They Called Him Macaroni
“… Some future historian will relate, with pleasures, & the latest posterity will read with wonder & admiration, how three hundred intrepid, rural sons of freedom…dare fight & die in defence of their just & natural rights …”
—“The Rural Heroes, or The Battle of Concord,” The New-England Chronicle or Essex Gazette, May 18, 1775
“I never was in any Sharp Action … but in what little I was, no one has dared say I flinched.”
—Paul Revere, re: accusations of cowardice, 1779
The British were coming. But I hadn’t in months.
My role in our intimate narratives was to enunciate in the way of our tyrant’s spelling. My wife batted her eyes and uttered, “Oh, officer, I am out of food and drink! How ever will I quarter you properly?” and I’d reply, in my hand-stitched costume and toothiest accent, “Do not apologise, all I require is a place to lay my sabre.” We wanted a foetus. The safeword was quagmire. Cass hailed from Salem and I’d jest that her family must be witches who slipped through a judicial crack. She leaned into that jape, wiggling her fingers at me, calling me her horny toad. Once, we even incorporated the broom. Another, we tried the bellybutton—I, a handsome naval officer under the command of Royal Admiral Samuel Graves. But then, during one coital playlet, Cass broke character, hollering, “I cannot wait to be a mum!”
“Don’t you mean mother, you ungrateful Yankee traitor?” I said, toothily in character.
“Quagmire, Robert,” she said, serious. “I meant what I meant.”
Since, we’d been debating whether to raise our future children British or American. Cass had already sewn teensy Union Jacks. Me? I didn’t see any harm in a little representation for all that taxation. I admired her loyalty to any scenario with a dominant and a submissive. But I also wondered: Why bring an innocent thing into a divided, tyrannical world? How could I defend a child if I could not even defend an idea? Cass believed I was over-wroughting the whole matter. But when you bury enough children, you wonder things like that. After a day of grave-digging and discreet pamphleteering against the King, Cass worked her magic over my back. Her fingers felt like tender grudges. There was plenty to work out there that we both took personally. But what is love if not agreeing to disagree on catastrophic things?
Still, the impasse didn’t sit right with me. So, I began faking it.
One night, after yet another false emission, there was a knock upon my door. It was Paul and he needed my assistance. With what? He dared not say here, but I sensed the criticality in his voice. Paul never singled me out before, and I so wanted to be a part of his group’s rebellious, furtive politicking, not just their lookout or pamphlet distributor.
“Meet me in the cemetery,” he said, and headed off into the snow.
“I’ll just fetch my coat!” I said.
“I don’t like that Paul one bit,” Cass said, crossing her arms as I closed the door.
She had her reasons. Paul Revere was a silversmith of repute, not to mention a Son of Liberty. He’d dumped more tea into the wharf than anybody else—I’d looked whilst looking out. Meanwhile, Cass was at home, a closet-Tory, inhaling burnt partridge feathers and cloves to relieve her feared barrenness after months of my pretend ejaculating. The womb and the nose were connected—not according to witchcraft, but to midwifery. She beat dried fox stones and pigeon brains with her broom handle into a fine powder to snort, lacing into those organs her red jealousy: Paul had himself seven offspring already: the majority with poor Sarah who died birthing the last and one with Rachel thus far. Paul was a goddamn babysmith. But, of course, I had my reasons, too. The closest a man can get to childbirth is war.
“I like that he includes me,” I said.
“He includes you because he thinks you’re a macaroni,” Cass said.
“I don’t think he thinks that,” I said, taken aback.
“Just look at yourself, Robert Newman,” she said.
I took in my reflection: velvet breeches, white gloves, and a powdered wig to keep me warm in winter months whilst conducting my out-of-doors stewardship. Indeed, my embroidered coat was not the drab frocks of Paul and his clandestine group and, yes, I smelled of scented waters, but only to mask the musks of corpse and mulch rot. Sure, my summer attire consisted of a thinner wig (to protect from the sun) as well as fingerless gloves (to prevent callusing from the tools and belfry rope). But did all that make me a macaroni? An androgynous Englishman of epicene tendencies? No. I was bloody American! More precisely, I was North End sexton. I rung the church bell heard as far as Watertown, dug graves, cut the grass, and pruned and raked, among other tasks. I’d come from a line of sextons: my father, and his father before him in the King’s Leicester. Tradition and heritage were as certain as death and taxation. But I could decide how to steward. I chose these elevated wardrobes because I wanted to introduce a little dignity to death, to be consequential to life. I wanted to be a new man, not just a Newman. Hence the pamphleteering and my willingness to don (and doff) Cass’s homemade Royal costumes, yoked beneath her as she wielded her discipline paddle until I forged my orgasm. At least, each night, I could fantasize about dying for something. Cass could not.
“This is about Paul having seven kids, isn’t it?” I said.
“Ten,” Cass said, flushed. “The dead ones count, too.”
I kissed her warm cheek and felt the shape and clench of her teeth beneath it.
“It is just unfair,” she said, dabbing a teary eye, “how some folks get all the luck.”
“Colony or Commonwealth,” I said, “whatever our littles call it, it’s still Massachusetts.”
“You’re a good man, Robert,” she said, softly smiling. “Even if you are a macaroni.”
“Which I am not,” I reminded her.
“Why do you think you always get assigned to distribute the pamphlets?” she said.
“Because I can read,” I said.
“Because it is safe,” she said, and touched her belly, hopeful. I knew it was empty.
“What does that mean?” I said. “I never once said quagmire.”
“It means you do not think you seem as you look to others,” she said.
“We’ll see about that,” I said, and exited into the snowy night.
Before entering the cemetery, I turned my embroidered coat inside-out. Its striped dun lining seemed more frock-ish, like Paul’s and his group’s. The church loomed, its dark belfry craning like some pompous swan. I knew where to find Paul: beneath the wintery Elm with its ruddy-haired branches—the Tree of Liberty, as his group called it, where they furtively met some midnights (while I, up in the belfry, looked out). The tree also resided over four graves: Sarah, Mary, Isannah, and John. I’d buried Paul’s first wife and three children. Beside those graves he now knelt, his lantern bouncing in a gentle breeze from one of the Elm’s limbs above him. The frigid air tasted metallic. It thinned my nose. This eve, Boston suffered a last-ditch spring squall that reminded you of your irrelevancy to Nature. On a whim, the earth could fill in everything we touched—King, Continent, Christ—like snowfall to a footprint. I felt Her cold indifference. I was already longing for Cass’s back magicand snug bellybutton. Until then, I was stuck out here, hopefully not making a macaroni of myself.
I supposed I should nip this potential macaroni-business in the bud, just to be safe.
“The King sure is a lush fuck,” I said. “I’m so decidedly the opposite of loyal to him.”
Paul nodded, somewhat distracted and perturbed, pushing his lips around the way that Cass did whenever I regaled her with my day’s municipal mundanities. Did Paul consider my patriotism as equally pedestrian? Cass had cast her spell of doubt in me. Then I saw what he was really mulling: a black bean skin stuck upon his upper gums. His tongue worked at that bean skin like a thought. The light threw our shadows long and thin across the snow, and I compared the contour of his tricorne hat’s silhouette to my downy wig’s.
“You know why I leave the lantern here each night?” Paul said, and touched his three children’s graves. “Because I can’t help but think they still get scared of the dark.” I saw his calluses, thick as rinds from his silversmithing and amateur dental work, from dumping crates of tea into the harbor or burning the offices of stamp collectors. Maybe I shall gift him talc-lined gloves? We could match. The others in the group would be so jealous!
Paul touched his wife’s stone. “I have missed so much,” he said, his eyes steaming in the cold. “Our cause has been like a baby with colic: I’m always up with it as it cries in my ear. All the while, my flesh-and-blood sleep alone in the dark.” He shook his head. “Joshua is two. He doesn’t remember Sarah. The older ones know enough. But Elizabeth? She’s five. She can and can’t comprehend. She remembers enough of her mother and I wish she didn’t.” He traced his wife’s engraved name, his throat catching like a door hinge. “Lizzie screams in her sleep. She’s afraid of the dark. She clings to me.” He pulled up a sleeve to show me bite marks, her glyphs. They painted quite a portrait. I looked away. “Isn’t that wicked, Newman?” he said. “The only way to relieve my daughter’s pain is to relieve her memories.”
I recalled a “trick” my father used to conduct: whenever he accidentally missed a nail and struck his thumb with the hammer, he’d kick his foot against a wall. Or, if he stubbed his toe, he’d whack his hand with something on purpose. He said it distracted him from the first pain. The first is always the worst, he said. When I got my pinky pinched in a door, I kicked the wall until my toes swelled into hot bells. At first, it worked—the throb in my hand was somehow made lesser. It seemed like good advice until the two pains merely blurred into a dull ache, like regret. It was then I knew that fathers were merely children, too. I wondered again: How could I in my right mind be a father with such irresponsible, mistaken knowledge?
“I know it hurts Rachel to witness,” Paul said. “She adores Lizzie. I think Rachel married me to be Lizzie’s mother more than to be my wife. I’m okay with that.” He knuckled his blinking eyes as he watched his lantern bounce in the tree. “Promise me,” he said. “If I am to be soon buried beside them, you will continue the hanging of a lantern from this branch so my children will never know what Lizzie knows: this fear of the dark.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because the dark spurs a truth,” he said, “that therein exists many horrors yet known.”
“I mean, why would you soon be buried?” I said.
“That is clandestine,” he said, furrowing, “as is why I need you to let me into the belfry.” From behind the gravestones, he removed two additional, unlit lanterns. “That is all I can say of it, or else it would no longer be clandestine, Newman.”
“But I can be clandestine,” I said. “What about all the looking out I’ve done for you?”
“For me?” Paul said. “No, sir. This cause is for our children. Our children’s children.”
Then I had an idea.
“I’m not having children,” I said. “I shall only nurture one infancy: our independence.”
Paul couldn’t refute. I could still sacrifice something that he could not—not anymore.
“What?” he said, his features elongating to a kind of wet appall.
I realized my error: every Son of Liberty was also a father. I couldn’t hem and haw my response now. Because Paul might wonder what else I could hem and haw? The justness of our furtive politicking? The intolerability of the Intolerable Acts? That King George was a lush fuck? Not to mention my counterfeit climaxing in British uniform.
So, I did what had proven effective thus far: I faked it.
“I want a family,” I said. “I mean I am…unable to father. You see, I am, sadly, seedless.”
Paul frowned at the belfry, then higher to where it pointed. “We’re all breathed into being by the breath of God,” he said. “Some are breathed freshly while others via His Holy Halitosis.” He sighed a steamy plume. “Still, others exist in between this ripe and rot during a time when He rinses His Teeth with alcohol, breathing momentarily sterile.”
“It’s unfair how some folks get all the luck,” I said, frowning at my polished boots.
Paul took a deep breath, mulling that black bean skin again.
Then he offered me the two lanterns and explained the clandestine task:
The British were coming. Tonight, Paul would ride to Concord to warn his group of an ambush to destroy their supplies. As a precaution, if Paul were arrested or shot, these lanterns would signal others: one if the Brits came by land, two if by sea.
In the wharf, bells clanged, enunciating, perhaps: offencive manoeuvre.
“I am sorry about your…circumstances,” he said, touching my shoulder. My heart was a red tambourine. Everything became too white. My wig itched. It was cold. Every grave had a single name: Robert Newman. Including the open one: the Pederson funeral was tomorrow. The old man had succumbed to the flu. I’d dug the hole that morning. It’d be difficult to shovel frozen dirt tomorrow. I couldn’t be exhausted. I couldn’t afford to catch a chill. Also, if I succumbed to a chill, who would distribute all those important pamphlets? The lanterns weighed a ton. Cass was waiting for me. We had a baby to not make. How on earth was I ever going to risk being a father if I couldn’t risk hanging a couple lanterns?
“Maybe you should do it,” I said, looking at the lanterns.
He looked at his family’s graves a moment, then at me and nodded. He hugged me. His heart was against mine, I wondered what they spoke of in their cyphered rhythms? God, my heart was beating as if it were trying to get everything out while it still could!
“I shall pray for you, Newman,” Paul said, then vanished into the night, off to Concord, leaving the lanterns with me.
I sat on a grave and placed my head betwixt my knees. Until now, the discreet politicking had been mere politics. And repercussions? Petty trials and pesky taxes. It was a bunch of touch-buttocks. I didn’t mind the role-playing with Cass. I wanted to die again and again, not just once. Who wanted to be consequential to life if they couldn’t live to see it?
Paul was riding to Concord with the knowledge that it may be his last: the last time the age and blade of the cold air knifed his scowl; the last scratchy itch of his wooly frock upon his neck; the last tangy whiff and pretty twinkle of dead bass half-leapt out of the frozen Charles; the last irksome black bean skin stuck to his gums; the last thrill in his heart as he spurred and whipped his horse into an unknown dark; the last time he looked at the stars; the last time he never looked back. I was no Paul. I was looking back at many things. Like these last few months with Cass. Like, how could I ever be a father if I could not handle the responsibility of hanging a couple lanterns in my own belfry? Like, if Paul failed to reach Concord and I failed to hang the lanterns, the rebellion would be yanked by its roots out of the soil—including me, a finely-dressed co-conspirator. Like, if Paul failed and I succeeded, the British would wonder how Concord had been informed, and thusly inquire about the two peculiar lanterns in the belfry—to which only I possessed the key. Like, if Paul succeeded and I failed, it would confirm his group’s suspicion: that I was indeed a macaroni. They’d treat me like just another regime puppet, like a stamp collector in need of a tarring and feathering, his office in need of a good torching. Cass’s teensy Union Jacks were good tinder. My viscera was cushioned with years of fat. I would burn long and slow from both ends. Even as a vigil I’d pussyfoot.
I shivered. My cold bones creaked like old poplar. I thought of Cass: a widow, childless, believing her false infecundity. I thought of Paul, hanging from this Elm. I didn’t want to be a dead man and I didn’t want to be an old man who lived with two pains. There must be a way to avoid both of those pains, some third limb I could smash.
And I had it: I would burgle the church—that way, any key, including the belfry’s, would be moot. If anyone inquired about my rendezvous with Paul in the cemetery, I’d explain the only lantern discussed was the one I’d hang above his family’s graves, as sexton. Paul would admire such a covert strategy: proof of my anti-macaroniness. I’d then keep Cass up all night, my alibi, filling her with a mirage of jism—at least until this revolution played out.
I unlocked the church door and, in the clergy office, swapped my clothes for a priest’s cassock. If I were spotted in the dark, I’d appear as nothing more than a beggar—no silhouette of a large wig, no reflection of an embossed brass coat button, etc. The cellar held my tools and supplies: chalk powder and linseed oil to mix white paint, turpentine, hammer and nails, rakes and shovels and shears. I selected the trusty ax. Outside, I hacked the cellar doors until the lock and latch broke. As I closed the doors behind me in the cellar, I recalled apprenticing with my father the day he built these doors—the latch smithed by Paul’s father. I’d asked my father why he liked being a sexton. He responded, “Because it’s The Lord’s work.”
“But doesn’t the priest do The Lord’s work?” I asked.
“It is a different kind of work,” he said. “The priest performs the magic we preserve.”
I understood now, after years laboring in unseen ways across these hallowed grounds. Faith was magic. Each of my mundane tasks made that faith magical. And this cause—or, as Cass called it, a limp coup—would result in a need for much magic. There would be plenty to bury soon, plenty who would be left behind in need of shepherding through grief. Faith was magic. The priest was the magician. But the sexton was the custodian of magic. The cellar was the trapdoor. The church was the top hat. God was the white rabbit.
Indeed, I had been consequential to life all along in a covert way.
I exchanged the ax for the spade shovel to pry open the belfry door. When I entered the sanctuary through the interior cellar door—the way a burglar would—I discovered two British soldiers knelt upon the altar, mid-prayer. I’d left the church door unlocked and open.
“Hello, Father,” one said to me.
“I am not a father,” I said, experiencing a kind of indigestion of the heart. “Well, not yet.”
“Apologies, Deacon,” the soldier said. “But we heard noises, saw the open door, a light.”
“Noises?” I said.
“Banging and clanging,” the other soldier said, eyeing my two unlit lanterns on the altar.
I thought of Cass at home, humming “God Save the King” to her belly while sewing a doll in an ornate red coat, praying that tonight’s narrative would yield us a foetus, asking The Lord to spare her some of His Magic. How long would she wait for me? I imagined her finding my bloated body hanging from the belfry, like a stale pastry in a bakery window.
And I thought: No. Not like that.
I realized that all of our narratives were in preparation of this exact, very moment.
I stiffened my lip and straightened my spine. “I have been doing The Lord’s work.”
“And what work might that be?” the other soldier said.
“The Lord works in mysterious ways, so that would be impossible to answer,” I said.
“That is a fair point,” the first soldier said.
“What were you praying for, my children?” I said, and liked the plural sound of that.
“The usual,” the other soldier said. “God save the King.”
“And our own arses,” said the first soldier. “We’re on our way to Concord—”
The other soldier punched the first’s shoulder. “Shut your gob, you twat!” he said.
The first soldier slugged the other’s shoulder in return. “You’re the twat, you twat!”
“Boys!” I hollered. “There will be no punching and cursing in my sanctuary!”
“Sorry, Father,” the first soldier said.
“He’s not a Father,” the other soldier said. “Remember? He’s only a Deacon.”
“What’s with the spade, Deacon?” the first soldier said.
“This?” I said. I’d forgotten the tool in my hands. I recalled—to the best of my ability—one of the sermons overheard from the cellar whilst I mixed paint. “Well, when thou sittest,” I said, “thou must carry a shovel to dig therewith a hole to cover thou’s shittest.”
“I thought there was no cursing, Father?” the first soldier said, narrowing his eyes.
“I’m not a father, goddamnit!” I cried.
The two soldiers glanced at each other, the lanterns. They gripped their rifles tighter. Then, the first soldier nudged the other and nodded at my polished buckled boots beneath the cassock. “It’s just the gravedigger,” he said, loosening his rifle grip.
“I’m the sexton,” I said.
“We thought you were a spy,” the other soldier said, and laughed.
That laugh was a glove slap. I was no Paul, but I was certainly more or less something.
“Is it so hard to believe,” I said, “that a sexton could also be a spy?”
“No, it’s not hard to believe that a gravedigger could be a spy,” the first soldier laughed.
“Just you,” the other soldier laughed. “Because you’re a macaroni.”
“Where’s your fucking wig, mate?” the first soldier laughed.
This was why Paul kept me around: to reduce their suspicion. I made them clandestine.
Cass was right. What else was she right about?
“The wig keeps me fucking warm is all!” I said, and swung the shovel into the first soldier’s face. His skull donged like a bell with a broken clapper. The other soldier blinked, stunned, freckled with his compatriot’s protein. Then I clobbered him, too.
“I just wanted to be diplomatic!” I wept as I dragged them to the Pederson grave. That morning, I’d laid a canvas over the hole to keep out the snow. I rolled the dead soldiers inside and covered them with a few inches of hard dirt. I buried them like excrement with my spade. There was no dignity to it. I wept as I hurriedly returned the cassock, lit the two lanterns and hung them in the belfry, then gathered the rifles. The drifting snow filled in my footprints. Like I wasn’t ever there. I told myself this again and again all the way home.
Upon entering the house, I heard the slap of Cass’s discipline paddle.
And there, in the bedroom, was my wife, bare-assed, over the knee of Paul dressed in my Royal regalia. “Coat me redcoat red, Admiral!” Cass said. Paul paddled her backside and replied, “I believe the colour you are referring to, madam, is ‘Venetian.’”
“What the fuck is this?” I said.
Cass stood, both sets of her cheeks hued Venetian.
“You told me maybe I should do it?” Paul said, buckling his belt. “Back in the cemetery.”
“I was talking about the lanterns, you bastard!” I said. “How much can one man covet?”
“I wasn’t coveting, just trying to help,” he said. “It was supposed to look like a miracle.”
I turned to Cass, equally horrified, “You made him an Admiral?”
In all of our previous intimate scenarios, she’d never ranked me above a Sub-Lieutenant.
She yanked up her trousers, her forehead vein prominent. “You lied to me!” she cried.
“I had to tell her,” Paul said. “What you said. About being seedless.”
“But it’s not true!” I said. “I have seed! I’ve just been faking it is all!”
She turned away and cried. I’d seen her cry like this too often: each time she was not with child. And now still because of me. Paul doffed the costume. I turned away but it was too late. I knew exactly why she’d made him an Admiral.
“Quagmire,” I pleaded. “Quagmire!”
“Well, you can’t stop it,” Cass said, looking back. “It’s already happened two times.” I saw her mouth mulling something: Paul’s black bean skin clung to her gums. I dropped to my knees, gutted. “I was going to raise it a Newman,” she added.
“But it’ll be a Revere,” I said. “It cannot be a Newman, not even close.”
“We would’ve pretended,” Cass said. “That’s what we did, didn’t we?”
“Who was pretending?” I said, but even that was performative. There was no end to it.
Paul dressed, now noticing the two rifles. “Where did you get those?” he asked.
“You son of a bitch!” I cried. “I will kill you, too!”
I stood and aimed one of the British rifles at Paul.
And just as soon as I did, I collapsed, my body folding under itself like a series of knees.
I opened my eyes. I crouched beneath my winter wig, which had grown to the size of our modest house. Suddenly, huge hands lifted me close to the giant, disappointed face of Cass. In the glasses pinched over her nose I saw my hideous, green reflection.
“What is this?” I ribbited.
“You’ve always been my little horny toad,” Cass said. “But I think I overreacted.”
“Change me back!” I ribbited. “To human!”
“I can’t,” she said. “It doesn’t work like that.”
Paul turned his tricorne cap in his hands, “I thought we resolved this matter in Salem?”
“Well, we can all be clandestine, can’t we, Paul?” she said, wiggling her fingers at him. He flinched. He lifted his duffel and left hurriedly. But a moment later, he returned. “Newman,” he said. “What did you mean when you said you’d kill me, too?”
“I killed two British soldiers on their way to Concord,” I ribbited. Cass blanched white. She looked at the rifles and tears filled her eyes. “I hung the lanterns,” I croaked. “I made it look like a burglary…” My throat ballooned. “But I still used the belfry key.”
Paul turned to leave.
“Take him with you,” Cass said, holding me out to Paul: a giant, just as I’d always seen him. Cass was better off with a reared Revere. I wasn’t a man, new or old. I wasn’t quite a frog either. I was some in-between creature who could now travel by land and by sea so, perhaps, I was British? But, in truth, I wasn’t quite sure what I was anymore.
“Why?” Paul asked.
“Because I’ll give you up otherwise,” she said. “Or,” and she wiggled her fingers again.
“Okay,” Paul said, and Cass set me in Paul’s hands.
“I don’t want to see either of you again,” she said. “Take those rifles, too. I don’t want the British or Americans poking around my home for those dead soldiers or for Robert. I won’t bring an orphan into this world because of both of your stupidities.”
“I do love you,” I ribbited to her.
“And I loved you,” she said.
“I thought we were enough together,” I croaked. “Or could be enough.”
“But we were not,” she said.
“We betrayed each other, didn’t we?” I ribbited.
“We did,” she said.
My throat ballooned in and out, “Gosh, when change happens, it sure happens fast.”
“It does,” she said.
“I will go, for our child’s sake,” I ribbited. “You will raise it a Newman, won’t you?”
“I will,” she said, and kissed my warty snout. I ejected my long tongue upon her cheek.
“I appreciate you not turning me into a frog,” Paul said.
“That’d be too easy a fate for you anyhow,” Cass said, “you seditious scum.”
With that, Paul set me in his breast pocket, and secured the duffel and rifles to his horse.
And we rode.
A few miles later, Paul stopped his horse beside the icy bank of the Charles. He lifted me out of his pocket and looked me in the black eyes. I smelled Cass on his neck. My gills flared and my blood ran cold—colder than it already was within my green flesh.
“I’m sorry that I most likely impregnated your wife,” he said.
“I don’t think I was going to shoot you,” I ribbited. “If I am being honest with myself.”
“Goodbye, Newman,” he said. “Thank you for hanging the lanterns.”
And before he tossed me to the icy river, I recalled his initial request.
“What about the third lantern!” I croaked.
He paused.
“I may not be able to hang the lantern above your children’s graves,” I ribbited, “but I can describe the darkness to them. They won’t ever know the unknown. Isn’t the light really serving as poor company? And what poorer company is there than me?”
He pushed his lips around, mulling again. Then he nodded.
He returned me to his breast pocket, and we rode and rode.
But we arrived too late.
The British had reached Concord by land and sea. From the embankment we watched: Cannons fired from the stout hips of ships. Buildings crumbled. Lines of redcoats shot men in their frocked backs. Women threw themselves out burning windows. Horseback men hacked at dogs chewing their boots. Trees burned. The sky flickered, a white lung of smoke and flares. It was as if the British traveled with their own weather. I felt their cold indifference. They left footprints in the snow. Nothing filled them in. They were very much here.
Suddenly, a voice came from behind Paul: “Daddy?”
His duffel unzipped, and a shivering little girl in a nightgown sat up.
It terrified the eggs out of me: glassy eyes emitted into Paul’s pocket—ones fertilized.
“My God,” I croaked. “I am a macaroni!”
“Lizzie?” Paul said.
That’s when Lizzie lunged and bit her father’s hand, the hardest yet—as if she anticipated the level of leaving he might succumb to this night. And Paul cried out, his palm bleeding down the horse’s haunch—a mortal sound I never imagined he could utter.
With my incredible peripheral vision, I watched as his daughter sunk her teeth deeper into her father’s hand as nearby red-coated soldiers crested the embankment, hearing Paul’s cry, searching for its source. They raised their rifles. One fired.
Paul and I both leapt.
When change happens, it happens fast. In Paul’s pocket lay my sixteen eggs, pre-tadpoles, frozen and perished. In Paul’s lifetime, he would beget sixteen children. But the dead ones count, too. He became a legend for his ride, his rebellion against the King, and for his hanging of a lantern in the cemetery each night until he passed so that the eleven children he’d outlived never feared the darkness. After that, each night in the cemetery, I described the darkness to those eleven sons and daughters on his behalf—that is, until gas lamps were installed. I kept my word, the only thing I had left to keep. Cass moved away before her son or daughter was born. Everyone who ever knew me called me a hero, even Paul. But only because he owed me that much, at least. For what happened. And what happened was change. When change happens, it happens fast. You see, even the biggest men can be made small. That night in the cemetery, just Paul and I? I’d been wrong about him. I believed I could sacrifice something that Paul could no longer. But he could, and he did. When he leapt, it was for cover behind an oak stump. When I leapt—a glorious hop—it was upon Lizzie. I spread myself into a warty green star, as big as possible to cover her, as if I held any chance of shielding her. But it had only been a warning shot. And it worked. Paul was a goddamn babysmith. But in that moment, as my thin, long, gamy body laid across Lizzie, I was her father.
Zachary Tyler Vickers is a writer and animator, and the author of the short story collection Congratulations on Your Martyrdom! His fiction has won numerous awards, like the Kurt Vonnegut Prize, and appears in many prominent journals.