Knights of Tom Taylor

In July of 1990, when I was five years old, at five thirty, first light, I zipped a windbreaker up to my throat, exited my home, and stalked the front lawn, my rubber-stoppered arrows sheathed down my back, a plastic bow in my grasp, the family Blue Heeler, Blue, sniffing at my waist. Traipsing back and forth, on guard, I thought myself the armed sentinel of Tom Taylor Road, in the service of my slumbering king. That was when my father still slept in my mother’s bed.

That was also when Doodles lived across the street from us, his small brick home on the corner of Cunningham, a gravel road that met Tom Taylor in a T. When Doodles came out on his porch around seven and sat in his rocking chair, I laid down my bow and crossed the road, Blue blocking me as I tried to pass her, me telling her all the while all was well, I wouldn’t get run over.

Doodles and I shot marbles. I tried to, anyway, but I never got the hang. In the warming morning, while my parents enjoyed alone time before work, I lay on my stomach on Doodles’s porch, and as he lay across from me in a gray suit and porkpie hat, I tried to dislodge ocean-colored marbles from the chalk circle he had shakily drawn. Once again, the flick of my thumb sprung the green shooter over the porch’s edge. Ever-patient Doodles, in the habit of retrieving my taw, pushed himself up on his hands, dragged his penny loafers across the grit of the porch, slapped dust off his thighs, and unbent himself, his porkpie hat remaining snug on his head, even as he stepped down from the porch’s edge, even as his fingers combed the grass.

“Here,” he said when he found the taw. In excitement, he held it out to me. I stretched forth my arm. At the same time, he stepped up on the porch but lost his footing and fell forward, scattering marbles as he went down. The sound of the air in his stomach dropped from his body like the thick fall of laundry. His hat had crooked forward. I crouched and nudged his shoulder. He didn’t speak or move.

I went inside his house and called my parents on his rotary. I hung up, dialed again. Endless rings. I ran out and down the porch steps, shouting for help. Blue in our yard raised her head and started barking. I ran toward her. A car horn honked. I crossed in front of a braked car. “I could have killed you,” the driver shouted as I passed.

On our side of the road, I beat on our storm door. My father opened in his underwear and gritted his teeth.

“Doodles fell,” I said.

When my mother emerged from behind my father in her nightgown, I repeated myself. My mother called the ambulance.

Meanwhile, I sat in the guest chair. My father sat on the arm of the couch in his underwear, listening to my recounting. “Why was Doodles having to get your marble?” he asked.

“He does that sometimes,” I said.

“And I guess you let him.”

“Bruce,” my mother said.

My father still went to work that morning. In the evening, he came home late. He said he’d stopped at the hospital. “Doodles broke his ankle,” he told my mother. “Got a bump on his head the size of a golf ball.” I accidentally laughed. My father loomed over me. “If you hadn’t been there, this wouldn’t have happened.” The wind left my lungs. I dodged behind my father’s shoulder and sought refuge in my room.

It had seemed we had a pact, my father and I, not something I could articulate as a five-year-old, but something that seemed as real to me as the fact that both my mother and I had hazel-colored eyes. The pact was this. I would go out in the mornings and play in the yard and let my parents have their morning time alone. That was what I thought we were doing. But in the end, this didn’t seem to mean so much to my father, just like I was no knight.

Fate, you know, is heavy-handed. A family surnamed the Knights moved into Doodles’s home. The new owner, Old Man Knight, added an inground pool in back and mowed the lawn so fine, he could play golf like he had an authentic green. Old Man Knight’s in-laws moved nearby him and took over most of Cunningham. And his son-in-law bought the empty red-brick beside us on Tom Taylor.

There was once an old woman who lived in that red-brick who kept rabbits in a cage at the back of her house in the crotch of a tree. I don’t know what happened to her, but I certainly didn’t have anything to do with it.