Fathers, Sons, Blood

On July 31, 1964, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I was sleeping late after writing all night when I heard my wife, Sally, scream above the yammering of children's voices. I didn't know what was wrong, but whatever it was, I knew instantly that it was bad. I sprinted down the hallway, and before I ever reached the front door, I had made out what the children, all talkingat once, were trying to say.

"Patrick ... "

" ... can't ... "

" ... in the pool ... "

" ... get him out."

The only house in the neighborhood with a pool was two doors away. I didn't break stride going through the front door and over the hedge onto the sidewalk.

As I went through the open gate of the high fence surrounding the pool, I saw my son face down in the water at the deep end, his blond hair wafting about his head the only movement. I got him out, pinched his nose and put my mouth on his mouth. But from the first breath, it didn't work. I thought he had swallowed his tongue. I checked it and he had not.

I struggled to breathe for him on the way to the emergency room. But the pulse in his carotid artery had stopped under my fingers long before we got there, and he was dead. That morning, at breakfast with his mother, he'd had cereal. The doctor told me that in the panic of drowning, he had thrown up and then sucked it back again. My effort to breathe for him had not worked, nor could it have. His air passages were blocked. In a little more than a month, September fourth, he would have been four years old.

A man does not expect to be the orphan of his son. Standing by the open grave, returning to his room, taking his clothes out of the closet and folding them into boxes, sorting through thestuff that was his, taking it up from the place he last left it--all of this is the obligation of the son, not of the father. Not of the father, that is, unless some unnatural and unthinkable collaboration of circumstances and events takes the life of the son before that of the father.

Patrick had never gotten out of the yard before; but that morning, some neighborhood children, most not much older than he, had come by and helped him out, and he had gone with them. The family that owned the pool always kept the gate locked, but that day the gate was open. There, two doors away, somebody was always at home on Saturday, and certainly somebody was always at home when the gate was unlocked, but nobody was at home when Patrick sat down on the cement lip of the pool, took off his shoes and socks and slipped into the water, thinking, probably, that he was going wading.

As I worked through Patrick's things after the funeral, I could hear Byron, my other son, bubbling and gurgling across the hall. I quit with the Slinkys and the Dr. Seuss books and the stacks of wild crayon drawings and walked into Byron's room, where he lay on his back watching a mobile of butterflies dancing over his head in the mild breeze from the open window. He would be one year old in less than a month, on August 24, and he was a happy baby even when he had befouled himself, which he had managed to do only moments before I walked in. I unpinned his diaper and a ripe fog of baby shit floated up and hung about my face. I looked at his pristine little cock, standing at half-mast about as big as a peanut, and I thought of my own cock and of the vasectomy I'd had a month after his birth.

"It's just you and I now, Buckshot," I said, "just the two of us."

I thought then and I think now that two children make up my fair share. Sally and I had reproduced ourselves and, in a world drowning in a population problem, that was all we were entitled to. If I had it to do all over again, I'd do it the same way. It is not something I ever argue about with anybody. It's only what I believe; whatever other people believe is their own business. Fair share or not, though, I had lost half of the children I would ever have. And behind that fact came the inevitable questions. Who needs this kind of grief? Who needs the trouble that will surely come with the commitment to fatherhood? Isn't a son at times disappointing and frustrating to the father? And isn't he at all times an emotional and financial responsibility that could just as easily have been avoided? And the ultimate question: Is it worth it?

I've had that final question answered time and again over the past 20 years, and the answer has always been yes, it is worth it.

The answer has come in many forms, out of many circumstances. One of the answers was given to me a short time ago when I came in on a plane and Byron was there to meet me. I was dead tired from days of airports and motel rooms and taxicabs.

When I walked up to him, I said, "I'd kiss you, son, but I don't think I can reach you."

He smiled, put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Hell, I'll bend down for an old man."

And the baby, who was now in the first flower of manhood and 6'3" tall to boot, bent and kissed me.

What affected me so much was not what he said or that he kissed me. Rather, it was the tone of his voice, a tone that can be used only between men who are equals in each other's eyes, who admire and respect each other. It was the voice of men who have been around a lot of blocks together, who have seen the good times and bad and, consequently, know the worst as well as the best about each other. Finally, it was the voice of love, the sort of love that asks nothing and gives everything, that will go to the wall with you or for you. In my experience, it is the voice hardest to find in the world, and when it is found at all, it is the voice of blood speaking to blood.

•

Blood, begetting it and spilling it. In those nightmare days following Patrick's death, I inevitably thought long and hard, usually against my will, about the circumstances of his brief life and his death. Much of it came as incriminations against myself. It is part of the price of parenthood. And anybody who would keep you from the knowledge of that hard price is only lying, first to himself and then to you.

The boy had developed a hideous stutter by the time he drowned. The great pain it had given me while he was alive was only compounded when he was dead. Somehow I must have caused it. I must have been too strict or too unresponsive or too unloving or. ... The list went on--just the sort of low-rent guilt that we heap upon ourselves where blood is concerned. Being low-rent, though, doesn't keep guilt from being as real as an open wound. But in my case, it got worse, much worse. Part of me insisted that I had brought him to the place of his death.

Sally and I had been married when I was 25 and a senior at the University of Florida. She was 18 and a sophomore. A year and a half later, when I was in graduate school, she divorced me and took the baby to live in Dayton, Ohio. I'm not interested in assigning blame about who was at fault in the collapse of our marriage, but I do know that I was obsessed to the point of desperation with becoming a writer and, further, I lived with the conviction that I had gotten a late start toward that difficult goal. Nobody knew better than I how ignorant, ill read and unaccomplished I was, or how very long the road ahead of me was to the place I wanted most to be in the world. Consequently, perhaps I was impatient, irritable and inattentive toward Sally as a young woman and mother. But none of that kept me from missing my son when he was gone, longing for him in much the same way I had longed for my father, who had died before I could ever know him. So out of love and longing for my son (selfishness?), I persuaded her to marry me again, come back to Florida and join her life with mine.

And my efforts to have Sally come back to Florida haunted me in those first hard days following the death of my son. If I had not remarried her, if she had stayed in Dayton, Patrick could not have found his death in that swimming pool in Fort Lauderdale, could he? But the other side of that question was yet another. If I had not remarried Sally, I could never have known and loved my second son, Byron, could I? The crazed interrogation with myself went on. Was there somehow a way to balance things there? Was there a way to trade off in my head and heart the life of one son for the life of another? Patently not. That was madness. But ... ? Always another but.

Enter my uncle Alton, who was as much a father to me as any man could ever have asked for. When he heard that my son had drowned, he walked out of his tobacco field in south Georgia and drove the 500 miles to be with me. While neighbors and friends stood about in my house eating funeral food, Uncle Alton and I hunkered on our heels under a tree in the back yard, smoking. We'd walked out there together and, as I'd seen him do all my life, Uncle Alton dropped onto his heels and started making random markings in the dirt with a stick. And just as naturally as breathing, I talked to him about the questions that were about to take me around the bend of madness, questions that I had not talked about to anybody else before and have not told anybody since. It was a long telling, and he never once interrupted.

I finished by saying, "It feels like I'm going crazy."

His gray eyes watched me from under the brim of his black-felt hat. He had only two hats, one for the fields and one for funerals. He was hunkered there in the only suit of clothes he owned. He couldn't afford this trip any more than he could afford to walk out of the field during the harvest of the only money crop he had on the farmed-out piece of south Georgia dirt he'd scratched a living out of for 40 years, any more than he could have afforded to give me a home when I was eight years old and had nowhere else to go. He needed another mouth to feed like he needed screwworms in his mules or cutworms in his tobacco. But he had taken me in and treated me the same way he treated Theron and Don and Roger and Ed and Robert, his other boys.

"You ain't gone go crazy, son," he said.

He had not responded until he had taken out a Camel cigarette and turned it in his hands, studying it, and then examining a long kitchen match the same way before firing it against his thumbnail. He was nothing if not the most reticent and considered of men.

"That's what it feels like," I said. "Crazy."

"Well, crazy," he said, acknowledging it and dismissing it at the same time. "What you gone do is the next thing."

"That's what the next thing feels like."

"I reckon it might. But it's some of us that cain't afford to go crazy. The next thing is lying in yonder in a crib. You ain't gone give up on blood, are you, boy?"

It was not a rhetorical question. He wanted an answer, and his steady eyes, webbed with veins from crying himself, held mine until I gave him one.

"No, sir, I'm not."

He put his hand on my shoulder. "Then let's you and me go on back in the house and git something to eat."

"You feel like a drink of whiskey?" I said.

"We can do that, too," he said. "I'd be proud to have a drink with you."

"Good," I said.

The two of us went into the back room where I worked and sat down with two whiskeys. As we drank, both of us heard the sudden furious crying of Byron from somewhere in the house. Funerals and death be damned; the baby was hungry. (continued on page 238)Fathers, sons(continued from page 112) Uncle Alton lifted his glass toward the sound of the angry, healthy squalling, a brief smile touching his face, and said, "There it is. There it is right there."

And so it is. Part of the way I am bonded to my son is made up of the way I will always be bonded to Uncle Alton, dead now these many years, dead before Byron could ever know him. But no great matter. Blood is our only permanent history, and blood history does not admit of revision. Or so some of us believe.

•

I picked up a magazine not long ago in which a man was writing about his children. In the very beginning of the piece, he said, "The storms of childhood and adolescence had faded into the past." He would be the poorer for it if that were true. But it is not true, not for him or for any father. The storms don't fade into the past, nor do all the moments that are beautiful and full of happiness, the moments that quicken our hearts with pride. In early July of the summer Byron would turn 12, we were sitting on the top of Springer Mountain in Georgia. It was rainin and we were soaked and exhausted to the bone, having made the long steep climb of the approach to the Appalachian Trail, which winds its way across the Eastern United States and finally endson Mount Katahdin in Maine. Between us, embedded in the boulder on which we were sitting, was the metal image of a young hiker.

Byron put his hand on the stone and said, "Well, we made it to the beginning."

And so we had, but a hell of a beginning it had been. It hadn't stopped raining all day as we'd climbed steadily over broken rock. He was carrying a 20-pound pack and mine weighed 45, both probably too heavy, but we'd decided to pack enough with us so that we could hike for as long as we wanted to without getting out of the mountains to restock our supplies. I had put him in the lead to set the pace.

"Remember, we're not in a hurry," I called after we'd been going awhile. "This is not a goddamn contest."

I was forced to say it because he'd taken off over the brutally uneven trail like a young goat. He'd looked back at me for only an instant and kept climbing.

Then, as the mud and rock made the footing more and more unsure, I said, "You think we oughtto find a place to wait out this rain?"

He stopped and turned for just an instant to look at me. "Did we come to by God hike or did we come to hike?"

He was smiling, but he'd said it with just the finest edge of contempt, which is the way you are supposed to say it, and I scrambled to follow him, my heart lifting. Byron had heard me ask him much the same thing many times before, because if you change a couple of words, the question will serve in any number of circumstances. And now, in great high spirits, he was giving it back to me. I would not be surprised if someday he gave it to his own son.

The question had come down to him through my own mouth from Uncle Alton. When he would be in the woods with me and his other sons hunting on a freezing November morning and one of us said something about being cold or otherwise uncomfortable, he'd say, "Did we come to by God hunt or did we come to hunt?" And the other boys and I would feel immediately better, because that was something men said to other men. It was a way a man had of reminding other men who they were. We had been spoken to as equals.

All of that is what I was thinking while we sat there in a misting rain on a boulder with the metal image of a hiker in it signaling the official beginning of the Appalachian Trail atop Springer Mountain. But it was not what he was thinking.

"Dad, you remember about the time with the rain?"

"The time about the rain? Hell, son, we been in the rain a lot together." I was wet and my feet hurt. I wanted to get the tent up and start a fire.

He cut his eyes toward me. Drops of rain hung on the ends of his fine lashes. He was suddenly very serious. What in the hell was coming down here? What was coming down was the past that is never past and, in this case, the past against which I had no defense except my own failed heart.

"We weren't in it together," he said. "You made me stand in it. Stand in it for a long time."

Yes, I had done that, but I had not thought about it in years. It's just not the sort of thing a man would want to think about. Byron's mother had gone North for a while and left me to take care of him. He was then seven years old and just starting in the second grade. I had told him that day to be home at six o'clock and we would go out to dinner. Truthfully, we'd been out to eat every night since Sally had been gone, because washing dishes is right up at the top of the list of things I won't do. It had started misting rain at midday and had not stopped. Byron had not appeared at six, nor was he there at 6:45. That was back when I was bad to go to the bottle, and while I wasn't drunk, I wasn't sober, either. Lay it on the whiskey. A man will snatch at any straw to save himself from the responsibility of an ignoble action. When he did come home at 7:15, I asked him where he'd been.

"At Joe's," he said. But I had known that. I reminded him of when we had said we were going to dinner. But he had known that.

"It was raining," he said.

I said, "Let's go out and look at it."

We went out into the carport and watched the warm spring rain.

"And you thought the rain would hurt you if you walked home in it?"

"It's raining, Dad," he said, exasperated now.

"I'll tell you what," I said. "You go out there and stand in it and we'll see how bad it hurts you."

He walked out into the rain and stood looking at me. "How long do I have to stand here?"

"Only until we see if it hurts you. Don't worry, I'll tell you when you are about to get hurt."

I went back inside. So far, pretty shitty, but it gets worse. When I went back inside, I sat down in a recliner, meaning to stay there only a minute. But I hadn't reckoned with the liquor and the rain on the roof. I woke with a start and looked at my watch. It was a quarter of nine. I went outside and there the boy stood, his blond hair plastered and every thread on him soaked. He didn't look at all sad or forlorn; what he did look was severely pissed.

"Come on in," I said. And then: "Where do you want to eat?"

"I don't think I want to eat."

"How do you feel?" I asked.

He glared at me. "Well, I'm not hurt."

We sat there on the top of Springer Mountain and looked at each other with the rain falling around us. I'd forgotten entirely about my feet and the tent and the fire. My throat felt like it was closing up and I had to speak to keep breathing.

"I wanted to apologize, but I had done such a sorry-assed thing that I couldn't bring myself to do it. But at the time, it didn't seem like it'd do any good."

"It probably wouldn't have," he said. "Then."

"Well, I'm sorry. I was wrong. I should have said so, but. ..." I'd run out of words.

He said, "I know. And I was only down the block. I've thought about it. I could have called. But, shit, I was only a little kid."

I loved that. I loved how he said he was only a little kid. "What were you thinking while you were out there? I mean, you had plenty of time to think."

He shook his head and laughed as though he couldn't believe the memory of his thinking himself. "I never thought but one thing."

"What was that?"

"I thought, That drunk fucker thinks I'm going to call and ask him to come in out of the rain ... but I'm not." Then he laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world, and I laughed, too.

That was the first time I knew he was the kind of guy who could be put out on the street naked and he'd survive. The kid had grit in his craw. I thought it then and I think it now. But more than that, there on the mountain, the boy and I had been privileged to share a moment of grace that we could never have shared if I had not fucked up so badly all those years ago and if he had not had the kind of heart he has. But that moment is the privilege of blood.

•

Sons grow up, though. God knows they do in a New York heartbeat. Byron grew up running with me. By the time he was a teenager, we had a four-mile course full of hills laid out. But the very worst of the hills was the last one. On the four miles, we jogged and talked, nothing serious; but at the bottom of that last, long hill, we'd always turn to shout at each other, "Balls! Who's got 'em?" And then we'd sprint and I always won. Somehow, I thought I always would. But the day came at the beginning of his 14th year when he beat me by 20 yards. I shook his hand, but I was pissed. I don't like to lose at anything. But then, neither does he. And we always had the understanding between us-- never, to my knowledge, spoken--that neither ofus, whether playing handball or whatever, gave the other anything. If you wanted the point, you had to win it. As we cooled out walking, I began to feel better and then proud of him. But the only thing I said was, "There's always tomorrow."

He patted my back, a little too kindly, a little too softly, I thought, and said, "Sure, Dad, there's always tomorrow."

I never beat him on the hill again. But I still had the gymnasium. Lungs and speed may go, but strength stays. Well, it stays for a while. And I don't even have to tell you, do I?, that the day came when he was stronger on the bench and at the rack than I was. Strange feeling for a father. No, not strange; sad. Part of me wanted him to grow into manhood, but another part of me had a hard time accepting it. Maybe, in my private heart, I'll never be entirely able to accept it. If I live to be 70, he'll still be my boy at 40. I know; mushy, isn't it? I don't even like it myself. But I don't have to like it; all I have to do is live with it.

And out of the feeling of the father for the son comes the desire to save him from pain, knowing full well that it is impossible. But that in no way diminishes the desire. You want to save him from the obvious things, like broken legs or lacerated flesh; but more than that, you are at some trouble to see that he is not hurt by life. I am talking here about education. Maybe I'm particularly sensitive about that because nobody in the history of my family ever went to college except me, and I had to join the Marine Corps during the Korean War so I could get the GI Bill to do that. So imagine how I felt six months ago when I walked by Byron's apartment and, as we were talking, he told me that he was quitting the university after being there two years.

"What are you going to do, son?"

"Play guitar," he said.

The guitar has been his passion for years. It is not unusual for him to practice six hours a day for weeks running. And to give him his due, he is a righteous picker. But if he just continued in the university, he would.... But you probably know the kinds of things I tried to tell him. Father things. But he wasn't having any of it.

Finally, in exasperation. I said a dumb fatherly thing: "Byron, do you know how many boys there are in this country with guitars who think they're going to make a living picking?"

He only smiled and asked, "Dad, when you were my age, how many boys do you think there were in this country who owned typewriters who thought they were going to make a living writing?"

There it is. The father has his dream. The son has his. And a dream is unanswerable. All you can do for a man with a dream is wish him well.

"Do well, son," I said.

"I'll try," he said.

"Did we come to by God hunt or did we come to hunt? ... That was something men said to other men."