The Animal in the Yard
HOPE WABUKE is the author of the chapbooks Movement No. 1: Trains and The Leaving. Her poetry and essays have been published in Tupelo Quarterly, North American Review, Salamander, Guernica, and The Guardian, among others. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the New York Times Company Foundation, and VONA. A contributing editor for The Root, she is also an assistant professor of English and creative writing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
THE ANIMAL IS COMING into the yard and destroying my plants,” my father says to me on the telephone at night. “I am going to set a trap for it.” His voice is shaking and slurred. He tires easily now, and when he does, his voice is the first thing to go. By evening, my mother says, she cannot understand him anymore. But I have a two-year-old baby boy, and I have gotten used to deciphering words from half-formed sounds.
My father will not say what kind of animal it is or how long it has been there. He has always been leery of revealing what he thinks is too much. The names of his eleven siblings, for example, or his first language, or what our home in Uganda was like. Anything about sex or relationships. When I was younger, I found this withholding painful. But now, older, I understand this was his attempt to protect me.
We speak to my father twice a day, my baby boy and I, usually in the morning and at night. My baby boy likes to call and tell his Baba good morning and last night’s dreams; Baba likes to say goodnight and talk about baby boy’s day. The daylight hours are no good for talking for either of them. They both spend different parts of it sleeping and miss each other’s phone calls. Lately, baby boy is sleeping less, and my father is sleeping more. He has a diagnosis, my father. He is dying.
MY FATHER USED TO BE a farmer. “Subsistence farmer,” he would clarify if anyone got overly excited about this history. His type of farming was the kind where you grew what you ate and were lucky if you had anything left over to sell at the market for luxuries like sugar and salt. The kind where you woke in the pre-dawn dark to work the land, where you had to walk long miles to fetch water from the well and carry it back to the kitchen or the fields. It was hard, and it was work, and he did it every day— sunup to sundown during summers, before and after school during the academic year.
My father was the first person in his family to finish second grade. He put himself through
