He was prosperous enough to buy a place in town so his
daughter didn’t have to live on the turkey farm, where
the smell would repel the sons of the nicer families,
according to her mother. And so they lived
on a shabby genteel block on a quiet, tree-lined street,
a gingerbread house next door that a doctor
and his young wife were fixing up to look better.

But he was still a turkey farmer, she knew that, and his ways
weren’t those of the boys who only got their fingernails
dirty playing football. He would crawl under their cars
and hook a log chain to the axle and pull the young pups
out of the mud when they got stuck parkin’ and sparkin’
on his land. That’s what he knew of dirt, and they didn’t.
They’d sheepishly open their wallets and give him a five.

He wouldn’t say anything, just go back to the barn.
Somebody has to feed the birds, he’d say as he walked away.
She was smart as a whip, he’d tell his friends proudly.
“Are you sure she’s yours?” they’d ask with a laugh and
he’d admit, he had next to nothing to do with it.
“She’s all her mother, thank God,” he’d say, and
it was true; the women of the house lived apart

from him, out on the farm except for Saturday night
and Sunday, when he’d come back into town. His wife
would make him wash outside the smell was so bad,
and she would yield to him only grudgingly, an animal
resistance he couldn’t miss, not with all the time he
spent in the barnyard, and he resented it. He was paying
for the house that looked liked splendor when he entered.

There began to be Saturday nights when he wouldn’t come
home, not even to give his daughter’s dates the once-over,
look them right in the eye, put the fear of the Lord in them.
The look that is an appraisal and a warning at the same time.
He had, he said, things to do, so they were split into three; mother
at home, daughter riding around, going to dances, having fun,
the father God knows where until they’d hear him on the stairs.

It was the night of the Junior Prom and her mother asked him
“Can’t you please be at the house for pictures when her beau
shows up? His father’s an optician, they’re a nice family.”
“You don’t want me in them pictures,” he said.
“And I can look at them anytime,” and with that he hung up the phone.
He’d put in a shower out at the farm, and begun to frequent
a new gentlemen’s club that went in where the old dirt track

stock car races had been held. “The Grandstand Club,” the signs
on the highway from the south into town said. “Exotic Dancers!
Luxury U Can Afford!” It was a hilljack’s dream of big city sin.
They had white girls, too, unlike the sporting houses over by the tracks.
He became a regular—he and the hare-lipped man who’d say it was
a shame they couldn’t gamble there too, then it’d be a heaven on earth.

One time he paid for an all-nighter with an Italian or Greek girl,
he didn’t know which, but she was everything his wife was not—
easy, complaisant, had he known that word, which his daughter
had just come across in a novel by Sir Walter Scott, reading in bed.
He fell asleep with the hooker and after the place closed down, an
electric fire started in the kitchen that burned the place to the ground.
The sheriff didn’t know what word to say when he called the next day.

“Your husband’s dead,” he said, finally, grim-lipped. “He was in the fire
that burned the . . . uh . . . cathouse to the ground last night.”
The mother didn’t make sense of the words at first, but the girl did;
she’d read enough novels to know what a man did when he wasn’t
satisfied with his life, or his wife. “I don’t know what you mean,”
the mother said. “That place out on the highway,” her daughter
explained, taking her aside: “It was a whorehouse, daddy went there.”

“Oh my Lord!” was all the mother could say. “I’m sorry,” the sheriff
said. “There’s nothing left of any of them. We found his car in the
lot.” Then he tipped his hat and turned and walked away.
The mother never got over the shock, not of the death but of the deception.
“To think that he got into bed with me after being with one of those
scarlet women!” she would say once in a great while, at the end of a
long meal or sitting on the porch swing as the sun went down.

The girl went on to college where she would put off the boys who
courted her, saying she wasn’t ready, the time wasn’t right,
anything to end the night without incident. After she graduated
she was inseminated, like a cow she thought as she got the shot,
and gave birth to a son, who she raised by herself. “I don’t know
who your daddy was,” she told him years later when he asked.
“I didn’t want to think I knew him, and found out I had not.”