Fatherhood And Other Stories Part 3

For fifteen years I had endured the insult he represented to me, my wife's deviousness, her false claim of virginity, the fact that I'd had to maintain a charade from the moment of his birth, claiming a paternity that neither I nor any of my neighbors believed to be genuine. It had not been easy, but I had borne it all. But with his final attempt to humiliate me by means of this exaggerated show of filial obedience and devotion, this incessant repet.i.tion of "Father, this" and "Father, that," he had finally broken the back of my self-control.

And so I told him to get out, that he was no longer welcome in my house, that no more meals would be provided, nor any bed for him to sleep in, nor a fire to warm him, nor clothes for his back.

We stood together in the backyard, he watching me silently while I told him all this. He'd grown a beard during that preceding few weeks, his hair had fallen to his shoulders, and he'd taken to going barefoot. "Yes, Father" was all he said when I finished. Then he turned, walked back into the house, gathered a few personal items in a plain cloth knapsack, and headed down the street, leaving only a brief note for his mother, its sneeringly ironic message clearly intended to render me one final injury, "Tell Father that I love him, and that I always will."

I didn't see him again for eighteen years, though I knew that my wife maintained contact, sometimes even making long treks to visit whatever town he was pa.s.sing through. She would return quite exhausted, especially in the later years, when her hair was gray and her once radiant skin had become so easily bruised that the gentlest pressure left marks upon it.

I never asked her about her trips, never asked a single question about how her son was doing. Nor did I miss him in the least. And yet, his absence never gave me the relief I'd expected. For it didn't seem enough, my simply throwing him out of the house. I had thought it might satisfy my need to get even with his father and my wife for blighting my life, forcing me to live a transparent and humiliating lie. But it hadn't.

Vengeance turned out to be a hungrier animal than I'd supposed. Nothing seemed to satisfy it. The more I thought of my "son," the more I got news of his various travels and accomplishments, heard tales of the easy life he had, merely wandering about, living off the bounty of others, the more I wanted to strike at him again, this time more brutally.

He had become quite well known by then, at least in the surrounding area. He'd organized a kind of traveling magic show, people said, and had invented an interesting patter to go along with his tricks. But when they went on to describe the things he said, it seemed to me that the "message" he offered was typical of the time. He was no different from the countless others who believed that they'd found the secret to fulfillment, and that their mission was to reveal that secret to the pathetic mult.i.tude.

I knew better, of course. I knew that the only happiness that is possible comes by accepting how little life has to offer. But knowing something and being able to live according to that knowledge are two different things. I knew that I'd been wronged, and that I had to accept it. But I could never put it behind me, never get over the feeling that someone had to pay for the lie my wife had told me, the false son whose very existence kept that lie whirling madly in my brain. I suppose that's why I went after him again. Just the fact that I couldn't live without revenge, couldn't live without exacting another, graver penalty.

It took me three years to bring him down, but in the end it was worth it.

She never knew that I was behind it. That for the preceding three years I'd silently waged my campaign against him, writing anonymous letters, warning various officials that he had to be watched, investigated, that he said violent things, urged people to violence, that he was the leader of a secret society pledged to destroy everything the rest of us held dear. By using bits of information gathered from my wife, I kept them informed about his every move so that agents could be sent to look and listen. He was arrogant and smug, and he had his real father's confidence that he could get away with anything. I knew it was just a matter of time before he'd say or do something for which he could be arrested.

I did all of that, but she never knew, never had the slightest hint that I was orchestrating his destruction. I realized just how fully I had deceived her only a few minutes after they'd finally peeled her away from his dead body and taken it away to prepare for burial. We were walking down the hill together, away from the place where they'd hung him, my wife muttering about how terrible it was, about how brutally the mob had taunted and reviled him. Such people could always be stirred up against someone like our son, she said, a "true visionary," as she called him, who'd never had a chance against them.

I answered her sharply. "He was a fraud," I said. "He didn't have the answer to anything."

She shook her head, stopped, and turned back toward the hill. It was not only the place where they'd executed him, but also the place where we'd first made love, an irony I'd found delicious as they'd led him to the execution site, his eyes wandering and disoriented, as if he'd never expected anything so terrible to happen to him, as if he were like his real father, wealthy and irresponsible, beyond the fate of ordinary men.

A wave of malicious bitterness swept over me. "He got what he deserved," I blurted out.

She seemed hardly to hear me, her eyes still fixed on the hill, as if the secret of his fate were written on its rocky slope. "No one told me it would be like this," she said. "That I would lose him in this way."

I grasped her arm and tugged her on down the hill. "A mother is never prepared for what happens to her child," I said. "You just have to accept it, that's all."

She nodded slowly, perhaps accepting it, then walked on down the hill with me. Once at home, she lay down on her bed. From the adjoining room, I could hear her weeping softly, but I had no more words for her, so I simply left her to her grief.

Night had begun to fall, but the storm that had swept through earlier that day had pa.s.sed, leaving a clear blue twilight in its wake. I walked to the window and looked out. Far away, I could see the hill where he'd been brought low at last. It struck me that even in the last moments of his life, he'd tried to get at me just one more time. In my mind I could see him glaring down at me, goading me in exactly the way he had before I'd kicked him out of the house, emphasizing the word Father when he'd last spoken to me. He'd known very well that this was the last time he'd ever talk to me. That's why he'd made such a production of it, staring right into my eyes, lifting his voice over the noise of the mob so that everybody would be sure to hear him. He'd been determined to demonstrate his defiance, his bitterness, the depth of his loathing for me. Even so, he'd been clever enough to pretend that it was the mob he cared about. But I knew that his whole purpose had been to humiliate me one last time by addressing me directly. "Father," he'd said in that hateful tone of his, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

NAMELESS STONES.

My father was a doctor in the northern foothills of Alabama. He was a large, mild-mannered man who took great care with his patients, carefully explaining everything he did to them before he did it. By Depression standards, he had a well-heeled town practice which rarely ventured out into the mountain regions above our town.

Most of his patients were local businessmen and professionals. Yet, for all that, my father still lived in what seemed to me a state of perpetual crisis. Night and day were pretty much indistinguishable in our house. Babies had to be born when they were ready, and people hurt or frightened came to him for help regardless of the hour.

There weren't many nurses in those days, and so after my mother died young, while attempting to have a second child, it was up to me to a.s.sist my father, to boil the water and arrange the instruments, to light the lanterns and put out the heavy cotton gauze and bandages, and at times to press down hard on someone's arm or leg or chest to keep him from injurying himself while he thrashed about in pain.

In those days medicine was a muscular profession-even for a nine-year-old boy.

From time to time people from the rural areas would wander in, bringing their various sufferings to our door. I remember them well: large women in flour-sack dresses and men in soiled gray shirts. Their children seemed to be hardly dressed at all. They were brought only when their parents had to bring them, when they had been sick so long or so terribly that their parents had finally become frightened for them.

Often too late.

Often they died.

Billie Withers died. He was a small, thin boy of four or five. His hands had a certain female delicacy to them, very soft and pale. Sometimes now when I reach over to take my wife's hands, I remember his.

The Withers were mountain people. And that is not to say they were stubborn or independent. It is not just to say they held to a code of silence or endurance.

They were mountain people in the sense that mountain life was the only life they knew. The ridges and granite cliffs were their cosmos. They could not imagine a world beyond them.

That in Istanbul muezzins called the people to prayer from lofty minarets or in Paris women danced barebreasted upon ornate revolving stages or in India people worshipped a G.o.d with an elephant's head-it was not that these things were unknown to the Withers and their neighbors; they simply did not exist for them.

What existed was the mountains, and they lived within their limited reaches like flowers captured in a vase. The farthest ridge was for them a beach, and all which lay beyond it an unknown, unknowable sea.

John Withers brought his son Billie to our house on a cold December night. When I opened the door, he s.n.a.t.c.hed his hat from his head and held it reverently in his hand. "Is Doctor Franklin here?" he asked.

He was wearing a pair of denim overalls over a faded yellowish shirt with a frayed collar. His face was drawn, worried. He looked as though he had lost a good deal of sleep.

"Yes, sir," I said.

Mr. Withers nodded shyly at the small boy cradled in his arms. "Mah boy's in bad shape, I thank," he said.

I stepped back and asked him to come in.

He hesitated, started to move, then drew back as if his boots had rooted to the porch. "I hate to trouble you so late."

I opened the door a bit farther. "It's all right. I'll get my father. Come on in."

Mr. Withers stepped through the door into the foyer and glanced timidly left and right. "I sh.o.r.e do hate to put you to this trouble."

"Just stay here," I said. "My father will be out in a minute."

I walked quickly back to the kitchen where my father was having one of his hasty late-night snacks. He had gotten used to never going to bed before midnight during the early days of his practice and had never been able to readjust his hours.

"Who's at the door?" he asked.

"A man with a little kid."

He pushed himself away from the table, still looking longingly at a half-eaten piece of chicken. "All right, go make sure my office is straightened up."

I ran to my father's examining room and began putting things in their proper places. He never had been a neat man, and his proper material element seemed to be a kind of usable but ultimately incomprehensible chaos.

His medicine bottles were deposited randomly throughout the office, and his instruments lay about on table tops, shelves and chairs. It was as if the logic which science brought to his mind had been imposed upon some older and less ordered beast.

Billie was whimpering slightly when Mr. Withers brought him into the room.

"Just lay him down there," my father said, and Mr. Withers gently placed Billie on the black cushioned table in the middle of the room.

My father stepped over to the table and began loosening the patchwork quilt covering Billie. "How long has he been sick?" he asked.

"'Bout a week," Mr. Withers said. "He ain't been no better in a while."

My father brought one of the kerosene lanterns over to the table for light.

"Hi there," he said brightly when Billie opened his eyes and stared languidly at the light.

"You're not feeling too well, I guess," my father said, comfortingly.

Billie squinted and tried to answer.

"No, no," my father said, "just rest still. We'll have you out playing ball in no time."

Billie's eyes closed slowly. He had a small, beautiful face, a mountain boy's face, open and unvarnished as the day he was born. Beneath the glaze, his eyes seemed to be greenish with spots of brown. His hair was light brown streaked with blond. His skin was stretched tight against his cheek bones. In the lantern light it looked as smooth and shiny as unpainted porcelain.

"You treat him at all?" my father asked Mr. Withers.

"I dist wrapped 'im up and kep' 'im by the far," Mr. Withers said. He thought a moment, then added: "Mah wife's people come over and prayed fer 'im."

My father tugged gently at Billie's chin, slowly prying open his mouth. He peered in for a moment, delicately pressing down on Billie's tongue with a depressor. He sniffed his breath then listened to his heart.

I watched my father carefully and saw a slight wincing of his eyes. I had seen that look before, a tiny drawing together of the eyebrows and narrowing of the eyes. It was so subtle a gesture I doubted any but me had ever detected it.

It meant Billie Withers was most likely dying.

Mr. Withers watched my father closely. One of his hands nervously fingered the carpenter's loop in his overalls while the other rhythmically squeezed his crumpled gray hat.

Finally, my father turned to him. "Is your wife at home?"

"She's dead," Mr. Withers said. He continued to stare at Billie.

"I didn't catch your name, I don't believe."

"Withers. John Withers."

My father walked over to the medicine chest and took out a bottle of dark-colored serum. He filled a hypodermic needle with a large dosage.

"Your boy has diphtheria, Mr. Withers," he said. "Have you ever heard of that?"

Mr. Withers nodded. "Can you hep 'im?"

"Well, this medicine is supposed to do some good. Your boy has a pretty advanced bad case right now. This medicine sometimes has some bad things about it. Most of the time it's all right though. I think we'd better go ahead and use it."

"Dist do what you can fer 'im," Mr. Withers said. "I'd 'preciate it."

Billie's body rustled gently on the table, and Mr. Withers' lips parted as if his own breath were tied to the boy's.

My father smiled. "Could be he'll be playing with his brothers and sisters in a couple of days," he said.

"Naw," Mr. Withers said. "He's mah onliest kid." He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "He took sick all of a sudden."

My father held up the hypodermic so Mr. Withers could see it clearly. "I'm going to give him the shot now. It won't hurt him." He turned and quickly injected the ant.i.toxin directly into Billie's veins.

"Can I take 'im home now?" Mr. Withers asked.

"No, I think you better not. He's pretty tired. He needs to rest. We'll let him sleep, see how he is in the morning. To tell you the truth, there's nothing to do but wait."

Mr. Withers nodded. "Awright."

My father turned back to Billie and ran his fingers through the boy's hair. "Fine boy." He circled his index finger gently around Billie's ear as he sometimes did mine.

"Could I stay with 'im?" Mr. Withers asked.

My father bundled Billie up again and lifted him into his arms. "There's plenty of room for both of you."

"I don't want to be no trouble."

"Plenty of room," my father repeated. "Come on, I'll show you."

Mr. Withers seemed to smile, and I could see the jagged, brownish teeth his closed lips had hidden. His face seemed softer now, less lined and pitted. The lantern light gave it an orange hue, making it look as if it had been carved out of the reddish clay of the hill country.

"Eddie, go get me an extra blanket," my father said to me.

I brought the blanket into the back bedroom and watched as my father laid Billie on the bed. He listened to his heart once again, then folded the blanket double and tucked it delicately around Billie's body.

"We'll keep him nice and warm," he told Mr. Withers.

Mr. Withers took the edge of the blanket and pulled it over Billie's chin. "When he gits in bed, he goes all the way under the covers. Even covers up his head."

"Smart boy," my father said lightly. "That heats the bed faster."

"Dist all of a sudden took sick," Mr. Withers muttered. "Dist clumb in mah lap and took sick."

"I'll bring a cot in for you," my father said.

Mr. Withers rubbed his eyes. "Naw, that's awright. I couldn't git no sleep. I'll dist set in that chair there."

"You ought to get some rest."

Mr. Withers shook his head. "Naw, thank you."

"Well, I'll sit up with you awhile," my father said. "I haven't been sleeping very well lately, anyway."

"Now don't go to no more trouble on 'count of me," Mr. Withers said insistently, drawing back from this last courtesy as if too much generosity could never be repaid.