The Code of Hammurabi

The Code of Hammurabi
“If a builder build a house for someone and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.” –Law 229

My father roofed houses one summer.
Under the sun I baked mud pies in and warmed
washtubs for makeshift swimming pools,
his arms and neck bubbled and burned
deep brown, as dark as the cracked shingles
he pried loose and flipped to the ground,
his hands toughening to the grain
of the new bundles of sixteen hogtied rectangles.

I visited him once that summer with my mom.
He was working on top of a new house with no people in it yet,
crawling on hands and knees, an apron ripe with tinkling nails
hugging his hips. The sun came from behind
him so I squinted at the light flashing through his hair,
still thick and brown, the same brown
as mine, beaming red-gold in the sun, glowing like a halo,
like a reminder that autumn is coming.

I circled a sapling tree while my parents talked,
my mother blocking the sun with her hand.
This day my dad wears a mustache,
the final hot weeks before he shaves it for good,
like a costume in my memories
of watching Bobby’s World together on the brown living room carpet
in that cigarette-burned floral comforter
and playing Skyshark on the Nintendo.
“Watch how it’s done,” he’d say, my brothers and I
leaning forward.

That summer my dad became a volunteer firefighter,
which meant a muttering radio and Dad putting on jeans
in the kitchen at bedtime, looking for his keys
while we jittered in pajamas like fawns.
It also meant the Fourth of July ended
summer. It ended in an ambulance racing
past fields of yellow knee-high corn
and a trip to the Green Bay hospital
where I drank gritty, vending machine hot chocolate
and I told my dad I loved him the only
time I remember.

A week later he came home
and could not stand without tipping,
strange angles working under his feet.
He sat in the blue living room chair,
his brown skin fading and the sun burning above our roof untended.
I would creep up to his bad side and stare,
cropping my breath and hanging it,
my eyes dry and exhausted before I left, knowing
he couldn’t see me.
I was tempting the gods.

Now, I’m thinking of Hammurabi’s Code,
laws thousands of years old.
The same sun browning the builder’s sweating skin
and baking his clay bricks,
the same joints and sockets
that eventually will collapse and crumble,
the same blind justice.