SUNDAY, SUNDAY

Novel Extract

by
Stephen J. Golds

I remember when I was a small boy my father would take long walks on Sunday afternoons. I don’t know why he went for walks because he never said. My father didn’t say very much to anyone. Sometimes I would go with him on these walks and sometimes I would not. I did not enjoy or appreciate the walks but would go if the appropriate pressure was put on me. To me the walks were death marches, my legs would begin to ache and I would beg my father to carry me on his shoulders as he berated me for not being stronger and pointing out my older brothers strength and excitement for nature. My mother would stay at home and cook Sunday roast with the help of my sister Sara. My father would tell me that I should have stayed at home with the women and helped cook and clean. On the walks my father would march along, his large arms folded behind his back and his hands holding each other. He would talk to my brother and I would watch the chunky black moustache above his thin lips raise and fall with the words that left his mouth. I would look at the cracked and broken ground mostly, listening to the sound of my father’s boots on the dirt and think of stories to try and entertain myself. I liked thinking up stories about dinosaurs that crept through modern cities and darkened alleys killing policemen and homeless people until the army was called out to try and kill it only to fail. My brother Mickey would walk alongside my father and imitate his posture and his walk. I would stare at the back of his head thinking that he was a pretender. A better pretender then I was. Mickey would fire a barrage of questions at my father and he would answer as I kept quiet and watched my father’s moustache twitch and tremble with the answers he gave.

One Sunday afternoon my brother ran screaming excitably into the room we shared as I lay on the carpet drawing pictures of dinosaurs. He stamped all over my drawings with his red Wellington boots and told me to get dressed because we were going for a walk. I didn’t want to go, I wanted to stay at home and draw pictures but I remembered the look my father would give me as he asked me whether I wanted to stay and help the girls cook. It was a cold and humourless look like a broken china dolls expression and it filled me with shame and disappointment. I wanted to make my father proud. I got dressed. I always got dressed and pretended I wanted to go.

On this particular Sunday my father took his ferrets. They were white and long creatures with very small mouths that had long thorn like teeth. My father would put them down rabbit holes and the ferrets would kill the rabbits and drag their dead bodies out into the sunshine and my father’s hands. Sometimes my father ate the rabbits and sometimes the ferrets ate them. I remember I ate a rabbit once. It didn’t taste of anything to me and I had to eat it with tomato sauce. As I ate it I kept looking at my father to see if he was proud of me, he sat watching the television ripping chunks of meat from the bone. He didn’t even look at me and I felt the chunks of dead rabbit crawling and boiling in my gut.

On this particular Sunday we walked for what seemed a very long time and Mickey kept pestering my father to let the ferrets out of their small carrying cage. My father kept telling him to just bloody wait. Finally we found a field that had many rabbit holes in the outline of its perimeter. My father knelt down by one hole. The hole was quite large and had little sphere shaped shits strewn around the shadowy entrance. Mickey was giggling as he looked over my father’s shoulder at the cage. My father clapped him around the head and told him to shut up, all good hunters knew when to be quiet he said. I knelt down near the hole and watched as my father opened the ferrets case and picked one out. The ferret hung from my father’s large hand peacefully and let itself be dropped into the hole. The ferret sniffed around the entrance and disappeared into the darkness. I flicked at the football shaped clumps of shit as my father smoked and whispered to Mickey about how many rabbits we would catch today. I remember feeling very excited at the prospect of seeing a rabbit killed and dragged from the hole by such a small and slender animal.

My father finished his cigarette and flicked it into the hedge and waved at the remaining blue smoke. I was watching Mickey playing with an earwig, letting it run from one small hand to the other when I heard it. A scream came from the depths of the rabbit hole and I jumped and reached for my father, taking hold of his shoulder. He told me the screaming was the rabbit, the ferret had found it. I remember feeling shaky and trembling as I tried to cover my ears. I pressed my palms hard against my ears and I remember looking at my brother who had an expression on his small face. His blue eyes were sad and his mouth had all but disappeared into a little slit. My father pulled my hands away from my ears and told me that it was over and to act like a goddamned man. I felt very funny, my stomach hurt and my eyes ached. I was only a small boy but I knew I never wanted to hear another noise like that ever again.

The ferret finally emerged from the hole. Tail first, I watched its tail straighten and its small white claws scraping into the dirt. I saw a clump of grey in the ferret’s mouth as the lifeless lump was pulled by small thorn like teeth into the Sunday afternoon sunshine. My father took hold of the rabbit and gently pulled at it. The creature let go and allowed my father again to lift it back into the cage with the other ferrets.

My father took hold of the grey clump of fur and lifted it from the hole. He held it by the scruff of its neck and the rabbit’s ears lay limply and long either side of its small skull. Its eyes were large black marbles and when I poked one with my finger it felt sticky and slippy. I looked but I couldn’t see any blood. Its paws hung from its body contorted in running shapes. I remember thinking that the rabbit hanging from my father’s strong grip looked like the man hanging from the crucifix that everyone talked about.

My father shouted in disgust. The dead rabbit was shitting out more small rabbits. Small round balls of grey fur with black jelly like eyes. My father kept swearing to himself and shouted very loudly for me and my brother to go away and wait outside the field. We went and my brother told me that the rabbit we had killed was a mummy rabbit. I put my hands in my pockets and took them out again when I felt the dampness on my fingertips. Mickey was laughing and screeching as he pointed at my trousers. I had pissed myself. I began to cry, my father would be very disappointed in me and probably call me a baby. Only wimps pissed their pants over a dead rabbit. Everything was hopeless and I was hopeless.

When my father emerged from the field he had many lines in his face and looked very tired. When he saw I was crying he slapped Mickey hard around the head and told him to keep his bloody hands to himself. When he saw the long damp stain down my trouser leg he looked at me for a very long time, he smiled a small smile, ruffled my hair and said we better get home. He held my hand all the way home and I remember his hand envelope mine completely. No one spoke and the only sounds that I could hear were the sounds of our feet scraping along the dirt mechanically and birdsong that sounded like wet fingers squeaking on glass.

That night I lay in bed and thought about the small grey furry balls with little black shiny eyes looking up at me, I tried shutting my eyes tight but the images would not leave me. They were there in the darkness watching serenely. I wondered if my father was sleeping or whether he could see the small black eyes as well.

© Stephen J. Golds
Reproduced with permission

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