Then to the evening meal; facing his mother, the porridge between them and the meat on a plate, and the red coals in the paraffin tin keeping out the chill of the evening because by then even the sky was grey, and looking up he could already see one star; eating in silence for a long time, caught in the slow rhythm of their hands dipping in the pot, each taking a turn after the other, the only sounds in that silence coming from the old woman sucking a bone and the yellow bitch at the end of a taut chain, whimpering until tossed a bone. When his mother had finished eating and had wiped her hands and picked a piece of meat from a tooth, she looked at him, her son, playing with a few crumbs of mealiepap on his plate, and told him again that his father was coming tomorrow.

He couldn’t remember when she had first told this story. It was the story of a man, a big man, a gentle man, a laughing man who had had to leave them for such a long time, but would come back one day. That was the manner of the first times she told him. One day, he was always coming back one day; and she had told it that way for many years and in a voice that made one day sound a long time away. He had had this story at supper most nights of his life, and maybe for this reason had not noticed the changes, like the time when he realized that her saying one day did not sound such a long time away, and after that failing to catch the precise moment when her voice, quickened with hope, spoke of a definite day, because the one day was said no longer. Instead she gave a definite day and a date, this still meaning nothing to him, until lately she had been saying things like next month, next week, three days time—and that he could understand in a way. Now it was tomorrow and that he could understand most of all because it simply meant going to sleep beside his mother, and then opening his eyes and there it was—tomorrow.

This man, this big, gentle, laughing man—his father— was coming tomorrow.

And what did he see when she said this? The image had taken a long time to form, and parts of it were almost as old as himself, going back many years, to the time she said, ‘He is warm David, warm in bed my boy’, which meant glowing like the paraffin tin full of coals on a dark night. Therefore he always glowed, this father, red in his bed, in his imagination, warmly on the winter nights, suffusing his dreams of when he would come with the columns of a sunset sky.

Then there was the laughing. She said this so often, and with such meaning, that he knew that he also laughed in his bed, in his sleep, even when eating. So a red, glowing man, always laughing, with big hands, being a big man, and maybe covered with feathers because she said he was soft and full of love. Red, laughing, big-handed, holding love and all of this ‘father’, which was all right because it made up for not having an ordinary one like other children. And he was coming tomorrow, maybe to come flying this long way away, moving his feathered arms like wings as he settled in the backyard. Tomorrow was a big day all right.