Dignity Among Toads
by John Brantingham
Henry, who is meeting his father for the first time today, who has been told not to speak to his father until he has been spoken to, who listened as his grandfather told his mother that he hopes Henry’s father doesn’t come home angrier than he was before he left, who heard his mother and uncle arguing about something as he fell asleep last night, who listened as his mother read a letter his father wrote about the Nazis he killed, slips out the backdoor while they’re setting the table and putting up the balloons and banners. He can hear their voices, party voices, Christmas voices, but they’re worried voices too, he thinks. They keep telling him that he’s so lucky to have his father coming home to him when so many boys don’t have their fathers anymore, and he nods and says yes. Only, they’re scared of something. He can see that in their faces.
So he wanders out the back door and into the woods down to where the stream runs, down to where he can always find toads. He doesn’t want to play with them today. He’s not in a running kind of mood, and anyway, he has his Sunday clothes on. He just wants to watch them. But when he steps on a branch, and his shoe snaps it and sinks into the mud, the mud sucking in around it, he knows that he’s going to catch it, and he thinks of his father meeting him for the first time, his father the angry Nazi killer, seeing that Henry ruined the shine on his shoes. Henry starts to cry. He hasn’t cried for a long time. It used to be when he did, his mother and uncle and grandfather told him that his father never cried, and so he stopped, but he can’t help it now as he trudges back to the yard where he takes off his shoe and wipes it on the grass. He gets off the big clumps and finds a rag in the garage and shines it off, and it would be good, everything would be fine except there’s dirt on his hands and a little on his white shirt. The last time he got his Sunday shirt dirty, his mother told him that God was very disappointed that he’d gone to services like a grubby little monster, so he tries to wipe it off, but that only spreads it more.
He’s about to start crying again, when something moves in the corner of the garage behind the rakes, and he goes over to find that a toad has crawled back there. He reaches back and picks it up, and he wishes that his father would never come home, and then feels bad, knowing that God is disappointed in him for being a little monster. Then there is a wild cheer, everyone inside the house shouting at once, and he knows that his father is here right now, and says to the toad in his hand, “You better run and get out of here, or he’s going to kill you.” He steps into the doorway and tosses the little creature out, giving it a head start. He puts his shoe back on and fights against the tears.
When he looks up, the toad has started back toward the garage. “No,” he tells his new friend. “I’m telling you that he’ll kill you. You have to go away.” He spins the toad around with his hand and pats him on the back and the toad moves toward the woods, but not fast enough. The toad is going to catch it, he thinks. This toad is going to die unless Henry can think of a way to save him. So Henry stands straight. He will face his father. He will talk to him. He will distract him as the toad makes it out to the woods where there is peace, where there is dignity.
John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines, Writers Almanac, and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has nineteen books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction including Life: Orange to Pear, Kitkitdizzi, and Days of Recent Divorce. He is the founder and general editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder. He lives in Jamestown, NY.