Toby...204:22 Mar 28 2010
Times Read: 921
Tobys father had been a doctor, a surgeon to be more precise. That was another of his mother’s favorite things to talk about, a father he didn’t remember, a father his mother said was…”Useless and odd, Toby.”. She would then hold his face by his cheeks and smile with saddened eyes…”Yes, you are your fathers’ son.”. She would sit and reminisce how handsome his father had been when they’d met, what a good future his profession had promised and how his eccentricities had seemed strangely charming instead of foreboding. “He had holes in his soul Toby.” She would tell him, as if to explain Tobys’ third birthday. “Your father loved you Toby when he took your arms and legs.”…Toby Allen Sparks wished with all his might for his mother to shut up…
…”I had been to the grocery buying your birthday cake and talking to that Jewess Mrs. Natzbaum, she always charged to much for everything! Jaysus Christ! It was for my little boys’ birthday, you’d think she could have a little Christian charity for once in her miserly Jew life! What a horrible woman! I’d only been gone an hour, the day had been so lovely for driving, so lovely I just had to drive down by the river, you know, down by Mr. Pattersons’ house? You remember Mr. Patterson don’t you? He was a very kind man and helped me with, things, your father couldn’t. Mr. Patterson was a fine Christian man Toby and it was such a hardship for him to be widowed. An hour couldn’t have passed before I came back and walked in our kitchen. I tried Toby, I really did, I didn’t know what to do. There you lay on the kitchen table all bloody and bandaged, screaming. And then screaming even louder when I took from the hat box your tiny arms and legs and tried to push them back on. Oh your poor little arms and legs, ghostly white, I finally just had to put them back and close the lid. Your father was very angry that he had to bandage you back up again, he always hated being interrupted during Judge Judy. He was watching Judge Judy when they finally came for him, you remember the night all the policemen came? Your father is in the State Prison, you know that, right? In the State Prison? I never understood why they put him in prison, he belongs in The BugHouse if you ask me. And after all that, after ALL that, do you think Mrs. Natzbaum would give me a discount? NO! Jews don’t give discounts Toby, what a horrible woman, she’s going straight to hell, Gods’ chosen my caboose!”…
…but Toby didn’t remember any of it. It seemed as though he had been born into this old wooden wheel chair. He knew things, oh yes, he knew that shadow on the ground below belonged to a swing set, but only from the shadow did he have an idea of what it looked like. That shadow looked to him like the legs of that spider that had crawled across his leg stump, that’s what his mother told him he had, leg stumps, once and he couldn’t imagine what swinging must be like. He knew what crows and corn were, his mother had told him that, Toby like to watch them grow and fly. He knew that was a fan he heard running, but like the swing set, he didn’t know what a fan looked like.
Toby stared out the window, it was getting dark, it would be hours yet, but they would come, they always came. He’d watch them trickle through the corn rows towards the house. They’d come in twos and threes to stand beneath his window. “Stubby…Stubby”…they’d chant in a whisper…”Stubby…Stubby”…all in a heavenly unison…
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