TOPICS MY BLOG e-mail me | SHORT FICTION LEGACY (early 1990s) Back to short stories home page |
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Emaciated and bald save for wisps of white
hair at his temples, my father lay with one narrow plastic tube dripping nutrients into his lower arm,
another winding unseen from beneath the hospital sheets to carry off
waste. He did not seem to know me. and
when he tried to speak, nonsense emerged.
It is not the dying who see their lives flash by, I was discovering, but
those who watch them die. There was a time when I was little and my father still lived and was able
to love me. He was a wheat farmer, a midwesterner
descended from generations of men close to the soil in America and before that
in England, a lover of the land. I
would sit on his lap in the tractor under the
cloudless sky, and he would pretend to let me steer. The aroma of freshly turned soil would fill my nostrils,
and the shimmering speck of a plane would drone above us. Every once in awhile, as though telling me for the first time, he would spread his arms,
thick as tree trunks in my imagination, to encompass the land, his land,
that reached as far as we could see.
“We feed the world,” he would say.
“People can do without many foods, Georgie, but not grain. The staff of life, the Bible calls it.” And he
would pull in his arms and fold them around me until the tractor began
to veer from its path. Trips off the land were great occasions, glimpses of other
worlds. Except when the roads were
snowed in, there was church every week, an eight-mile drive over narrow and
bumpy blacktop that dipped from center to
shoulder. The church stood just back
from the main highway, the only building in sight other than a Texaco station
three hundred yards further along and a silo on the horizon. After the service, while my parents
exchanged greetings with our minister and fellow-worshipers,
I would drift to the highway’s edge to inhale wafting petroleum aromas from the
gas station and watch for out-of-state license plates. The best outing was the twenty-mile ride to
Great Plain with its concrete sidewalks and a main street lined with offices and diners and stores and a
public library. On Veterans’ Day, my
father would dig out the sergeant’s uniform he had worn in jungle battles on
Pacific islands he could no longer name and take us to town to attend the memorial
service. And each fourth of July we
would drive in for the parade and barbecue followed by orange popsicles and a
fireworks display. During the parade,
my sisters and I would take turns perching on his shoulders to see over the
crowd. There came a year when I tapped
his arm to lift me up and he told me I was too big; I worked my way to the
front of the crowd so I could see for myself, but the view wasn’t the same. I was a weak boy, introspective and withdrawn, and I did not take
readily to the labor of farm life. But
my father behaved as though I were as powerful and able as he. I can remember when I was smaller than the
heavy sacks of fertilizer he had me drag from the storehouse and lean against
the side of our decrepit flatbed truck that flaked red paint. I would inch backwards, grasping a sack with both hands as if tugging a
corpse by the shoulders. When I had
lined up half a dozen, he and I would hoist them onto the truck,
grunting together as he took most of the weight upon himself. When I was eleven I announced over dinner that I did not want to
be a farmer when I grew up. My little
sister, retarded from birth, laughed.
My older sister, Sarah, was leaning an elbow on the table while pushing
her fork to shape her mashed potatoes into plowed fields. My father asked, “What do you plan to be, then?” “An actor.” I loved the
movies, especially old films starring Red Ryder or Hopalong Cassidy or Roy
Rogers. “Then who am I going to leave...” From the sideboard where she was spooning out dessert my mother
interrupted. “Stan, no quarreling at
the dinner table. Sarah, how many times
have I told you to sit up and eat like a lady?” My father looked
over my mother’s head, out the window behind her. He lay his fork and knife across his plate and stood up. “It looks like rain. I better get the tractor in the shed.” “We’re in the
middle of dinner,” my mother said. “I wasn’t hungry
anyway.” At the one-room
grammar school that I reached by bicycle, the other children tolerated my withdrawn ways. But when I
went to the regional junior high school in Great Plain, my physical awkwardness and preference for reading rather than cars and
sports made me a loner. Goading boys
would surround me like gamblers at a cock fight, egging one another on until someone shoved me, or punched me in the chest or shoulder. One day I came home, lips tight and eyes glaring with misery. My
father whispered with my mother while she sliced vegetables for dinner, and
then he turned to me and said, “Put on a jacket and come with me, Georgie.” He led me
outdoors. It was a late fall day with
the smell of snow in the air. We walked
toward the fields, long since bare from the harvest. I gazed straight ahead, hands deep in my pockets against
the cold. “Your mother and I
think something’s troubling you,” my father said, and proposed causes for me to choose among: teachers, grades, illness, growing
up—even girls, which made me bristle in horror, for I still had
nothing to do with them and could not yet see why older boys did. “I don’t want to
talk about it,” I finally said without looking at him. I sniffled against the wind that
scudded the plain, and my eyes teared at the cold. “You haven’t had
any friends visit for a long time. Why
don’t you invite someone over this weekend?” “There’s nobody I
want to invite.” “What about Jack or
Bob?” “They hang out with
other guys at school now.” ”Why don’t you hang out with the other
guys?” “They don’t like me. They
call me names and stuff.” “And what do you do?” “They’re stronger than me.” “What do you mean? You’re
not scared of them, are you?” I said
nothing. “Georgie, I asked you a
question.” “I guess.” We walked for awhile in silence.
“You can’t let yourself show it.
It’ll only encourage them.” “I can’t help it.” He stopped and jerked me by the shoulder to face him. “Don’t say that! You can do whatever you want.” “Yes, sir.” “Do you ever get into fights with these
boys?” I took a deep breath and whispered. “Sometimes.” We started walking again.
“Well, I’m sorry about that,” my father said. “But it’s part of growing up.
When I was your age, I had fights, too.” “Yeah, but you’re strong.” “What happens when you fight?” “Nothing. I fall down and they stop hitting me.” And I began to cry. I waited for my father to take me in his arms and comfort me as he
had when I was little and hurt myself.
“No son of mine is going to let anyone push him around. Do you understand?” A numbness not of the wind was settling on me. “Yes, sir.” “You’re going to learn to fight.
Do you hear me?” “Yes, sir.” ”You’re not coming
home again beaten up unless you’ve tried to fight back, do you understand me?” “Yes, sir.” And in a tone and
volume as though he were talking to himself, he proceeded to show me how to
box—how to hold my feet and arms and fists, how to keep my chin tucked in, how
to jab and parry.
He would thrust his own fists through my meager defense and jar my body
until fear of pain made me maintain my guard. Each time I fell down, he would stand back
and wait for me to get up. I was
miserable, but desperate to please him.
It took a long time on that hard, cold plain before
he stood back and said, “All right.
That’s enough for now. Let’s go back to the house.” I pulled out my
handkerchief and wiped it back and forth across my nose. We began to walk home, and he coached me in
a low voice that was sometimes lost in the wind. “When you hit, hit hard as you can. I know you may get hurt. But they only keep it up because they think you’re an easy
target. Promise me you’ll fight back.” I promised. What choice did I have? It was fight or not come home. The house was warm
and redolent with beef stew, yet I couldn’t stop shivering. My mother gave us a
quizzical look as we passed silently through the kitchen. I went to my room, and when my body finally
stopped trembling, I started composing a book report for school. The next day during
recess, Carl Vandergast pushed me and whacked my
shoulder with the side of his hand. I
could remember nothing from my father’s instructions-how to stand, how to jab,
how to defend myself—nothing except his threat and my promise, and I closed my eyes, lowered my head, charged forward and
flailed my arms in front of me. I could feel Carl retreat as I pressed forward. Most of my blind blows missed, but a few
caught his chest. Perhaps he was only surprised,
for after several moments he stopped giving ground, and I felt
two sharp punches to my shoulders. I
wanted to cry, but I swung out and my fist, as if of its
own accord, landed in his stomach. His
blow, aimed at my chest, went wild, crashing against my
cheek, jerking my head to one side. I
fell to my knees but no further, while he doubled over, gasping. When I got home, my
father was waiting. “Did you do what we talked about?” I nodded. “Good,” he
said. “Keep it up. They’ll leave you alone soon enough.” I waited, thinking he would demand details, but he turned to his newspaper and let me
escape. There were several
more fights in the coming days, and I performed no better than the first—worse, in fact, because now the other boys were expecting it. Each day I would give my father a brief
report and receive a silent nod. One day a teacher
caught me fighting and sent the ether boy and me to the principal’s office. I was ashamed and
terrified; I was always the good boy at school. The principal lectured us and gave us notes to bring home to our parents. Full of dread,
I sought out my father after school to hand him the note in private; I couldn’t bear to have my mother know what was happening, and
I was grateful that she had been accepting, however hesitantly, the accidents I
was inventing to explain the occasional bruise that appeared on my face. When he finished
reading, my father folded the note and tapped it in his palm. “I’ll have a talk with Mrs.
Goodwin. She’s right to do this; it’s
her job, and she’ll have to punish you. But you’re not to stop fighting back, do you
understand?” As my father had
predicted, the fights began to tail off.
When several days had passed without a fight, he
left me alone, and we never spoke about them again. Kids still teased me, but their insults came casually, almost
like greetings when passing in the hall or jostling in the lunch line. Yet if I was freed
from oppression at school, I now bore a new weight—two new weights. For though I did
not tell my father, in my heart I felt tainted by the way I won my liberation,
and in feeling tainted, I knew I fell short of his
expectations of me. As an adult, I came
to understand that his behavior grew from love, that
he suffered while he taught me to become what the world had told him a man must be.
But no understanding could displace my secret guilt, and now, as his
shrivelled body finally gave up the ghost, I felt release amid my grief, and I lamented the price of my freedom.
I cried at the funeral, but whether for him or myself, I do not know. I have a son,
Steve, fourteen now. It seemed fitting
that not long after his grandfather’s death, Steve was
suspended from school for fighting. It
was the first time he’d been caught, though not the first time he’d
fought. Suspension is automatic in this
Chicago suburb, in a time when kids have learned to carry
knives or even guns, and a fight of punches to the shoulders and chest looks as archaic as a sepia publicity photograph of Gene Tunney. Steve came home
early, with a black eye and blood caked on his nose. He handed me the note that announced his suspension. I read and asked, “What happened?” “Some jock shoved
me against my locker.” “Do you have to
fight over every little thing? It could
have been an accident.” “I don’t fight all
the time. And it wasn’t any
accident. The jocks think they own the
goddamned
school.” “I wish you could
find other ways of dealing with aggression.” “This isn’t the
sixties, Dad. I mean, I respect the way
you went down South and sat in at draft boards and all that non-violent stuff,
but the world isn’t made up of hippies.
Going against everybody’s grain is out of date.” “Are you going to
jump off...” “...the Sears Tower
because the rest of the world tells me to?” “I can’t tell you
not to defend yourself, son, but I don’t believe anything gets solved by violence.” ”That’s your opinion.” “Let me have a look at your eye.”
He leaned close and I studied the blue-and-purple skin.” I don’t think you need to see the
doctor. Go clean up. When your mother gets home from work, let
her have a look.” I handed back his
note from school so he could show Rachel. and
I returned to the brief I had to argue in a few days. Steve was with me in the kitchen, basting the meatloaf, when we
heard Rachel close the front door. He
shut the oven and went to talk to her.
She joined me a few minutes later, swiped a slice of carrot from the
salad I was tossing and kissed me hello.
“I hear you already had a talk with our Rocky. The eye doesn’t look too bad to me.” “That’s what I thought.” “What are we going to do about him?” A picture came into my head, of my father towering above me on the tractor and spreading his arms to embrace the seemingly unlimited horizons of our world. “Hang in while he finds his way, I guess. What else is there?” | |