“Forgetting the promise”

Forgetting the promise is Rafo’s name for an adult failure that has shaped his estrangement from his father, Howard Polk. To Rafo, a promise is not casual speech but the heart of trust: Howard’s repeated failures make his father seem both contemptible and still painfully important.

The Promise and Its Breaches

Rafo remembers a pattern of promises that do not hold. Howard would say he would be back by Saturday, but return only the following Tuesday. He promised to bring Rafo a Texas sheriff’s badge and never did. These smaller disappointments lead to the promise that mattered most: after deserting Rafo’s mother, Howard said he would come for his son and take him north to the rodeo. The accumulation gives the expression its force. The rodeo promise was not an isolated disappointment; it followed a history in which Howard’s words repeatedly failed to become action.

The promise of a rodeo carried particular weight because Rafo loved animals and had a passion for horses. He had learned to ride before he learned to read. At his first visit to the Hipodromo, he ran onto the field after the first race, screaming with excitement, and had to be restrained. The remembered promise therefore joined Rafo’s longing for his father to something he loved in its own right. Howard’s failure was not simply a delayed outing: it frustrated a cherished expectation and confirmed that even a promise Rafo treasured could be abandoned.

A Child’s Measure of Adulthood

Rafo cannot understand how a grown-up can break a promise. Among the boys in his banda, he imagines, such carelessness would earn a person a crippling punishment. The contrast exposes the standard by which he judges Howard: Rafo believes that promises bind the speaker, and that a community would enforce what his father evades. His blunt formulation, “The promise was the heart of things,” makes fidelity the basis of ordinary relations, not a sentimental extra.

Unable to reconcile adult behavior with that standard, Rafo considers whether growing up means forgetting the promise. The question turns a personal grievance into a bleak account of adulthood: if maturity licenses forgetting, then becoming an adult may mean surrendering the very obligation that makes trust possible. His conclusion is categorical—he rejects adults, and especially his father—but the expression remains rooted in specific broken commitments rather than in an abstract dislike of age.

Anger and Unresolved Attachment

Rafo calls Howard a promise breaker and condemns him, yet his rejection does not end his attachment. He still wants to see his father again; he imagines that meeting him might make him reject Howard once more, but admits that doubt remains. The gap between what Rafo says and what he continues to hope gives the expression its emotional tension. Remembering the promise sustains his anger, while the wish to see Howard shows that the bond has not been erased by disappointment.

Forgetting the promise thus names both an accusation against Howard and the uncertainty Rafo cannot settle for himself. He treats promises as durable obligations and sees their failure as evidence against the adults who break them. Yet the most important broken promise continues to orient his longing toward the father who made it. Rafo can condemn the betrayal without becoming indifferent to the person who betrayed him.