My father-in-law walks laps around the baseball field every morning. He does this, he says, for heart health, but I know his secret.

“He’s constipated.”

My mother-in-law stops making tuna sandwiches, wipes her hands on a dish towel, then motions for my attention, as if she’s about to show me where they keep the wrapped stacks of cash and the Armalites. My eyes follow her as she opens a cabinet and turns toward me. It’s too far for me to read the labels on the bottles inside, but that’s no matter. She catalogs them aloud—Dulcolax, MiraLAX, Metamucil, Senokot. My father-in-law’s digestive system is both criminal and victim, deserving, his wife’s smirk seems to say, our pity and our scorn. His walks are a treatment. His walks are a penance.

I am dispatched to the ballfield to retrieve my father-in-law and his jammed bowels. I spot him out by the fence in centerfield. He is by the sign that reads “367” as in “It’s 367 feet from here to home plate.” He walks with his hands in loose fists near his chest. I shout his name. He looks up, sees me. I wave to him. He waves back.

I sit on the top tier of the little four-bench bleachers, where the awning slices a shadow that provides relief from sun, but not the heat. It’s summer in Florida, where my in-laws retired, where they don’t believe in taxes, where the air has the texture of microwaved cling wrap. An unlikely breeze picks up dirt from the field. It stings my sinuses. Baseball was my dad’s sport, so it very much wasn’t mine.

I’m a middle-school P.E. teacher, and as a middle-school P.E. teacher, I turn a professional eye to the grass. I decide it’s well kept. Nearby, a boy throws a ball against the dugout wall, just below a sign that says, “Do not throw balls against the dugout wall.”

I wonder whether to say something. Never mind that there’s no one in the dugout. It’s summer, when only professionals play. The boy is in no danger of braining someone. The only people here are him, me, and my father-in-law, who’s progressed only so far as left-center, who’s beyond the reach of an elementary-school arm.

Where are this boy’s people, the busybody in my head asks. Where is his dad?

The ball makes the sound of a body hitting the floor every time it meets the cinder-block wall. It bounces back to the boy, who squares up on it, feet wide. He gets low and traps the balls in his glove with his throwing hand, then pops up and tosses it against the wall again.

“Get that glove dirty,” I say, for some reason. The boy looks up, suspicious of this middle-aged man who has spoken to him, who had until this moment been landscape.

I realize I’ve become stranger-danger. I look around for an escape route, and see only my father-in-law, who is still in left-center, who sure is taking his sweet time. I climb down from the bleachers, slide my sunglasses from the crown of my head to the bridge of my nose, and walk away from the boy, enter the field beside the visitors’ dugout.

I walk over the pitcher’s mound. I calculate my trajectory to intercept my father-in-law just before foul territory.

My father-in-law looks like a man from a bad future. He wears a mint green bucket hat and wireless earbuds that hug the tops of his ears so they don’t fall out. His wraparound sunglasses reflect my face back to me, a face that is too eager, too obsequious. My father-in-law looks neither eager nor obsequious. His is the serene face of a man who has pleased all those he needed to please in life and managed not to inflict more than a reasonable amount of hurt. All that’s left for him are wreaths and
laurels and deterioration. I tap my ear with my index and forefinger.

“What are you listening to?”

He stops walking and removes an earbud. He does this more slowly than he needs to. My father-in-law is deliberate and gentle. I admire this and am exhausted by it.

“The Táin,” he says. “I wrote a new translation. The publisher commissioned an audio version.” My response to this is not immediate, so he adds, “It’s something I’ve been working on a while.”

Most of this information isn’t new. My father-in-law is a retired academic and expert in Irish folklore, which is a thing you can be when your wife is a radiologist. I’ve known him 15 years. I’ve vacationed with him. I’ve picked him up from airports and been picked up by him from airports. I’ve received money and advice from him. When my own father died, he called me. He didn’t call my wife and ask her to hand the phone to me. He called my phone, while I was at work, and told me that he loved me. I lied and said I was about to start class, and that I’d call him back, which I didn’t do. Of course I know he’s been translating the Táin.

“You told me a little about it.” An understatement. Anyone who sits down near my father-in-law gets told a little about his translation of the Táin. I’ve been told a lot. I have been hearing about this world, this ancient second reality that occupies half his headspace, for most of my adulthood. The first time I met him, he spent half an hour telling me about a woman who was married three times, cursed each time to forget her husband and marry anew, then finally transformed into a swan. The story was nonsense, but the man telling it talked for so long, and talked as if there were no place he’d rather be than right there on his aging patio furniture with me, a 26-year-old at the beginning of a long, permanent estrangement from his own father. Three years later my wife and I were married. It was a big wedding, and my in-laws paid for everything. At the reception, my father-in-law got drunk and spent another half hour telling me that swan story all over again, and I let him. I didn’t want to do the “Cha Cha Slide” anyway.

So when, while standing there in left field, in Florida, with a very non-Gaelic sun asserting itself over us, my father-in-law asks, “Do you know who Cu Chulain is?” I just shake my head and look sad, like I don’t know who Cu Chulain is and I’ll never be whole until I do.

Thus, my father-in-law tells me, not for the first time, of Cu Chulain, thrice born, son of the god Luigh. He tells me how Cu Chulain introduced himself to the king of Ulster by beating up a bunch of boys who wouldn’t let him play field hockey with them. He tells me how Cu Chulain killed a dog. He tells me how when Cu Chulain would go berserker-rage mode, one of his eyes would get really small and the other eye would get really big, and his hair would catch fire. I look around. I wonder if the boy who was throwing the ball against the dugout will take the field and save me, if a ballgame featuring that boy’s friends or his uncles or all the warriors of Ulster will dislodge us from this outfield, if we will be run out of here at the ends of baseball bats and spears. I don’t worry whether my father-in-law sees my attention wander. Let him see! I savor the notion that I might offend this man who has never offended me, that complaints would be filed, that peace would be disrupted on my account. But I don’t tell my father-in-law I heard all this before. I don’t tell him I already read the galley copy of his book that had been sitting, conspicuous, pleading, next to the half-done jigsaw puzzle. I let him keep going.

“When Cu Chulain grew to be a man, he pledged himself to a beautiful girl named Emer,” he says. “Then he left for Britain to train to be greater than all the warriors of Europe. While he was there, he fought the warrior queen Aife in single combat and won.”

My father-in-law removes his sunglasses and squints through the sun at me. I shouldn’t take the bait—but I haven’t actually heard this one before.

“Single combat with the warrior queen?” I waggle my eyebrows.

He laughs. He has an audience now. He tells me how Cu Chulain spared Aife on condition that she lay with him and bear him a son, which she did. He tells me how Cu Chulain then booked it home—but not before instructing Aife that in seven years she should send their son to Ireland, so that Cu Chulain might train him in the manly arts of warfare. Cu Chulain, I learn, returned home and married Emer, who didn’t mind Cu Chulain’s dalliance with the warrior queen.

That last part seems unlikely, I say. Well, at least he was honest, says my father-in-law.

Seven years after Cu Chulain came home, an unfortunate Ulsterman spotted a boy in a bronze ship landing on a beach. He approached the boy, who challenged him, defeated him, bound his hands and dispatched him to the king of Ulster with a message: Send the best of your warriors to meet me at the beach prepared for single combat.

The king looked around at his men. His eyes settled on Cu Chulain.

“Swear that you will kill this boy, who has insulted me,” the king said to Cu Chulain.

“I swear by the god by which my people swear.”

Cu Chulain readied his chariot. Emer begged him not to go, believing that the boy must be the British son Cu Chulain told her about. Cu Chulain said he feared it too, but that he had sworn an oath and could not break it. So Cu Chulain rode to the beach, and there he and the boy battled for a day and a night until Cu Chulain finally shoved the boy into the sea and pierced him with a spear. The boy died in Cu Chulain’s arms. The warriors of Ulster wept, and no calf in the county was allowed its mother’s milk for three days out of respect for Cu Chulain’s grief.

“In the old days, you could make everyone stop feeding their cows if you were sad,” my father-in-law says. Then we walk to the car. The kid throwing the baseball is nowhere to be seen. I give my father-in-law the keys. He’s not supposed to drive with his cataracts, but it’s his car.

As I buckle in, my father-in-law adjusts the seat, the steering wheel, the mirrors.

“I heard you went to see your dad.”

My guts tighten. When I was 15, my dad left. When I was 17, he stopped trying to
call me. When I was 23, my sister found his arrest record online. Home burglary,
assault, solicitation. The assault and solicitation charges were from the same arrest. We
drew our own conclusions. He tried calling a few months after I got married, and I didn’t
pick up. He never tried again. Then, two months ago, my aunt called, said it was the
end and asked me to come see him. At the hospital there was a girl younger than me
but older than my kids, a waif with wax-paper skin who drifted off when he told her to
go. He talked at me for 30 minutes, then asked for money. For the rent, he said. Just
give it to Paisley, he said. When I asked who Paisley was, he said Paisley was his wife.
“You just met her.” I went back to my hotel room and stayed there watching TV for the
next two days. I didn’t go back to the hospital, I didn’t give Paisley any money, and I
didn’t return for the funeral a month later.

“Yeah, it was good,” I tell my father-in-law. Then I pull out my phone. “I’m gonna
let them know we’re on our way back to the house.”

I text my wife and tell her we’re en route. She writes: “I didn’t know you were gone.”

Back at the house, I deliver my father-in-law to his wife, my wife’s mother, my mother by marriage and through the kids by blood. They shuffle their way together toward their bedroom. She tells him that there is tuna in the fridge if he wants a sandwich, then begins to list for him the things she wants to accomplish today, goals whose feasibility, she says, have been endangered by him spending so much time walking around a baseball field. My father-in-law lifts a hand. He cups his wife’s head and nudges it to him. He kisses her forehead.

“I need to shit,” he says. “Do you want it done fast or do you want it done right?”

“Both,” she says. She squeezes his waist and kisses his shoulder, then pivots away toward some chore in some far-flung part of the house. She leaves the King of Ulster to deposit himself on his throne.

Before passing the threshold of the master bedroom, my father-in-law turns to me.

“If you ever want to talk,” he says. He is an old, constipated, sunburned man. Yet he looks then like my wife. He looks like she did more than a decade ago, when we were on the cusp of not being young anymore, when I told her that a few weeks earlier I’d received and ignored the only call from my father I’d received as a grown man. She asked if I wanted to talk about why I hadn’t picked up. She looked hopeful, but ready for the rebuff. She’d begun to know me a little by then. When I said “maybe later,” she went back to what she’d been doing.

When I say “maybe later” to my father-in-law, he nods, then says, “I left a galley of my book by the puzzle table, in case you want to look.”

I tramp up the stairs and into the guest bedroom we call “our room,” but my wife is gone—run off, I learn via text, with most of my children to the store for eggs, Solo cups, a watermelon. I wander the house. It belongs to a family I am familiar with but not wholly a part of. I am not from this place but am allowed to be here, on condition.

I find signs of life in the pool out back, where my youngest daughter and three of her cousins are chickenfighting under the watchful eye of my sister-in-law. She is a stouter, pinker version of my wife in a Mets hat and aviator sunglasses. She waves to me with a hand that holds a low-carb beer. I wave back.

In the pool, my daughter sits atop my nephew’s shoulders and, with a warrior’s ferocity, assaults her opponent, a niece on another niece’s shoulders. Water sloshes over the copping in big, sloppy gulps. All four kids shriek. My nephew and nieces are laughing, but I know my daughter. She is nine years old, and already she’s seen enough of the world and me to know that everything is combat. Her back is bent over her cousin’s head, her arms are sunbronzed branches, her fingers knit together as she
swings her hands not in wild, sweeping motions, but in short strikes designed to penetrate her opponent’s defenses, designed to hurt. She’s not laughing. She’s issuing a war cry.

I take a seat in a rotting wicker chair beside my sister-in-law. When she smiles at me, I smile back. I reach into a cooler for a beer. I watch as my nieces begin to wobble, the precarious architecture of their two-person tower threatening to fail. My daughter gives no quarter. As her cousin topples, she takes advantage of the opening and aims a hand for the mouth. My niece comes up from the water squealing, that loud siren that sounds like pain, but the experienced parent knows is pain mixed with shock, disappointment, betrayal. My sister-in-law leaps from her seat. I sit and watch my daughter in her triumph. One of her eyes has shrunken to the size of a pinhead. The other is wide as the mouth of a mead cup. She raises her arms and bares her teeth from ear to ear. Her hair stands on end in flames. The pool around her boils from the heat she radiates. The battle rage is on her. What she swore to do has been done.

G.D. Holloway is a former journalist whose short fiction has appeared in the South Carolina Review, Booth, Little Patuxent Review, and other publications. He received Miracle Monocle’s 2024 Award for Innovative Writing.