The Voices of My Fathers by Jeanne DeLarm-Neri

In response to the “The Thin Veil” prompt posted on April 14, 2025.

Someone is always talking to my father and now I realize

a spirit trudges the southern banks of the Riviere Saint Lawrence,
bandage wrapped around his belly, strips of bedsheet tight.

My father’s grandfather walked in front of a priest’s hunting rifle,
took a bullet between the tenth and eleventh rib,

and it tore a path into the bowel. The metal lies to this day
under a tilted gravestone crusted with white lichens.

My father and his grandfather shared small eyes set close
like the boy in between, four years old when Henry died.

“Like father, like son,” Dad says. They converse in his living room,
He built a plywood wall and papered it with orange maple-tree foliage.

“That was before I came. Maybe that’s why they put me in the country.”
His psyche split in two, divided by a fence of lightning bolts.

I catch a rip in the photographed wallpaper, peel it with a fingernail,
press it down again flat. “Did he die, your grandfather?”

“Sure! He died.” In 1890, a generation before my father
arrived on this stage of ours. “Sail Away,” Randy Newman sings

and I strain against the piano notes. The cassette revolves on its spool.
My father hacks, draws in smoke. “I had a dream last night.

Tell me what it means.” No one answers. “Somebody put the peanuts –
I don’t think we should…May be something they want done over.”

My brother takes a drag of the joint, coughs from his lungs.
Before we entered stage left, he heard the voices.

We grew up with him talking. Hearing. Silence. Explosion.
“I told you–shut up about Schaeffer. If you say anything.

Schaeffer.” I hear him take a drink and suck in another drag.
My brother picks up the thread. “Who’s Schaeffer?”

“The ones on my father’s side were not important.
My mother’s mother, now. There was a leader. The power.

Any question, she knew the answer. Gasoline, water, the end –
The world will be a ball of fire. The sun will crash into the earth.”

All his life they watched his moves, these ghosts, and their flesh.
“Of course, you never know what will be the cause.”