I reserved my greatest admiration for rocks. Nothing could hurt them. They were hard and tough, capable of repelling all but the most fierce attack—a hammer or dynamite. I believed that rocks were sentient and alive. Rocks lay in place, slowly forming sockets in the earth, waiting patiently for the disruption of travel. Where there was one rock, there were more, and I concluded that they lived in families. When I found a lone rock, I transported it to a group. My strongest interest lay in the misfits: rocks with an embedded fossil, a tint of yellow, red, or black. I was particularly drawn to rocks with a hole that fully perforated the body. Such a violation was contrary to the essence of being a rock. I believed these would be shunned by others, and I carried them home, keeping them on a shelf with their brethren. At times I sensed their gratitude. The trees knew me, the animals accepted my presence, but the rocks genuinely liked me.
I needed to believe in the friendship of rocks because Dad often threatened to kill me in the basement. He mentioned several methods, but his favorite was hanging me by my thumbs, a fate that perplexed me. I didn’t understand how anyone could die from it. To validate his threat, Dad said he’d killed our older brother, whose name was John. This made me particularly nervous, since my middle name is John. Maybe Dad had killed him before I was born, then named me for him. Or maybe it meant that I was next, since he’d killed a son already. After supper one night Dad elaborated on the murder of John, explaining that he’d cut up the body and flushed it down the toilet, which was why the commode never worked properly. To prove his point, he wrote “Hi John” on a scrap of paper, led my siblings and me to the bathroom, and flushed the note.
In retrospect, it’s clear that my father was trying to be funny with the kind of joke that gets carried away until the humor is leached out and the audience is confused. I can forgive my father for a failed joke. I have made many myself. But as a young boy, I fully believed my father had killed my brother and therefore might kill me. Dad’s office contained guns in plain sight. The available wall space held a broadsword, a battle-ax, several knives, a dagger, and a dirk. I often wondered which implement he’d used to dismember John.
The intensity of my multiple fears embarrassed me, but what really scared me was the concept of being a coward. As the oldest, I had the responsibility of courage, the same as taking care of my siblings or loving my father. Being afraid of my own murder taught me to live with impending mortality. I accepted fear and set it aside. I believe my father was governed by his fears, and in taking them out on those people closest to him, he taught me the folly of making my own important.
Chapter Fifteen
DAD WAS seventeen when his father died, their conflicts forever unresolved. Lacking an adult relationship with his own father, he didn’t know how to proceed as his children aged. Before he began his career as a writer, he was gone many evenings, closing sales with clients who worked during the day. On the few nights he was home, we begged him to play cards and board games. He taught us poker. He invented a game in which we knocked marbles around the supper table with spoons. On poster board he drew a complicated route for a game based on race cars, dice, and cards. Dad had a vast capacity to make us laugh. We adored our father. He made our evenings fun.
When he began working full-time at home, the joyful nights after supper were fewer and fewer. As we got older and more mature, Dad remained the same. The humor slipped away from his limited repertoire of jokes. The deliberate naughtiness, such as a dice roll coming up six and calling it “sex,” produced tense silence instead of laughter. Dad missed his attentive audience, but the old ways no longer worked. To an extent, we’d outgrown him. One by one we did the worst thing possible—we ignored him. I believe this hurt him deeply, in a way he didn’t fully comprehend and we certainly could not fathom. In turn, he began ignoring us. Now that he was dead, I could give him the attention he always craved.
I began with the goal of assembling a full bibliography of his work. He’d never done it himself, and I was curious about the extent of his output. Opening the boxes in Mississippi released the scent of decaying mouse dung, dust, and cigarette smoke. It was the smell of Dad’s office, my childhood, the house itself. I worked fourteen hours a day organizing thousands of letters and tens of thousands of novel pages.
More than five hundred manuscripts made several uneven columns on a long dining room table, reminding me of architectural ruins. The older drafts were crumbling at the edges. Carbon copies typed on onionskin tore easily. Metal paper clips left rust marks on the pages. I separated them into categories of porn, science fiction, and fantasy, then subdivided those into published and unpublished, short story and novel. Dad didn’t date the first drafts, all of which were handwritten, their titles and character names shifting between revisions.
I went through the material again, slowly seeking insight, acting as a kind of literary detective. My father’s earliest extant novel, written in college, was a three-hundred-page historical account of Rome called The Sword and the Cross. Completed in 1958, it included a preface declaring eleven years of research and writing begun as a teenager.