Last summer, I worked for my uncle. You see, I don’t have my work visa yet for the States, so I went up north to work for him. He owns a woodworking shop in some middle of nowhere farmland just outside Toronto. Pretty mundane stuff really: cut, cut, sand, cut, sand, repeat. Day in and day out. I mean, I’m still picking the sawdust out of my pockets from working there. I stayed in an old RV they had because the house was too small to hold another person comfortably. Besides, that gave me some privacy, a pretty big deal at nineteen. Every week was the same: work, eat, sleep. Relax on the weekends.
The one thing that made it bearable was my uncle, Sean. He’s a smaller guy, no more than 5’7”, black hair, and a mustache. Overall I guess you could describe him as short and bristly.  When something needed doing, Sean got it done; he was very militaristic in that respect. The barn door needs to be fixed? Hop to it, let’s go. Need to fix your car door? All right, to the autoparts store. He was upbeat, usually smiling, and always doing something. When I got up there he was getting ready to retire from his service with the Canadian Armed Forces. He had just hit forty and needed this much deserved rest, believe you me. He had served peacekeeping missions in Yugoslavia and Bosnia. There was also a stint on the Red Sea, boarding boats and such, looking for contraband. He never talked to me about his time in the military, and honestly, I didn’t want to ask him.
Now, you have to understand, up until this point, all I knew of Sean was the smiling, devious uncle who would sneak me beer when I was fifteen, and then argue with my mom about it after she found out. He was quite literally all you could want in a crazy uncle: always joking and doing something he probably shouldn’t be. Uncle Sean was always fun to be around. I remember once, he was coming to visit us, but was going to be in late. So my brothers, father, and I stayed up till about one o’clock (an unheard of hour when you are eight years old) and ambushed him with water guns as he got out of his car. Rather than the unsuspecting, weary traveler we had thought to encounter, he came out wielding two huge water guns. He was backed up by his wife, Judy, firing frantically out of the sun roof, both roaring battle cries that woke up the neighborhood. After all of us were sufficiently soaked and out of breath, we headed back inside, my brothers and I to bed, my Uncle, Judy and my father to the living room to talk.
Now I had grown up and needed some work, and Sean was there to help me out. One weekend while I was working for Sean we decided to finish early on a Friday and went over to one of his friends houses. We sat on some lawn chairs (which coincidentally I had made a few weeks back) and for a while just watched the lake. I can’t remember its name now. Idle chit chat, and (since I was of age in Toronto) a few beers. It was calm there, sitting by the lake. The faint smell of freshwater, a mix between algae and fish, drifted over to us as we talked about everything and nothing. How was work going? Did I like the job? How was my family? What did I think of the states? All that superficial small talk stuff. Once the sun began to fall towards the horizon we decided to head back home and caught a ride with one of Sean’s friends.
Shortly after we got back Sean started cooking dinner. We put some music on the stereo and I sat at the kitchen table, watching him prepare the pork chops for the grill. One thing I will say about Sean is this; he is one hell of a cook. The concentration that was evident on his face was amazing as he cut the fat off the slabs of meat and dashed seasoning on them. The quick, sure efficiency of his hands as he passed the sharpened blade of a knife so close to his fingers that the flat of the blade touched his skin shocked me. I know I would be far less confident had that been me, seeing as I’m rather attached to my fingers.
Once the meat was ready, I took the pork chops out to the grill. Just as I was opening the propane line Judy was pulling in the driveway. Judy and Sean have offsetting personalities, and they both manage to keep each other in check. Without Judy to balance him out, I have no idea where Sean would be. Plus, any woman that can put up with Sean for more than a year immediately earns my respect. Her car slid to a gentle stop on the loose gravel as I threw the meat on the grill, the faint crunch followed by a more aggressive sizzle. Little Michael, their three year old son, ran out of the car and into the house to go tell daddy all about his day at school. Judy walked at a gentler pace, with the gait of someone who had just fought through another tough day at work.
“Sean inside?” she asked as she laboriously walked up the steps that lead to the front door.
“Yeah, he’s just making the fries now,” I responded.
She just nodded and headed in. After a few seconds, Michael came out with his helmet on and jumped on his Big Wheels ATV to scoot around the yard for a while. As I flipped the pork chops the sound of raised voices came from inside, I knew something was wrong. The music was turned off and the argument continued, offsetting the sound of sizzling fat and my growling stomach. Their voices drifted out to me.
“You know you’re not supposed to be drinking!”
“Listen, I’m just having a few beers with the boy, it’s no big deal!”
“No big deal? With the medication you’re taking--”
“I don’t give a damn about the medication! I can take care of my damn self!”
The mention of medication brought up some questions. I knew my uncle had hurt himself while he was on tour, messing up his back. But I also remembered my dad telling my something about Sean taking pills for his post traumatic stress. I never really learned more about why he needed them; just that he was on a medication. Shortly thereafter, Judy came out with a small suitcase.
“Michael! Michael come here honey. We’re going on a sleep over.” She picked the child up off of his toy and headed towards the car without so much as a word to me.
“But where’s daddy going?” Michael asked.
“He’s staying here, now come, let’s go.” They both got in the car. The next time I would see them would be two days later. They would come back though, eventually. Sean and Judy would work past this fight. I don’t know how Sean would have held up if they hadn’t. I guess I never really understood just how much Judy kept Sean in balance, but I would soon learn.
Sean walked out on the porch, and before I could ask what happened, questioned angrily,
“How the pork chops coming?”
“I’m not really sure,” I replied, a bit uncertain of what I should do or say. “Maybe you should check them out.”
He hastily dug into one with the spatula, barely giving it a glance. “Looks good enough to me,” he said, practically barking the words.
So I brought the food in, all the while wondering what had just happened. How long would Judy be gone? Why had she taken Michael? How big of a deal was it for him to be drinking? However, given Sean’s current demeanor I knew that asking would only serve to aggravate him more, so I decided to leave it be.
I remember the pork chops being undercooked and blood pooling on the edge of my plate. The fries, coincidentally enough, were overcooked but made soggy by the blood leaking from the meat. All this was washed down by a nice, cool Guinness (at least the beer was good). My growling stomach didn’t mind the food and the beer did enough to kill my sense of taste that it made it all edible. We ate in silence.
Afterwards, Sean decided we needed to have a fire.  Once a week we used the scrap wood left over from working in the shop to have a little fire in the backyard. It was a good way to end a long week. I went in to the shop and gathered all the bins we kept the scrap wood in while Sean started up the fire. Soon we had a blaze crackling up high enough that, if I sat close, I could feel the hairs on my arm singe.
After a quick venture inside to get a nice big bottle of vodka, we both hunkered down in our chairs and enjoyed the fire. My uncle decided to pour me a “man size” drink. Eager to prove that I could take anything he dished out, I accepted the drink with unsteady hands. The warmth from the clear liquor sliding down my throat was a complement to the heat coming off of the fire. After pouring himself a shot and pounding it back angrily, Sean looked at me and said, through gritted teeth,
“She took my son.”
“Wait, what?” I responded, caught off guard by his sudden shift in mood.
“She took Michael with her. You know, I don’t care about me, do what you want to me, but don’t mess with my son.” He was staring into the fire as he said this, gesturing sharply with his hands.
“C’mon man, it’s not like she won’t come back or anything.”
He looked up from the fire, staring blankly at me.
“You know, I could pick you off at about a hundred yards. One bullet, that’s all I would need.”
His eyes bored straight through me as he said this. You’d think that statement alone would be enough to scare me, but what really terrified me were his eyes. The eyes that I was used seeing slightly squinted and turned up in the corner in laughter, were now blank and cold. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but I swear that as he said this, his iris looked almost completely black. It’s that look that scared me, because it told me that he actually could pick me off at a hundred yards, and it wouldn’t bother him. Not if he was in the mindset he was then. It wouldn’t bother him in the least.
His eyes lost their serious tone, and turned up into a smile once again.
“I’m just kidding buddy, where’s your sense of humor?” He said with a smile and a laugh. My nervous laughter accompanied his, although I was still shaken up by what just happened.
After a few more drinks, and some talk about work we needed to get done, Sean turns to me and asked for my cell phone. He said he needed to make a quick call, so I passed it over. What he ended up doing was calling my father, my brother, and my other uncle. He told my father I was a booze hound, my other uncle that I was a bad influence, and my brothers that I was passed out drunk on the front lawn. We were both laughing our asses off but after that last call I decided it was time to steal my phone back, so I snatched it from him.
A short while later, after our laughter had died down, my uncle turned to me and said in a very serious voice, uncommon for him,
“I know you’ve been through some tough shit, especially for someone your age.”
“Yeah,” I responded, non-committal. I wondered where this was going, not really wanting to talk about myself.
“You know, any time you need anything, I’ll be there for you.”
“Yeah, I know,” I responded, once again wondering where this grave attitude was coming from. I was still brooding on what exactly had happened with Judy and still a bit scared by what he had said earlier. The whole thing with the phone had only served to further confuse me. Now he had brought up a still sensitive subject.
“Sometimes the things people do, they don’t make sense,” he looked at me with caring eyes. A month before I decided to go work for Sean a friend of mine, Sasha, had committed suicide. At least that’s what I called it. He decided to take on a police station with two assault rifles and three handguns. He killed two people before he himself was gunned down. Right after I got back from my first year at college, rather than a fun relaxing summer with my friends all I had was death and sorrow; police and reporters calling me, wanting interviews. I never even found out where they buried him. I guess going up to Toronto was just as much an escape for me as it was a job opportunity.
“Listen Sean, I don’t really…”
“I know, I know,” he said, “I understand.”
I looked up at him, wondering how he could possibly understand.
“Some of the shit I’ve seen, no one should ever have to deal with…” He gazed into the fire, somewhere else.
“Really, like what?” I asked, more out of drunken stupidity than lack of tact, still a bit angry that he could be pretentious enough to say he ‘understood’.
“You know what they used to do?” He looked at me, vaguely trying to focus on my face through the light of the fire and the haze of alcohol. “They used to take them, and sort them, by height you see. Sort them by height, so they could line them up, single file. Use less ammunition that way, you see. Pow. One shot. Three, four, five people dead. In a goddamn church. A church, for chrissake. Then they’d burn it to the ground.”
“Oh shit,” I responded, shocked. Any sort of anger I might have held at him for poking at such a sore subject for me was lost. “That’s messed up man.”
“Yeah, you’re telling me. I can’t even sleep most nights without seeing their faces--their blank, staring faces. Messed up, and that’s not the least of it.” He stopped suddenly, and once more gazed back into the fire, lost in his memories. Showing an unusual grasp of the situation given my current state of mind, I didn’t push him further on the subject. The day had left a lot of questions in my mind, and had certainly altered my perspective of my Uncle. Looking back on that night by the fire, I find myself wondering just how much Sean would have been affected had Judy decided not to come back. The threats from before and the whole thing with the church scared me. Sean turned out to be a lot more fragile than I had always thought him to be. If things had gone worse, I think, he might’ve cracked. In a bad way. Just like Sasha had.
A blinding light shone down the drive way. A car pulled up, the soft crunch of gravel once more returning to my ears, although now it was offset by the gentle crackling of wood on the fire. We both stared unblinkingly as a figure walked with a slightly uneven step towards us across the back yard. The figure slowly became clearer, and revealed herself to be Judy’s sister, Leone. She looked a little disheveled in her sweat pants and shirt, and ill at ease coming over here. Sean stared blankly at her while she related that she was here to collect Michael’s pajamas and some things for Judy. Sean just nodded, not saying a word, still staring blankly at her. Slowly he nodded. She quickly flashed me a nervous smile, then turned back to the house. After a few seconds a light shone through the main bedroom window, and was shortly turned back off. The car slowly backed out of the driveway, the headlights leaving their bluish after-burn on my eyes.
“So…” wondering what exactly I should say. “Got a lot of work to do this weekend. Gotta mow the lawn and put that new screen door up.”
“Yeah, that we do.”
“Well, uh, I guess I’m gonna go get some sleep soon.”
“Yeah, me too.”
We both got shakily to our feet. Sean poked the fire, stirred around the embers to make sure it was safe to leave overnight. I remember the smell of the ashes rising up to my nostrils as a burned out two by four collapsed in on itself, throwing embers up into the air. I wondered if these were the same embers he remembered seeing, back at the church. I wondered if he was looking at their dead faces. I turned to him, trying to discern anything about what was going on in his head, but he just stared impassively. We stood for a few more seconds while he stirred the fire. Eventually he gave a slight grunt, which I took as a sign that he was satisfied that the fire had died down enough.
I grabbed the vodka bottle and our glasses and headed inside. Sean stayed out by the almost dead fire. It was weird, being in the empty house. I was so used to it being filled with the sound of Michael running around, or Sean cooking, or Judy typing on the computer. I quickly deposited the empty glasses in the sink; the clink of glass on metal seemed to ring out like an alarm bell throughout the house. It was almost deafening. I left the vodka bottle on the counter. The silence scared me, awakening that deep primal fear of darkness that’s too quiet that usually haunts only the young. That fear welled up in my chest until it almost burst, clawing at the back of my throat with desperate abandon. I quickly rushed back out to the fire, the tiny circle of light growing ever smaller. Out of breath I found Sean exactly where I left him, stick in hand, staring at the glowing embers.
“Goodnight,” I mumbled feeling a bit awkward about my fear before, and the fact that I had rushed out here. He didn’t respond so I headed back to the trailer. The light emitted by the fire pit was reduced to a dull red glow which barely served to outline him, still standing and staring into the embers. I went sleep, and left him to wherever he went when he was staring into the flames.