Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (66 page)

Then Dan started to pester Katrina. He was sitting next to her, and he kept pinching her leg. “Skeeters are out,” he kept saying. “Bsst! There’s another one.”

Katrina squirmed about and slapped at his hand. “Quit it, Dan.”

“I’m not doing anything,” he said. “It’s those skeeters.”

Because I was an only child, I had no knowledge of the give-and-take between siblings. I knew nothing about their rivalries and affections. When I saw Dan pinching Katrina — when I took note of her mounting anger — I thought I understood perfectly: Dan was the villain; Katrina was his innocent victim, a damsel in distress.

Now, when I remember Dan, I call to mind a slight boy, so much smaller than other boys his age. “He’s the runt of that litter,” my father said.

And it was true. Dan, who was three years older than I, was perhaps an inch shorter. His brothers were both tall and beefy, but Dan was elfin, a sprout yet to take root and grow. I imagine now that he must have resented those of us who were younger. Here he is in our class photo, sitting cross-legged on the floor with the rest of the pipsqueaks, while his chums, the fourth graders, loom over us. Even though he was generally good-humored and friendly (in fact, I can recall several times when he defended me against the teasing of older boys), surely anytime we had to assume a line at school, he must have grown tired of always having to join the first graders, or at Christmastime having to be one of Santa’s pint-sized helpers in the school pageant.

I wonder, too, if perhaps he resented Katrina because she was the only girl in the family, a sweet, good-hearted child who claimed everyone’s attention. Maybe that’s why he was pestering her in the basement on that rainy afternoon. Or maybe he was pinching Katrina’s leg because he loved her deeply and couldn’t say it, could show it only with a gesture that he considered playful and harmless. Or maybe he was just bored, frustrated with the rain that kept us confined to the basement.

I didn’t understand, then, the complicated crosscurrents that run through a family’s affections, though eventually I would figure out that even in my father’s anger and my anguish as a result of it lay a wellspring of genuine love. Why else would we have been so disappointed with each other, so ashamed after an ugly scene? Why else would we have longed for a life more considerate and kind?

All I knew that day in the basement was that Katrina didn’t like what Dan was doing to her any more than I liked their terrier nipping at my ankles.

“Leave her alone,” I said. I shoved at Dan’s shoulder, momentarily knocking him off balance.

“I’m not hurting her,” he said, when he had regained his balance. Then he shoved me back. “Don’t be a baby.”

I don’t remember exactly what happened next, only that we were wrestling. On Saturday nights, my father let me stay up late so we could watch
Championship Wrestling
together on channel seven. It was one of the few times I felt close to him, both of us rooting for Rip Hawk or Dick the Bruiser. It seems so ironic to me now, but perhaps natural, too, in a perverse way, that we would unite as spectators of violence, staged as it most surely was, when so many times my father had left stripes on my skin with his belt. Watching the wrestling matches, I learned holds and moves: the hammerlock, the headlock, the body scissors, the reverse toehold, the abdominal stretch, the flying mule kick.

I believe it was the headlock that I eventually used on Dan that day in the basement, and somehow in his attempt to escape it, he fell back and banged his head on the cement floor.

It’s difficult ever to forget the sound of a skull hitting concrete, especially when you’re in some way to blame for it. I stood over Dan, stunned. He lay motionless for a moment. Then he sat up, sheepishly rubbing his head, looking dazed, not injured nearly as badly as I had at first feared.

“You hurt him.” Katrina was drumming her fists into my back. I spun around, surprised, and she hit me in the chest. “You’re awful,” she said, and then, as if she never wanted to have anything to do with me, she ran up the stairs, leaving Dan and me alone.

“Are you all right?” I asked him

“Yeah, I’m okay.”

I felt such an emptiness inside, similar to the sinking sensation I got riding in a car that crested a hill too fast and dipped down the other side. “Hold onto your gizzard,” my mother always said. I wondered whether this emptiness was what my father felt after he had whipped me, sorry that he had let his temper get the better of him, sorry that he had gone too far, sorry that the world he thought he had a hold on had slipped out from under him.

From time to time, in public, I had to help him with some chore. In stores, I took his billfold from his shirt pocket, and, at his instruction, fished out the appropriate bills and coins to settle our accounts. In the barbershop, if it was winter, I helped him off with his coat and cap. While we waited our turn for haircuts, I fetched him a Pepsi from the cooler and held it by the neck so he could grasp the bottle with the pincers of his hook. Sometimes, when he was finished drinking, he wouldn’t be able to let go of the bottle. The pincers would be open so wide, he wouldn’t be able to muster enough strength in his shoulder to open them a fraction more. “I’m fast,” he would say to me then, humbled by his inadequacy, and I would have to work the bottle free from his hook.

I always felt that I was on display whenever he called on me to do something he couldn’t. “Roy, who’s your helper?” someone might say to him.

“That’s my boy,” he would say, and despite all the trouble between us, there would be an affectionate lilt to his voice, and I would believe that in his heart of hearts where he was whole and with out temper or regret, he loved me.

“He looks like a good helper,” someone would say, and my father would answer, “Well, sure he is. He’s my right-hand man.”

I would forget, then, the whippings he had given me, would convince myself that there wouldn’t be any others, that we were moving into a better part of our lives. I was his helper, his right-hand man. That was my job.

Then, one summer, there came a time when I could do nothing to help him. A fisherman had drowned in the Jents’ pond. He had leaned out too far to reel in a catch and had fallen from his boat. He had sunk to the bottom and never come up.

The first we knew of it was when his buddy, a skinny boy, gasping for air, came to our door begging for help. It was toward evening, the sun a reddish-orange ribbon in the west, just beginning to sink below the horizon. Water ran from the boy and puddled on our front porch. He had dove and dove, he told us, hoping to find his buddy, but had come up empty-handed.

“Mister,” he said to my father. “Please. You’ve got to do something.”

What could my father do but turn to other men for help? He told my mother to call the sheriff and then Mack Jent.

Earlier that summer, when a mountain lion had been killing livestock, a group of men at the Berryville Store had formed a hunting party and gone out with rifles. My father had gone with them, a bundle of rope looped over his shoulder, looking ineffectual among the men and their guns.

The evening the boy came to tell us his buddy had fallen into the pond, I got the same feeling that had come over me the night my father had marched off with the men: a tender pity for him and all he lacked. He would never be the one whom people could depend on in a time of crisis. He would never shoot a mountain lion, never rescue a drowning man. He would never be Lucas Mc-Cain from
The Rifleman
, or Paladin from
Have Gun, Will Travel
, television characters who always saved the day.

What made me especially sad was the knowledge that inside my father was exactly that kind of man — decisive, resourceful, courageous — and had he only had hands he would have been better able to demonstrate those qualities. He would have been freed from the clumsy movements of his hooks. How many times had he mourned a physical action he once performed with ease, now lost to him forever?

That evening, as dusk gathered, he could only stand on the bank of the Jents’ pond while Mack and his oldest boy, David, and the skinny boy went out in the rowboat and dropped a tangle of barbed wire, tied to a rope, down into the water. They hoped that the barbed wire would snag the drowned man’s clothing and then the three of them might be able to haul the body to the surface.

I stood beside my father as the dark came on. I could hear the boat moving on the pond, the oars creaking in their locks, the blades slapping the water.

Then Mack shouted, “I think we’ve got something.”

My father said to me, “You go on home. You don’t need to be here to see this.”

I wonder now whether he was thinking of the moment when a farmer driving past my father’s field heard his cries for help and freed him from the corn picker, brought him from the field, his hands mangled to pulp.

“I’ll stay with you,” I said. I wondered how long he had stood in the field, his hands caught in the rollers of the picker’s shucking box, before the other farmer had happened by.

“You do like I say.” My father’s voice was angry now. “Or do you want me to blister your ass?”

I ran across the field toward the lights burning in our farmhouse. I was crying because I had to leave my father there, alone in the dark — helpless. All he could do was wait while Mack and David and the skinny boy pulled the drowned man from the pond.

One day not long afterward, my mother accepted a teaching position in the northern part of the state, and just like that, we were moving. My father sold our livestock. Trucks rumbled up our lane and took away our cattle and hogs. Suddenly, the pens and pastures were empty.

We were moving because my mother had lost her job teaching at Claremont Grade School, and my father was willing to move three hundred miles north to a suburb of Chicago in exchange for the extra income the new teaching position would bring. He leased our farm to Mack Jent and became an absentee landlord.

It gave me an odd feeling to think of Mack Jent farming our ground because I knew that my father didn’t completely approve of his way of doing things. He planted too close to the fence lines, my father said. More than once he complained that Mack had planted over our property line. And he didn’t keep his beans cultivated, or his machinery in tip-top shape. And he cut his wheat when it was still damp with dew, and on and on.

He had also brought a lawsuit against another farmer whose pickup truck had come up too fast behind Mack’s tractor on the County Line Road and rear-ended him. It hadn’t been a serious accident, but Mack had claimed whiplash and back injuries and had won a settlement.

It was practically unheard of in those days for one member of our rural community to sue another member. It was considered bad form — unneighborly and unchristian. Good neighbors would find a way to work out their differences with out involving the courts.

So Mack Jent had a reputation of someone not to be trusted. Why my father handed over our farm to him, even allowing him the use of our machinery, I still don’t know unless it was merely because the arrangement was convenient. Time was short and someone had to be found. Mack was close and eager for the chance.

To me, he was like their terrier dog — tightly wound and tenacious, full of growl and snap. He wasn’t ill-tempered or abusive the way my father often was; he was dangerous for a different reason. He was a wiseacre. When he joked with me, his barbs often stung. He teased me about being afraid of their dog, or having to double with Katrina when we rode her horse. Maybe I ought to try riding sidesaddle, he suggested. I know his teasing was meant to be good-natured, but I was a sensitive boy, one who suspected, even then, that I would never be the sort of man he was — gung-ho and brazen, unwilling to calculate risk and consequences.

He worked for Marathon Oil and did his farming at night and on the weekends. Everything about him said that he was ready to go, man, go. He wore overalls with nothing beneath them but bare skin and boxer shorts. He kept his hair in a sharp-bristled flattop. A Winston cigarette jounced from his lower lip as he gabbed. Maybe he talked his way into leasing our farm, the way he would eventually try to convince my father to sell him the whole kit and caboodle. By this time, my father had come to regret the fact that he had ever allowed Mack to sink a plowshare into our eighty acres. From time to time, he would say, “I don’t ever want this place sold to Mack Jent, or to any of his heirs.” He had never accepted Mack’s farming methods, and once, while Mack was our tenant, a spark from one of his Winstons had started a fire, and our International H tractor had burned to ruin.

“You see what you get,” my father said, “when you’re careless.”

I never stopped, then, to consider the irony of his statement. What right did he have to accuse Mack when he himself had been careless with the corn picker and had ended up losing his hands? I thought only of the afternoon in the Jents’ basement, when I had gone off half-cocked and wrestled Dan until he fell and hit his head. I had been reckless. I had thought I was defending Katrina and had ended up making her angry. Although we eventually put the incident behind us, the way children do, it seemed to mark the end of the way we had always known each other. Suddenly we were just two kids who went to the same school and happened to live near each other. There was nothing special between us. We may have even begun to pick up on the subtle tensions that smoldered between our fathers. We were moving in different directions. Then I was gone to Chicago, and though I saw Katrina in the summers when we came back to our farm, we were never the same. When we were around each other, there was, at least for me, the feeling that I was a stranger, had perhaps always been one, allowed a momentary place in Katrina’s world only through her deliberate kindness. I had ruined that; I would know it forever.

The last time I saw her was in 1988 at my mother’s funeral. It was January, and southern Illinois was in the midst of a bitter cold spell. The temperature had dropped into the teens. The wind howled. Dusty ribbons of snow snaked across the streets. I imagined the wind moaning in the stovepipes of our deserted farmhouse.