BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 58

APRIL 2012

WULF

Back at the rider house, Wulf looks at the list David gave him. Three names, the same, different middle initials. One in Florida. One in New Hampshire. One in Texas.

He asks himself, at this point does it matter? He sets the page down, bothered more by its quiver—his hands have been shaking slightly for a couple years now—than the information on its surface.

He has a father. Had, rather, until Verlyn died. But he wonders, of course, about his biological origin.

It has been years since he wrestled with not knowing who his father was, his curiosity has atrophied. Anger comes, toward his mother—the information may have been useful decades ago, when the taunts of "bastard!" came. Those initial epithets were few once he'd whipped their hurlers, but they remained, coming silently from all corners and shading his days, his weeks, his years.

He didn't even know what it meant, the word 'bastard', but ferreted it out from a friend on the bus ride home. He had to explain to Wulf why it was said with such derision, as the implications hadn't occurred to him as being bad in themselves. He had come off the bus angry in a new way, one without focus, and had opened the door to home with such force that he knocked the infant David, who was at the door to greet the family, against the half-wall. The collision broke his ribs, broke his wrist.

He paid for the act when his dad came home.

Once he was old enough to understand the process of pregnancy, he did the math that generated his approximate conception date, a week after Germany's surrender. Rape came to mind, the possibility that his father was a rapist troubling him most of all, making his bloodline questionable even though he didn't believe in the fixity of genetic inheritance.

Phone numbers attach to the names. David said she'd tried to call them but had no luck. The man was probably a little older than his mother, in his nineties now at least, unlikely to be alive and if he is, likely with dementia. Wulf is curious, of course, but only lightly so, he has never had a sense that a long lost father or unknown siblings would rescue him. Or that he needed rescuing.

He wads the paper and tosses it in the wastebasket under the sink, begins reading the memoir.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston