How Archibald Sweeney Vanished
By: Omar Ateyah,
Staff Writer
I suppose all families have their idiosyncrasies, their strange origins, ideologies, and practices; my family’s came from my father’s portion, in which every child for the past several generations has had a name that begins with the letter A. My father was Archibald, my brother was Adam, and I was Anastasia.
However, to state that the strangest aspect of my kin lies in their names would be a deception; in fact, many more unusual events occurred among the dear Sweeney’s in my sweet town of Crocs, Florida.
In this slightly miniscule town, my family, the Sweeney’s, were rather prominent figures. We had resided in this city for approximately six and a half decades before my father’s death. The male Sweeney’s provided great sermons in order to guide the humble men of Crocs, to prompt them into doing justice and making sure fairness is the axis on which the earth rotates. Despite the fact that we managed to scrape by on terms of producing honorable men in our humble town, not all of the Sweeney’s have been particularly gifted at the art of sermon giving.
For example, my great grandfather, Alastair Sweeney, was a highly intelligent man, but often failed in translating his mind into a cohesive speech on the podium. After writing quite a thought provoking soliloquy, he would usually end up stuttering, “N-now, h-h-uman beings were brought down to this earth to be good, really good.” Oddly enough, no one is quite sure what happened to Alistair; frankly not a single man over exerted himself in trying to find out.
My father, Archibald Sweeney, on the other hand, was a topic of great envy among the other men of different families in Crocs. He was a tall man, with a slim figure, and hair cleanly flattened backwards, with glasses that always glinted; his look was rather stern but his cinnamon irises gave him a kindly sort of gaze, even when he was scowling. Above all, though he gave sermons with messages that could move a nation. He managed, with beautiful eloquence, to state what it meant to be a human and therefore what man’s responsibilities were.
Naturally, one could see what expectations lay upon my brother, Adam. One of my father’s great friends, Warner, hardly ever had a conversation with Adam without saying, “Ah, young man, hopefully you have the mindset for when your father’s gone, for who will guide Crocs? So you just keep working hard and of course, paying close attention in your father’s sermons, and perhaps you could be almost as powerful!” In response, Adam would nod with a polite smile on his face, but in reality he would wear a scowl for the rest of the night.
Until today, I do not view my brother as someone capable of delivering speeches. He was quite a peculiar boy, who always had a notepad in which he would scribble feverishly at random intervals, causing people in our family’s presence to eye him uneasily. He had practically no friends and would have constant arguments with the sparse number that would bear his presence. He was extremely fair-minded, but I always worried that he would be the next Alistair, perhaps disappearing without a single person blinking an eye. Often my father would try to train him in the practice of public speaking, but it would merely lead to mutual frustration, with my brother marching angrily out of the house, touring the streets of Crocs for several hours.
Another mysterious figure of Crocs was a brawny and tanned man known as Commodus. In every way possible, this man attempted to discredit my father and the Sweeney’s in general, most likely out of jealousy.
Indeed, the story begins on a swelteringly warm summer day in Crocs, after my father had delivered a groundbreaking sermon with the main message being that “Envy is the little demon that crawls inside the good man, who sees his brother acquiring more success and glory than he. Once this obscene devil crawls in, the good man loses grasp of everything that forms his nobility in the journey of destroying the brother he once loved.”
We returned home after the sermon, where my father went to his office recording himself giving additional at home sermons, while preserving his previously made ones in cassettes. My mother, without speaking at all, entered the kitchen and began to prepare supper. I sat on the couch, completing my assignments for school, while Adam, who was a year older than I was and in the eleventh grade, sat with his notepad open with a look of murderous concentration on his face.
I typically found myself in these uncomfortable situations, where the silence seems to decimate the atmosphere. I cleared my throat and thought that protecting a perfectly comfortable environment would be wise.
“So, what are you doing?” I asked conversationally.
Adam did not acknowledge the question for a while; finally he looked up and said, “It’s funny how people ask these questions expecting me to tell them every minute detail of what I try to keep personal. No one needs to know, Anastasia.”
Then, he looked back down and resumed his writing. I stared at him for a while, quietly wondering how I had ever wronged him. With frustration that failed to cease growing, I tried to reset my focus on my assignment; perhaps if the pair of us set our focus on our projects, it would be less awkward. Then my soft-spoken mother popped her head into the room.
“Anastasia,” she said, “I could use your help in the kitchen.”
I got up from my seat and entered our circular kitchen, with pans hanging from small pins all around the circumference of the room. There were some portraits of past Sweeney’s, scowling down at us, not a single one of them bearing a smile on his face.
“I just don’t understand Adam,” I said to my mother as I chopped onions, my eyes instantly tearing up.
“Maybe that’s the problem with all of us,” she responded, her back to me as she stirred a pot of my father’s favorite broccoli soup. “I think it’s very possible that Adam is not the one with the issues at all; maybe we just fail to understand and connect with him.”
“But what have I ever done to him?” I wondered aloud.
“Look,” my mother said turning around to face me. “Some people just simply have their ways; and what’s family without accommodations? We all handle each other so we keep a stable roof on this house.”
Then she resumed her stirring as I tried to digest what she said.
I was hardly ever notified antecedently that we would be having visitors; therefore I was not surprised when Warner and a couple of my father’s other friends came home for dinner. It was customary for my father to not allow women to sit with unrelated men; my mother and I ate in the living room. I could hear laughter and intense conversations coming from the kitchen as Adam tried to mind his own business, not speaking at all as he ate.
When the men finished eating and began piling into the living room, my mother and I stood up while Warner, a stout man, said, “Broccoli soup was great, Madam Sweeney.”
“Thank you,” my mother said shortly without looking at him as she put her hand on my shoulder and we walked upstairs.
As I sat in my room, I heard rowdiness emitting from the living room as my father shared his wisdom and jokes and showed them his collection of cassettes, earning him a whoop of admiration from Warner. I could almost feel Adam’s annoyance of not being allowed to leave the room until the guests leave, but at least he was not forced into speaking.
That was until Warner said, “How are you, Adam? Ready for sermon giving, are you? You know, I think you should consider yourself lucky. With a father like yours and great wisdom that is running through your veins and will soon explode. My son would love to be in your place. He’s quite a confident young man, and I’m sure he aspires to be a public speaker.”
At that point, I expected to hear silence as Adam followed his trademark habit of nodding and smiling at Warner’s comments. I was shocked to hear my brother attempting to speak pleasantly as he said, “Why doesn’t he?”
“Who?” asked Warner. “And why doesn’t he what?”
Adam’s voice sounded uncharacteristically polite as he clarified. “I’m talking about your son. You just said that he likes public speaking and would love to give sermons. Maybe he should give it a try because…what is standing in his way?”
I sensed the uneasiness in Warner’s voice as he said, “We are not Sweeney’s. What gives us the right to give sermons?”
“What gives the Sweeney’s the right to have a monopoly on public speaking? And why can’t we make our own choices on whether or not we want to give sermons?” Adam’s voice began to rise as he approached the end of the last question.
“Son,” my father cut in sharply. “For sixty-five years, our family has guided the residents of Crocs, and furthermore this is our responsibility to our friends and our world. That reminds me; perhaps you should practice now, with a small audience for you here now. Stand up and talk for five minutes about what you remember from today’s sermon.”
“Are you serious?” Adam nearly shouted. His voice sounded like another boy’s when it rose to such a volume. My pen slid out of my hand as a thought struck me; Adam had finally fallen off the cliff. He had been prodded until shoved to breaking point. I heard my mother’s footsteps as she briskly made her way down the hall. She leaned against the banister, staring nervously at the men. Anxiously I joined her, seeing my father with a dangerous expression residing on his face and Adam whose face was red.
“Don’t you ever raise your voice at me,” my father whispered so I barely heard it.
“Archibald,” Warner said softly, trying to assuage him.
My father held up a finger at him, silencing him instantly as if with an incantation.
“Now,” my father said, attempting to sound good natured as he tried to retrieve his friendly gathering. “You will deliver a sermon based on what you remember from mine today.”
Adam automatically turned his face back into its impassive and default form. He stood up without saying a word and cleared his throat.
“Hello,” he said, trying to mimic our father’s crisp tones as he stood behind the podium. “I am Adam Sweeney, obviously as we would let no other person even look at this podium with longing-“
Suddenly, my father was on his feet and my heart sank while everything around me seemed to freeze.
“I’m warning you, boy-“
“And it’s as if we consider,” Adam said vehemently, cutting across father, “all other human beings to be infidels and unworthy compared to our family’s holiness-“
Warner and our two other guests grabbed my father as he made his way towards Adam, furiously.
He screamed, “Have you forgotten who you are, Adam? Are you really that idiotic as to allow your desires to supersede YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES?”
Adam kicked the coffee table leg as he walked past, causing it to collapse to the ground in a heap. He slammed the front door behind him, leaving an ominous echo in its wake.
Eventually Warner and the others calmed my father down. He stopped breathing heavily and simply stood there. Then, he looked up at the banister and saw my mother and me. He smiled grimly and said, “I assume you heard what just happened. Now, I’m going to see if I could catch up to him.”