The Christian

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My father would admonish us with a finger and a stern word if we misbehaved.  He would punish us with no dessert if my mother had made pudding, and no TV and up to bed.  And there was no getting around it.  Once it had been declared, that was it.  He didn’t cave in to cute looks or making him laugh.  

If we did something really bad, he’d whip us with his belt.  

One time, me and Michael staked out his bedroom waiting for him to get up — this must have been the middle of the night, because we had cattle, and he was up milking them at four in the morning — and when he came out the door, we shot him in the face with little plastic disc guns we had gotten from the pharmacy.  When we got up to make a run for it, we tripped over each other’s feet and splayed out on the floor, and even though my father had been in his bathrobe, his belt was on us before we could get to our feet.  I don’t know where it came from, but there it was lashing and cracking until we were both in tears and red in the face, and I had a welt on my arm and Michael one to match, and who knows what our behinds looked like.  

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.  You hear these people today, how it puts a child behind being treated like that.  How it makes them timid.  Well, I just don’t believe that.  It kept us in line.  My father was the head of the household, and he was a respectable, hardworking man, and he wanted us to be that way, too, and we are; and if spanking us when we done wrong was a part of getting us here, then I don’t see the wrong in that.

We prayed at the table before meals.  Now, I only ate dinner with my father growing up, because he was out in the fields by breakfast, and we was off to school for lunch.  But we prayed at all of them, and I don’t know how it was for my brothers, because I never asked them; but I prayed not because of God or Jesus, but because I knew my father wanted me to.  That goes for most things.  That goes for raising my children the way I do, praying at meals, going to church, the way I work — my integrity, my ethics.  I hardly learned anything of what I know from business school I didn’t already know listening to my father when I asked him questions.  When I asked something, he’d give it to me.  He’d give me everything he could every time.  That’s what a father does.  He answers.  And I don’t blame my father for what happened any more than I blame the weather, because through it all, he continued to answer me when I asked him questions.

My father got into a bad car accident when I was in the fourth grade.  We were off at school, Michael in the fifth grade, Todd, I think, in his first year at high school, and I remember the morning it happened getting up real excited when I saw sleet on the ground, thinking I wouldn’t have to go in at all; but there was only a two-hour delay, which for us meant a little time to play if father didn’t need us in the field.  And he didn’t that day, so after breakfast we flung half-melted ice balls at each other, and they stung and hurt, and it was cold enough to see your breath, and the fields looked turned over and muddy; and I remember seeing my father out there, way out there, just a dot, and wondering what he was thinking.  Wondering if he could see us, and hoping that he couldn’t, because maybe he’d get mad at us for getting mud on our shoes and tracking it in the house and making all that racket when he was out trying to get some work done.  

I know my kids must think the same thing when I come home and they’re acting rowdy, and they’d be right — sometimes I do.  But my father, come to think of it, was probably only thinking of the work he had ahead of him, not just that day, but for the season, for the year.  Until he had the house paid off and had us all in college.

His truck slid off the road into a ditch when he was on his way to the feed store.  He had driven in worse often, and it shouldn’t have happened.  His head went through the driver’s side window when the truck rolled over, and the cab compacted and broke his left leg, and he was pronounced dead at the scene, but they were able to bring him back to life with a shot of adrenaline.  

His brain swelled and he went into a coma for almost two days, and when he came out of it, we were allowed to visit him in the hospital.  I remember that day, because there was still a storm on and the corridor leading to his room was filled with moving shadows like in a Dracula movie; and I clung to my mother’s skirt, and Michael clung to the other side, and Todd called us little babies and went on in ahead of us.

My dad was sat up in the bed with pillows propped behind him and tubes snaking in and out of his nose and all over his arms.  I remember the top part of his head seemed bloated and it was purple and orange, and he had stubble over his lip I had never seen before.  He had always been clean shaven there.  

I remember he smiled when he seen us, and he lifted his arm, and his arm didn’t seem so big to me then, and he waved us over, and we went to him, and he grabbed us up and nestled us up against his beard, and I grabbed a great big handful of it and kissed him right on the lips.  He spoke to us, saying it was good to see us, and he was thinking about us, and his breath smelled awful, and I saw the stitches on his head.  They were black and purple, and I could see where they went into the skin, and I was reminded of Frankenstein.  

And I remember being afraid of my father then just as I had been afraid of my uncle, but then he had laughed, and it was such a gentle laugh.  He had the kindest laugh.  It was a laugh that could bring a feud to peace.  And as he laughed, all my fears melted away, and that’s another job of a father.

He stayed in the hospital for another day, and then he was brought home in an ambulance and he stayed in bed, fed by my mother and visited on one occasion by our family doctor.  He stayed in bed for two weeks while we continued going to school and coming home through the snow that followed, and as we went sledding and got into snowball fights and played games with the chickens in the snow.  We were aware he was home, and we went in and saw him, but there was a freedom offered us in that small pocket of time to escape out from under his thumb.  And the first time I thought there might be something wrong was after he had gotten out of bed and was walking around on crutches, and he did not join us at the dinner table.

“Walter, are you coming in here?” my mother asked.

We had seen him walk by on into the front room where the TV was, and he never  watched television unless it was cartoons with us sometimes on Saturday morning, and the only other thing he did in there was sit and read the Bible.

“I’ll be in in a minute,” he said, his voice sounding feeble.  “You can start without me.”

“We can wait,” my mother said, stirring up the mashed potatoes in a plastic bowl as she ushered us to the table.

“I said, start without me,” he said, raising his voice just enough to command it, and my mother got us all around the table, and even Todd moseyed on down from whatever he was doing up there, and we prayed.

“Bless us, O Lord, and these our gifts, which we are about to receive from your bounty.  Through Christ our Lord.  Amen.”

Then my mother came around and gave us our helpings, and Todd got his own because he wanted to be a grown up, and our father didn’t join us for the whole meal, and by the time we were done eating and I was ready to head upstairs to read a comic book, I had forgotten all about my father not having come to the dinner table.  

I saw him in the front room as I was heading upstairs, and he was just sitting there in his reading chair, only the lamp was off and he had his arms hanging down at his sides.  And his Bible, which was the only thing he ever read, wasn’t on the end table next to him where it usually was.  And what he was doing was, he was just looking at the wall. 

I found that Bible later in the back of a desk drawer where we kept crayons and construction paper, and I still have it somewhere, its black cover with the HOLY BIBLE letters in gold almost wore off.  There are notes on hunks of paper in it in my father’s scroll maybe from when he was a kid, and there are notes on Paul and John, a lot on John, and the notes ask questions.  What was he testing them on?  Why did God put him through this?

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