Crab Orchard Review Vol. 12, No. 2, our

Heather E. Goodman
“I can do it,” I say.
Will sighs. “You’re not supposed to lift.” He snatches the turtle’s
tail, and lugs it toward the plywood mounted on two saw horses. The
plywood is splattered with thirty years of splotches and smears.
He hauls the snapper up to the table, and it bounces with the
weight. The turtle attempts to swim its way off. Its nails carve gashes
into the plywood.
“Can you stoke the fire?” Will coaxes me with his eyes, both hands
keeping the lumpy turtle from scrambling away.
“I can handle this.”
“Christ, Louise, I know you can. But there’s no reason you have to.”
In a huff, I walk toward the fire, but out of the corner of my eye I
glimpse Will uncover the machete, and I have to watch as I hear Dad’s
rasping voice. I see him again, hunched up in a foreign room with
tubes and bright lights, and he’s telling Will how to clean the snapper.
Not me, his own daughter, but Will, whom he loves more than even his
own son because Will is “a man of the woods, a survivor.”
Dad picked at one of the numerous scabs that had appeared all
over his body and gave curt directions, “Jam a fork through its head,
and then—bam—hack its head off.” That was the last I’d heard of the
snapper soup recipe until this morning. Without making an excuse, I
had walked out of the hospital room. By the time I came back again,
I could see from the door Dad sleeping, as Will, my survivor, held his
hand, his forehead tucked against Dad’s yellowed fingernails.
Will married Dad as much as he married me at the church last year.
Will and I met at the community center during a career fair just
after Mom’s death. That day we both landed jobs, Will a chef at the only
decent restaurant in town, and me a clerk at the post office. We were
both unguarded and relieved, and when we walked out of the center,
instead of saying goodbye, we celebrated with a beer at The Joint. When
I brought Will home to meet Dad the following month, I couldn’t get a
word in. It was the first time Dad came back to life after Mom died.
We fell in love quickly. He called each day after the lunch rush,
and on my way home I visited the restaurant, enveloped in his broths
and sauces, oregano, onions, wine. At the swamp, he told Dad his own
butchering stories of venison and pheasant. We watched silhouettes
of songbirds transform into silhouettes of bats at dusk. Sitting on
the steps with my back against Will’s chest, tracing his forearm
tendons, we talked about how wrong people had gotten things, and
we planned a quiet life away from them in our own swamp. He cried
Crab Orchard Review ◆ 47