Humming Birds (excerpt of rough draft)

“Amy, you’re gonna get it,” Nikki tells me. I’m hiding between the lilac bushes, Barbie’s head in my hand. It’s our weekend at our father’s house.

“What’d you use?”

“Daddy John’s knife.” I’m not afraid. My father is harmless, even almost afraid of us. It’s my stepfather I’m scared of.

“I’m telling!” And off she runs toward the farmhouse. I fish for the knife in the pocket of my dirty overalls and slice at Barbie’s pretty blue eyes so they open. I sit and poke little holes where her pupils are and then I saw at her ratty hair. I lick my bottom lip, almost got it. A pleasure fills me.

“Amy! You get in here!” It’s Grandma Helen, I can see her wiping her hands on her apron through the lilac branches. The white house is blinding but filthy. The shutters are falling off. My Uncle Bob saunters up the dirt driveway and tosses a beer can near my hiding spot. He doesn’t see me, I breathe. His hands, I don’t like his hands.

I wait for him to get to the porch before I emerge. I stuff the knife in my pocket and leave Barbie behind.

“Amy what are you doing? Give your daddy his knife back, you don’t belong with that. Come in it’s lunch time.” I race up the stairs and into the kitchen where Grandpa Leo sits in his brown leather chair that spins and spins when you lay across it. He’s next to the window, above the lilac bushes, watching the humming bird feeder as usual, sipping his Old Style. I know it’s time to be a little more civilized so I toss the knife on the table and take my seat. Nikki and Jodie are already eating their Spaghettios from the chipped blue China dishes I always loved to look at.

The kitchen is a dismal yellow place with large wooden silverware hanging on the walls. There’s dishes and beer cans and paper bags all over. The floor is a brown linoleum that slants down into the next room where grandma’s organ sits. My sisters and I sing church hymnals with her on Sundays. There are old jelly jars all over, filled with old fashioned candy; lilacs fill white bubbly vases. The floor then rolls into the dark living room. On my tricycle I barely have to petal around the rooms. Grandpa’s torn, black leather chair sits in the corner against the gray paneling. The first time he gave me a sip of his beer I was sitting on his lap in that chair, picking at the white stuffing coming out of the arm.

Daddy John walks into the kitchen on his long, faded denim legs. He wears one of three shirts, this one the brown and white plaid one with the pretty white metal buttons. He sits down at the little table and opens another beer.

“Jesus Christ, John. You’re good for nothin’. Good for nothing. You got three babies here and alls you do is sit around and drink, piss your life away, can’t hold a job. You’re a miserable failure dammit.” My dad’s head bows a little and he’s quiet. Grandpa shakes his bald head and Daddy John looks at us and looks away. We smile and eat in the silence. As I get up to go outside, I reach across and can barely reach the knife but I do, and I slide it towards Daddy John and say sorry. He pinches my cheek.

Outside we race for the huge apple trees. The pink blossoms fall across the yard like snow and if you stand beneath the two of them, they arch over you and it’s like being in one of those snow globes. The swing Daddy John built is a board on one piece of rope. Nikki gets there first and Daddy John comes out to push her. I climb the tree, up the nailed-in boards my cousins pounded in for steps. Fat bumble bees buzz all about in the pink honeysuckle fragrance.

“Daddy John, Daddy John, when’s it my turn?” Jodie and I take turns asking. For the first and last time I see my father get angry.

“I’m not ‘Daddy John’ I’m your daddy! He can’t take my place with you’s!” and just like that he storms off into the field where the hay bales dot the horizon. We follow after him singing "Daddy John, Daddy John." For the first time he keeps going.

It’s getting dark and grandma tells Daddy John to put us in the tub. All three of us strip down, shameless with the door wide open. Daddy John, filling the tub, sees us and blushes, looking away. He gets up and says, “Okay, okay you’s, wash up,,” and he leaves, too embarrassed to stay, so grandma comes in to wash our hair. She calls us Salt, Pepper, and Paprika because of our blond, brunette, and red hair. It’s different at mom and Scott’s house. You gotta watch--always watch.

We march up the yellow-carpeted stairs to the room we share with our father. It’s divided in two by an orange afghan. We crawl up into the high double bed we share, Jodie in the middle because she’s the smallest and might fall out. It’s dark up here and my pajamas are still clinging to my wet body. Daddy John kisses us good night saying “I love you’s” and he walks toward the light in the door and

descends the creaky stairs. I watch him disappear and then my eyes get caught, as they do every weekend I’m here, on the haunting picture of The Last Supper. There are golds and silvers and glittery greens in it and it and it shimmers somehow, in the dark. I stare at it, somewhat afraid and I don’t know why the terror, until I doze off.

I sneak up on Daddy Scott, crawling across the nappy green carpet in my scratchy nightgown. Sometimes staples stick up from hidden ridges and prick my knees. The carpet is smooshed like fields after a storm, with mysterious, stitched rivers dividing the landmasses. I crawl to the end of the dull and sticky table. Two owls with glassy, yellow eyes sit on their perch, holding up the dingy lampshade. A glass ashtray reflects golden light. I watch his profile as he smiles and talks with his brother—my new uncle—who sits among empty beer cans on the other side of the dark living room. They’re talking with words I don’t quite understand yet. He laughs, so I laugh. I like his dimples. I like everything about this strange character. My sisters and I are learning how to spell his last name. He wants us.

He hears me laugh and slowly turns an annoyed, oily face in my direction. My hair is still wet from the tub. He puffs a large cloud of cigarette smoke into my shiny face. They laugh. I cough and laugh, too. They keep talking. It means go away.

We're learning how to spell our new last name. I try to copy my mother's cursive--the elegant loop of her capital S. "Stevens."

Jodie looks up from her construction paper of scribbles, "How do we write Daddy Scott?" My mother, warm and safe, smiles and tells us "just dad is fine." She likes him, so we do too.

Daddy Scott chases me with boots and fists and belts. My feet sweat and slip around in my jelly shoes when I make my dashes for the nearest door, even though I am never fast enough. He is huge and takes up all space. After awhile I don’t feel so afraid anymore. I propel across rooms like a boomerang—a strange mixture of euphoric flight and humiliation—and crash into the yellowed walls or broken dressers. Upstairs my sisters sit on their ruffled sheets, waiting for my screams to stop. I didn’t know I was screaming.

It’s best to get it out of the way early in the day. One swift black boot coming at my head means blackout, and I can wake up and be left alone for the whole day to play with my Hug-a-Bunch and Barbie dolls. He locks himself away in the garage, chain-smoking Doral’s and sweating over an engine to Deep Purple. I try to offer him a Coke or Kool-Aid, barefoot in the driveway. I think my sisters and me should clean the house to surprise mom when she gets home. I want to shine for her.

When she returns home from cleaning the church rectory, it's time for Daddy John to show up. This is where my trouble begins--somewhere in here. I refused to go with him, screaming at my mother through hot fat tears that I didn't want her to die, that I didn't want to have babies. I began to do this before Headstart as well--she still regrets forcing me to go. My memories stop here, aside from two things: the time my mother took me to a psychiatrist. I remember playing in a cardboard house, and then I was told to draw my family. I drew a blue bird, pressing the black and blue crayons into the paper as hard as I could, pleasing. I'm a good girl. The other memory is a pornographic video tape of my stepbrother and stepsister on a swing, and I'm involved somehow. I hear Daddy Scott laughing and cajoling. And I'm a good girl. Their faces--I'll never forget their faces. Dead; the look of dead children.

Daddy John died from scerosis of the liver--drinking. He fell on the floor of a tavern while Nikki and I were in another city, wasted. I was twenty-one. I had that look spreading across my face by then--the look my stepbrother and sister had. Death you can never run from. It grows in you and gains strength as if another perpetrator has come into your life. I used to believe I failed myself--that I was weak and my will was failing and I was, deep down, a bad joke. I used to think that filth lived only in the belly of people...until he died, and I thought about those petals that fell like snow on his lawn.

At the viewing of his body I had my first full-blown panic attack. My sisters and I got to go to his house (which we'd never been in--we hadn't seen him in years except downtown) and the first thing I went for was his closet. And there it was--the brown and white plaid shirt with the pretty white metal buttons. I breathed him in, and that was the first time I died.