Clear and strong across the water

How I brought Dad home

His real name doesn’t matter – he won’t be heard from again – but for courage let’s call him Leo, the one who tells how he shook out the gray powder and bits of bone at the creek’s edge. How the season’s first snow began to fall on upstate New York. Like a benediction, Leo says. It would have made a great shot in a movie.

Leo pushes aside his plate. He is up here in the mountains to direct a western. They wanted Tom Skerritt for the lead in a complicated story, full of emotionally confused and troubled people. They couldn’t get Tom Skerritt. Now in the candlelight Leo is talking about his own life.

A week after the ceremony of ash, Leo walked again by the ice-crusted stream where they had fished as boys. “In the backwash where an oak tree had fallen, there he was. My brother. Congealed into a frozen clump. Mashed and hardened against the bark of that tree.”

No one at the table speaks. Colorado night paints the windows black. Horses whuffle in the yard.

Leo shapes his hands around a piece of air, volleyball-shaped. “He looked like a huge barnacle, or some kind of obscene, petrified sponge. I wanted,” Leo says, “to gather him up.”

*

“You know what I miss?” Dad shoves himself up straighter in the hospital bed, a tricky move without legs. I know he’s not going to say, as much as I wish he might, I miss your mother, or The life you and me never had.

“Walking on a winter night, late. So cold the snow crunches under my shoes and it’s quiet except for traffic noise far away. I’m walking under the streetlights. I can feel the air coming up my pant legs and I’m just walking.”

He pauses. “I think crazy shit now. I have dreams, like me and Al Nightingale go hunting and I can’t make the wheelchair go through the mud! So I get out, fold up the goddam thing and walk with it under my arm.”

The nurse brings a paper cup of water and three pills.

After the divorce in 1961, when I was six, Dad lost touch with Al Nightingale and the rest of us. As I grew up I spotted him around our northern Illinois town. Not until my 30s – in St. Louis by then, second marriage, third child – did I find him again, living with his mother on the flats of Colorado. We met for weekends in Las Vegas. He played poker drunk and won anyway. I yanked the slot machine handle and kept Dad in sight. We continued the Vegas jaunts for a few years.

Then, his accident. Grandma Mac had died a few years earlier, leaving Dad motherless and alone in the dusty old house. In the TV room he fell, and for two days lay twisted “like a garden hose,” the specialist in Greeley would tell me. A hunting buddy found my father, steamed in alcohol, unconscious. Paralyzed from the middle of his spine.

*

During one of my own post-divorce period of exile and wandering, I went places where Dad had been and where he had not. I didn’t plan to retrace his footsteps; I didn’t know exactly where his footsteps had gone. But I roamed like he did, like men do when they are broken by failure and don’t want to stay in one place long enough for it to show. I slept in my car. I had a romance at 9,000 feet in Colorado.

My own mother’s death landed me back in Illinois, where I camped on my uncle’s back-room futon in Fox River Grove, not far from the place where it started for us as a family: Rockford, the second-largest city in the state, 90 miles northwest of Chicago.

The doctor called from the V.A. Hospital in Augusta. “Your father’s time has not come, but he has given us instructions.” The doctor needed documents “before we can implement the advance directive. Your father doesn’t want anyone jumping up and down on him, you understand. Resuscitation. Heroic measures.”

They amputated Dad’s useless legs, bloated with bedsores, and diagnosed him with leukemia. His blood pressure went haywire. Kidneys began to fail. A month later, the doctor called again. “I’m sorry. He was in and out of consciousness. Early this morning he woke up, looked around and said very clearly, ‘I’ve had enough. Shut everything off. I’m ready to go.’ We proceeded in accordance with his wishes. I suppose you’ll be flying in.”

Aides at the assisted-living home had left everything in his room as it was before the hospital trip. HIs mug on the bedside tray. The paperback western and half-eaten Snickers bar.

On my way back to Fox River Grove, in Atlanta’s airport, I handed the metal box of Dad’s ashes to the woman at the security gate, along with a certificate provided by the crematorium. She read the paper and glared at me. Shoved the box into the arms of another security person. I stepped through the gate. The alarm went off.

“Over here,” a man said, pointing to the X taped on the floor. I kept my eyes on the ashes, which by now had been relayed to a third security guard who was looking around for a handoff. The man told me to spread my arms and legs. He outlined me with his wand, like the police do with chalk on pavement around a corpse. He said, “We need you to remove your shoes.” With a piece of fabric in tweezers, he rubbed my shoe. Another alarm went off. More men came over, guns over their shoulders.

I said, “Can I have my Dad back?” By now my boxed father was on a table many paces distant from me, with the certificate on top of him. Someone in a suit appeared. He shook a spray can. He said, wearily, “Nobody panic,” and opened the machine. Sprayed and wiped with a paper towel.

I said, “You can keep my shoes. I’m going to miss the plane. Please let me have my Dad back.” The man in the suit ignored me, screwed shut the machine, smacked a button. My shoes passed.

On the airplane, with Dad in my lap, I thought of that other jet ride we had taken together from Colorado, after his accident. How things had gone for him since then. How they had gone for him before.

“I’m sorry about the Popsicles,” I said – quietly, it seemed to me, but a woman across the aisle turned her head.

My earliest memory of Dad: The house on Thelma Street, winter. Our freezer was broken and Mom put Popsicles in a snowbank outside. I wanted one. She asked him. Dad yelled and flipped over the table I was hiding under and smashed our plates. He slammed his fist into the wall. It was the same fist he shook, bawling and cursing, at the sky one stormy summer in the backyard. “Your father wanted to go fishing today,” Mom said behind me, hand on my shoulder.

“I’m sorry about what happened in California,” I told him, this time in my head. A few years after Mom and I left him, Dad quit his job as a postal clerk and set out for Australia with a plan to mine opal in the outback. He had cut and polished stones as a hobby; now he wanted to stake his own claim in the desert.

On the ship over, he met a woman. “He was pretty shy at first,” Gloria told me later. She was on her way home after a visit to the U.S., where she hoped to live one day. Dad sat across from her in the ship’s dining room. He winked and nudged her foot under the table. They stayed together for the whole cruise.

The baby was born in Coober Pedy, two months before they married. Dirt clods and beetles fell from the dugout ceiling into her crib. No place for an infant.

Soon the new family left Australia for California, where Dad settled into an ordinary existence again. He drank. They argued. Dad grabbed his loaded rifle. Gloria tried to wrestle it from him. He threw her against the wall. She picked up the phone.

Dad said, “The first cop through that door is dead, and me next.” He sat on the edge of the bed with the rifle barrel in his mouth. Gloria hung up and talked with him until he passed out on the floor.

She signed papers for Dad to get what were then called electroshock treatments. When they let him out, brain fried, he visited his mother in Colorado. He returned to find his belongings stacked on the front lawn. Gloria had warned him in a letter.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered on the airplane. Then, 35,000 feet above the ground, my father and I drifted into one of our many silences, like that Sunday afternoon at the assisted-living home in Georgia, months after his accident, when he begged me to get him a gun.

I refused. It’s a crime, I said. Assisted suicide. Bible Belt prosecutors would put me away faster than you could say Jack Kevorkian. Things will get better, I told him, but I had no idea how they might.

“I can get one without your help,” he said. “I know how to get one.” I told him he’d have to do it that way, then.

Dad held his head in his hands and wept. He took a long time to stop. The courtyard was full of birds and I watched them.

My next remark is still a mystery to me. During the years since, I have puzzled over what might have caused it, and I’ve wondered at the crevice in my life that opened afterward. Maybe, in the moment, I simply wanted to change the subject, divert us from our drama. So I made something up. I said, “A friend of mine is thinking about an abortion. I don’t know what to tell her.”

Dad wiped his nose with the back of his hand. He rubbed his face in the way of our family’s men: Open hand starts at the forehead and moves down over the eyes, thumb on the right side of the face, fingers on the left side. Then a swipe, with an almost wringing motion at the end. Dad’s father did it. I do it. My son does.

“You can’t ever know,” Dad said.

He meant, I supposed, that you can’t ever know how things will turn out, what plans to make. I was ready to launch my spiel against suicide based on exactly that premise when he said, “It’s not the worst.” Wind blew in the pines. The sun went behind a cloud. He said, “Your mother had an abortion.” The courtyard birds were mostly sparrows, with a bright male cardinal hopping through the flock. “You were two years old. She took care of it.” Took care of it … somehow. Abortion wouldn’t become legal until the year I graduated high school.

Why did he choose to tell me, and why at that moment? To lash back at me because I wouldn’t get him a gun? Or was it his way to provide comfort that I might pass on to my non-existent friend? Why she aborted was easier to figure. My birth meant two days of agonized labor, or so went the family story – understandable if she did not look forward to a replay of that fabled ordeal. By 1957 she may have begun to dread the future with her wrongly chosen husband. To consider an escape.

*

I picture the aborted fetus as male, and imagine my unborn brother as an adult man. When the weather is better – say, Dad’s birthday in August –  my brother would walk with me and together we would scatter the ashes of Dad into the rivers and streams of Illinois, where our father fished when he had legs. Where I fished with him a few times, or sat on his tackle box and watched. Cast, retrieve. Cast, retrieve.

My brother would carry the box of Dad’s ashes. He will open the lid and plunge his hand into the ashes. When he flings them I will try to pray -- I am the older one, it’s my job – but will stammer instead and pause, godless. My brother will speak the rest of it clear and strong across the water, like in a perfect movie. Finished, he will sink to the grass, and I will place my hand on his shoulder. I will gather him up.