Tiny Americans

by Devin Murphy

  Dedication

  For Hyat, Nora, and Jude

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1. Jamie Thurber, 1978

  2. Connor Thurber, 1984

  3. Connor Thurber, 1985

  4. Catrin Thurber, 1986

  5. Lewis Thurber, 1986

  6. Jamie Thurber, 1992

  7. Connor Thurber, 1995

  8. Terrance Thurber, 2000

  9. John Parks, 2000

  10. Connor Thurber, 2005

  11. Lewis Thurber, 2007

  12. Jamie Thurber, 2013

  13. Lewis Thurber, 2018

  14. Terrance Thurber, 2018

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise for Devin Murphy and Tiny Americans

  Also by Devin Murphy

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Jamie Thurber, 1978

  In the fall of 1978, our father brought home a stack of books from the library on activities to do with us kids as an attempt to get himself sober. He had Taking the Kids Outside, The Dangerous and Exciting Backyard, old back issues of Seventeen and Boys’ Life magazines, and Boy Scouts training manuals. I was thirteen and my two little brothers, Lewis and Connor, were ten and nine. Of course we didn’t know it at the time, but from that point on, what he read the night before would be implemented the following morning as the day’s activities, and for a year this became his new parenting style.

  “Today we are going to find the heartbeat of a tree,” he bellowed into our bedrooms on a Saturday morning in September. We were to dress and meet him on the front porch in fifteen minutes. Our father had traded with a truck driver fireworks from his shop for a contact microphone and headphones. He used to run his store like a pawnshop, trading goods that he’d bring home for himself or for us kids. We each took a turn wearing the headphones while he placed the microphone into the warped knothole of a hollow tree. “That’s the heartbeat,” he told us as the soft shivering sound snuck into our ears.

  That calming sound momentarily soothed the coil of nerves that had gripped me since childhood, and that I could not seem to shake. By the third tree, my father was yelling at my brothers again—“Boys, quit your grab-assin’!”—and he handed me the microphone and tried to separate their wrestling match. “Come on. Sit and be patient like your sister,” he told them, and pointed to me sitting at the base of a large elm. I hunched closer to the tree like a dutiful daughter and let the rhythmic crackling and distant gurgling noises seep into my bones.

  “The noises come from grubs nibbling away at the wood,” he said, but I was beyond his voice and was already convinced everything around me was alive.

  From what I could tell, our father’s amped-up efforts at parenting began after my parents started going on their Wednesday night “dates,” which really meant marriage-counseling sessions in town. It was one of the only times they were consistently in close proximity. If they were both at home together chaos usually broke out.

  “You’re not even listening, Terrance. Just listen for once, will you,” our mother yelled. “You were told to be a better listener.”

  “Well, I was also told to tell you when you are being impossible to love, remember that?” he yelled back.

  Then they’d quickly lash out at each other, going for the seams to tear the other down or reverting to a silence that wouldn’t break until our father became too agitated to sit still. Then he took us kids outside and gave us lists of things we needed to learn, as if he were trying to systematically force on us an interest in the world.

  “You have to know the world you’re in to know who you are in the world,” he said. Then we moved on to learning a list of backyard bugs, which he was in a hurry to teach us, like something essential was on the line. This only made us anxious instead of satiating anything in him. We’d race one another to find millipedes, crickets, grasshoppers, and potato bugs, which I secretly envied for their ability to curl up in their instant armor.

  That October, he woke us early and we spent a long weekend making a stone oven in our backyard out of used cinder blocks, red bricks, and clay we dug out of the river bank that bordered the far end of the cemetery. He never considered what it looked like to people driving by who saw us carrying industrial-strength black garbage bags laden with clay, and shovels slung over our shoulders as we crept out of the graveyard.

  There was also our aborted attempt at a compost heap that flattened and spread out into a smelly brown splotch of eggshells, rinds, and earth in the far corner of the yard. We made jack-o’-lanterns and collected pine cones. Connor and Lewis chased the Canadian geese that populated the cemetery. They would get real close and run away when the birds raised their wings and hissed. We collected their feathers, which I dipped in ink and used to write out my homework. We did leaf and bark rubbings until we had imprints of almost everything in the woods on our thin white papers. I suspected this was all an attempt to keep us out of the house so our father wouldn’t have to go back inside and be with our mother.

  My mother had her own obsessions. She was an artist and kept her studio in town, where she could often be found working on her sculptures and paintings. The paintings rotating on our walls correlated to whatever period she was in. My brothers brought several boys from their school to our house to stand at the shrine of Naked Women #17 during my mother’s “live art” period when our walls were fleshed with life-size drawings of nude people that she framed herself.

  Then there was her fascination with Indonesian shadow puppets. She painted a large series of them using dark pastel acrylics. The puppets were solid-white reliefs against prismatic-colored backgrounds. They looked like Nefertiti-esque skeletons frozen in terrifying pirouettes. She brought those puppet paintings home one at a time. My father, brothers, and I stood around the walls with her, looking at what she had hung, wondering if we were supposed to interpret some kind of meaning she could not express any other way.

  The shadow puppet she brought home that fall was the brightest. The white outline of the puppet was more demonic than the rest, as if the dark, silent shadow at the center of our lives had been emboldened to dance. I positioned myself between my brothers when she unveiled it.

  “This is one of your best yet!” my father said.

  “I like the colors,” Lewis said.

  “Me too,” echoed Connor.

  “This feels wonderful,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I was talking about the painting itself or standing there with them all together, but my mother kneeled next to me and engulfed me in her arms.

  “Thank you,” she whispered soft and warm into my ear, perhaps realizing I would forever remember her embrace.

  Despite these few happy moments my mother shared with my brothers and me, neither we nor her art were quite enough to keep her rooted in our world. Whatever sadness haunted her kept its firm grip on her ankles and would not relent. So she kept herself steady by drinking, and by afternoon the drinking gave a lovely brightness to her face. From far away she looked like a blushing girl. It was only when you were very close that you noticed the faint explosions of capillaries just under the skin.

  Over the course of the day she became more animated. Her German accent waned by lunch, so her voice trickled like smooth honey-water. By sunset, she was back to her thick, bitten-off syllables. Then, late at night, when she woke us up, I tried to understand her, really understand her, but it was almost always too difficult.

  That November, she rolled onto my brothers’ beds cheering because the Buffalo Bills won their night game. From Connor’s bed to Lewis’s, she bounced and whooped, and I watched from the doorway as in their half sleep they got excited and joined her hea
then celebration. But I never asked what they really thought once they were fully awake, and realized they had never seen her watch a football game, and that her cries of “We won. We won!” were nothing more than some mistimed attempt to connect with her sons.

  The next day, our father waited for us at the bus stop after school, pacing around in anxious little circles with red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes.

  “Come on, I want to show you something,” he said, and loaded us into the back of his old 1964 four-door powder-blue Oldsmobile—a large, boxy land yacht with one of the floorboards in the back seat rusted away, which allowed my brothers and me to watch the road fly past beneath our feet.

  “Don’t put your feet in the hole!” he yelled.

  Eventually my brothers learned to scoop up handfuls of gravel from the driveway before getting into the car. They dropped the pebbles through the hole and watched out the back window to see where they ricocheted.

  He drove us to a pond south of town, on the outskirts of a horse farm. The trees along the road were posted with Private Property signs. He parked the car, and the three of us followed him into the autumn woods. There, he took a bucket and scooped it full of pond water so we could look at the life inside: pond skaters, dragonfly nymphs, pond snails, and whirling beetles.

  “This is where the real life is out here,” he sighed to us. He had a magnifying glass that we used to find and collect frog eggs. When he found some eggs, we scooped them into a mason jar, which we took home to watch as the eggs slowly cracked open and the tadpoles grew bulbous foreheads, hind- and then forelegs, until we had a handful of frogs that needed releasing into our local stream.

  In the evenings, I eavesdropped on my parents when they attempted sitting together on the back porch. They talked about the firework shop, painting, and the philosophy books my father brought home from the Olean Public Library. My father loved those books. He thought they were near sacred, and I’d listen to him talk about them from my window until my parents’ voices began to slur from their drinking. Then I’d listen for the call-and-response of their tiny mood swings and the endless surrenders they required of each other. I’d lurch into fitful sleep wishing I could stretch my arms out the window, down the side of the house, and rest a hand on each of their shoulders to calm them—to let them feel how much I loved them both.

  It was after one of those heavy-drinking nights that turned into something heated, my mother came to find me in my sleep. She woke me by shaking my shoulders until I sat up and looked at her. It was one of the last moments where there wasn’t anything truly wrong between us.

  “Don’t ever have children,” she said, looking me squarely in the eye. “Promise me you won’t ever have children.”

  She was sullen, her words piercing through my sleep, and I saw her standing in the center of my life like a glass sculpture—translucent blue and desperately fragile.

  I wanted to yell at her but swallowed those feelings because I didn’t know what hidden need was pulling at her to say those things. The trajectory of her day was always building upward to some manic excitement about one thing or another, always ending like some sort of fabulous Roman candle, flowing light for a few incendiary moments before leaving that phantom path in the dark where the tails of fire had been.

  I could never fully piece together why my parents were the way they were. The facts were shadowy; my parents were shadowy; everything about our entire lives was blurry-eyed—her from Europe, him from Montana, both seeming just as far away. When I was feeling brave I’d ask about their earlier lives. When I asked my mother how she and my dad came to be married, she told me that they dated for a while first.

  “Mostly we were fooling around,” she said. “Once, he came into my apartment, burst through the doors from outside, soaking wet from the rainstorm he’d marched through, and stood there with a giant smile on his face and stared at me like he was really happy with life and thrilled to find me standing there.”

  “I mean it was my apartment!” she said. “Who was he expecting to be there?”

  “Then he said he wanted to dance with me and came toward me. I didn’t want him touching me dripping wet like that, so I moved out of the way, took one step to the side, and the drunk fool goes crashing by me. Both of his hands smashed clean through the drywall in my hallway.”

  She said all this like people were always showing up at her place, falling-down-drunk with inarticulate confessions of love, and crashing through walls like a cartoon character.

  Because I never knew when my brothers were going to charge in, or when our father was going to call for me to explore the neighborhood, or when our mother was going to sneak in for one of her midnight sermons, I didn’t trust the privacy of my own bedroom. So I got into the habit of dressing warm and sneaking across the street at night to the cemetery to give myself what Charlie Rutkowski from school called “the old sticky finger.”

  I went when it was late and would lean against one of the larger headstones set back from the road. I unbuttoned my jeans, and began rubbing myself until it felt like my body was lifting upward and floating.

  In October, my father was hired to clear and remove the wood from a new property development near Chautauqua Lake, which he did with a backhoe, chain saws, and a rented flatbed semitrailer with an attached crane. He brought the big semi loaded with logs down through town and let a big blast of the truck’s horn go several times in succession in front of our house. I heard the horn and went running out.

  On the street my father was in the big rig, the cab purring and lurching off the pavement. A drift of black smoke rising out of the chrome exhaust pipe, the disk lid popping up and down like a Pac-Man mouth belching fumes.

  “Get your brothers and hop in,” he yelled.

  He drove us through the south towns. On the empty country roads, he let us yank on the cord that made the horn blare, and that was how we made our entrance onto a large Amish settlement with horse-drawn buggies, large red barns, and fields with mounds of cut hay spread out like bedded animals. We paid no respect to the quiet of the countryside that belonged to the men with untrimmed beards hanging flat off their chins and the women in denim-colored dresses with white bonnets, who stopped and watched as we went screaming by. Thick children with broad, squared shoulders covered their ears, and I waved to them.

  “Thatta girl,” my father said, but kept looking out the window.

  I secretly watched his face as he drove, trying to decipher what he was thinking—how he felt about me at that moment.

  At the center of the village there was an old sawmill where the Amish used draft horses and large levies hung from the barn to unload the felled trees.

  “Let’s go have a look,” my father said, and led us to a kennel around the back of the barn. Dozens of large black Newfoundland dogs were separated by chain-link fencing. They were all giant to begin with, and each dog was also pregnant. Some had dark nipples hanging off their stomach like plump raisins.

  “What is all this?” I asked.

  “Where do you think those puppies at the pet store come from?”

  “Can we have one?” Connor asked.

  “Do you really want a pregnant dog?” my father asked.

  “Well. Any dog,” Lewis said.

  “No. These will get goofier and goofier the more they breed them.”

  His answer didn’t surprise me. We had avoided pets since Lewis brought home his kindergarten class’s hamster over a school break and it clamped onto his tiny finger. He thought the animal was going to eat its way up to his knuckle. He slammed the clinging hamster against the paisley wallpaper as he ran from room to room, leaving blood splats until Mom finally dragged him into the bathroom, held his hand under the tap, and drowned the hamster.

  The smell of freshly cut hay and dog urine hung in the air. The calls of men guiding the horses and the logs came from the back side of the barn.

  When the logs were all unloaded my father handed the men who did the work a list of furniture he wanted bu
ilt from the wood.

  “I give them the wood. They make the furniture, and in return they keep the leftover lumber. Then I’ll sell the furniture at the store or back to whoever owns that big damn house being built,” he said.

  Early that December, my father took us for a scavenger hunt at the dead-car junkyard. On the drive across town he stopped into a local bar called the Tavern, and we all went inside with him. The floors were linoleum, and my school shoes glided over them until they got stuck on something sticky. My chin barely cleared the padded leather saucer seats propped up on chrome poles bolted into the ground. No sunlight made it into that room, and the man behind the bar, a scrawny guy who had an overwashed red flannel shirt and a cigarette-ash-colored beard, looked like he’d never seen the sun in his life. Behind the bar was a fat boy Lewis’s age, named Lenwood Murry. He stopped washing the dishes, smiled, and waved at Lewis and Connor.

  “Jesus,” the bearded man said to my father, pointing at the three of us sharp on his heels.

  “Don’t worry. We’re just passing through.” My father pulled out a wad of cash from his wallet and slapped it onto the bar with his open palm. “This makes us square,” he said, then he had us all turn around and walk out the front door, into the sunlight that stung my eyes.

  “What was that all about?” I screwed up the courage to ask him.

  That’s when he reached down and gently wrapped his fingers around my neck and pretended to throttle me. My skin prickled at his winsome touch. “Look who’s turning into Miss Nosey,” he said, pecking my forehead before letting me go.

  That same month we took a five-gallon work bucket out into the cemetery, toward the back part of the burial grounds. Our father had us make plaster casts of the animal tracks we had found. I filled a hoof indent a deer had made in the mud, Connor filled one that looked like it came from a small dog, and Lewis came back wearing one shoe and smiling with a plaster mold of his own left foot.

  Our father put those plaster molds on our kitchen counter, where they shifted across the linoleum from one spot to another for weeks until he knocked them all to the floor while rooting around in the cupboard. He finally found a clear unmarked bottle that he held up and swirled in front of the light. He was frantic, and his forehead was dabbled in beads of sweat. The dark yellow liquid inside looked like pond scum. Then he shut his eyes and drank it all in one tilt without noticing me in the room.