by Robert Johnson.
My old man was a piece of work. “Certifiable,” as the shrinks say on TV. He sat in that godforsaken attic “office” of his most of the years I was growing up at home, banging out his “tales” on an old portable typewriter, and—truthfully—I think he sold, what . . . two or three? A more colossal waste of time you’ve never seen. But, the old man was possessed. A demon had him. “The world,” he claimed, needed “visions.” This was long before e-mail and computers, of course. These days, he could hook up with hundreds of like wackos, all over the globe. But, in my father’s time, loonies sweated out their fantasies alone.
All this started years before I was born, I’m told. He labored away his adult life and in the process worked nearly every damn dirty ugly job you could name. The experience marked him. Broke him. Most of the last years I was at home, he slopped around knee-deep in gore at a packinghouse. I asked him one time, when I was in grade school, what he “did for a living”—I needed the information for a school report. “I slaughter the fatted calf,” he told me. Just like that. “Sometimes,” he added, “I kill the skinny ones, too. Ziiiip! I slit ‘em right across the throat. They hardly get out a scream, boy.” He made a quick horizontal gesture with his arm, and I cringed. We were all still too close to huffing and puffing and blowing your house down, so even the thought of such dismemberment was nerve-rattling. My father, though, figured such exchanges were what he called “reality therapy,” necessary to stiffen our resolve.
So, that’s the way he used to talk to me and my brother—even Mother. In somebody else you would have called his quirks “creative,” I think. But in him, as perceived by his children, they were just scary.
For example, one time, we’re all on the train . . . bound for Chicago, as I recall. We traveled a lot. He lived for it. Well, one morning just at dawn in the freight yards outside of Council Bluffs, the train slows down and, for whatever reasons, halts. Now, you’ve got to picture this. It’s freezing cold. Maybe five in the morning, and there’s nothing outside that we can see but a horizon full of empty boxcars and railroad tracks. So, my father, he’s been up since the evening before and is totally enraged because some clown of a second-grade teacher has his class on our coach, and the teacher’s been stalking around the whole night long with one of those clunky, old-fashioned portable tape recorders under his arm like a suitcase, making notes on “the boys’ and girls’ big adventure.” He and about twenty noisy kids, they’re all from like Winter’s Depths, Wyoming, and it’s the first time they’ve ever been east of Jim’s filling station, I guess, and this teacher is recording everything—right down to the color of their socks when they kick off their pointy-toed boots to “catch some shut‑eye.”
My dad? He’s lost his sleep, and he’s steamed. When Dad couldn’t go under for about six hours or so, he’d come down with blinding migraines. He’d storm like a prophet. So, missing sleep, I think, frightened him. Consequently, he was fit to explode at this silly, overzealous teacher, maybe strangle the poor devil on the spot. I had fears of impending Apocalypse.
Somehow, as a result of the whole situation, just as it’s getting light and he can make out civilization, my father decides “we’re all goin’ to see Omaha, Nebraska,” and he trots to the end of the stopped car and begins—now, feature this—pitching our bags out the door onto the ground. I know he’s serious when he hands my little brother down after about the third or fourth satchel. The poor kid is half-asleep, and, crunch, he’s sitting on a pile of luggage in a train yard in the middle of what looked to be nowhere. There’s a suitcase falling past his head.
My mother, I suppose to spare Dad the temptation of handing her along next, scoots to the end of the car and leaps out the door, shortly after which time the rest of us have made our own dives out after my brother, the crazy old man himself last to arrive into the chill. Then, we line up, grip our bags, and trek on over to Nebraska. In miles, this is not far. You can see Omaha from the Council Bluffs train yard. But, emotionally, it is like scaling Everest in your underwear.
We felt totally exposed.
My dad didn’t. He felt “free,” he said. He thought we should be reveling in our little excursion. But, he was like that: never felt anything anybody else felt. Ever.
And, celebrations! My dad was death on celebrations. Birthdays, for instance, came and went with hardly a notice. If not for school terms, I barely would have kept up on the time of year. He told me once: “You don’t celebrate being one step closer to the grave, idiot child! Use your noggin,” and I guess that was his philosophy, in a nutshell. Christmas decorations in our house consisted of one pale green colored‑paper tree taped onto the wall over the bookcase in the living room. He would not shop in stores that played holiday music, either. Found it “offensive” to his “sensibilities.” He cautioned, “You want to celebrate Christmas? Fine, go to a church and pray for Jesus. They killed him, you know. Think about it, boy. Nailed him up by his hands! If Jesus and Moses and those folks could see what we are doing with their ideas today . . . why they’d just puke! Think about it.”
So, I thought about it, and the more I did, the more I became convinced my father was one strange and isolated human being. I was still attending church at the time—often on the sly—and his performances troubled me to my bones.
There was, I remember, always this haunting sense of mission to his life. We were always going someplace, or bound for some amazing change of luck. He was convinced. Nothing ever changed, of course. That’s my religion, by the way: nothing ever changes; nothing ever gets better . . . and I think I learned it, by default, from the old man . . . but he always had us believing we were on the edge of “great new times,” of explosive and sudden good fortune. He entered the Irish Sweepstakes once, and was so convinced he had a goer and it was his fate to win the thing, that when he brought the ticket home, he posted it on the living room wall in a frame. When the truth later sank in, that he had tacked up a joke, the icon silently disappeared. He never said a word, but one morning it was gone.
This was right before he started his “God Tests.” Damned fool. He sucked us all down with him.
What happened was that he had been reading in a bible. Sitting up at night and studying a dour‑covered Gideon Society edition he had lifted out of a motel room where we had stayed overnight, in California. Barstow, I think. He pinched it out of the desk drawer—though, I suppose, that’s the function of motel bibles . . . they’re supposed to be stolen, and save lives, after. But, I was shocked, as a kid, when I saw him put it into our bag.
After we got home, he began staying up late at night, reading that bible and taking endless notes in a loose‑leaf binder labeled “Greetings from The Black Hills”—a memento of Rapid City, South Dakota. Had all his “best thinking” in it, he claimed. He said he was “wrestling with angels,” like the “heroes of old.” Mother, she was worried sick. Took to watching the late television news rather than going up to her empty bed. She tried to explain things to me one night, over graham crackers and hot sugary tea at the card table in our kitchen.
“Your father,” she started off, “is a kind, but not very successful, man—as the world sees things. You have to remember: he has always been a man with a great capacity for imagination. You know . . . he always dreamed of us going to the East, to Thailand. Just me and him and the jungles.” She halted an instant. “He used to bring me pictures of jungles. Didn’t look like any place we’d ever been. But what mattered was, it wasn’t any place we’d ever been. It was far away and strange, and now all of that is gone—and it eats him. You’re going to have to forgive your father. That’s all.”
I, as you might expect, came right back at her. “But, why didn’t he think?” I countered. I was always a bit short on patience when it came to the old man.
“I suppose he wanted a family so badly,” she said; “he wanted a place to fit . . . and he gave in on things like dreams. He did it for you . . . for me . . . for us all. Therefore, you must forgive him.”
You can guess how forgiving I was.
Especially about his “God Tests.” They first started with a series of preliminary “challenges.” My father would latch onto some “cause” in history or the news—famine, corruption, inequality of the races—and then he’d announce over dinner one night that “a consideration was in progress, concerning God’s actions” in one such situation or crisis or historical event. Afterwards, he’d start buying papers and magazines and checking out books from the library, and pore over every page, seeking out the latest facts concerning the happening in question, all of which he next clipped out and pasted in yet more notebooks. After a week or maybe two, he would work up an absolutely baroque algebraic plotting of the course of occurrences surrounding the event, then issue God a score on handling things. This score, he would formally announce over another dinner, always on Sunday. Right in the middle of, say, a fork full of potatoes and peas, you’d get caught short by the man, who would break the room’s silent eating with a proclamation that we had “a score on God” regarding, for example, the Salk vaccine.
The case varied, but the format of the announcement never changed. It was as stylized as the Academy Awards. I expected someday Mother would chime in with “The envelope please. . . .” But she’d just go quiet, like the rest of us. Maybe we were supposed to write the latest score down someplace, to see if God was doing any better than in the past. We all, though, pretty regularly just stared into our plates, as rigid as dolls on a shelf. I think that on Salk vaccine, by the way, God did all right. Sixty was passing, and for some reason, I remember that Salk vaccine got an eighty‑five on my father’s scale. There were extra points that time for “practicality and the protection of the innocent.” Viet Nam, I recall, was a total failure (forty‑five percent), as were Watergate, prostate cancer research, and the Rolling Stones. These all eventually became subjects of my father’s “challenges.” Only later, came the “verdict.” It was like working your way through the playoffs, and on to the championship game, he told us.
The playoffs ended for my father when Mother went down. Kidneys. Almost a total failure, her doctors said. She simply fell silent, the poor woman, steadily sickened, and lost her features. If you weren’t family, you wouldn’t have recognized her, I’m afraid. Even back in those days, I’m guessing, for people with money, there was some kind of a treatment. But for us . . . well, there was only waiting for the inevitable. Dad hated that. Took it as his own fault.
My mother, as always, was completely courageous. She never broke for an instant in her own steady faith, or in her devotion to my father. Her last words to me, in fact, concerned the story I’m telling now. She said to me: “Don’t you let that man be forgotten. He has struggled profoundly, for me and for you. His thoughts, you must remember, are his own. There’s no law he has to think like us. No law at all. Don’t you abandon him now. You tell his story.”
Father, meantime, had been reduced to flame. He’d march up and down the halls of the hospital, talking and cursing to himself, shaking his fist at the holy pictures on the walls. On Mother’s last night, he followed his rage to the roof. He was alone up there when the orderlies grabbed him. Standing like a rod and staring into the sky. When they walked up, they overheard a little of what he was saying. Near as they could tell, he was chanting in the direction of the heavens, over and over again, something like “You have no right, you have no right, you have no right. . . .” All by himself, in the dark. So damned mad, there were veins standing out on his face in ropes. Fists jammed down in his pockets like he was trying really hard not to punch somebody. He “could have been iron, and welded there,” one of the orderlies told me, later.
They tackled the man, shot him full of tranquilizers, checked him into an empty room downstairs, and in the morning, I was the one who was chosen to go in and tell him that his wife had passed.
I didn’t know any way to pretty the situation up, so I just said things straight out: “Mah’s gone on, Father,” I told him. “They lost her last night—while you were on the roof.”
“I figured,” he replied. “When they all sent you in, I knew it was something like that.”
He was silent then. Pulled a little at his beard.
“This was the final exam, son. This was the real deal,” he instructed me. “I was aiming at giving everyone in charge one more chance if your mother got through. But not now. Not on your life. I will never forgive them for what has happened here.”
Right then, my patience ran out. I asked him if he thought God was really worried about his ridiculous tests.
“You know, that’s the part that got me, too,” he replied. “I don’t think God gives a rat’s ass, one way or the other. I realized it, just last evening, up on the roof there. None of this matters a whit. Not a whit. Everything just keeps going on, boy. What it is, is what it is, and we ain’t got a voice in it. . . .”
I turned and I left. And that was pretty much the end of things for him and me. He walked out of the hospital the next morning—nurses came in and found him gone. He’d left his hospital gown folded, took what was his, and walked.
That’s not to say that I don’t know what happened to him. At least, I have my suspicions. A couple years ago, I got a postcard one day. Picture of a bunch of women with pointy fingers dancing on the beach, around one lone enormous shaggy tree, with big green mountains sticking up in the background, over some kind of water. There was no signature, but the card was from someplace called Xiatil. I looked the name up in an atlas and found out it was in the up-country Yucatan.
There was a message. In awkward ballpoint printing, from somebody being terribly careful to disguise his handwriting: “Game’s Off.” That’s all it said.
I have no proof, but like to think it was from my father. I like to think he’s stopped arguing with God. I like to think that he’s drowning in monkeys, and he’s laughing like he was the devil’s own man.
Thanks to Noel Tree for her help with “Eden.” A version of the story originally appeared in Barkeater: The Adirondack Review (Summer 2001).