In 1974, when I was six and my brother, Alex, ten, we lived in a house on the edge of town; the land behind us belonging to a state park, which ran along the Sageeyah River for about a mile until it reached the Arkansas border. No one at that time ever visited it aside from my father, Professor Robert Campbell, who had excavated the smaller of the park’s two Indian mounds. Every morning, at exactly six o’clock, he would leave the house and follow either the Forest Trail or, if he were particularly anxious, the Meadow Trail for half an hour, returning always at six thirty, when he expected the rest of the household to rise.
Sometimes, after he left, I would lie in bed and watch him from my bedroom window on the second floor. Stick in hand, he always walked with his head down, paying no attention to wind or weather. Nothing the rising sun could do ever attracted his attention, and I doubt he ever heard the cicadas in the trees or the birds in the tall grass. He was, I could tell, worried about the book he was writing, the history of the Cherokee in Eastern Oklahoma, which he never did finish.
And yet, I liked him best at those times. I could sympathize with him at a distance, could convince myself that he was a man like other men and not without weakness.
He was worse during the summer months, when there was no escaping him. Wherever I was, I could sense him in his office upstairs and could see him in my mind. He was always watching for messes, for mistakes, for transgressions of any kind. If we could hear the click of his typewriter, we were usually safe, but if the house were silent, we knew that he was sitting there in his study, his notes organized in two neat stacks on his antique desk, his keen ears listening to every sound we made.
Not surprising, Alex and I, accompanied by our sister, Susan, spent as much time outdoors as possible, preferring the open air to the house, which seemed cramped when he was home. Our favorite spot was a sandbar on the river. We spent hours there every afternoon, building forts in the sand, digging for arrowheads, and adding to our already impressive collections of spiders, insects, and small snakes.
It was there that I lost my onyx buffalo, a figurine that, for whatever reason, mattered more to me than any toy I possessed. I had been playing with it in the sand, and somehow I had forgotten it there. We were almost to the house when I realized my mistake.
“We can’t go back for it,” Alex insisted. “We have to be home by dark. You know that.”
I was already crying. Too much time has passed for me to remember why, but I was. The thought of losing it, of not having it, I couldn’t bear. It was as if this little, worthless figurine was all that I had.
“Mama will help you look for it tomorrow,” Susan said, putting her arm around me. “We all will.”
At the house, I told my mother what had happened, and she comforted me as only she could. We were in the kitchen, and I remember hearing, with a sinking feeling in my stomach, the sound of my father’s footsteps on the stairs.
“You have to take care of your toys,” he said, kneeling beside me. “They cost money, and money costs time. When you lose, or break, one of your toys, you waste the time of those who bought them for you.”
He spoke, as he always did, in a steady, even tone, as if he were lecturing a student who was rather slow or had disappointed him.
“I know,” I said, trying to speak clearly despite my tears. Even at that age, I didn’t like to cry in front of him.
He looked at me, his gray eyes troubled, but he couldn’t help himself.
“As much as we love you, your mother and I can’t fix everything. If you had taken better care of your toys, you would still have your buffalo. Now it’s gone, and it’s dark outside, and there’s no way to find it in the dark.”
My mother, in her quiet way, somehow convinced him to leave, and a few minutes later, we heard the irregular clicking of his typewriter, as he sat at his desk, straining over every word in his never-ending quest for perfection.
Years later, I learned from Alex that he sometimes worked all night, stopping at six so that he could take his daily walk, which he seemed to enjoy no more than he enjoyed anything else in his life.
That night, however, I wasn’t thinking about him. I was thinking about the bare place on my dresser, where my little buffalo had always stood. There was nothing there now, and the room felt alien and empty to me. I was a stranger, a guest in a home where I did not belong and was not wholly welcome. I wanted reassurance, I suppose, but the gloomy, unbroken silence that hung over the house seemed full of reproach.
Eventually, I drifted off to sleep — I always did after crying. When I woke, the moon had risen, and I could see it shining on the prairie below. I rose, wanting to use the bathroom, and tiptoed down the hall.
My father was still in his study, and I watched him for a moment through the doorway.
He was staring at his typewriter, his beloved artifacts arranged carefully on the wall behind him, his hard face tired and full of lines and angles. Not wanting him to see me, I retreated to my room and climbed back into bed.
Before I fell asleep, I noticed that on the dresser stood my little onyx buffalo, its calm, inscrutable face staring silently at nothing.
Dylan L. Henderson was born in Green Country, the northeastern corner of Oklahoma. Despite dropping out of school, which he loathed, at sixteen, he would eventually earn degrees in history, literature, and library science. He is now a doctoral student at Purdue University, where he is studying the British ghost story, pulp magazines, and weird fiction in general.
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