? My father maintains she wasn’t always this way. Suggests that with time she is becoming more cunning, more physical of humor, more like her mother. To which my mother balks. But when he asks, Is that a bad thing, to be like your mother? she replies on edge, No, my mother was a saint!
Once, upset by her antics, sore of flesh, I chased her around the house. She begged, Please, please don’t tickle me! Though, clearly, I was not going to tickle her. We rounded into the sala, where, cornered, she sat, bowed her head, and tucked her hands like a handkerchief into her lap, smaller and smaller, between her knees until her source of power could no longer be seen. I knew she was attempting to appear meek and humble (a phrase she often uses to describe her sons, to describe a dog’s upturned eyes). What was I supposed to do with that? How could I argue with my mother now, with her looking like something between La Virgencita and a wayward girl in timeout? And what would I look like, scolding her for having some fun?
Her eyes only pretended to close. After a short silence, she whipped her arm out and pinched me. Again. I jolted as if rising out of my own body. Her head hinged open like a plastic easter egg—HA!
§
The sun is always rising in the Badlands. Again and again, in its thousand horizons. Paleosols, those iron-rich sediments, stripe rocky pinnacles and buttes into so many simultaneous pink dawns. All morning. All morning, I seemed as if I would fall off the edge, shuffling in untied boots toward sloped and jagged cliffs. Taking my body over imaginary lines, making motions toward the dark interior, the night morning still contains. All morning you winced.
It was still the dawn of our relationship. We felt we knew each other deeply, shared bodies and woke from shared dreams. Still, once in a while, in a snap, we became indecipherable to one another. A muddied image. I could see it, looking back at you from the edge. You didn’t know what to make of me.
Together on a desert frontier, we began reading American folklore from a discount Wall Drug encyclopedia, seeking recognition in creation myths, feeling ourselves on the brink of our own beginning. But we found ourselves dog-earing stories of the trickster gods instead. Laughing, scratching our heads, sticking our fingers into the armpits of the page—AHA!
Most enduring was the story of the Mudheads. As the Zuni tell it, a man begets many children out of incest and, ashamed of what he’s done, beats himself and buries his face in the earth. The children are born mud-headed, with bulbous welts of tuberous earth for each eye and mouth, and while they cannot live ordinary, integrated lives, they assume many sacred roles. Curers, sages, tricksters, clowns. When an Old Woman tries to teach the Mudheads to copulate, one sticks his penis in her ear, another her elbow, her knee, her ass. And the Old Woman laughs each time. This being sacred.
Watching your face contort in worry, I could have mentioned the trickster gods. Could have argued it was the Mudheads waving me over into the picturesque, trying to trip me into one of their lessons, a lesson I surely needed. Instead, I told you about the women in my life.
When my grandmother was dying, my mother told me to hold her mother’s hand. When I approached, it was my grandmother who took my hand with hers, knobby and dark, and began inspecting mine as a strange derivative, remarking more than once at my smooth skin. She began referring to me, addressing the room broadly, as The Girl. I was fourteen. And perhaps because of the nervous silence, perhaps because she’d long laid there surrounded by a watchful crowd, my grandmother began telling her favorite jokes. All dirty! The Priest and the Donkey. The Cunning Old Woman and the Naïve Traveler. Perhaps because she knew these would be the last words she’d ever say to me, perhaps to get a rise out of her daughter, she held me unshakably. No one pulled me from this, from her, and tensed, eyeing one another on edge. I don’t remember laughter, but there must have been. What else could have carried us into the next moment?
Hand in hand, we walked together back to the golden beetle, the borrowed RV parked in the dry dirt lot. We sat at the wooden picnic table beside it, and abstracts of legends surrounded us like smoke. In my bag, under rolls of clothes needing to be washed, under the beat-up encyclopedia, there was that keychain. La Virgencita without any keys—no home, no shed, no office. But that night, a thousand sunrises. And around the rim of the Badlands, as many prairie dogs. Rising out of their dens like whack-a-mole. Or like Jesus on the third day. That prank of all pranks.
§
In the photograph of my grandmother at her youngest, she is beautiful the way the earth is beautiful. A chipped and dusky outline of Girl wedged on a wooden chair beside a wooden cart amid the pale bright expanse of desert. This is the desert where, as my mother tells it, she bartered for shawls and bags in Spanish and sometimes Kickapoo, rarely endeavoring the flat monosyllables of English for distaste of sounding, in her own words, like a barking dog. The desert where, as a child, she hunted wild turkeys with stones carried in the lifted hem of her skirt. Where at the age of eleven, she married my grandfather, twenty-two, to escape her father’s rape, and as a child of fourteen, began having children of her own. She is wearing what my mother tells me was an emerald-green velvet dress but on film remains slate. A ceramic Sheltie tucked comically beneath one arm, a bow at its collar matching the rosette at her own. Insouciant, eyes dark and squinting. At the film’s periphery, as if peering in, the shadow of a man’s hat.
Once, as children, my brothers and I attempted to spy on her this way. Or perhaps the way we’d seen in Scooby Doo. Our three totemed heads peaking through her bedroom door ajar, unsure of what we’d find. We watched her braid a meticulous silver chain of hair, winding and pinning it to her skull. Ever demure, powder-soft, though her expression confused me. We watched her in the vanity’s reflection, foolishly thinking she could not see us too.
Then, in a snap, locking eyes with us in the mirror, my grandmother’s face contorted. Lips tucked and snarled. Eyes flayed wide and white. A face of knobs and lumps. We scrambled, terrified, down the long hall.
I do not remember her laughter.
§
Do you remember? You waved me gently back to you. Told me, pointing out the rough contours of where I’d just been standing, that loose rocks were sometimes packed with loose gravel, loose dust. The powder-soft blush-brown dirt the result of the razor-sharp underneath. How ready some were for disintegration, for breaking into smaller and smaller pieces that would, in a breath, fall away, taking people with them. That if I fell and survived, the rescue would be long, would cost us what little we had. I winced. How did I not realize?
We felt for firmness with an outstretched foot and found a safer ledge to sit on, our four legs lain atop a soft slope rather than dangling in free-fall. The sun setting, the sunrise in the sediments appeared more vivid.
Virgencita Cuidanos. Like the sacred, care is so difficult to understand. Cuidar (to care for, to look after) from cogitare (to consider) from agitare (to move to and fro) frequentative of agere (to set in motion). Curious lineage. How the mind turns on itself.
Did I ever tell you?
You told me the story of the raccoon. Full winter. Where everywhere there should have been green, the earth had frozen grey. You were about to let the dogs out, but before you did, spotted a raccoon circling in the north field. Unusual to witness midday, you decided you would scare it off. To keep the dogs from running after it, from picking a fight with an animal, one who may have been sick. You picked up a long stick and approached it.
You hoped your approach alone would be enough to send it running across the field. Enough to signify. But it only seemed to follow you. Slowly, without aggression, wherever you moved, to and fro. It wheezed. Its eyes glazed over.
You thought about dreams your mother had in sickness. How, long after she’d recovered, she felt the need to tell you about the beautiful music, the otherworldly feeling. You imagined this animal had rabies, was nearing death, conceivably hallucinating. I thought maybe it mistook me for its mother, you said. The way it followed you, seemed to trust you, to need you.
As you recounted, I considered my own mother. How, when she and I would drink coffee together on the patio behind my childhood home, she’d lift her legs and gasp at the sight of a chipmunk or mouse darting a hundred feet away. Had this raccoon stumbled into the yard, it would surely be enough to end our leisure, to send us both back inside. Her first and hurriedly. Me, her lingering shadow.
I considered what my grandmother might do if she were still with us. Would she find a stone to throw, to knock it dead once and for all, like she’d done to all those turkeys she’d hunted as a girl? Or perhaps her mercy would take the form of another joke—one sharp and particular as stone, one with an impact equal to the image of the animal’s pleading gaze.
Were it me, would I know to do anything more than simply watch it, turning, turning, like endless time? Is looking, merely, the child of looking after?
You considered bringing it leftover chicken from the fridge. Considered borrowing a gun from your father. The world frozen over, you decided to bring it some water in the plastic bowl you kept lodged under the elm. Part of you remembers it drink, wrinkle its face, hiss. Another part of you can’t remember if it merely looked down into it.
A few days later, you found it dead, not far from where you’d seen it in life.
§
The sun rises. Easter morning in San Antonio, my grandmother bent over the side of the hotel bed, my head in her hands like an urn. In Spanish, Ah, look at those eyes… Never close them.
Beside us, the hotel balcony, and below, the well-dressed shuffling into cars and cabs for Mass, drivers patting dry slick necks, children like fabled children, jumping with starry hands to catch the green anoles as they crept up stucco walls. Around us, cousins sauntered in and out of the room sweet-smelling and rosaried, none passing so much as a glance toward our grandmother or her unyielding grip on me. I was eleven. Absolutely, she said, eyes not yet hinting cataracts. A face murderers confess to.
My mother appeared with a short laugh, easing me away by the shoulders. She means your eyes are beautiful, mija. That’s all. And years later, when I told you, you agreed. Said my grandmother must have been picturing some outlaw staggering through saloon doors, taking my face in both calloused hands, rattled and earnest, to tell me all he’s been through. But I wasn’t so sure.
Could I have spent my whole life wondering what she meant? Turning it over in my mind, carried inward by its darkness, in ever shrinking spirals?
But later that day, my brothers heard the story only to burst out laughing.
She means your eyes are humongous, idiot! So open it’s hilarious! Bulbous! Protruding eyeballs! HA!
Mudhead, all ass, I never get the point.
§
I remember my grandmother’s dogs scrambling up and down the halls of the house. Chihuahuas. They were small. They were loud. She joked they were good for catching cockroaches, the way a housecat might catch mice.
Their names were Benito, Carlos, Lupita… —No. Had my grandmother named her dogs after her own children? Confused, I asked my mother what she thought about that, and how she felt about the mother dog being named for herself, Lupita for Guadalupe. My mother shrugged. But something in her face diminished.
It wasn’t until years later that I ever thought to ask about my grandmother’s name. Guadalupe, my mother said. Doña Lupe.
You’re named after your mother?
Mija, I don’t know.
My mother disappears behind her mother like a child behind an interlace of legs. Among the dogs, was it she mothering her brothers? Or was it my grandmother mothering her sons, my mother nowhere to be seen?
I close my eyes. No, my eyes stay open, but I close my eyes. Do you know what I mean?
§
The sun rises, and we approach what seems like home.
Hand in hand, we walked the rocky grey of Toadstool Geological Park until it became the miraculous green of an endless meadow. Then kept walking until it greyed again, iridescent, crumbling. Two Old Women hundreds of paces away waved at us, told us we were going the wrong way. Just so you know. We couldn’t make sense of them. It’s true, there were arrows, meant for following one of a few routes. But the park, aside from its trails, was designed for wandering. Posted signs encouraged, for some reason, the gathering of rocks, which meant combing through the grey in any number of ways.
In our confusion, the moon moved slowly into the shadow of the earth. The grey world had gone violet, then dark. In the van, we unlocked and swiveled the seats, making a table between them. You began working a meal at the narrow stove an arm’s breadth away. A few short years from now, it would be in this van, on a trip much like this one, that you’d propose to me. It would be with an improvised ring—the plastic pull-tab from a carton of milk—which became its own divine relic. Even after we replaced it with gold, I would still carry that first ring with me and feel its protection always.
Go see it for the two of us, you said, elbowing out toward that eclipse just beginning.
From the outside, I watched you through a dust-covered window. Your body shifting, head turning as you moved plates from side to side.
Years later, years into our marriage, it would dawn on us. Remembering the bright sun on our pale dry skin. The eagerness of thumbs looped into backpack straps, our ankles flexing as we spun to face each other, over and over, walking forwards and backwards though the lush green grass of forever. This had been rattlesnake season. We hadn’t even been thinking about it. We had been in the worst of places, the green inside the grey, where most rattlesnakes lived camouflaging their bodies to the earth. It would have been our terrible luck to step on one, it being an hour on foot back to the van and maybe another hour on the road to the hospital. How had we not realized?
Far across the lot, the Old Women’s campfire. Orange flames, a violent rush in near-total black, sliced upwards in direct line to the moon, which, as it slid fully into our shadow, glowed a ferrous red. In the moment of full eclipse, coyotes unseen but near yipped wildly.
I snapped my head to see yours, already leaning out from under the golden wing. Your mouth, each eye, round with wonder.
§
Images emerge only as afterimages.
In memory, my mother tells me to hold her mother’s hand. To walk with her. The ground a stony patchwork like cracked slabs of desert earth. What do I recall? So little. How slowly she walked. Slower than I ever thought possible for all the quickness within her. Gentle as a cow under the pecan trees, our single body, our four feet in dappled light.
In imagination, here is the future. Everywhere I enter, I leave a key firm in the lock. I rush to whatever is inside. You, the dogs, the work to be done. The keychain, La Virgencita, her little visage encircling all things, dangles a silver umbilical. The door swung wide open.
- Published in Creative Nonfiction, Issue 34
FIGHTING THE LION by Lydia Cyrus
My great-grandfather was named Martin and when he got to a certain age—somewhere after sixty but no one can say for sure now—he had to be locked up in the back bedroom of the house. He was mean and he would yell and beat on people. Martin died long before I was born. I’ve heard stories about his cruelty. I wonder, often, if I look like him in any way. I wonder if I’ll become cruel in my old age. Fate, it would seem, has always felt like a carrion bird to me. The word carrion has such a negative connotation for some, but for those who understand the importance of vultures, it sounds beautiful. In the case of my family, it is hard to find beauty in the face of fate.
My grandfather, Martin’s son, presses his own shotgun shells. When he lived with his third wife, their garage was full of rows of presses. Boxes of lead pellets and red or blue plastic casings were neatly organized around them. On the other side of the garage, there were rows of Christmas villages. Reality split evenly: shotgun shells and the charm of domesticity. The presses sit in the garage of my childhood home now, lined up in a row. Even now, I remember the movement of making bullets.
My father says we have a family curse: no matter how badly you might want something good to happen to you, no matter how badly you want happiness, you’ll never have it. He says that’s just the way it is.
In December of 1898, John Henry Patterson sought to engineer the Uganda railway which would run through present-day Kenya. Before the railway could be finished, two male Tsavo lions killed and consumed thirty-five workers. Patterson, a former tiger hunter, took the responsibility of killing the “man-eaters”. Construction on the railway stopped for several weeks before Patterson could shoot the lions. In his 1907 memoir, he writes, “their man-stalking so well-timed and so certain of success that the workmen firmly believed that they were not real animals at all, but devils in lions’ shape.”
The lions typically struck in the nighttime. Patterson writes, “at about midnight, the lion suddenly put its head in at the open tent door and seized someone—who happened to be nearest the opening—by the throat.” The man begged the lion to let go and tried to wrap his arms around the lion’s neck. After the man’s death, one of his fellow workers asked, was he not fighting a lion? That question stuck between my ribs, imagining when my father would be pulled out of bed late at night. Faced with certain death if the gun went off and yet he fought instead.
Sometime after my youngest uncle was born, my grandfather began to wake his children up with a shotgun aimed at their faces. My father and his older brother were the ones who had to wrestle the gun away. My dad says his younger brother is too young to remember it. When I ask, that’s all he’ll say: He was a baby, he doesn’t know the half of it.
Patterson wrote about how the lions had an “uncanny” ability to slip away, always near midnight, whenever he would stake out with his hunting party. Armed with guns and goats, he would hide in areas where the lions were known to kill or were spotted. Each time, silence would fall over the camp, and, in the distance, Patterson could hear the cries of the men in the camp as the lions attacked. They knew when he was away.
It is said the lions knocked men off their donkeys, pulled them off trains, and even leaped onto tents, smashing them. Once they decided to take a man, nothing would prevent them from doing so, “shots, shouting and firebrands they alike held in derision.” A hiccup in the gene pool gave them jaws that closed around the lives of men like an inescapable sickness.
Patterson instructed the men to build tall, thorn fencing around their camp. For a while, it worked. But despite every precaution, “the lions would not be denied, and men continued to disappear.” They found ways beneath, above, or around the fencing. Estimates of their death toll do not include the deaths no one knows about. The number of thirty-five is the number of men consumed. Not men attacked, not men killed, and not those left to die. No one knows the true number of the dead, but it is believed to be in the hundreds.
Before my father was my father, he tore down houses with his dad. From the time he was thirteen, he had a job. He followed his father from abandoned houses to condemned buildings, always tearing them down. In photographs, my father has a baby face. Nothing at all like the coal-black beard and hair I know. He’s covered in soot and dirt, standing between his father and an uncle. Smiling. Out of the four siblings, all three boys became ironworkers. They all picked a profession that required sparks, soot, and pain.
Being part of this family, I’ve gathered, is much like being a plow horse. Retiring when the weight of the plow and its sharp edges are too much. Only to become a trail-riding horse, carrying the weight of other people. Nothing good. Only hard work.
The first lion to be killed by Patterson, once shot, measured nine feet and eight inches long from nose to tip of tail. It took the strength of eight men to carry its body back to camp. It took ten shots to kill the second lion.
The Ghost and The Darkness, as the workers called them, live behind a glass case now. Scientists still study the skulls and teeth of the lions. Trying to ascertain a true number and a true cause for their killings. The only way to make sense of the uncanny is to explain it. They have many theories as to why the lions ate humans. Some think they had severe dental damage or they were accustomed to the bodies of men left behind by caravans carrying enslaved people. Some of the men were practicing Hindus and created funeral pyres for their dead, something scientists suggest could have attracted the lions. They keep trying to find a definitive answer. Identify the causation of the killings, number the bullets, count the teeth, and someday you will have an answer. Someday you will understand.
If you asked me what my relationship with my father is like, I would tell you about the time we were passing a football around in the backyard and his throw landed in my face. I would tell you how bad it hurt, how the tears were instant. I say instant because, normally, I would not have cried in front of him. He was devastated his daughter wasn’t a volleyball player or a softball pitcher. I would tell you the only thing he said to me after that was to stop crying like a girl.
I should tell you my father loves dogs. Every dog we’ve ever had has loved him too. When he comes home from work, he often walks through the door and says, “Where’s my girl? Where’s my baby girl?” When I was born, my parents both had Rottweilers. Greta and Bear both belonged to my parents prior to their marriage. I grew up with them. My mother tells me often now how much she and my father loved those dogs. How they wanted to have more of them, but having children changed their plans.
One evening, Bear got tangled in his chain, tied out in the yard. Someone tried to help him get loose but got bit in the process. The way I remember the story is that the man demanded the dog be put down.
My father took Bear outside and shot him.
I’ve never asked, but I know the place where the dog was shot must be where our storage building is now. Sometimes, if I think about it and close my eyes, I can see that spot of land before a building stood there. Bear is buried in the hollow where all of our dogs are buried. My dad says he’ll never do it again. He says he would never shoot a dog again, even if his life depended on it.
As a graduate student, living states away from my father, I drove to Chicago to see the lions in the Field Museum. Two maneless, male lions. Their paws and heads were larger than I imagined they would be. When I went to the museum, I looked at the maneaters in wonder. I felt as though the lions were always calling for me to see them, like we were meant to meet. Like I was meant to understand something after seeing them.
Now, I believe that those lions are a sadness. The maneaters live behind glass and were it not for a Michael Douglas movie, they would be forgotten.
Worse still, was the fact that there was a display of a mother lion and her cubs. Meaning a lioness and her cubs died. Their fate isn’t listed on the case—they weren’t violent like their male counterparts. They ended up in the glass boxes at the same museum. I came to Chicago without knowing the mother lion and her cubs were even there. But now I think about the small, hand-sized cubs often. They must have weighed nothing in life and now even less in death.
When my mother was nine months pregnant with me, my uncle held my father at knifepoint. He held a knife to his throat and his then-wife yelled at my mother. Do something! My mother looked at her, her hands folded over her stomach, over me, and said no. He doesn’t know I know this story. When he held the knife to his brother’s throat, he was eighteen. He didn’t know who I was. He couldn’t have guessed I would ever know about that moment. But I was in the room with them. I always have been.
When my father was a teenager, he held his father at gunpoint. No one remembers why and he doesn’t know that I know this story. All my mother said was that he changed his mind and thought better of it; he put the gun down.
When I was around the age of five, the same uncle made a visit to our house to take the guns away. He took away every single gun in the house, because my mother thought my father was going to kill himself and maybe even us. If I was five, my brother would have been a newborn.
I don’t remember this story; I only know I was there.
The state of Ohio used to have no laws or regulations about the ownership of exotic animals. It was, in fact, a hot spot for animal auctions, a wild Midwest. Tim Harrison, a retired animal control officer, is one of the people who got the calls about tigers in basements or vipers in garages. In Zanesville, you didn’t have to go to Asia to see a tiger. You didn’t even have to go to the zoo.
In the earliest years of Tim’s career, the animals had nowhere to go. A lioness named Tabitha ended up living with Tim for that reason. Lions reach the age of sexual maturity at around three to four years old. Before that deadline, Tabitha stayed in the house. Whenever she roared, the sound rattled the windows of the house.
After a lion reaches the age of sexual maturity, instincts kick in. An ancient need to be the leader drives the cat to dominance, to violence. This isn’t “turning.” Lions and tigers are born to hunt and kill. Even if they live in a house in rural Ohio, instinct cannot be replaced or removed.
The lion will fight to assert dominance. To prove they are the ruler of the family, the center. Just like tigers living in basements, pacing back and forth. They know on a cellular level what is and what is not wild, what should and should not be. At an animal sanctuary in upstate Indiana, the tour guide told me the animals remember the people who abused them. A baboon has lived there for fifteen years but because of whatever her owner did to her, she never bonded with another animal or human. Sometimes, when they move her to her outdoor exhibit, she pulls the grass up by the root and throws it.
When I interviewed Tim, he said the animals experience trauma the same way we do. It changes their brain, their body even. But they can’t tell you in our words how it feels. Tigers make a specific sound when they feel happy. It’s a sound deep in the back of the throat reminiscent of an exhaust pipe on an old truck. At the sanctuary, when the tour guide comes, some of the tigers walk up to him and they make that sound. Over and over again. The guide says if an animal makes it to their facility, it means they’ll be there for the rest of their life. They got out of their toxic homes, out of the basements in Ohio, and roadside attractions in Texas. Now they live better lives, not quite free, but sometimes happily.
On October 18th, 2011, a man in Ohio named Terry Thompson let fifty-six exotic animals out of their cages. Forty-nine of the animals were “put down” on the spot: eighteen Bengal tigers, seventeen lions, six black bears, two grizzly bears, three mountain lions, two wolves, and one baboon. Prior to their release, Terry was sentenced to prison for illegally selling guns. He told the judge if he went to prison, his first act as a free man would be killing himself. But only after he let his animals loose.
When the news broke of the animals being shot and buried, I was a freshman in high school. I remember saying, “it really is a zoo over there in Ohio.” The bodies of the animals were buried on site, at Terry’s home, even though officials were warned the animals were worth more dead. The black market thrives on the selling of pieces of exotic animals. Terry’s wife left town with some of the surviving animals. I wonder what her new life must be like, free of a gun-running husband. I wonder if she ever thinks about the deaths of forty-nine animals.
I can’t remember what my father said, even though that was the biggest thing to happen in the tri-state area for a long time. It would have still been the biggest news story for years to come, until a family was murdered execution-style in their Kentucky home. We didn’t talk about guns or violence in our home, but we always talked about animals.
I watched the story of Terry Brumfield play out in a documentary. I was twenty the first time I watched it and I return to it often. Terry lived in Ohio. Across the river, as I would have said, the river which separates my home from his. In the film, he’s introduced as a man who owns two large, African lions.
Lambert, the male lion, and Lacey, the female. Two lions bought off of a friend after a trucking accident left Terry disabled. With every appearance, I felt endeared to him. After a second viewing of the film, I realized why. Terry Brumfield’s hair and bear-like looks are akin to my father’s. His voice, and his work ethic, all matched my father’s.
In the film, Tim Harrison offers to help Terry with his lions. They have been living in a horse trailer after an accident caused Lambert to chase cars down the interstate before he was captured and brought home again. As Terry speaks, he tells Tim about a time when he thought local law enforcement would take Lambert away.
He said do you remember that thing that happened down in Waco, Texas? Well, if you try to take my lions, what I’ll do won’t even compare to that. That was when I knew whatever cloth my father had been cut from, Terry came from it too. He wouldn’t start it, but if his lions were lost, he would certainly finish it.
Over the course of filming, a freak accident involving an electric current kills Lambert. He was five years old and weighed over five hundred pounds. Terry, with camera in hand, lies on the ground petting the lion as he takes his last breath. Terry cries I’m done, I’m done.
Tears always welled in my eyes when I thought of Terry. He was a stranger I felt I knew, a stranger I know. The lions, he said, brought him out of a deep depression. They gave his life a purpose he had never known before. He cried in the film, something my father rarely ever did. The love he felt so deeply for Lacey and Lambert was the kind of love I always wanted my father to have for me. It felt so strange to be so envious of a dead lion, so envious of all the dogs we had when I was growing up. It also felt like one of the deepest sadnesses I have ever known.
Terry buried Lambert on his property at home and agreed to give Lacey and her cubs up. He became a champion for legislation that would change the way people interact with animals. He began writing a book about his life with the lions. His pain was twisted into purpose, not swallowed or echoed.
Shortly after the release of the film, Terry died in a car accident right outside of his home. When the paramedics arrived, Tim said, they found him lying on top of Lambert’s grave. Terry is now buried with Lambert. When I read about his burial in a local newspaper, I cried. It felt like losing a chance to meet someone I had grown fond of. Then it became a reminder: someday my father would die, and I may never know him well at all. We may never be bonded or endeared to each other the way Lambert and Terry were.
When my father was a child, my grandmother swears there was a mountain lion that lived in the woods behind their house. When they talk about this lion, they call it “her.” My grandmother says her because the lion never bothered the children or the dogs, a supposed gentleness. Now, I marvel at this. Gentleness is still somehow wild but feminine all the same. Whereas masculinity is violent. They saw her often and heard her even more often. My grandmother told me if I ever saw a big cat, I should run. You better run faster than it can. You never want to be caught alone with the cold clip of claws and death.
Once when we were camping, I heard one. I was sleeping in a small tent with my younger cousin. The sound was a woman screaming for her life. It had been so silent then, like a crack of lightning, all silence and safety was lost. Fear kept me from crying out. Then my uncle talked to us from his own tent. He said to be still and not to worry. I can’t remember if we held our breath, but I’m certain we thought it couldn’t hurt. I trusted what he said. He survived a lion when he was a child and through him, we would do the same.
Eventually, we fell asleep.
Tigers kept in unfit conditions are prone to having ingrown claws and decaying teeth. They are found with urine burns on their skin too, from the inability to escape their own waste. Once, in Ohio, a building caught fire, and a tiger jumped out of a window. No one had known it was even there, but when the flames began to lick the home, it leaped. A tiger, in the wild, can consume up to a hundred pounds of a carcass in one sitting. In an American basement, the best they’ll get is frozen chicken or a dead deer.
People with money buy exotic animals for show, breeding, and trading. They do it because they can. Isn’t that the way most bodily violence happens anyway? Because you can. In one case, a young girl set out to play with a family friend’s “pet” tiger. The cat swatted at her head in play, and it broke her neck instantly.
My neighbors have a ceramic, white tiger on their porch. The color white is a genetic hiccup for tigers. Once in the wild, a cub was born white, and someone stole it. Now white tigers are inbred for their color. Those tigers have the potential to suffer from a multitude of pains. Some have spines that never grow past their hips, so they can’t use their back legs. Nearly every white tiger has crossed eyes. The thing that makes them beautiful—that sets them apart from their brethren—kills them. I often wonder how heavy the ceramic tiger is, if I could steal it, and then how badly would the neighbors miss it. Then later, I think of the math—the statistics really—and wonder if they have a tiger in their basement.
Our grandmother kept water guns in her garage. The biggest one, a Super Soaker, belonged to my youngest uncle. When we would have a water gunfight, he would always hide in plain sight. Except, it never seemed that way. Armed with smaller guns, we would run and aim for each other. The entire time knowing he was somewhere. Waiting. Then, as if he were a shadow all along, he would turn to face us and chase us down. He would empty the entire tank of the gun in your face, while we laughed and ran. My father, during a similar fight, was sitting on the roof of the house with a bucket of water. Like his brother, no one knew to look for him in places like that. No one noticed until it was too late. They knew where we were, and what ammunition we carried, and they soaked us to the bone every time.
One Halloween, I snuck around the side of the house to scare my dad. When the heavy door swung open, I yelled BOO! And watched my father’s hands smash into a fist and saw his arm pull back. When he saw that it was me, he shook his head. Later, my mother said you scared him. You’re lucky he didn’t punch you. I thought it was odd that in our family luck did not equal wealth or laughter, it meant not getting punched.
Shortly after that, my grandfather contracted cancer and got divorced. My dad, always so committed to his father, couldn’t let him suffer. So my grandfather came to live with us. He too would resort to swinging when afraid. He lived with us for fourteen years before I moved out. Even now, when it’s time for dinner, we yell from across the room. We motion with our hands, pretending to scoop a spoonful of food into our mouths. This is the safest way to get his attention. This is how we are lucky.
When I was twenty-three, my brother got into an argument with our father in the driveway. My father taunted him and dared him to throw a punch. They fought until one of them ended up on the ground. My mother and grandmother pulled them apart. After it was over, my father said to his son you’re lucky your mom was there.
I knew, without asking, that this was not the first time my grandmother had separated a fight between father and son.
My uncle, on the day I graduated college, told me to leave and never return. When I was eighteen and upset after a fight with my father, the same uncle provided me solace. My father followed me and yelled and cursed. I hid in my uncle’s garage; when my father finally left, my uncle came to talk to me. He had been building a shelf and wood shavings were everywhere. He sat across from me.
He said I had to work hard to graduate, to leave. I was the first one in the family to do that, so it meant more. This was what made me stand out from the rest of the family. I was the hiccup in the family line, at least I was trying so hard to be. He said I had to look at my father as an example and decide to be better than that. Decide not to hit my kids or yell or be distant or curse like that or seethe. I had to learn to forget.
In all the books I’ve read about trauma, psychologists have discussed how trauma lives in the body. Strangely, how trauma travels through bloodlines and rears its ugly head in many ways. I poured over these books in the same way the scientists pour themselves over the teeth of the Tsavo lions. I’m trying to explain the uncanny to myself. Up until now, the uncanny could not be explained. This haunts me, knowing I may never know.
When I started college, I began to have intense night terrors. Sometimes waking up screaming and crying. Sometimes waking up standing in the kitchen and having no idea how I got there. When you have a night terror, everything seems and feels real. Like it would if you opened your eyes. However, something sinister will be waiting. Sometimes, I’ve seen people sitting on my chest or standing at the foot of my bed. More often than not, I don’t remember what happened. I only know I wake up and I’ll be sitting up in bed and sobbing so hard that I question if it’s even possible to cry any longer, any harder.
While being diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I talked a lot about my symptoms with my mother. She had a hard time understanding how it could be possible for me to have such a disorder. Like everyone else in my family, she overlooked the history. She missed the forest for the trees. I still have night terrors when I’m excessively tired or stressed out. I have long accepted that it is simply my reality. When I stay in foreign places for work trips, I create walls of pillows around me and I stay up as long as I can. I worry that it’ll happen and the person in the next room will wake up in terror too. Although I had accepted it, I had never thought much of it. Until I learned my father would wake up with a gun shoved in his face. Then I understood.
After my father assaulted my mother, the police officer responding to the call had them standing apart from each other in the driveway. The officer was loud and perhaps shaped that way. He yelled a lot and assumed a lot. My mother explained she is separated from my father and has been for years, but didn’t divorce because she has kids and needs health insurance.
The officer looked at me and said, “She’s an adult, so that’s solved.”
For the rest of my life, I will always think of that man and think how lovely it must be to not understand what a legacy of pain was. He kept his thumbs hooked into his belt, next to his gun.
He asked, “What can we do tonight about what just happened?”
Unable to hold it back, I started to cry and said, “Officer, he has a history of aggression and abuse.” Meaning: Officer, if you do nothing and you keep yelling at us, he’ll think the behavior is okay. He’ll eat us. He’ll put us in a big, glass container so everyone can stare at what’s left. You have to reprimand him, you have to tell him if he ever does it again, he’ll go to jail.
My dad spent the night somewhere else that day. I don’t remember where. In the years to come, he would cheat on my mother. He would break my heart so many times over that it felt as natural as breathing—as pacing. I’ve tried to understand it in the only way I can: Through the lens of what is wild. Instinct. I count backward and find there are three generations of violence alive in me. Rather than flounder in the revelation, I’ve thought about it like this: I’ve transitioned from the basement of someone’s house to living in a sanctuary. I’ll never be the same but I’ll be free. I wish my father could see it that way.
- Published in Issue 30, Nonfiction