The Hollows by Tom Howard

Once my father took me with him to throw a gun in the river. This was on a Saturday morning in early winter. We climbed into his pickup, and he set the gun, a pistol, down on the seat between us. We both looked at it for a few seconds without saying anything. I’d never seen  my father with any kind of gun. Eventually he said, Okay. Then he began driving. He didn’t explain why I had to come. He didn’t explain why he had to get rid of the gun, either, so I had to believe it was because he’d murdered someone with that gun. I didn’t hold this against my father. My father was beyond reproach to me. He was forty-six when I was born, and was in his late fifties now. He seemed both ageless and ancient to me. He worked as a foreman at a mill, and though it wasn’t a steel mill, I pictured him going in to work every day, taking a heavy shovel off the shovel rack when he arrived—I thought there had to be a shovel rack—and grimly shoveling hot coals into a furnace all day. Now and then, I imagined, he probably also wiped his brow with a leather glove. My father never lied or drank or gambled, and he’d never owned a bike, even as a boy, likely because his parents couldn’t afford one. But I don’t think he ever coveted anything in his whole life. For these reasons and others, I knew he would’ve only murdered someone if there were no alternative. And I assumed he felt that being caught with the gun and convicted of a crime would have upended our family, compounding the tragedy of the justifiable murder. And so the gun had to disappear. He was bringing me along, I understood, as a kind of witness, to make it clear to the universe that he wasn’t hiding from what he’d done. My father was not a man who would ever hide. 

The river in question was the Staunton, and it was where my father fished as a boy. That was one of the few things I knew about his childhood. I knew he fished there as a boy and I knew, or strongly suspected, that he had never fished there again once he became an adult.  This was because for many years, whenever we drove across the river, my mother would say, Well, that’s where your father used to fish. As if my father no longer fished, which he did; or as if he no longer fished in this spot along the Staunton, which was no more than fifteen minutes from our house, for reasons that she believed one or the other of them had shared with me in the past, which they had not. She always said it exactly this way—Well, that’s where your father used to fish—and she said it whether he was in the car with us or not. If he was in the car, she might also say to him, Wasn’t it? And he would pause to consider this, and then say, after considerable thought: ’Twas. I thought sometimes about asking for more information. But the idea of my father expanding on this, of him telling a story in actual words about something personal that had happened to him during his time on Earth, was unthinkable. I’d known this from the time I was five.

I had learned to fill in the blanks in my father’s life and character myself. And so I imagined, for example, that he avoided the river because he had been fishing there once with a friend named Cecil. I had a friend named Cecil myself, who carried a rabbit’s foot all the time, and I figured my father probably had a friend named Cecil too, who also carried a rabbit’s foot. My guess was that my father’s Cecil had fallen in the river and drowned because he didn’t have his rabbit’s foot with him. His ghost now haunted the length of the Staunton from Watkins Bridge to the mouth of the Roanoke, and he blamed my father, wrongly I was certain, for taking no action to prevent his untimely death. I suspected that at first my father would’ve gone back and faced Cecil’s ghost, and even tried to explain himself and ask for forgiveness. But the ghost’s ears would have been filled with water and river slime, making him incapable of understanding what my father had to say. And so Cecil’s ghost only croaked and gibbered and rattled his dripping chains some more, until my father was forced to give up and find another place to fish. Not so much for his own sake, I suspected, but for the sake of Cecil’s ghost, to allow the ghost to get some rest from all the croaking and gibbering and rattling.

Of course, I didn’t know we were going to the river that day, not at first. It wasn’t until my father turned the truck sharply off the road just beyond the bridge that I had any idea. I looked at him with some alarm then, unsure if this was his doing or the work of Cecil’s ghost. But my father was stone-faced as always. Wordlessly, he guided the truck down a long gravel path toward an embankment, where he came to a stop and shut off the ignition.

He took a moment to look out toward the river, and so I took a moment to look out toward the river as well. The winter cold had only just arrived, and columns of steam drifted skyward from the river’s quiet, still-warm waters. I was thinking about loons because I’d just watched a television show about a lake in Minnesota that had loons. There had never been any loons on the Staunton as far as I knew but I thought it would’ve been right for there to be one, and it would’ve been right for us to hear its strange mournful cry just then. It would’ve felt like it was something only for the two of us. And we would’ve looked at each other and nodded without having to say a word, because sometimes you don’t have to say words to share something like that, like hearing a weird bird together. And I’d remember it all my life, until I was an old man and almost in the grave myself. I’d remember the day we came to throw a murder gun in a haunted river, and the river was afire and a loon cried out and we didn’t have to say a damn word about it.

Well, it’s time to get on with it, my father said. And he pocketed the gun and stepped out of the truck. 

By the time I got out of the truck he was three strides ahead of me. My father was not a tall man but what height he possessed was in his legs, and so he tended to stride along with a surprising quickness. Wanting to mimic what I believed was the gravity he brought to the situation, the gravity it warranted, I didn’t quicken my own pace, but rather tried to elongate my stride as much as possible, which was not very much.

I was thinking about this, about elongations and gravity and so on, when I lifted my head to see my father already at the river’s edge. His slightly stooped back was to me, and as I watched, he lifted the gun and tossed it into the water without fanfare. If he said a single word before the act, I was too far away to hear it. When he turned back, I was still coming toward the river’s edge myself. I paused and turned my head, gazing north through the bare winter trees in a general upriver direction, and trying to look purposeful.

You see something? he asked, stopping beside me and following my gaze.

Thought I did, I told him, but it was only a buck. 

This wasn’t true. I had seen no buck, nor any living thing in those woods. I don’t know why I lied except that in the moment it occurred to me that perhaps my role all along had been to stand watch, and it troubled me that I had done such a poor job of it.

My father put his hand above his brow to shield his eyes from the winter light. He had eyes like a hawk, and I regretted the lie. Now I would have to spin a tale about the buck to explain its surprising absence from the visible horizon—quicksand, maybe, or a small fissure that had opened and then quickly closed again, like the one that was rumored to have opened and closed in Burkeville after the earthquake, swallowing a live Holstein cow and four sheep. Although that rumor in fairness was started by a boy at my school named Todd, who hated livestock and was untrustworthy as the rule rather than the exception. Either explanation, the quicksand or the temporary fissure, seemed fraught to me, and so I decided then and there to come clean and admit that I had failed in my role as lookout, knowing full well that this would stain the memory for the rest of my days, and for the rest of my father’s days, too. I might have thought we would look back on this day in shame, but I knew the truth was worse, that we would never look back at all.

Ah, my father said, at last, dropping his hand. You’re right. Not a big fellow yet, is he?

I rescanned the horizon, startled. Then my eyes moved back to my father. He had a slight, soft smile on his face, of a sort that I had not seen and couldn’t properly interpret. But I allowed, carefully, that the buck was not yet big at all.

My father set his hand on my shoulder for a moment, and for some time we watched in silence as an imaginary buck receded into the deep, befogged woods along the Staunton.

Then my father sighed and said, Alright now. And we returned to the truck. 

He started the engine, and then he turned to me in the front seat.

Now I want to tell you something, he said. 

My breath caught in my chest. I understood that he was going to tell me the whole business with Cecil now. Or he was going to explain who he’d murdered with his murder gun, and why.  Either way, I figured this was again one of those moments in a life that clearly divides the past from all that comes after, and I would forever be changed by what was about to happen.

When my father lay dying, he said, I was still very young. 

I blinked at him.

He cleared his throat, and turned his eyes toward the waters of the Staunton in front of us. And then, after a moment in which he seemed to collect his thoughts, he began to speak. 

I was only a year older than you at the time, he said. Too young for a son to lose a father, though I imagine there is no age that doesn’t seem too young. Now I loved my father but I feared him greatly. He had never laid a hand on me, but I feared him. He seemed very old to me at that time, though he was no older than I am now. His wrinkled skin was as thick as tree bark, tanned by the furnaces. His hair was a rat’s nest, silver and coarse and untamable. His eyes were the palest and most somber eyes you could ever imagine. That came from what he had seen in the Great War, it seemed to me, though in fact he had not fought in the war because he was lame in one leg, had been since he was a boy himself. I imagined that he hated not being able to fight, that he spent the duration of the war picturing his friends falling on the battlefield, day after day, with such terrible clarity that the very color did drain from his eyes, like blood from an ashen face. On top of this, for a full year before he died, he had become mad, or so it seemed to my mother and to me. He lost hold of who he was, and railed at phantoms, and limped from room to room with some forgotten purpose, the more terrible for being forgotten. Eventually he was confined to bed, and his mind grew more clouded still. One day my mother said to me that he would be gone soon. She said to go speak with him, hoping, I know, that we might share some moment of grace, he and I, before he died. Something for me to carry forward through life, maybe, and for him to close out his account here on this world in peace. And so I went each day to the madman’s room and stood by his bed. Each day I said that I loved him, though I spoke quietly, hoping not to rouse him despite my mother’s desire that we speak. Because I was still afraid, you see. And each day when my allotted time was up, I was relieved to steal away, though I felt a great guilt in my heart for it. Then one day my father awoke. ‘My son,’ he said, with his eyes still shut. ‘My son. You have returned to me.’ And I leaned close, and said, ‘Yes. Of course. Every day.’ And he patted my hand and smiled and seemed to fall back asleep, and I thought maybe this was the moment of grace I had been charged with finding. For the moving forward and for the settling of accounts. Then he opened his pale anguished eyes, and he said, ‘Paint me the hollows.’ ‘The hollows,’ I said. ‘With the daisies,’ he said. ‘Where we went together when you were a boy. I want to see it again before I die.’

The windows in the truck had fogged up. Now there was no river and there was no winter beyond the glass, but still my father’s eyes remained set on some invisible point in the distance. 

You know, he went on after a time, that you had an uncle. Luke.

I blinked at this, hard, but said nothing.

Of course he died young, my father went on. This was in a motorcycle accident in Europe immediately after the war, in which he had fought with no small distinction. Now he was a gifted artist, and by all accounts a gentle soul. During the war he often sent back sketches he’d drawn in the field, and sometimes he sent back watercolors, too. Windmills and French farmhouses and lilac meadows and such. I knew nothing about art, I was only a boy, but those watercolors were as perfect and as peaceful as anything I had ever seen. As if he were painting the world as it used to be, or as it would be again, when the war was over, or when the Earth was whole again. I felt better about him being over there because of those sketches and those paintings. And he always included a letter to my mother and father, along with a separate letter to me. He wrote to me of what he had seen and thought over there, not about fighting but just about the world, and what it was like being out in the world like that. And he asked me, though I was much younger and I of course knew nothing much at all, what I had seen and thought back here at home. And so I idolized him as we all did, as much for his gentleness as for anything else. It shook me when he died, of course. It shook my father more. He loved me but he treasured Luke, needed Luke, I believe, as one needs the soft rain against the windows on a June night. Luke was like that, you know. By the time my father lay dying, Luke had been gone for four years. But I understood that when my father told me he knew I would return, when he asked me to paint for him the hollows filled with daisies before he died, he believed in that moment that I was my brother Luke.

My father fell silent then, and for some time we sat there in the idling truck, looking out together through the fogged windshield. And I turned over in my mind what he’d said, and what I thought came next.

With some confidence I said, You painted him the hollows.

I did, he said.

And it was pretty good, I said. Even though you didn’t know what you were doing. I bet.

It was, he said, an abomination. 

I said nothing to this.

At first, he continued. I’d never been there, to the hollows. But I knew of it. It was Luke’s place, and my father’s place. So I went there the day after my conversation with my father.  I set up my easel the way I remembered seeing Luke once do it. I stood as Luke had stood. Then I painted. For three hours I painted, the same scene again and again and again. Until my arm grew tired and the sun dropped low and blood-red on the horizon and despair hung like a heavy suit over my spirit and body. 

And then I bet things changed for the better, I said.

They did not, he said. Because I could not paint. And because I was a child. But I came back the very next day, and the day after that, and the day after that. For a full week I came every afternoon to the hollows, and I tried to make something that in my father’s deranged state he might accept. Each time I failed, and considered stopping. But then each night when I went to see him, empty-handed, he roused himself long enough to ask if I had brought with me that which he had requested. He was in much suffering by this point. And I had come to understand that he was staying alive, and therefore continuing to suffer, only because he was waiting for his hollow, his daisies.

Eventually I had something to bring to him, my father went on. This was several days later. It wasn’t anything like the hollows. It was only swirls of yellow-orange and green and white, which was all I saw anymore when I closed my eyes, and all I could see when I looked out at the hollows. But it was what I had. So I brought it into my father’s room right as the last of the day’s light seeped from the sky. And then at last he looked at my painting.

Here again my father paused. But in the space of that pause I could see the ending well enough. My father’s father lying in bed, his weird pale eyes out of focus, deep golden light streaming in through the window to soften his terrible face with its gruesome rictus of suffering. My father, setting his easel down just so. The watercolor hidden beneath a thin white cloth, which my father now removed, without fanfare, his eyes slightly downcast. And then: grateful recognition dawning on my father’s father’s face, setting it aglow right at the moment when he passed through the veil and into eternity.

My father said: He grimaced then. ‘Not your best work,’ he said.

This story, I said, is bleaker than I expected.

He nodded, and said, At least it was not a recoil. I had expected a recoil. Because as I said, I only painted abominations. I was more or less content with a grimace. And then he said something else. 

I tried not to wince.

‘But it is enough.’ That is what your grandfather said to me. And then he died.

We sat together with that for a time, my father and I, while the truck continued to idle.

Then he cleared his throat, and said, Now. About the gun.

For a moment I had no idea what gun he was talking about. 

I am sorry about the gun, he said. I want you to know.

Well, I said. 

He shook his head, and said, I have failed you. But it is done, now. You see that we did what must be done?

I think so, I said, slowly.

And there will be no more of it, he said. 

None, I said.

Your mother, he said, is worried.

She is, I allowed, more slowly still.

As am I, he said. It cannot have been an easy time, I know. That boy.

I nodded hesitantly at this.

The fault is mine, he said. I have left you, I fear, far too often on your own. 

And I shook my head and quickly said No, no, because I saw and was touched by how stricken he was, how his craggy face had drawn in upon itself. 

Well, he said, trying to compose himself. 

So you’re saying, I said. And then I stopped.

I mean it is a good thing, he said, that we have spoken. And then he, too, stopped, as if suddenly uncertain.

And in that moment, I understood that the gun did not and had never belonged to my father. My father had after all never murdered anyone, either with moral justification or not. He had simply found a gun, and brought me here to the river to deal with it, to help me through what he believed was a great and terrible trial. He brought me because he believed the gun was mine.

I marveled at this as we drove off.

I could see it. Oh, but I could see it so well, the story he’d told himself. This troubled boy, distant from a father who had grown old too quickly. Starved for attention and love. Hadn’t the boy, sure—would he not turn inward? Would he not lose himself in fantasy? Wouldn’t his oddness bloom, and isolate him even more, even from his oldest and truest friends? Even from Cecil. My Cecil. Cecil who was full of imagination, like me, and always up for any adventure when we were young. Cecil who looked like me, so much so that people who didn’t know better called us brothers. Brother Cecil, lucky Cecil, whose own father was young and strong and not dying at all, and who taught Cecil and me a lot of things. The things a father teaches his son, I mean, like how to throw a baseball side-armed, and how to use a miter saw, and how to shoot a gun, and how to field strip a gun, and where to hide your guns so you can reach them when you need them. Of course, all that was before things took a turn. Before the friendship withered, as friendships do. We hadn’t talked in some months by the time it happened, but that made it no easier for me when Cecil went missing like he did. Wasn’t I the one who found the rabbit’s foot in the woods, caked in mud? Of course, my father was right. It couldn’t have been easy for me. Maybe I’d found the gun, too, and kept it. I couldn’t think of why I would keep it. What reason could there be? But my father seemed to know. In his old face, his sad wonderful old face, he seemed to know.

We turned off the gravel path and onto the bridge that would take us back across the Staunton. I looked through my window toward the east, where the rising sun was finally burning off the river fog. The bone-white bark of birch trees shone along the banks. I scanned the woods on both sides of the dark and silent waters, looking for the buck. I knew he was out there. I couldn’t see him, but I knew, I knew. He was there.

Tom Howard is the author of Invisibilia (Slant Books, forthcoming) and Fierce Pretty Things (Indiana University Press). His recent work appears in the Iowa Review, Booth, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife in Arlington, Virginia.

10 October 2025