You hear it said that fathers want their sons to be what they feel they cannot themselves be, but I tell you it also works the other way. A boy wants something very special from his father. I know that as a boy I wanted my father to be a proud, silent, dignified man. When I was with other boys and he passed along the street, I wanted to feel a flow of pride. “There he is. That is my father.”
But he wasn’t such a one. He couldn’t be. It seemed to me then that he was always showing off. Let’s say someone in our town had got up a show. They were always doing it. The druggist would be in it, the shoe-store clerk, the horse doctor, and a lot of women and girls. My father would manage to get the chief comedy part. It was, let’s say, a civil war play and he was a comic Irish soldier. He had to do the most absurd things. They thought he was funny, I though he was terrible. I didn’t see how mother could stand it. She even laughed with others.
Or there was a parade. He’d be in that, too, right at the front of it, as grand marshal or something, on a white horse hired from a livery stable.
I remember once when he had done something ridiculous, and right out on Main Street, too, I was with some other boys and they were laughing and shouting at him and he was shouting back and having as good a time as they were. I ran down an alley back of some stores and, there in the Presbyterian Church sheds, I had a good long cry.
Or I will be in bed at night and father would come home and bring some men with him. He was a man who was never alone. Before he went broke, running a harness shop, there were always a lot of men loafing in the shop. He went broke, of course, because he gave too much credit. He couldn’t refuse it, and I thought he was a fool.
There’d be men I didn’t think would be fooling around with him. There might even be the superintendent of our school and a quiet man who ran the hardware store. Once I remember there was a white-haired man who was a cashier of the bank. It was a wonder to me they’d want to be seen with such a windbag. I know now what it was that attracted them. It was because life in our town was at times pretty dull and he livened it up. He could tell stories. He made them laugh.
If they didn’t come to our house they’d go off, say at night, to where there was a grassy place by a creek. They’d cook food there and drink beer and sit about listening to his stories.
He was always telling stores about himself. He’d say this or that wonderful thing had happened to him. It might be something that made him look like a fool. He didn’t care.
If an Irishman came to our house, right away father would say he was Irish. He’d tell what country in Ireland he was born in. he’d tell things that happened there when he was a boy. He’d make it seem so real that, if I hadn’t known he was born in southern Ohio, I’d have believed him myself.
If it was a Scotsman, a German or a Swede, the same thing happened. He’d be anything the other man was. I think they all knew he was lying, but they seemed to like him just the same.
A lot of father’s stories were about the civil war. To hear him tell it he’d been in about every battle. He’d known grant, Sherman, Sheridan and I don’t know how many others. He’d been particularly intimate with general grant so that when grant went east to take charge of all the armies, he took father along.
“I was an orderly at headquarters and Sim Grant said to me, ‘Irve,’ he said, ‘I’m going to take you along with me.’
It seems he and grant used to slip off sometimes and have a quiet drink together. He’d tell about the day lee surrendered and how, when the great moment came, they couldn’t find grant.
“You know,” my father said, “about he general’s memoirs. You’ve read of how he had a headache and how, when he got word that lee was ready to call it quits, he was suddenly and miraculously cured.
“Huh,” said father. “he was in the woods with me.
“I was there with my back against a tree. I had got hold of a bottle of pretty good stuff.
“They were looking for grant. He had got off his horse and come into the woods. He found me. He was covered with mud.
“I had the bottle in my hand. What’d I care? The war was over. I knew we had them licked.”
My father said that he was the one who told grant about lee. An orderly riding by had told him, because the orderly knew how thick he was with grant. Grant was embarrassed.
“But irve, look at me. I’m all covered with mud,” he said to father.
And then my father said, he and grant decided to have a drink together. They took a couple of shots and then because he didn’t want grant to show up drunk before lee, he smashed the bottle against the tree.
That’s just the kind of thing he’d tell. Of course the men knew he was lying, but they seemed to like it just the same.
When we were broke down and out, do you think he ever brought anything home? Not he. If there wasn’t anything to eat in the house, he’d go off visiting around at farmhouses. They all wanted him. Sometimes he’s stay away for weeks, mother working to keep us fed, and then home he’d come bringing, let’s say, a ham. He’d got it from some farmer friend. He’d slap it on the table in the kitchen. “You bet I’m going to see that my kids have something to eat,” he’d say, and mother would just stand smiling at him. She’d never say a word about her all the weeks he’d been away, not leaving us a cent for food. Once I heard her speaking to a woman in our street. Maybe the woman had cared to sympathize with her. “Oh,” she said, “it’s all right. Life is never dull when my man is about.”
But often I was filled with bitterness, and sometimes I wished he wasn’t my father. I’d even invent another man as my father. To protect my mother I’d make up stories of a secret marriage that for some strange reason never got known. As though some man, say, the president of a railroad company or maybe a congressman, had married my mother, thinking his wife was dead and then it turned out she wasn’t.
So they had to hush it up but I got born just the same, I wasn’t really the son of my father. Somewhere in the world there was a very dignified man who was really my father.
And then there came a certain night. He’d been off somewhere for two or three weeks. He found me alone in the house, reading by the kitchen table.
It had been raining and he was very wet. He sat and looked at me for a lone time, not saying a word. I was startled, for there was on his face the saddest look I had never seen. He sat for a time, his clothes dripping. Then he got up.
“Come on with me,” he said.
I got up and went with him out of the house. I was filled with wonder but I wasn’t afraid. We went along a dirt road that led down into a valley, about a mile out of town, where there was a pond. We walked in silence. The man who was always talking had stopped his talking.
I didn’t know what was up and had the queer feeling that I was with a stranger.
The pond was quite large. It was still raining hard and there were flashes of lightning followed by thunder. We were on a grassy bank at the pond’s edge when my father spoke, and in the darkness and rain his voice sounded strange.
Take off your clothes,” he said, still filled with wonder, I began to undress. There was a flash of lighting and I saw that he was already naked.
Naked, we went into the pond. Taking my hand he pulled me in. it may be that I was too frightened, too full of a feeling of strangeness, to speak. Before that night my father had never seemed to pay any attention to me.
I did not swim very well, but he put my hand on his shoulder and struck out into the darkness.
He was a man with big shoulders, a powerful swimmer. In the darkness I could feel the movement of his muscles. We swam to the wind blew. Sometimes there would be a flash of lightning and I could see his face clearly.
It was as it was earlier, in the kitchen, a face filled with sadness. There would be the momentary glimpse of his face and then again the darkness, the wind, and the rain. In me there was a feeling I had never known before.
It was a feeling of closeness. It was something strange. It was as though there were only we two in the world. It was as though I had been jerked suddenly out of my world of the schoolboy, out of a world in which I was ashamed of my father.
He had become blood of my blood; he the strong swimmer and I the boy clinging to him in the darkness. We swam in silence and in silence we dressed out wet clothes, and went home.
There was a lamp lighted in the kitchen and when we came in, the water dripping from us, there was my mother. She smiled at us. I remember that she called us “boys.”
“What have you boys been up to,” she asked, but my father did not answer. He turned and looked at me. Then he went, I though, with a strange dignity out of the room.
I climbed the stairs to my own room, undressed in the darkness and got into bed. I couldn’t sleep and did not want to sleep. For the first time I knew that I was the son of my father. He was a story talker as I want to be. It may be that I even laughed a little, softly there in the darkness. If I did, I laughed knowing that would never again be wanting another father. |