RECALLING REBA MAE

Reba Mae on her 50th wedding anniversary

 May is my mother Reba Mae’s month. Her birthday and Mother’s Day are within a few short days of each other. I began writing this on the eve of her birthday. The idea was to publish it on her day, May 16^th. But as often happens with a piece like this, it took a lot more thought and effort than expected, when the idea first popped into my head.

She would have been one hundred two this year. And she would have been aghast. She was already wondering “how she’d gotten so damned old” when she was seventy. In July, it will be twenty-two years since her death. I’ve always wished she had decided to stay a little longer.

It’s not like she was vain, though. I mean regarding the age thing. On the contrary, she was self-conscious, even self-effacing. She thought of herself as “so big and ugly and awkward” and felt that small-boned, petite women like my wife were really fortunate. She said she always felt like “such a big, clumsy, German cow” around them. At social gatherings, which she was loath to attend, she sought to “stay out of the way,” and blend with the wallpaper, unless she could be of use in the kitchen, in which case she would withdraw to that safe haven and remain there for as long as possible.

Her shyness garnered her a reputation—in general but particularly in my father Whitie’s patently verbose family—as “tight-lipped”. As in, “a tight-lipped kraut,” coming as she did from the Weber-Lenninger clan. They were hardy rural folk who were more prone to action than to talk. They knew what they knew and the rest was “none of their damn business.” Despite that fact, if someone managed to coax her out of her self-conscious trance, they would be surprised to find a woman with a fun-loving, even zany bent, somebody highly articulate, with a sharp wit and often even sharper tongue.

Age 18.

Reba Mae was beautiful. I mean that literally. Not because she was my mother. I mean, I’m not being a dutiful son here, not like some guys I’ve known who would say their mother was beautiful even if she looked like Winston Churchill. I’m saying it as  someone who has always been able to deeply appreciate the artistic and aesthetic value of beautiful women. Usually not the ones widely touted as beautiful—certainly not the plastic Barbies—but the ones with a rare natural beauty, with uncommon traits, and the ones whose inner beauty forms an inseparable part of their outer attraction.

She was, I suppose, a clear product of the rural Ohio of her time. A mix of the German and Scots-Irish bloods that prevailed in the state back then, but, according to accounts from her mother’s family, with a dose of Native American blood to temper her European genes. She put her prominent cheekbones, thick, dark hair, and almond-shaped eyes down to that heritage. Those eyes were indescribable. On her driver’s license they figured as “grey”, But that doesn’t begin to describe their color, which I can best depict as “varied”. They changed with the light, and the conditions of the surroundings—sometimes grey, sometimes green, sometimes blue and sometimes almost violet.

Reba Mae and older brother
Gene (right) with Father and
mother (Vern and Myrtle), and 
two younger siblings, Ken and
Marilyn

That Native streak was said to come from Great-Grandpa Job Cavinder’s side of the family. Although proud of it, no one in the family that I know of has ever produced proof of our ties to the Indians, nor is anybody very sure of the tribal origin of our alleged predecessors. But the most plausible story concocted so far has pointed to the possibility that Job’s mother, “Zura” (called that because she hailed from Missouri), who was a Kennedy, may have been the daughter of a Native American mother and an Irish immigrant father.

Whatever the case may be, Reba Mae ascribed to that family theory and said it was the reason for the apparent “Indian traits” in her Aunt Ruth, her Uncle Jesse, her brother Gene, and even her own mix of Teutonic and supposedly Native features. Whatever the case might be, it was a winning combination.

As I say, Reba Mae was of rugged rural stock. Folks on both her father’s side and her mother’s farmed for a living. Her father was a first-generation American whose parents immigrated from Germany. As his daughter,  Reba Mae grew up in the rural Ohio of the nineteen-twenties and thirties, when there were few frills. Even fewer since she was raised on a series of three tenant farms that her father operated for a major local landholder, also of German descent, Charles Herbst.

Oddly enough—thanks to relatively advanced telecommunications in the two counties (Auglaize and Shelby) where the farms were located—her family always had a phone, but never had electricity or running water until they moved to town when she was a teen. The toilet was “out back”, water came from a well through a handpump in the kitchen, meals were cooked on a wood-burning range, baths were taken in a tub in the kitchen with water heated on the woodstove, and Reba Mae did her homework by the light of a coal oil lamp.

That spartan lifestyle made Reba Mae cringe at any suggestion of things “rustic” throughout her adult life. She coveted modern conveniences and if she was traveling, she wanted good hotels with comfortable beds and proper linen sheets. The word “camping” didn’t form part of her vocabulary. And she found nothing “charming” about the log cabins we stayed in when we vacationed on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where she was, of course, the only one who knew how to build a proper fire in the pot-bellied stove.

Despite that, she remained in intimate touch with nature, and made sure that her children developed a deep appreciation of their natural surroundings. She knew the names of every tree, plant and flower, and those of the many birds of rural Ohio, and she knew the traits and habits of a wide range of animals, both wild and domesticated.

Reba Mae (right of the teacher in the second row
from the top), with her class at the one-room
Lennox School in Auglaize County

Reba Mae was a good student and, like her mother, loved to read. She was an assiduous patron of the Auglaize County Library from the time she moved to town, and for her entire life after that. But she also frequently joined book clubs and loved to visit bookstores. In her latter years, she read upwards of fifty books annually.

Before she moved to town and enrolled in Wapakoneta’s Blume High School, she received her education at a series of one-room schoolhouses. These were typically sturdy red-brick buildings about the size of a small family home. Prior to the advent of regular school bus routes, schools went to the children rather than the children traveling to schools. With the proliferation of buses, bigger more centralized schools could be built and rural children could be bused to them. But from the nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, the one-room schoolhouse was the solution for ensuring that rural children received basic, compulsory education.

Back then, there were about two hundred one-room schoolhouses in Auglaize County alone. The idea was for schoolkids to never be more than two miles away from one. Most kids made their way to class hiking cross-country or on horseback. Reba Mae was one of them, depending on the season, either walking with her older brother Gene, or riding her Shetland pony to school.

She loved school, and excelled in her studies. Today it almost seems incredible that anyone could get even a basic education in a school with a single classroom, where one teacher taught six to eight grades. But when Reba Mae entered Blume High School in town, her teachers and fellow students were amazed to find that she had no catching up to do. She was always grateful to the incredible rural schoolteachers she’d had, such as Miss Yvonne Cannon or Miss Jessie Rue Crawford, women who would still be teaching in Wapakoneta City Schools by the time Reba Mae’s own children were in grade school.

Reba Mae got saddled up young with a husband and family. Married at nineteen, her new husband off at war, she took on the task of saving for their future. She waitressed at first, taking a job at Lyman’s Restaurant—which would later become a self-service cafeteria—in downtown Wapakoneta. But she eventually got a better-paying job in the defense industry, working on the line at the Tank Depot in nearby Lima, Ohio, where the M3 Sherman tank, the M5 light tank, and the M26 Pershing tank were all being manufactured for use in World War II’s European Theater. 

It didn’t take long for her bosses to figure out that Reba Mae was smart, industrious and meticulous. And before she knew it they had promoted her to inspector. Very shortly, she was promoted again, this time to line supervisor. All very daunting for an inexperienced young woman who was barely twenty years old when she stopped being a simple line operator.

According to the journal she started keeping in her senior years, the responsibility of the supervisory post got to be too much for her. Especially the part of it that involved giving orders to her peers. Ever shy and self-critical, far from making her feel empowered, ordering her workmates around made her feel embarrassed and uncomfortable. She apparently asked to be put back on the line as a regular assembly worker but her request was refused. She was needed where she was and her bosses had every confidence in her.

So she quit, went home to her parents-in-law’s house, and tried to figure out what her next move would be. She had secretarial and bookkeeping skills. Perhaps she could find a job like that.

But before she even started her job-hunt, her immediate boss from the Tank Depot showed up at her door. She was sorely needed at the plant, he told her. She had to come back. Her country needed her, and so did the boys overseas. Besides, he told her, there was a new assignment waiting for her. He couldn’t tell her about it, except that it would mean more money and a higher position on the organizational chart. She would be briefed if she took the job, but the details were top secret until she decided.

Known as "the duck" this was the secret
amphibious craft Reba Mae was to work on for D-Day

He argued so convincingly that she said she would  take the job under one condition: that it didn’t involve giving orders to others. No, no, he told her. It wasn’t a supervisory job, but a key post in a top-secret project, in an isolated sector of the plant. According to her journal, however, two weeks after taking the post, she was already being placed in charge of specific production teams, something to do with weather-stripping and waterproofing. But it was too late to back out now. Reba Mae’s guiding rule was that, no matter how tough the going got, the worst thing you could be, once you’d made a commitment, was a quitter.

It is noteworthy that, even half a century after the war, Reba Mae refused to write in her journal about what the top secret project had entailed. She had taken an oath, had been sworn to secrecy, and for her, a secret was just that. If you had given your word not to reveal something, you died with whatever it was, and didn’t tell another soul. It didn’t matter that it had already come out in the post-war era that the super-secret project the Tank Depot had been working on was the building of advanced amphibious assault vehicles, specially designed for the D-Day landing. It might not be a secret anymore, but if it wasn’t, it was not Reba Mae who was going around blabbing about it. Loose lips sink ships, as they say. Her code was like that of the Mafia: two people could have a secret…as long as one of them was dead.

Reba Mae with Darla and Dan

From this sort of responsibility as a defense worker at a very tender age, when the war ended, she was out of a job. It was, “Thank you for your service, but the men will take over now.” But she took all of that sense of responsibility and put it into creating a home for her Army veteran husband and the three children that they would produce over the course of the next eight years.

Reba Mae was, obviously, a Taurus. Taurus, the bull. And she lived up to the name with her quiet bull-headedness. She was quietly stubborn and serenely passive-aggressive. And once she had made up her mind about something, there was no veering her off her path. The only one who could manipulate and control her was Whitie. And he did, consistently.

When we were still young enough to get too big for our britches, she was, like a lot of mothers of her time—obviously, she had been brought up that way as well—a great believer in the old adage, “spare the rod and spoil the child.” You always had fair warning, but when she picked up her yardstick, you knew she meant business and it was often too late to “fall on the mercy of the court.”

Our family (Whitie in the rear), Reba
Mae, Jim, Darla and Corky in the middle, 
Dan in the foreground

After a certain age, my older sister Darla had grown too smart to ever merit a whipping. My little brother Jim (Dennis to his friends) was just too cute and simpatico to spank. Eight years younger than Darla and five years younger than I, he was clearly, like a lot of youngest children, her favorite. He was, in fact, everybody’s favorite—a towheaded little guy that was a ringer (in looks and character) for the comic book personality Dennis the Menace, and whom my sister once described as “weighing thirty-five pounds for like four years.” So more often than not, his mischief (of which there was plenty) prompted laughter, while mine (as someone who was anything but cute—equally well-described by Darla as “never a child, always like a little old man”) tended to generate irritation. 

But as I say, at a certain age, when we got too old to cane and old enough to reason, her tactic changed. For me, it was when I grew taller than she was in about a year’s time, and when she once whacked me with the yardstick and it snapped in two. I laughed so hard that it infuriated her, and she grabbed her broom instead. And still, I laughed, so it was obvious I’d outgrown corporeal punishment—unless Whitie decided to dispense it.

I was always respectful (scared spitless) of Whitie’s temper. Darla once said she never was scared “except when he moved really quickly.” That’s a good description, because once Whitie started moving like greased lightning, it was too late to get out of his way. And he remained dangerous like that for most of his life. When he was seventy and I was forty-four, I once said, “Y’know Dad, I must be one of the very few forty-something men who aren’t very sure they could whip their old man of seventy.”

“Oh hell, Dan,” he said, “you’re a helluva lot stronger than I am.”

“Maybe,” I said, “but you’re faster, and you’re meaner.” 

Anyway, from that time on, Reba Mae developed a wonderfully passive-aggressive way of making us do what she wanted us to. Whenever we hinted that we might like to do something that sounded like fun but that could be construed as morally, socially, or ethically questionable, she never prohibited us from doing whatever it was, never yelled, never grounded us. Instead, she would say, “I know I never have to worry about you kids, because I know you’ll always do the right thing.”

But what was the right thing? Was everything that was fun the wrong thing? Ah, there was the rub. If we went to her, it wasn’t for advice, it was for approval. And she knew that, whatever iffy thing we were thinking of doing, we already knew what the right thing to do was.

With Jim, well, it didn’t take. That boy was so full of life, and so free of convention, that he was going to do whatever the hell he was going to do and consequences be damned. In short, he was the healthiest of us all with regard to living life on his own terms as a teen and youth.

But for me, as well as for Darla, that dictum of Reba Mae’s weighed on us like a battleship’s anchor. Our mother was the person we most respected in the world, and knowing that she was expecting us “to always do the right thing,” made every secret adventure either of us chose to realize a source of profound guilt that was almost equal in the balance to whatever fun we derived from it. And that guilt followed us right into adult life, so that, at the backs of our minds, we imagined Reba Mae looking on as we did whatever we were doing.

I’m sure that helped me, at least, to be a somewhat better person, since there was no ethical code higher than Reba Mae’s. But it didn’t help me to be freer, or to live life as it came without regard for the moral consequences of my actions. It put a self-activated bridle on me that reined me in whenever I sought to step out of bounds. It made me a highly responsible person, but played hell with my narcissistic dream of living the artist’s life.

Still, it wasn’t like she was imposing anything on me that she hadn’t imposed on herself. For the decade that I made a living as a professional musician, she used to always say that she just didn’t know where I got my musical talent. “It sure didn’t come from me,” she would say. But that wasn’t true.

The Andrews Sisters

Maybe she didn’t think I was listening when I was a little boy and she told me how much she loved the music of the swing era, and how she’d dreamed of being in a group like the Andrews Sisters, a trio of three saucy chicks singing in the coolest of harmonies. She had a huge collection of 78rpm records with every major swing band and singer of her time. And she indeed had a nice voice and a good ear.

But if she felt like singing along with her records or the radio, she always kept it to a quiet hum and a random lyric, because she was, rightfully, afraid of the derision of her children, or comments from Whitie like, “What the hell are you so happy about?”  To which she would answer, “I don’t know. Just stupid I guess.”

Over the course of the rest of her life, Reba Mae was a mother, restaurant manager, school cafeteria cook, insurance agency secretary, and law firm office manager. She had a good and artistic eye for home décor, and always dreamed of starting an interior decorating business of her own, but it was a dream that was never to come to fruition. It was that enormous amounts of her energy were taken up by a consistent labor of love. Taking care of Whitie.

For more than forty years after returning from that war, Whitie suffered from what was known back then as “manic depression”. Reba Mae was always there to try and rein him in when he hit impossible highs and to attempt to catch him when he fell to abysmal lows. But it was a tough way to live. When a member of the family has severe mental health issues, the whole family suffers from the illness. And that was certainly the case at our house. But it was Reba Mae who lived it every minute of every day.

She followed him through a series of psychiatrists and a series of hospitalizations over the course of decades. It created a kind of symbiosis that they were both powerless to break. It locked them into a small, dark, secret world that only the two of them could comprehend. A world that shut out others including their children. In the end, they came upon a psychiatrist who was willing to call what Whitie had “a chemical imbalance”, and to keep him in a drug-based state of mild but tolerable depression for the rest of his life. By then, the psychiatrist had prescribed a “happy pill” for Reba Mae as well.

Whitie and Reba Mae, sixty years together

When Whitie died at eighty, after a prolonged illness, it was at home, alone with Reba Mae. I’ve often wondered what their last words a to each other were. He had always warned her that she couldn’t die before he did, because he wouldn’t be able to get along without her. His death seemed to release her to finally give in to her fatigue of years and die herself. Shortly before she passed away, six months after my father’s passing,  Reba Mae told me that she wasn’t sure how to go on any longer. She said that she “had been Whitie” for so long that she no longer knew how to find Reba Mae.

After a few months of progressively crueler illness, she was released into my brother Jim’s care at a rest home. Her stay was quite brief. Darla and Jim were with her when she died. All she wanted to do was rest. When Jim, her favorite, her baby boy, tried to talk quietly with her on her death bed, her last words to him were, “Just leave me alone!”

Clearly, she was ready to move on.

She seldom comes to me in dreams anymore. When she does, she’s quiet and aloof. She has nothing to say to me. I moved far away, and she moved on.

I try not to dwell on these things. It seems like such a waste of a smart, creative spirit, and it breaks my heart.

But then I remember the good times. A sunny kitchen where I watched her bake and ice beautiful Christmas cookies. A road trip on which we all played My Father Owns A Grocery Store and ended up laughing until our sides hurt. She and Whitie dressed up in clothes like Roy Rogers and Dale Evans to go square-dancing with The Spinning Eights. Her cutting up with the girls at the sandwich and coffee shop she and my father owned together, or joshing good-naturedly with the men who came in to get their morning joe there. My mother and little-boy-me planting a garden together. Reba Mae pruning her roses. Everybody but Whitie working together to redecorate a big, beautiful house we once lived in on the main street in town. Reba Mae teaching me how to pitch a ball. Reba Mae, getting up at the crack of dawn on wintry Sunday mornings to cheerfully take me on my paper route when temperatures were just too low, and the snow just too deep for me to deliver my newspapers on my bike. Reba Mae surreptitiously slipping me her list for the liquor store whenever I was home because it embarrassed her to go in herself. She, Whitie, my wife and I driving down to Tennessee together for a weekend at Opry Land. Reba Mae and I shopping together, lunching together, having pie and coffee together. My mother and I sitting at the kitchen table, a pot of coffee between us, swapping stories about people and events in our small town, she, instilling in me my love of books, my love of storytelling, and my penchant for chronicling the past of personalities the rest of the world had never heard of.

I think about her almost every day. But never more than in May.

FATHER’S DAY

Whitie, you were never what I would call “The Ideal Father”. But then again, hands on our hearts, whose was?  Besides, if the collective evolutionists turn out to be right, I picked you before I reincarnated—if, indeed, I did—so perhaps I have no one to blame but myself.

Whitie

That said, I’ve known of a few who pretty nearly were ideal for their kids—within the margins of human foible—and let me just confess to you that, growing up, I often envied those kids.

Be that as it may, “ideal”, I’ve learned, can have its drawbacks.

I have one friend who, when he talks about his dad, (and no offense, Whitie) he makes you want to crawl up into his ol’ man’s lap and beg him to adopt you. My friend’s dad was a shop worker who busted his ass for his family, but who always had time for his sons, and especially for my friend, who was a rare bird by any standard. But his dad always supported him in every endeavor. If my friend wanted to write, if he wanted to gather the stories of those who couldn’t tell theirs in their own voices, then he should, his dad said, throw himself into it heart and soul. Go after his dream. Not let anybody discourage him. He had a talent, his father said, and by golly, if you were lucky enough to have one, you should flaunt it.

He didn’t tell his son to forget his stupid fantasies about being a writer and learn to do something that would make him rich, or something that would give him a trade, or something with womb to tomb benefits.  In fact, his ol’ man used to do more than encourage him. He used to help his son get interviews when he was still just a sprout, and drive him back and forth, and read what he wrote afterwards, and comment. Once he even told his son that the boy had gone far beyond his own understanding, that his dad no longer understood exactly what the boy was doing, but that whatever it was, he admired his son for it and that the boy should shoot for the stars.

I hear him talk about his father and, you know, Whitie, I get a lump in my throat thinking what I wouldn’t have given for a little, a fraction, of that kind of encouragement and understanding. But like I say, “ideal” sometimes isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. And one day my friend’s father went down into the cellar, stuck a shotgun in his mouth and blew his brains out—in the very house where his sons lived, and where my friend still lives and writes today. I mean, all that had gone before in their almost ideal relationship was shattered in a thunder-clap. How could a boy, by now a man, who had felt so close to his dad compute this? That his father would want so badly to leave the world they shared that he was willing to kill himself to get away?

My friend still has the shotgun. It’s not some morbid “souvenir” of his “ideal” father’s death. On the contrary, the shotgun has become a celebration of life. Every year my friend and his brother take that very shotgun hunting, and after spending a great day afield together, my friend looks out at the great beyond as the sun goes down and says, “See what you’re missing, you sonuvabitch?”

But let’s talk about us, Whitie. I’ll have to say this, that you were never the everyday, ordinary dad. For better or for worse, you were unique. Obsessive-compulsive, manic, bipolar, most of the time at least mildly depressed, irascible and short-fused, ever worried about what might happen in some future that only God knew would exist or not, seldom if ever just living the moment and enjoying life, usually predictable but sometimes, exceptionally, off the charts, unfathomable. But some other times, once in a great while, countable times, happy and hilariously funny....like the time, during one of those lighter moments, when we were playing My Father Owns a Grocery Store and had exhausted every item on the grocer’s shelves so we changed the name of the game to My Father Owns a Drugstore and when somebody said, “My father owns a drugstore and in it he sells something that starts with  ‘s’,” the first words out of your mouth were, “Is it bullet-shaped?” We still laugh about that sometimes!

But then there were the dark, dark times when you’d hole-up in your room for weeks on end or check yourself into a psych ward, where you could hide out even from us, and it was as if nothing but your illness existed—for any of us, but especially for you. You barely recognized us. We barely existed in your world, and if we did, it was only as a burden, a responsibility, added noise and static you’d rather not have had. Especially me, I told myself, because that was what it felt like, as if I were what most vexed you in the entire world.

And then, all of the sudden, right after one of these psychotic episodes, you’d get up and, after a brief period that acted a lot like a hangover but wasn’t, because you never drank when you were depressed and only occasionally, socially, when you were happy (or on a manic high), you could be a completely different person. Especially around others. So much so that my friends would say, “Wow, you’re dad’s so cool. I wish I had a dad like him!” And, although it embarrasses me to tell you this, Whitie, I’d say, “You want him? Take him home with you when you leave. Strictly no return policy.”

You always had such physical grace. I admired that in you, Whitie. A natural sportsman, you were. As a boy, none of that rubbed off on me. If somebody had seen you walking down the street, marching with long strides and sure feet, your Popeye arms pumping, one-two, one-two with each stride, they would never have guessed that you were chronically ill. Nobody could have looked more confident and in control.

Clearly, I was overgrown and clumsy. You told me so yourself on many an occasion. I know it must have embarrassed and disappointed you. It wasn’t until I was a young adult that I learned to overcome that by training my body. Like in anything else, there are naturals like you, Whitie, and those who need to train like crazy, like me. I just wish I’d known that, wish somebody—like you, Whitie—had told me that when I was still a boy, instead of allowing me to believe, before the Army got hold of me, that if you weren’t a natural, you might as well get used to being a washout, a nerd, a benchwarmer. Confidence is so important in becoming athletic, and I didn’t have any. I had to find it and build it myself—with the help of a drill sergeant’s boot up my ass.

It hurt when I was a kid that we never tossed a ball together, that you never taught me everything you knew about sports, that neither did you take any interest in my interests, that we never hunted, or fished, or hiked, or camped together. I remember joining the Scouts, working hard to fit in, to get my merit badges, to be “one of the boys”. Not because I gave a rat’s ass about being a Scout, but because I thought maybe it would make you love me more and maybe take an interest in something I was doing. Mom ended up going with me to buy my uniform, accompanied me—along with widows and divorcees, since the other boys were with their dads—at the Blue and Gold Banquet, was there to cheer me the day I won the Pinewood Derby, while I’m not even sure you knew I was in Scouts. Which I wasn’t for long because, not surprisingly, I lost interest and quit.

And when I decided sports of any kind were a lost cause and excelled in band—head percussionist, student conductor, head of the percussion section in All-Area Band, head percussionist in the Buckeye Scarlet concert band my first and only year at Ohio State—you wrote me off, never came to a game or a concert, never acknowledged my achievements, never said you were proud of me. I didn’t realize it consciously then, but everything I did, even later when I found myself in charge over and over again in whatever activity I undertook, it was to seek your approval, Whitie.

Why was that? Because I always loved you. I still love you.

Still Whitie

But I want you to know, Whitie, that, like I told you in those long-overdue talks we had while the cancer was killing you, there’s nothing pending between us. I’m okay, you’re okay, Whitie. It’s an EST thing. No blame, no regrets. Mostly, I feel bad for you. For how sad and broken you were much of your life. How you couldn’t break far enough out of your personal darkness to see us better. To see me better.

Still, if I seldom managed to make you feel proud of me, there were lots of times I felt proud of you. Like the time on a hot summer day that I took a black friend to your restaurant and soda fountain, the Teddy Bear, for a Coke. The chief of police was sitting drinking coffee at the long table up front, the only other patron in the middle of a slow dog-day afternoon. The same chief who’d held that post for as long as anybody could remember, mainly because he’d been so adept at keeping our all-white town that way. And he made a nasty racist comment, said he hadn’t known you were a nigger-lover, and you told him that if he could get out of there before you got out from behind the counter, it’d save you the trouble of throwing his fat ass out on the street.

My heart burst with pride that day, Whitie.

Or the time later when you were a route salesman, killing yourself working twelve, fourteen, sixteen-hour days on minimum salary and a three percent commission but pulling down the best money you’d ever had in your life, selling several million dollars’ worth of goods a year out of the back of a twelve-ton truck. One afternoon you stopped by the house to pick something up and the company president happened to drive by. That evening he left a note on the windshield of your truck where it was plugged in for the night at the plant. It said he never again wanted to see your truck parked in the driveway of your house at two in the afternoon.

You went inside and marched up to the president’s office. Pushed past his secretary who said that he was “in a meeting” and told her, “Don’t worry, this won’t take long.” You burst in, nodded to the president’s guests, then turned to him, slapped the note down on his desk top and said, “The next time you leave me a little note like this, I’ll personally shove it up your ass.” And then you turned on your heel and walked out, not knowing whether you’d have a job the next day—but you did! And not caring either, because no matter how much money you were making, it wasn’t worth letting yourself be humiliated.

That day too, Whitie, you filled me to bursting with pride. And there were others, lots.

So, I get it that maybe there just wasn’t anything left over from your illness to invest in being “the ideal dad”. I get it. I understand. You were fighting that all your life. You were constantly struggling to overcome a handicap. If you’d been blind, or in a wheelchair, or missing an arm or a leg, I’d have gotten it back then too. But mental disabilities don’t show. People with them just seem to be “acting up” or “not getting their shit together.” Those of us who, right along with the person suffering them, become victims of them always want to say, “What the hell’s wrong with you? Why are you acting this way? Why can’t you just be normal?”

But, Whitie, I get it now. It’s like blaming a paraplegic for not being able to walk, or a deaf person for not being able to hear, or a blind person for not being able to see. You couldn’t reach me, because you couldn’t reach yourself.

But you taught me so much with your example, Whitie. You taught me that you only had your name and your word and that without them you were nothing. You taught me the nobility of work, of not owing anybody anything, of being your own man. You taught me not to back down no matter how scared I was inside. And also with your example, with your suffering, with your constant and losing battle, you taught me about depression, and I learned that you had to get it before it got you, that as soon as it loomed into sight, you needed to confront it, grab it by the throat and shake it, choke it to death, before it had a chance to grab you.

I don’t know if there’s anything beyond this, Whitie. But the day you died, you sent me a message. You know what I’m talking about. So if that was your way of telling me that there is something else, I’m hoping you are really in a better place, Ol’ Man. And wherever you are, Whitie, know that I love you and always did.

Oh, and, happy Father’s Day.

VIGNETTE SIX: SCARS

Jake and Russ were sitting on the back steps. Both men quiet for the moment. Jake had just stuffed a fresh cud of Redman deep into his left cheek and was sucking it against his back teeth, letting it get wet down with his saliva. Russ had been tamping a Chesterfield short on the broad side of a new pack and now he stuck it in the corner of his mouth, worked the brass Zippo out of the watch-pocket of his jeans and lit it, inhaling deeply and sighing the smoke back out again.

The steps were home-made, not store-bought. You could tell. Like a big three-tier box with no banister. They made a deep, satisfying clunk when you stepped on them wearing work boots. They were a little splintery and were painted battleship grey—probably the only color available in the shed at that moment, and the paint was for protection, not aesthetics, anyway.

Like everything Jake had built in the house, since he and his family had moved to town, the steps weren’t pretty, but they were sturdy and functional. They led to the closed-in back porch that he had also built on.

Actually, it was more like he’d turned the back porch into a mud room that ran the entire width of the house. Mostly, it was where everyday outerwear, caps and hats hung on pegs attached to the siding that had once been the back of the house. That’s why, oddly it seemed, there was a window that had once looked into the front room, but which now usually had a barn coat, slicker, fawn-color hunting coat or plaid flannel jacket hanging over it. On the other side of the wall, the opening had long since been boarded up and plastered over, so now it was a view to nowhere anyway.

There was usually a bushel basket of fruit stored at the far end of the porch, where it was cool and dry. What was in it depended on the time of year—in the summer, pears or peaches, right now, autumn, it was apples. Sometimes it would be walnuts still in their aromatic green skins. Whatever was there, it perfumed the back porch with wonderful fragrances the year round.  

A long, wide shelf attached to the outer wall, beneath a high sash window that looked onto the backyard bore an assortment of items including a clothespin bag made to hang from a clothes hanger and that was shaped like a tiny house-dress, an old flat-iron, a glass bowl with a collection of keys in it (many of which no longer opened anything, but you didn’t just throw keys away), and a coal-oil lamp with a shapely glass chimney and a thick glass tank with delicate flowers hand-painted on it that sat on a brass base. An old barn lantern and a smaller railway lantern hung side by side near the door, all throwbacks to the days when Jake and his family had still lived in the country, before the coming of rural electrification. But all three were still well-dusted, wicks trimmed and fueled up set to go, just in case. Many a tornado and snow storm had pressed them back into use when the lines were down.

Jake had had a hand in building the entire house, back in the thirties when this land had been part of one of several tenant farms he had worked over the years for the Hirsches, the biggest landholders in this originally German immigrant community. Even though the block where the house stood still ended on a field that had once formed part of the farm, this lot was now located on the south edge of town, which, over the years, had expanded out this far, where the factories of several cottage industries has sprung up. They had built it very much in the style of a barn, but with windows, upstairs bedrooms and inner walls. Barns were what they knew how to build. Why mess with the model? They had even raised the downstairs like a barn, building the sides on the ground, then pulling them up with ropes and spiking them together, before climbing up and raising the second storey and gambrel roof.

When he’d first moved the family to town, Jake had rented the house from his former employers. Later, once he got steady work, he’d taken out a mortgage loan and bought it. It had taken him twenty-five years to pay it off but now it was his free and clear.

Russ was Jake’s youngest boy, the male half of what Jake called his second-wind family, a son and a daughter who had come along more than a decade after the younger of he and his wife’s older two children, also a son and a daughter. The older two had always lived on the tenant farms that Jake worked before they left home, the boy to join the Marines, the girl to get married and live in town. They had always hated farming, hated not having electricity or greater creature comforts, hated bathing in a tub in the kitchen and having outdoor toilets, hated being “country kids”, brought up in one-room schools, in a high school full of “town kids” who tended to look down on them. The youngest daughter had been too young to remember much about the farms before they moved to town. She too, however, was all town girl.

But Russ had loved the farm, despite not having gotten along well with his father back then. He wasn’t alone. Back then, Jake had been a hard-drinking, often violent man who broke his animals with violence and broke his wife and children the same way. When Jake spoke back then, you lowered your eyes and said “yes sir”, if you knew what was good for you.

When they moved to town while Russ was still a pre-teen, he had felt cheated, like a fish out of water. He knew rural life, trusted it, the work and the play of it. He had felt self-sufficient out on the farm. If you knew how to farm you’d never starve, you’d never be poor even if you didn’t have a penny in your pocket. Out there, when food was short, you could live off the land, hunt and gather. It was the best possible life a man could hope for. That’s how he’d felt about it.

Rather than try and fit in with the town kids, he had been rebellious and belligerent. He’d been in almost constant trouble for starting fights and disrupting classes, and at sixteen Russ—and the principal—finally decided he’d had education enough and he quit.

By then his father had been, for several years, the caretaker at the local cemetery. Russ had been obliged by Jake to work there part-time, Saturdays and after school, since he was thirteen. But now, Jake put Russ to work full-time as one of his team of laborers, mowing, trimming, digging graves, fixing the internal lanes, all the tasks that went into maintaining a well-kept graveyard.

Russ hadn’t minded the work. It was outdoors and it was working with the land and with his hands. But working with Jake as his boss was a different story. Jake was always trying to make an example of Russ for the rest of the crew. That meant he was constantly riding Russ, constantly ordering him around, constantly criticizing his work. Ever threatening to whip his young ass.

That’s what Russ, now a middle-aged man, was thinking as he sat quietly on the steps smoking beside his father, who was now an older, tamer shadow of his former self.

Finally, he broke the silence saying, “Hey Jake, ’member that skeleton we dug up in that old abandoned cemetery down by the river?”

Jake turned, stared at his son and narrowed his eyes, as if trying to recall just which skeleton Russ was referring to. As if reading his mind, Russ said, “You know the one I mean. The pink one.”

Now Jake grinned, showing his remaining three tobacco-stained front teeth and managed to laugh around his huge cud. It was as close to a hearty laugh as Jake ever got, a hissing, pulsing, almost silent laugh like steam escaping in bursts from a relief valve. He stood, walked over to the grass and spat a dense squirt of yellow-brown juice into the grass and then sauntered back, hissing again in breathless laughter that shook his entire body before he sat back down on the step next to Russ.

“That there was a long time ago,” he said, “What made you think o’ that?”

“Dunno,” Russ shrugged. “Just crosses my mind from time to time. Wonder why them bones was that color. So pink.”

“Dunno,” said Jake. “Maybe the soil, or how it decomposed, the wood of the coffin. Hard telling. You see some funny stuff working in a boneyard as long as I have.”

“Yeah, hilarious, I’ll bet,” Russ snorted.

“That was ol’ Lester Schultz’s great-grandpa,” Jake went on, pushing a sweat-stained Stetson to the back of his head. “Wanted him buried at Oak Lawn with the rest of the family and got himself an order to exhume. Then he didn’t even bother to show up for the transfer.”

“Good thing he didn’t, as I recall,” said Russ.

Jake hissed again before saying, “Goddamn bottom come plum out o’ the coffin when we picked it up to load it on the bed of the truck.”

“Yep, and there was Les’s granddad just pink as a flamingo.” Russ said, setting off another fit of Jake’s hissing laughter.

Russ was picturing it in his head, he and Jake hauling the crusty old wooden coffin out of the ground with ropes, with Jake’s red ’47 Ford pick-up backed up almost to the open grave. But when they each grabbed an end to lift the box up onto the tailgate and shove it in, it suddenly went light on them, there was a thud and they both looked down under the box to see a coral-colored skeleton lying on the wood-slab bottom between them at their feet.

Catching his breath again, Jake said, “You looked at me and said, ‘Now, what the hell do we do?”

“Yeah, and I no more ‘an I said it, till you nodded for me to help you flip the coffin over top down, then you reached down, grabbed that slab and flipped that skeleton into the box face down and put the bottom on like a lid.”

You had to be a gravedigger to find the humor in this, but by this time Jake was swept away in full-hiss laughter, which only intensified when Russ said, “Wasn’t nobody around when we got him back to Oak Lawn, so we just nailed down that lid and stuck that poor ol’ bastard in the ground like we’d brought him, face down.”

“Aw Russ, he wasn’t in any shape to give a damn by then,” Jake wheezed, snatching a red bandana from his hip pocket, pushing his wire-rimmed spectacles up onto his forehead and wiping his eyes with it. “’sides, if he was anything like Lester, I figure he was headed thataway anyhow.”

For a while, they sat there in silence again, Russ lighting another Chesterfield, Jake chewing the rest of the good out of his chaw.

“We had some fun, didn’t we, Boy?” said Jake.

“Yeah, I guess it wasn’t all bad, Jake,” his son said.

“Wasn’t none of it bad,” Jake said, turning to look at Russ’s profile.

“Well, when I went off to join to Navy it wasn’t under the most amicable of conditions, as I recollect,” Russ answered.

“Water under the bridge,” he heard his father mutter.

Russ recalled how one day he’d had enough. They used crank-starter mowers back then and if you didn’t get the motor to catch on the first crank, they could be harder than hell to start after that. That particular morning, Russ hadn’t hit on the first crank and now he’d done about ten more and the mower wasn’t having any. He was cussing now, and sweat dripping into his eyes. Ohio summer it had been and hotter than hell even in the early morning.

And now there was Jake, berating him. The three hillbillies who formed the rest of the crew were digging a grave within earshot and it was humiliating to have them see him being dressed down by his ol’ man.

“Whatsa matter, Boy? Can’t you start that goddamn mower? Come on, Boy, there’s work to be done. We don’t have all goddamn morning.” And now Jake was standing over Russ, breathing down his neck, literally, and shouting, “Gimme that goddamn crank and lemme show you how to start this thing. Come on, Boy, gimme that sonuvbitch, give it to me! You had your chance. Plain to see you don’t how to start it, so step aside and let somebody that knows how do the job. Come on, goddamnit, gimme the goddamn crank!”

And with that, Russ had sprung to his feet, hollering, “You want it, you cantankerous ol’ sonuvabitch? Here!” And he hit Jake up side of the head with the steel crank and knocked him cold.

For a moment he stood there looking at the stunned faces of the three hillbillies and then at his father’s inert body lying on the ground, blood pouring from a wound that had split his eyebrow where it met his temple. He suddenly realized it was the first time in his life that he hadn’t been physically scared of his father. But then the reality of what he’d done hit him.

“My god!” he’d thought, “I killed the sonuvabitch!” For a second he almost stooped to check Jake’s pulse but then thought better of it and, instead, connected the crank, gave it a sharp turn and heard the mower roar to life. “I just don’t give a damn anymore,” he thought, and mowed around Jake and down between the first row of tombstones.

Turning now, where they sat on the back steps, he saw that Jake still carried the reminder of that day, a scar that still split his left eyebrow and a small indentation where the brow bridge had cracked. That was nothing, however, compared to some of the permanent scars Jake had left on him. No remorse here. But he guessed if Jake could let bygones be bygones, so could he.

“Wanna go huntin’ tomorrow?” Jake asked now, breaking Russ’s thoughts.

“Naw, I got stuff to do,” Russ said.“Tomorrow’s Sunday. What the hell you gotta do?”

“Stuff.”

“We’ll go out early. You can do your stuff later.”

“Okay, Jake, maybe,” he muttered.

Their hunting trips always started at Oak Lawn. It was on the far western edge of town, just outside corporation limits. Jake knew every woodlot and every farmer for fifteen miles around. So they would leave the car at the graveyard and hoof it cross country from there, like always.

“Back to the scene of the crime,” Russ thought.

“What time should I pick you up, Boy?” Jake asked.

“Don’t bother,” Russ said. “I’ll meet you there.”