The Dew Breaker Read Free Page A

Stomping the well-manicured grass, my father heads toward one of the benches. I sit down next to him, letting my hands dangle between my legs.
    Here I am a little girl again, on some outing with my father, like his trips to the botanic garden or the zoo or the Egyptian statues at the museum. Again, I’m there simply because he wants me to be. I knew I was supposed to learn something from these childhood outings, but it took me years to realize that ultimately my father was doing his best to be like other fathers, to share as much of himself with me as he could.
    I glance over at the lake. It’s muddy and dark, and there are some very large pink fishes bobbing back and forth near the surface, looking as though they want to leap out and trade places with us.
    “Is this where the sculpture is?” I ask.
    “In the water,” he says.
    “Okay,” I say calmly. But I know I’m already defeated. I know the piece is already lost. The cracks have probably taken in so much water that the wood has split into several chunks and plunged to the bottom. All I can think of saying is something glib, something I’m not even sure my father will understand.
    “Please know this about yourself,” I say. “You’re a very harsh critic.”
    My father attempts to smother a smile. He scratches his chin and the scar on the side of his face, but says nothing. In this light the usually chiseled and embossed-looking scar appears deeper than usual, yet somehow less threatening, like a dimple that’s spread out too far.
    Anger is a wasted emotion, I’ve always thought. My parents would complain to each other about unjust politics in New York, but they never got angry at my grades, at all the Cs I got in everything but art classes, at my not eating my vegetables or occasionally vomiting my daily spoonful of cod-liver oil. Ordinary anger, I’ve always thought, is useless. But now I’m deeply angry. I want to hit my father, beat the craziness out of his head.
    “Ka,” he says, “I tell you why I named you Ka.”
    Yes, he’d told me, many, many times before. Now does not seem like a good time to remind me, but maybe he’s hoping it will calm me, keep me from hating him for the rest of my life.
    “Your mother not like the name at all,” he says. “She say everybody tease you, people take pleasure repeating your name, calling you Kaka, Kaka, Kaka.”
    This too I had heard before.
    “Okay,” I interrupt him with a quick wave of my hands. “I’ve got it.”
    “I call you Ka,” he says, “because in Egyptian world—”
    A ka is a double of the body, I want to complete the sentence for him—the body’s companion through life and after life. It guides the body through the kingdom of the dead. That’s what I tell my students when I overhear them referring to me as Teacher Kaka.
    “You see, ka is like soul,” my father now says. “In Haiti is what we call good angel, ti bon anj. When you born, I look at your face, I think, here is my ka, my good angel.”
    I’m softening a bit. Hearing my father call me his good angel is the point at which I often stop being apathetic.
    “I say rest in Creole,” he prefaces, “because my tongue too heavy in English to say things like this, especially older things.”
    “Fine,” I reply defiantly in English.
    “Ka,” he continues in Creole, “when I first saw your statue, I wanted to be buried with it, to take it with me into the other world.”
    “Like the Ancient Egyptians,” I continue in English.
    He smiles, grateful, I think, that in spite of everything, I can still appreciate his passions.
    “Ka,” he says, “when I read to you, with my very bad accent, from
The Book of the Dead
, do you remember how I made you read some chapters to me too?”
    But this recollection is harder for me to embrace. I had been terribly bored by
The Book of the Dead
. The images of dead hearts being placed on scales and souls traveling aimlessly down fiery underground rivers had given me my own nightmares.