WELL DONE! Dismantling a Childhood by Jon Sokol

Dismantling a Childhood by Jon Sokol

The late August sun scorched Edgar’s bare neck and weighed him down as if he were carrying another man on his back. The air was thick with humidity. Each gulped breath was like inhaling through a soggy sponge. It was only 10:30 in the morning. But on this oppressive Sunday, he was determined to tear down the rotting play structure in his backyard.

Perhaps “determined” is not the proper word. His wife, Emily, was certainly determined to have the eyesore removed. Edgar did not particularly care for the pressure-treated skeleton out back, but there was a lot he didn’t care for. He didn’t care for the fact that Emily had threatened to ask the work crew patching their neighbor’s roof to tear down the monstrosity and haul it off. He didn’t care for the insinuation that he was a lazy so-and-so.

He didn’t care to get his hands dirty. He didn’t care for the inevitable snakes, the busted knuckles, the missed ball game, the prying neighborly questions. He did not care. He did not care if the dilapidated jungle gym remained in its prime shady spot until God Almighty and English Ivy brought it down to its chemically preserved 4x4 knees.

But Emily did care. The family that sold them the house had been brimming with Catholic children, while she, with her apparently barren womb, had none. So he, on this day, the 394th since they moved into the “whimsical” Queen Anne on Butler Street, would dismantle the structure with the hopes of preserving a few pieces of usable lumber and what little pride he had left.

Edgar, forlorn, stood facing the playset. He wore his worst jeans and a KISS t-shirt he had bought at a concert in 1991. He had been sixteen and had to sneak out of his grandmother’s house. That was back when the band wasn’t wearing any makeup. He regretted not seeing them before they ditched the face paint. Sure, he could see them next month on their farewell tour, painted and hoary, but without Ace and Chris, it just wasn’t KISS.

He kicked one of the posts. It did not budge. He fretted that they may have been set in concrete.

Thirty minutes later, he had assembled an arsenal of tools, some jangling from an uncomfortable tool belt, that would allow him to remove each board one by one. His plan was to use some of the playset’s better boards to build a pair of Adirondack chairs suitable for adults. And maybe a bird house or two since the rotten structure was home to quite a few backyard chirpers.

Edgar removed his safety glasses. He glared at the monstrosity and jammed his thumbs into the tool belt. “Are you making fun of me, Swingset?” he said aloud. The late morning trickles of sweat were turning into a deluge. The structure stared silently back at him.

Edgar unhinged his step ladder and climbed up to the long crossmember that spanned from the main structure (part pirate ship, part dollhouse) to an a-frame ten feet away and supported three plastic swings. He unhooked the chains one by one and relished the satisfying clinks as the swings dropped to the ground.

“You aren’t so tough,” he said. A daddy long-legs knuckled away from him on the beam. Edgar pulled out a claw hammer from his tool belt and squashed the spider with a thump. Spider juice squirted into his left eye. It burned like fire. “Sonofabitch!” He rubbed it hard and knocked off the safety glasses that had been perched on the bill of his ball cap.

“All God’s creations.” His grandmother’s words from long ago wafted through his mind. “Every little creature has a reason for being here on God’s beautiful earth,” she would say, lazily swatting mosquitoes on the back porch as little Edgar would sit in the yard, torturing ants with a pilfered cigarette lighter.

Edgar had gone to live with his widowed grandmother a few days after his eighth birthday and two weeks before his mother left on a mission trip to Paraguay. He would not see her again until his own wedding.

“I never had a swingset,” he said to the swingset. “Not even one as shitty as you.” He loosened rusted bolts using a can of WD-40 and a ratchet. “No dad to build one either.”

Neither Edgar nor his mother had known his father’s real name. The traveling preacher had used Phineas Godson as an alias. And although the slick-haired Preacher Godson was certainly present for the notably maculate conception, he hadn’t stuck around for the rather banal birth.

The A-frame toppled to the ground leaving the swing support beam hanging precariously like a man about to fall from a boat. Edgar eased down the ladder and moved it away from the wavering 6x6 timber. He climbed up into the main structure and removed the plastic ship steering wheel and the tattered remnants of a rainbow sail that reminded him of his grandmother’s bath towels.

She would string up the laundry every other morning and make little Edgar read to her from the Old Testament. She especially loved the shalls and shall nots of Leviticus. She was the kind of woman who loved her neighbor, loved her church, and loved her grandchild. She loved him so much that she spent a considerable amount of her time beating the hell out of him.

Edgar pried a board loose and tore it off the structure. An unseen red nail scratched his forearm as he tossed the plank to the ground. Blood seeped from the shallow cut. He wiped the wound on his jeans.

“It’s not so bad,” he had heard his grandmother say. Little Edgar had cut his foot on some rebar out in the yard. She had not believed in vaccines even though tetanus shots were free for the poor kids in the town. He would scream as she poured kerosene on the wound then whip his ass for the words he’d used.

By early afternoon, Edgar had succeeded in bringing down half of the play structure. Emily brought him a bacon sandwich and a Bloody Mary.

“How’s it coming, cowboy?”

“It was kicking my ass earlier,” he said. “But it’s coming down now.” He ravaged the sandwich and downed the cocktail like a backsliding drunk.

“Are you okay?”

“Me? Yeah. Why?”

“You don’t look so good.”

Edgar looked down at his sunburnt arms. A dried creek of black coagulated blood had crusted on the left one. “It’s not bad.”

“Let me know if you need some help, okay?”

“I’m fine. Just leave me alone.”

“‘kay.” Emily took his paper plate and empty plastic cup and left him a bottle of water.

He watched as she walked back to the house. She would have been a good mother, he thought. But biology’s cruel randomness had made that impossible. He looked back at the play structure and rubbed his eye that still stung from spider guts.

Let’s get this over with.

Edgar used the blunt end of a splitting maul to crash down the sliding board. He found that destruction was more satisfying than pulling nails and tapping out bolts. He ripped down the monkey bars that reminded him of the playground at school. The school he had attended up until third grade when his grandmother pulled him out of that “Godless Lake of Fire.”

“They still teaching you about monkeys and dinosaurs?” she had asked one day. “I know they’re your favorite animals, but they don’t need to be teaching that trash to young minds.”

Edgar threw down the maul and fell to his knees.

“That’s right, boy,” he heard her say. “Pray for forgiveness.”

I don’t want forgiveness, you old bat.

“Tell Jesus to forgive you for listening to that sinful music,” she said in a singing gospel voice that grew louder in his skull. “Tell him to forgive you for your bathroom iniquities. Your evil intentions. Your rebellious nature!”

Edgar vomited on the ground staining the grass with blood red. He began to feel—better. He wiped his mouth and stood on shaky legs. He saw his grandmother lying in her coffin. Her face was powdered an unnatural white, and she wore a blue dress and a twisted grin.

“Laugh if you want, but I’m done with you,” he had told the corpse. He was eighteen when she had finally died from some undiagnosed illness.

Edgar faced the stoic remains and adjusted his tool belt. “Swingset,” he said in a gravely Anthony Quinn voice. “I love you very much. But I will take you down before this day ends.”

He jammed in his earbuds and scrolled to ACDC on his phone. His head bobbed to the snare drum slashes signaling the beginning of “Who Made Who.” He pulled the cord on his chainsaw and it roared to life. He no longer cared about preserving anything. After ten minutes the playset that once belonged to an unknown child was turned into a lifeless heap of splintered gray wood.

Edgar killed the saw and pulled out his earbuds. He looked over the fence and saw Reba, his neighbor, watching him from her back porch. She held a lime green watering can. Her brow was wrinkled with concern.“Do you need some help, Edgar?”

“No ma’am. I’m good.”

It’s all good. For now.

Jon Sokol is a writer, forester, traveler, and furniture-maker from northeast Georgia. His short stories and essays have appeared in the James Dickey Review, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Southern Literary Review, Gutwrench Journal, Reckon Review, Cowboy Jamboree, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and other journals and anthologies. In 2021, he graduated from Reinhardt University with an MFA in Creative Writing. Jon can be found online at www.jonsokol.com and @JonSokolWriter on Twitter.