In the Language of My Captor. Shane McCrae

Purgatory: A Memoir / A Son and a Father of Sons

       I myself prefer to be left face up

       in a ditch and for someone to go to jail

      because of what he’s done to me.

      — PRISCILLA BECKER

      Ajax (within)

       Boy! Where is my child?

      — SOPHOCLES (TRANSLATED BY JOHN MOORE)

      1

      Most mornings, on my way to school, I would stop on the bridge over the branch of the creek that separated the school from my house and peer through the railing down at the minnows twisting in the pale current.

      Some afternoons, and sometimes on the weekends, I would climb through the thick bushes behind the school—I would push, violently, sometimes knocking whole trees down, sometimes stomping on them, imagining myself hacking through a faraway jungle, and once I brought one of my grandfather’s machetes with me, his only souvenirs from the army, although he hadn’t fought in a war, two machetes and a pair of boots, and hacked so desperately, so gleefully then that I didn’t get anywhere, but stood in one spot, hacking—and through the bamboo trees beyond the bushes, to the village of abandoned and rotting houses in the placeless clearing.

      Two houses, both wooden, and both painted brown, although most of the paint had peeled away, stood in the center of the village if one were facing the village, having just emerged from the bamboo forest. To the left of the houses a narrow dirt road led away from the village. To the right of the houses stood a building that looked like a cross between a barn and a warehouse. It, too, was brown, and brown also where the paint had peeled away, exposing the wood underneath.

      The village was the emptiest place I had ever seen. But the warehouse and the houses were full. The houses were full of furniture nobody had used in years, and old kitchen appliances, and shoes—I remember several pairs of shoes—and stained jeans. In the first house I walked through, the first couch I saw had been tilted on its back. It lay in a small living room, and next to it was a pair of cracked brown wingtip oxfords, and a few feet in front of it were two empty, beatenup suitcases; otherwise, it was surrounded by old sheets of plywood and fragments of the walls. The houses stood even though they looked as if more material had been torn from the walls than could have been in the walls in the first place.