Angels Of Hope

Chapter 39

Dixie P.O.V

The bus rocks us from side to side as we travel these familiar roads, our brains afforded the time to daydream or rest. There are those who chatter, their voices rising and blending together in the sweet ritual of friends. Some absorb themselves in music, others drift into worries that will erase themselves on arrival, when their body rejoins the world of moving and speaking to others. And so it goes on that way, all of us together and separate, feeling all the same turns and bumps.

Loud, obnoxious children yelled and laughed. I gritted my teeth in annoyance. Then a kid tumbled into me and I grunted in anger and shoved him away.

"Watch it!" I snarled and stood up. "Shut up! My gosh, do you have to be so loud?" I yelled, not caring about the glares or the way the bus driver stared. I just wanted and needed these people to shut up.

No matter how many times the bus driver asked them, they didn't quiet down. Rebellious, ignorant, and undisciplined - as my father would say. That was for sure. I shoved away someone when they tried to yell at me. By the time the bus ride ended, I had been written up for punching someone.

I had managed to push past the constant stream of children and to the school field. The grass was damp and covered in a thin layer of frost. As I walked my footprints were embedded, leaving a piece of me in the cold ground. The field was out of bounds in the winter but I didn't care, it was a Friday and the school teachers had better things to do with their time.

Breath pale against the numbing air, I blinked thoughtfully as the frost patiently kissed my face, captivated by the soft, dusty illusions of light that sat heavy on my eyelashes. I adored the snow, moreso when it was falling.

Father never said "I love you." He wasn't one of those fun parents who spun you around by your arms until you were dizzy. He didn't build me a go-cart or dance with me to rock 'n' roll. He watched his money and he took care of the car. He didn't gush over my art work or inflate my ego in any way. Mostly I only saw him on the weekends when he fell asleep in front of the television beer in hand and chips in easy reach.

But every ballet recital he was in the front row, regardless of who's view he blocked. The first day Tristan Gomez followed me home from school with his gang he went to the police, the second day he went after them with a baseball bat. He spent eighteen years filling a college fund so that I could have an education at any university I chose, but he never told me what to study. That was my choice. He never gave advice unless I asked for it, he never really spoke unless someone else did first. Now every time I visit he checks my well being and how things are going before he let's me go back to my mother's house.

He had never known what love was until that cold January morning in the hospital two years previously. He had been brought up in foster homes, many of them. He had known kindness, but the negative influences in his life had outweighed the good. The morning that his wife gave him the most perfect gift he could have wanted. The most perfect feeling he had ever known had swept through him. He was rocked to his core, He knew he would do anything in the world for her. He would be her hero, her keeper, the one who gave her cuddles and kept her safe. He would be her Daddy. He loved her.

My father was a proud man. He was strict, disciplined and of high principal. He was short tempered and did some wrong in his life but he wasn’t a bad man. He had just been washed with bad experience and born more short-tempered than most. He wore his pride like a parapet. I didn’t know whether it was to shield him or not let anyone in. His judicious intellect, precise eye and impetuous anger led to a profoundly tarnished reputation amongst his distant relatives. From my memories of him, I can recollect his leathery skin; it had seen more distress than happiness as if he had been fighting with life, all his life. He had his dusky hair that rested atop his herculean sallow figure. A disorderly mess of hair and wrinkles sat on his brow bone, forehead and under the green eyes that never smiled. His hands were withered and his fingers were like an insect antenna. He was bold. He had the resounding presence of a fiery phoenix but the quiet yet strong aura of a Boilam Brikkho he didn’t have to talk to be the loudest person in a room.

In fact he was much like a Boilam Brikkho tree with great boughs striving to touch the sky and its noble roots strengthening its hold on the ground; he was very ambitious man with firm roots to his past and great ties to his land. The native Bengali-speakers would often talk of the legend of how God stopped the Boilam Brikkho from growing because it worried too much about growing more rather appreciate what it had. But this led to it cutting itself off from the other trees and being consumed by its anger. I never understood why stopping the tree from growing even mattered because the Boilam Brikkho was the tallest tree in all of West Pakistan anyway. But when I think about how my father once only cared so much of our future but had stopped, with a newly founded petulance overtaking his once slightly optimistic demeanour, I wondered if God did to him what it did to that Boilam Brikkho.