Tonight it was something else.
The thunderheads appeared on his father’s brow. “What do you mean, ‘That’s too bad’? What kind of shit is that?”
“Just…too bad, Daddy. That’s all I meant. it’s-”
Torrance’s hand swept out at the end of his arm, huge hand, hamhock arm, but speedy, yes, very speedy, and Jacky went down with church bells in his head and a split lip.
“Shutup” his father said, giving it a broad A.
Jacky said nothing. Nothing would do any good now. The balance had swung the wrong way.
“You ain’t gonna sass me,” said Torrance. “You won’t sass your daddy. Get up here and take your medicine.”
There was something in his face this time, some dark and blazing thing. And Jacky suddenly knew that this time there might be no hug at the end of the blows, and if there was he might, be unconscious and unknowing … maybe even dead.
He ran.
Behind him, his father let out a bellow of rage and chased him., a flapping specter in hospital whites, a juggernaut of doom following his son from the front yard to the back.
Jacky ran for his life. The tree house, he was thinking. He can’t get up there; the ladder nailed to the tree won’t hold him. I’ll get up there, talk to him; maybe he’ll go to sleep – Oh, God, please let him go to sleep – he was weeping in terror as he ran.
“Come back here, goddammit!” His father was roaring behind him. “Come back here and take your medicine! Take it like a man!”
Jacky flashed past the back steps. His mother, that thin and defeated woman, scrawny in a faded housedress, had come out through the screen door from the kitchen, just as Jacky ran past with his father in pursuit. She opened her mouth as if to speak or cry out, but her hand came up in a fist and stopped whatever she might have said, kept it safely behind her teeth. She was afraid for her son, but more afraid that her husband would turn on her.
“No, you don’t! Come back here!”
Jacky reached the large elm in the backyard, the elm where last year his father had smoke-drugged a colony of wasps then burned their nest with gasoline. The boy went up the haphazardly hung nailed-on rungs like greased lightning, and still he was nearly not fast enough. His father’s clutching, enraged hand grasped the boy’s ankle in a grip like flexed steel, then slipped a little and succeeded only in pulling off Jacky’s loafer. Jacky went up the last, three rungs and crouched on the floor of the tree house, 12 feet above the ground, panting and crying on his hands and knees.
His father seemed to go crazy. He danced around the tree like an Indian, Bellowing his rage. He slammed his fists into the tree, making bark fly and bringing lattices of blood to his knuckles. He kicked it. His huge moon face was white with frustration and red with anger.
“Please, Daddy,” Jacky moaned. “Whatever I said … I’m sorry I said it…”
“Come down! You come down out of there take your fucking medicine, you little cur! Right now!”
“I Will … I will If you promise not to … to hit me too hard … not hurt me… just spank me but not hurt me…”
“Get out of that tree!” his father screamed.
Jacky looked toward the house but that was hopeless. His mother had retreated somewhere far away, to neutral ground.
“GET OUT RIGHT NOW!”
“Oh, Daddy, I don’t dare!” Jacky cried out, and that was the truth. Because now his father might kill him.
There was a period of stalemate. A minute, perhaps, or perhaps two. His father circled the tree, puffing and blowing like a whale. Jacky turned around and around on his hands and knees, following the movements. They were like parts of a visible clock.
The second or third time he came back to the ladder nailed to the tree, Torrance stopped. He looked speculatively at the ladder. And laid his hands on the rung before his eyes. He began to climb.