Call me, 911,” my wife’s text said.
I checked my email.
“Call me, 911,” said her email.
I was at the college, in a meeting.
Also, a missed call from my mother.
“Hello?”
“Your dad’s unresponsive,” my wife said. “Come home.”
I hung up, turned to the people in my meeting.
“I’m leaving.”
“You’re leaving?”
“I’m leaving.”
I left.
Unresponsive. What a strange word. My father had been unresponsive for seventy-one years. He responded to nothing, because nothing impressed him—not spaceflight, nor magic, nor Bach chorales, nor the Olympic Games, nor social media platforms.
“Pop, when are you going to get on Facebook?” I said, often.
“Face who?”
“Book.”
“Book?”
He did not respond to books, either, unless they were being read during church, to which he responded by taking my arm in the vise grip of his earthmover hands and squeezing hard enough to weaken my vocabulary.
He was responsive to food and women and babies, whom he rocked with a mighty gift, and he was responsive to the acting of Charles Bronson, because he responded to the idea of a man shooting whatever he wanted to, and he responded to innovations in fishing lure technology, but not really any other kind of technology, such as the iPhone.
“You seen what this thang can do?” he said, when he got it.
I expected he’d show me some app that would tell him the location of the nearest escaped convict or Red Lobster. He pushed a button.
“Looka here,” he said.
It was the compass feature. That impressed him. He liked knowing where he was.
He was unresponsive in other ways, too, such as the time when I was five and he fell into his raisin bran. I was sitting on the floor of the bathroom, putting on my tennis shoes for school, when I heard my mother cry out. I dashed to the kitchen, and saw Pop facedown on the table while Bird looked on with sleepy eyes and Mom lifted his head out of the bowl.
The ambulance arrived.
He woke up.
“I ain’t going to no damn hospital,” he said.
The next year, he had his heart attack.
Mom, fearing as she did another family member being ripped from her arms and swept up to heaven, called these moments “episodes,” as though Pop were a really great television show. Over the next thirty years, he had many episodes, with great reviews, many cliffhangers. I found him on deer stands, looking dead. Was he asleep? Should I wake him? Fire a warning shot? Would it frighten him, and send him plummeting off the high stand to the earth, killing him? I was too young to be killing my father. It wasn’t time for that, not yet.
“Pop,” I’d whisper, from the ground below.
I’d have to get a stick, throw it at his face.
This long-running TV drama remained captivating, terrifying. He kept leaving, and kept almost dying, and kept coming back. He’d black out, run his truck off the road, nearly die, which was fine, according to him.
“It was time to sell that truck anyhow,” he’d say.
He was very responsive to new trucks.
“Goddang, boy,” he said on the phone last deer season. “I fell out the dang deer stand.”
“Maybe you should stop hunting by yourself,” I said.
To this, he was unresponsive.
Those blackouts were a rehearsal for his last great performance, the one he wouldn’t wake up from. And frankly, we were all a little surprised that he’d lived this long, given how many times he told women he was pretty sure they’d gained weight. He had always been so big himself, and now he was shrunken, withered.
There’d been an especially bad episode not long ago, back in Mississippi, when he’d been unresponsive in his big chair while Mom screamed and hit and slapped and cried at him to wake up, which he finally did.
“What the hell is wrong with you, woman?” he said.
“I thought you were—” Mom said.
“Tired.”
“Yes.”
It was time to get them to Savannah, I knew. Mom could not scream at him all by herself. The show seemed to be in its final season, moving toward a final memorable episode that could really only end in one way. It would not be easy, asking Pop to leave the only land he’d ever loved, the lakes and rivers and woods he knew so well, his heart’s terrain. He would wilt. The very move might kill him. They said his heart was at 20 percent.
“The girls sure would like you to come to their Christmas program,” I said on the phone, hoping to convince him that there was no longer anything for him in his ancestral homeland, even though it was a lie. Everything was there, except his three granddaughters.
“We’ll see,” he said.
I couldn’t say the thing I wanted to say, which was: I’d spent a life leaving him and had finally decided I wanted him back. I wanted to turn corners in my own town and see him.
It wasn’t just his health that kept him from coming. It was money. Lucre was his tragic flaw, specifically his inability to not be an idiot with it. Sometimes his idiocy was selfish, such as buying a fishing rod that would’ve paid for that crown Mom needed, or perhaps forty fishing rods, and sometimes his idiocy was unselfish, such as giving a mortgage payment to a home for orphaned children. Nothing put him in a good mood like having money and nothing put him in a foul mood like sitting in his big chair wondering what in the hell he’d spent it on. He’d never had a budget. It was all in his head, he said, except when it wasn’t.
“Hey, where’s check number two thirty-seven?” he’d say.
“I don’t know,” Mom would say.
“Well you better damn well remember,” he’d say, trying to reconcile various bank statements with the tale of magical realism told in the checkbook ledger. This was back before online banking, when the only way to tell how much money you had in the bank was to send a peregrine falcon to town and then wait two weeks for it to come back.
And they would fight.
“You think you can just buy anything!” Mom would say, her voice yodeling and high. “We don’t need another lawn mower!” She would keep on and on about the new lawn mower, or the new rifle, the new rod, the new anything, until, growing tremulous, she would collapse, low and pitiful. “All I need is a perm,” she would say, weeping now, her sad hair losing its curl in front of our eyes.
I prayed hardest on these days, when I was a young boy, kept my eyes closed tight until it was daylight. When I grew up, I vowed, I would have a job that paid for things. I would be master of my money. I would not have two lawn mowers, or one lawn mower, or even a lawn. I would have no hobbies, which required checks, and I would have a wife who did not require perms, even if it meant she had no hair.
Lawsuits. Bankruptcies. Repossessions. Boats he didn’t need, because he already had other boats he didn’t need, because he’d already won a boat in a bass tournament, which he sold, to use that money for a bigger boat. The bigger boats needed bigger garages, and bigger garages are always attached to bigger houses, because they almost never attach them to smaller houses, and so the mortgages grew in size and number, which meant the banks grew in size and number, and so did his blood pressure, especially when the banks came and took some of the boats away.
“Can’t win for losing,” he’d say.
“Stop buying things you don’t need,” I wanted to say, and often did, as I got older.
I wanted to move him to a place where his days could be occupied by his granddaughters, who did not require large garages. The move would call his bluff. He’d have to sell everything: the lawn mowers, the boats, the gun safe, the four-wheeler. They wouldn’t fit in the apartment I had found.
“I found you a place here,” I said.
But he did not want to die in a city, you could tell. He wanted to die somewhere quiet, somewhere you could drown alone, fall out of a tree, be gored in peace. And he didn’t have the money, and this embarrassed him. He’d worked like a mule all his life, and all he had to show for it was a few guns, a few rods, and sixteen lawn mowers.
“Listen, Pop,” I said. “I’ll pay for it.”
Money: He always responded to that.
The day they moved in, I stood with him outside his new apartment. It was a little sad, knowing he would never again live in a freestanding house, this born homesteader. But there was a nice lagoon he could see from his little porch. It wasn’t Mississippi, but it was hot and green, like home.
There was great beauty in Savannah, of course, the Spanish moss that visitors gathered like the hair of Jesus, but there were also men in ponytails walking little poodles, and it made me even sadder knowing I had made my father live near men with such dogs.
“Would you ever get a tiny dog like that?” I said.
“And watch it shit all day?” he said. “Shit no.”
The man with the ponytail waved at us. He seemed nice. Savannah had more than small dogs. We had big oceans, and he sort of liked that.
We got them moved in, got them settled, got them on a budget. Pop got him a bank in town, made friends with the tellers.
“I might would like to do some deep-sea fishing,” he said, that first day.
A month later, he’d be dead.
There we were, driving to the hospital at unsafe speeds. Savannah had always seemed a little foreign to me, more East Coast than Deep South, but so many of the great stories of my life were happening right here, including this hospital, where two of my children had been born, where I’d carried my wife when her migraines had reduced her to cursing at people, where the man who made me would die. This was home now.
We parked. We heard sirens.
Had we beaten the ambulance here?
It screamed in. We ran to it, but were stopped by a cyclone fence, some sort of construction barrier. I grabbed the fence, wanted to jump it.
“Stop,” my wife said.
“It’s him,” I said.
The ambulance doors opened. It was twenty yards away. They pulled someone out.
“It’s him.”
“No.”
“It’s him.”
The thing on the gurney looked dead. White as a winter sky.
“It’s not him,” she said, and dragged me inside.
I looked back.
It was him.
Why all of human history is so concerned with its fathers, I’ll never know. The mothers are so much nicer. The mothers cook us food and mail us brownies and fold our underwear. A mother quest, that would be nice. Where are our mothers? They are at home, waiting for us to call. They made spaghetti. Our favorite. So we go home, and we eat the spaghetti, and let them wash our underwear, and then it’s over. Mother quest. So nice.
A cousin quest would be fun. Where are our cousins? They are down by the river, and they’ve got beer!
Or a wife quest. Where is my wife? She is probably at the Walmart. She hates it so much.
Moms, cousins, uncles, wives, sisters, teachers, lovers, these are all fine things to write about, but it seems like so many of us are always coming back to our fathers—who don’t really excel in folding underwear. What they excel in is the Fine Art of Being a Real Sonofabitch. Even the good ones. Sometimes the good ones are the best at being a sonofabitch. It’s like being a sonofabitch is what they think fathers are supposed to be. The Bible is full of sonofabitch dads, and so is Faulkner and Star Wars and Shakespeare. You know Shakespeare’s dad was a real piece of work. And so was yours, probably.
If this story’s really a Father Quest, then it started in kindergarten, on one of those days where all the dads are invited to eat lunch with their children and endure the humiliation of sitting in chairs that would ensure they could never again reproduce.
Pop said he’d be there.
I was pretty excited, because I’d been telling stories about him all year: How he was a big hunter and killed things and would soon allow me to kill things. How he fished the Red Man Tournament Trail and would soon allow me to put Red Man in my mouth, too. How he was generally Bigger and Better than Any Dad Anywhere and could probably beat up all the other dads.
“Yeah, but my dad has a tattoo of a dragon,” one boy said.
“My dad could beat up a dragon,” I said.
I have never, to this day, been so excited to see another human. My heart grows a size every time I think about how much I wanted to see him on that day, so they would know, so everyone would know how great he was.
Other fathers and grandfathers arrived. I was not impressed. These men were small. None of them would be carrying a knife, for example. Pop would have a knife. He would show it to everybody, if I asked. This was back when you could take a knife to a school, before people forgot that knives were not for stabbing people.
“Where’s your dad?” my friends asked.
“Ha ha, he’s not coming,” they said.
“He’s coming,” I said.
Could they tell I was worried? I was worried.
The growing crowd of fathers spoke in kindly, vaguely interested tones to their offspring, in baby voices, not at all the way Pop talked to me, one man to another.
Soon, it was time to walk to lunch, and he was still not there.
Everyone lined up, but not me. I would wait.
He would come, I knew it. He must.
And I did what any little boy would do. I cried.
There was a knock on the classroom door.
It’s him, I thought.
It wasn’t him.
Our mothers, most of them, tell us who they are. They tell everything. Their hearts live on the outside of their bodies, because we are their hearts, and we are no longer inside their uteruses. But our fathers are always aliens. We were never inside them. Or maybe it’s just me.
After that day in kindergarten, my relationship with Pop only got harder. He was just too large to be anything other than the Everest out before me, something to be scaled, conquered, known. I was not an untalented child, was blessed with modest intelligence and curiosity and a gift for making some people laugh, even my sister-in-law, this one time. But if you have read even half the stories in this book, you know there was one thing I could not do, and that was to love what my father loved. I quested, on woods and water and fields of play and farms of work. I did. I quested like a real sonofabitch, and could not find him in those places, or even myself.
It took many years before I realized I must have baffled him as much as he confused me. What must he have made of me, with my love of baking and books and bow ties? What a riddling abyss I must have seemed to him, when I announced that when I grew up, I desired very much to be a ventriloquist? Mom made sure I got a Bozo the Clown dummy that Christmas, and the only real trick I learned was to create a sense of shame and dread in my father. As I got older, I was no longer allowed to go grocery shopping with Mom, or to help her in the kitchen, because any boy who liked to cook was a sodomite.
Then, when I was twelve, I overheard a conversation between my parents, where Pop described some horrible thing he’d caught me doing the day before. Mom didn’t want to hear it, was afraid, but he insisted she know.
“You know what I found him doing?” Pop said, his voice hushed at the horror of it.
“I don’t want to know,” she said. “He’s a good boy, he’s a good son.”
“He was in our closet,” he said.
“Doing what?” Mom said, moaning, covering her ears.
“Sewing a goddamn pot holder.”
It was a Father’s Day present.
Here was this boy, who he’d been told was his boy, and whom he resembled from certain angles, but who must’ve seemed like he’d been fathered by extraterrestrials, as when I came home from college and made the grave announcement that I was going to be in a play.
“A play?” he said.
“Romeo and Juliet!” I said. “I’m playing Mercutio!”
I knew he’d be upset to see his boy wearing tights, but I hoped they were similar enough to baseball leggings that he might not notice the difference. Perhaps he would not see that they were purple and festooned with gold sequins.
Mercutio has some great lines, and I did all my speeches in an acting style that could best be described as “speaking very loudly.” Mom said they were going to bring the video camera, so the night they were there, I made sure to be extra loud.
In Act III, Mercutio dies. It is perhaps the greatest death scene in all of dramatic literature. Mercutio is stabbed, wounded, dying, but he rages.
“I AM HURT!” I screamed. “A PLAGUE ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES!”
By the time I was finished dying, I knew my father was going to love Elizabethan drama.
A few years later, I was at home with Mom and found the videotape they made that night. I watched it. It may have been the worst production of Shakespeare in the history of higher education. I fast-forwarded to my death scene. It was as loud and long as I remembered. As soon as I was dead, the tape cut off.
“Where’s the rest of the play?” I said to Mom. “Didn’t you tape it?”
“Oh, well,” she said, a little embarrassed. “Your father thought that since you were dead, we should probably go ahead and leave.”
I wanted to be offended, but of course was flattered. He had no interest in supporting the arts. For him, Romeo and Juliet was not about star-crossed lovers. It was about a young man in purple tights who seemed to have a hearing problem and then got stabbed, probably because he went around screaming at everyone.
His being there was merely a part of his own journey. Call it a Son Quest.
Maybe all this time, maybe what I’ve wanted to know is this:
Was I a good son?
I did everything he’d ever asked me to do. Shot things, hooked things, cleaned and hit and tackled and mauled and murdered and burned so much flesh and flora, worlds of blood and dirt. When I was little, I thought I’d love this stuff, and when I was a little older, I thought I could learn to love it, and when I was old enough to be a young man, I knew: no.
I know it hurt him, to see me quit football, then baseball, then the church he’d raised me in, to bury everything he’d given me, the hunting and fishing and fighting and foolish ways of a certain kind of Southern Man that I both am and am not.
And I wanted to hate him for it. And guess what: I did.
Like so many boys, I found myself believing my father to be a monster, an ignorant, hateful, bigoted wastrel who refused to respond and change and grow. That’s why I left home, and left him.
Screw the Father Quest, is what I said.
And so he became the one waiting on me to show up: To church. To the deer camp. To the football game. To come home.
The phone would ring.
“Is that him?” Pop would say.
“It’s not him,” Mom would say.
I know it must hurt when your children reject the things that make you more human. I put a deep sadness inside him, for a time. But a funny thing happened a few years after I left. I’d come home to visit and find him gone.
“Where’s Pop?”
“Fishing,” Mom would say.
“With who?”
“A boy from our church,” she’d say. “He’s adopted. His daddy doesn’t really take him anywhere.”
He was drawn to young men with no fathers, or bad fathers, or absentee ones. He hired these boys, brought them to the house to work, paid them, fed them, spoke to them in virile tones about What a Man Is and Should Do and Not Do. He coached them, clothed them. He took whole trucks full of children out to lakes, to show them how to cast. I’d come home and find him out back, sitting with three black boys from up the road, him trying to be a father and them not snickering at all, but listening, talking, laughing.
“Them boys ain’t got daddies,” he’d say, after he’d paid them and taken them home.
He was a born father, and he was going to do it with or without me. His Son Quest was over. I was what I was. And what I was, was a writer and a teacher. One thing I can say for him: He never made fun of my wanting to do something as silly as writing. Never once. I was his boy. He still believed I was as much of a badass as I’d believed he was. If I wanted to write, shoot: It must be a good thing to want.
“My boy’s writing a book,” he’d started telling people, with pride.
And then I finally came back, and I came with a beautiful woman and a family of my own, and guess what? Those three little girls were better than any number of animal heads. Animal heads don’t climb in your lap and hug you. Not unless they’re still attached to their animal bodies.
When my parents would visit, my daughters would run to Pop, climb him like a tree. I watched them climb and wondered: Would they be so different from me, that I would not understand them? Will they reject what I love, those things that make me human?
We found Mom in the ER, sitting, worried.
“Come with me,” someone said, and we went. I held my wife’s hand, and my mother’s, and couldn’t shake the feeling that wherever we were going, nobody would be there. They took us to a small room deep in the gray half-light of the hospital, and we waited.
The door opened, the team came in: a doctor, a nurse or two, and a retinue of medical students and residents who were getting their lesson in How to Tell a Family That a Loved One Did Not Make It. The attending physician, a pleasant, competent-seeming man about my age in wintergreen scrubs, began to speak, offering a brief medical history of what had happened in the previous hour, much of it originating from what mother had told the EMTs: Pop’s climbing the few steps to his new apartment, how he’d fallen back onto Mom, the CPR, the paddles, the intubation, and so on, and so on; the story was too long.
The doctor kept talking, and I stood in front of my mother, maybe hoping to keep her from the news she was about to hear.
“We pronounced him dead at four fifty-nine p.m.,” the doctor said.
And they left us alone, to cry.
People came in and out, asked questions. Did we want to see him, one last time?
Mom nodded.
“Yes,” I said.
It will happen to all of us, at some point, someone asking us if we want to walk down a hall to see a dead man.
The last time I saw him—really saw him, not just the tank that had been his terrestrial habitation, the color of cigarette ash and laid out on a steel table, mouth open wide, as though violently asleep, but him, the man, in his body, alive—was four days prior. It was Mother’s Day. We’d had Sunday dinner. We ate, we talked. He was quiet.
I was happy to have them here, finally, all of us together, Pop and me and five women we loved, eating on a Sunday. It was almost like Coldwater.
At lunch, his hands shook a little. Mom looked at me and made a face and motioned with her eyes to look at his hands, which I did. Despite the havoc that a dying heart had done to his body, bending, breaking him, the hands remained enormous, square, two fleshy earthmovers.
“That’s what toting eighty-pound milk cans will do,” Bird would say, a week later, at the funeral, when Pop’s hands lay folded across his body. They would not fit together, were too big.
When dinner was over, Mom and Pop got ready to leave, and I walked out first, with my father.
“We need to get you a cane, old man,” I said.
Normally, he would not have said a word to something like that, a remark meant to question his strength, but this time, he responded.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I don’t know what happened.”
It was an odd thing to say, but I knew what he meant: He had gone and gotten old and was about to die. He was as shocked as anybody.
It was May, hot. He wore a camouflage jacket, because his dying heart could not keep him warm. He walked away from me, toward the car. I reached out, touched him on his back. The man had grown small, but when my hand touched his big broad back, I could feel no weakness there.
He was an Army Corps of Engineers spillway project, his head the outlet tower, his outspread arms like two granite weirs, his back the wall of stone that confined an awful power. I ran my hand along the sweeping granite of his back and marveled. He still felt a mile thick. He was my spillway, and I had come through the mass of him and out the other side, a man.
I wanted to tell him what he meant to me, but that would’ve been admitting he was leaving us. I hoped he knew what I didn’t say. I hoped he could feel it in my hand.
“See you later, Pop,” I said.
“See you, boy.”
A week later, Bird and me and four other good men would carry his body to a little piece of land beside the Bull River, and if I told you how heavy that casket was, you might not believe me.
Often, these days, when I am sad and thinking of my father, I go back in my mind to that elementary school, that day in kindergarten, when I longed for him, back to a time when I was not trying to outrun him, to escape his habits and affections.
I was a tiny boy, shuffling down the hall at the end of the line. He hadn’t come, and now I felt silly for crying, for letting everyone see my feelings. And then, when I rounded the last corner before the cafeteria, I saw something I’ll never forget: Him.
He stood there in front of the cafeteria doors, waiting, so tall, so big. I looked up at him, wiped my face, sucked back any evidence of feelings.
His greatest lesson was the one he never said out loud, the thing a father should do, which is this: Be there. Always be there. And never stop being there, until you can’t be there anymore.
“Hey, boy,” he said, smiling, jangling the change in his pocket. “You ready to eat?”
“Yessir,” I said.
I felt silly, crying there in the cafeteria line, and trying not to cry.
But now, I don’t feel silly. I just feel a rush of something up through my heart, wide and deep as a river of light, and it rushes over the banks, and up through the throat and into the mouth and out my eyes, a great big surge of something that for so long had no name, a fugitive animal in a wood, and I know the name of it now, and what it is, is love.