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Ira SukrungruangCONSEQUENCE In my Cub Scouts troop, I was the poison ivy alarm. “Poison ivy!” I shouted. “Poison ivy!” Out of all the lessons at den meetings, this was the one I most remembered. Our Den Mother had pointed to pictures of three broad leaves and told us tales of people who came in contact with them. One time, she told us, a friend of hers went into the woods to do number two and accidentally brushed his bottom on poison ivy. Hours later, rashes and bumps broke out all over his skin and he couldn’t stop scratching to the point she had to take him to the hospital. Her story stuck with me. I was allergic to everything already, miserable during hay fever season, another thing I inherited from my father whose allergy sneezes shook the earth. There was nothing more uncomfortable than a constant itch, one that gnawed at you and didn’t go away no matter how much you scratched. ...There was a chance my father was one of the twenty per cent immune to poison ivy... When my father came to the Father & Son Cub Scout Halloween celebration at Maple Lake, a forest preserve in Cook County, Illinois, he wanted to know what poison ivy looked like. It was the first time he took part in one of my extra-curricular activities. Usually, he worked at the tile factory most of the afternoon, so I rarely saw him except for weekends. That day, my father was in navy blue slacks, white leather shoes, and a pink golfing polo. He did his best to converse with the men, who towered over his five-four frame, but most conversations led to uncomfortable silences. My father was different from other fathers apart from being a small Thai immigrant. Other fathers wore rugged jeans and work boots. Other fathers sported camouflage jackets and hats. Other fathers gripped cans of Budweiser and smoked unfiltered cigarettes. My father did not fit that mold, and because I was seven and a Cub Scout, an organization of boys training to be men, I wondered if my father was a man. I wondered if the other kids thought I was like him, a goofy-looking Asian. In one of the activities, my father and I entered the forest to forage for things to decorate our lopsided pumpkin: pretty stones, twigs, fallen leaves, acorn tops, strips of tree bark. So when he asked me what poison ivy was, I located some at the base of a maple.My father pointed at it. “Ne nawn?” Are you sure? I understood his question. For a plant to be called poison ivy one expected it to look poisonous or alien, like the Venus Flytrap. But to the untrained eye, poison ivy looked no different from other bushes and shrubs and trees. It did not drip purple ooze like toxic waste or emit a foul odor. It was green and red and leafy like everything else around us. My father knelt beside it and pointed at it again. “This poison ivy?” “Yes,” I said. He moved to touch it, his finger hovering over the plant. “What are you doing?” I said. “Want to know what happen. Want to know if really poison.” “You’re not going to like it.” I couldn’t stop him. He touched it. He pinched a leaf, tore a bit of it off, and brought it to his nose. He sniffed. “I no feel anything.” He wiped his hands on his slacks. There was a chance that my father was among the twenty percent who were immune to poison ivy. But from what I remembered reading, it took some time before the skin got irritated by the oils of the plant. He shrugged and laughed, and I shrugged and stood a good distance away from him the rest of the time we collected our items, telling him to wash his hands in the creek bed so I wouldn’t be infected too. When we started decorating the pumpkin, I noticed a bump on my father’s cheek. As I stuck thick branches into the top of the pumpkin—its antennae—I noticed another. As I pushed acorn tops around the stem of the pumpkin, my father began to scratch a collected series of bumps that started at the corner of his mouth and ended near the point of his chin. As I glued on leaves for the pumpkin’s multicolored hair, he was scratching so hard, tiny bubbles of blood emerged from his skin. “Dad,” I said, pointing at his face, trying not draw the attention of the other fathers and sons around us. His fingers scratched and scratched. Blood smeared his face. But he kept working, kept shoving acorn tops into our pumpkin. He carved wavy lines on the sides and inserted leaves into the space. He told me the pumpkin’s eyes should be the weathered stones from the creek, the smooth brown ones that were thin and long. When we were done, our pumpkin looked like an Asian alien bellowing blessing from its large oval mouth. We took first place for our pumpkin. We would take first a month later with the regatta boat we built together and first again for the best meal cooked by campfire during the winter campout. That day, with the blue ribbon in my hand, my father drove home, grinning like a jack-o-lantern, his rash already scabbing up. I wanted to tell him I told you so. But it seemed he knew what I was thinking and said that there were some things you must find out yourself, no matter the consequence. “Kow chi?” Understand? I did. I reached up and touched his skin.  Ira Sukrungruang is a Thai American writer. He studied Creative Non-Fiction at the Ohio State University and is teaches non-fction writing at the State University of New York, Oswego. He co-edited both What Are You Looking At?, an anthology of stories about America's obsession with fat, which incudes contributions from George Saunders, Tobias Wolff and Peter Carey, and Scoot Over Skinny, a non-fiction collection exploring the same topic. Photo by VivaAntarctica.2:45 AM - 21/7/2006 - post comment
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