Sometimes on nights like this, my father went on about World War II, when he was stationed in Saipan at an oxygen plant. Some people associate war with death and suffering, but Big George spoke of his years in the South Pacific as if they were the most golden days he could remember, which made me feel a little bit hurt. He often told me about the day when his base was bombed and he almost died. The planes flew so close that he was able to spot a Japanese pilot’s long yellow scarf blowing in the wind. He never spoke of the thousands of American boys who died on Saipan. My parents never mentioned bad things at all.
Once a year, he went off to St. Louis for a reunion of his army buddies on the Hill, the Italian section of the city on the South Side. He didn’t have that many male friends in Madison. I don’t think I could have named one. I didn’t have that many either. It was fairly difficult to gather a band of boys to stage a re-creation of the Academy Awards with me as the favored nominee for everything.
“Good lord,” my father said, anticipating the fishing expedition. “Of all the damn things . . .”
“Of all the damn things . . .” I repeated. “Of all the damn things . . .”
“I guess I’m supposed to get a damn pole,” my father said. “I guess we’ll have to buy some damn worms.”
“Where,” I asked, “do you buy the damn worms?” I was no Huck Finn, though I thought the hat was interesting.
“Hell if I know,” he said, “but someone will know. I don’t think we’ll have to put an ad in the paper.”
I continued to powder Toto—a loyal but randy terrier who pursued every bitch in Monroe County. Domestic life did not come as second nature to him. Asked to perform even the most rudimentary trick, he yawned and sauntered off to lick his well-used private parts. He seemed to like my father, who had found him on the street and took care of him mostly. Me, he had reservations about. Each day when Big George arrived home, Toto swaggered over to his station wagon, looking aggrieved and obligated to report that the boy-dog bonding thing just wasn’t working out.
. . .
Until 1972, when I was thirteen and we packed up to head a dozen miles down Highway 24 to Paris, my parents and I lived in Madison, a town of 528 people, where Betty grew up and her father built the family’s first lumberyard. Big George ran the place. When we pass through Madison now, I see my father standing in front, crying out something a little shocking at passersby, or raising his hand as my mother and I drove by.
“What is he up to?” Betty would ask. “No good.”
Rolling down the car window, she would yell at my dad, “Get to work.
“What am I going to do with him?” my mother always asked.
“Hit the road, Betty,” he cried back.
Big George fancied himself a little bohemian. In the late 1960s, when the hippie signs proclaimed FLOWER POWER, he painted the refrigerator in the family room completely black with one big blooming white flower. He could draw anything, and, wishing I could too, I sat watching him for hours as he sketched a caribou from the World Book Encyclopedia, the profile of John F. Kennedy, a sleeping dog, my mother’s face from a photo taken when she was in college. In the picture she looked shy and innocent; in the sketch, through my father’s eyes, even more so. He worked on that portrait night after night, but she didn’t like it. It was the same old problem; in person or on paper, she never thought she looked right, even when captured by loving hands.
My father’s big hands were rough from work, but gentle too. When laboring in the yard, he touched the leaves and shrubbery with kindness. Standing behind my mother, latching a necklace or strand of pearls, he brushed the hair away with delicacy, always kissing her neck when he finished his task. I came to see my mother through my father’s eyes, which took in what few others recognized, her sweetness, vulnerability, and the sadness that sometimes came over her silently.
Betty and I were nervous characters, and when we were on the downswing, the house was still except for the sound of my father making jokes, trying to wash our cares away. When we would return to the world, we would find him, sitting in a chair on the patio with a beer, stroking the ears of Toto, who had grown accustomed to my capricious affections and my mother’s tendency to send things into a bit of a whirlspin.
There seemed to be some kind of rule that my father could never have anything he wanted. He lived for us.
. . .
On the morning of the fishing trip, I located a glass jar with a top and dragged the snow shovel out of the garage. Digging tentatively into the earth, I left a fairly shallow impression and collapsed on the ground as Toto eyed me skeptically. Already I found life exhausting, and it seemed to have the same opinion of me, but eventually I did find a couple of worms and managed, with a kitchen fork, to get them into a jar. “Two will be plenty,” I said to Toto. “We won’t be staying long.” I had a plan.