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WE’D BEEN DRIVING since the gray of predawn. I lay curled up in the far backseat of our old station wagon with a tatty Indian blanket over my head and cried on and off—whimpered’s more like it—quiet as a mouse ’til my stomach hurt. Somewhere west of Milwaukee, I was lulled into an uneasy sleep by the incessant drone of the tires beneath my head and didn’t wake up until we were on Route 39, well north of Madison.

I was exhausted. I’d hardly closed my eyes the night before and when I finally did, it was time to get out of bed again. My father insisted we hit the road early to beat the rush hour traffic around the cities. My mother didn’t understand why we couldn’t just wait until rush hour was over, say, latemorning after a nice breakfast, but he said no; he was in a hurry to get going. Seemed like he was in a hurry to change just about everything lately.

We were heading up to his father’s old homestead, the place he was born and raised, and when I say up, I mean way up in the Northwoods of Wisconsin—home to bears, moose, and mosquitos the size of bats! The twenty-acre patch in the pines lay along the banks of the Stony River, just beyond the boundary of an Ojibwe Indian reservation of the same name. The tiny town of Blackstone is the closest thing to civilization. It’s a couple hours’ drive east of Duluth, Minnesota, and closer to Winnipeg than to any major city in Wisconsin. Only thing that mattered to me was that it was hopelessly far from my home in Racine.

Grandpa called his place Parsons’ Lodge because long ago he’d put up a few plywood shacks and built a rough camp for hunters and fisherman; calling it a lodge was a bit of a stretch. My parents had taken me to visit four years earlier when I was six years old. I recalled that Grandpa Reuben wasn’t very friendly and hardly what you’d call industrious. The lodge wasn’t much to look at, but over the last four years, the place had by all accounts fallen into complete dilapidation and disuse. Grandpa needed help, and my father intended to fix it up.

If that’s all there was to it I’d have been obliged to go along, even if I did get dragged out of bed at five o’clock in the morning. I certainly wouldn’t have been blubbering under a blanket like a big selfish baby. But there was a lot more to it.

My father had left his longtime job selling insurance to go into business as the new proprietor of Parsons’ Lodge; he was moving us to Blackstone for good. In other words, he’d torn up my life by the roots and tossed it aside like a fistful of weeds.

It was dark and eerily quiet when we pulled out of the driveway and rolled down Elmwood Lane. Still, my father kept the headlights off to avoid drawing the attention of nosy neighbors who might be awake—said our doings were nobody’s business. Somehow, it felt like we were fleeing the scene of a crime. Just before I ducked my head under the blanket, I stole one last look at our home through the rear window, but all I saw was a black, empty shell with no curtains and no lights.

 

THOUGH MY HEART was broke, I kept my fussing low. I’d climbed into the last backseat as a matter of course, to be outside the range of my father’s long, skinny arm should he get in a foul mood on the road. It was a strategy I’d learned the hard way on our last trip to Blackstone.

The misunderstanding occurred when I suddenly had to pee. Dad told me I should’ve gone when we stopped a half hour ago. I told him I didn’t have to go then, but I sure did now. He grumbled that there was no good place to stop ’cause we were in the middle of West Bumfart, Wisconsin. Mom pointed out that I’d drunk a soda at lunchtime and it was likely kicking in. He ignored her and said, “Cassandra, quit your damned whining, or I’ll give you something to cry about, you betcha.”

I did not quit my whining. Instead, I leaned in for emphasis and hollered right back at ’im, “You’d better stop now or I’m gonna wet my pants!”

Dad swung his bony hand around in a wide arc and smacked me in the face before I had time to duck—didn’t so much as look back to check for damages. I was too stunned to cry. Mom sucked her breath through her teeth with a sound like a hissing snake but said nothing. I crossed my legs and kept my mouth shut until he pulled into a rest stop twenty minutes later.

 

MAYBE I COULDN’T protest out loud, but I dared to lift the Indian blanket and glower brazenly at the back of my father’s head, confident that he couldn’t see me in the rearview mirror from that angle. I stuck my tongue out at the jagged white scar where his hair would not grow. It seemed to scowl right back at me.

The scar was shaped like a lightning bolt and ran diagonally, a full three inches long, not counting the zigzag. My father said he got it as a small boy when a pitchfork fell from its hook in the chicken shed. The details were fuzzy, but he thought it happened when something startled the chickens into a flurry of flapping and one of ’em knocked it loose. The tools were hung upside down, so when the handle hit the dirt floor, it must’ve swung out like a catapult. The rusty old pitchfork had three long, pointy tines, and the longest managed to catch and tear his scalp. ’Course, he didn’t have eyes in the back of his head, so he didn’t know for sure, but that’s the explanation Grandpa came up with. “All I know was that it bled like a sonovabitch,” Dad remarked from time to time. “Like a stuck pig!” I’d heard him exclaim. His daddy drove into town to fetch the doctor, who took one look and said they ought to bring little George to the hospital. Grandpa Parsons said he couldn’t afford it, and they’d just have to patch him up in the kitchen.

The only available anesthetic was single malt whiskey. Dad said he felt much better after a shot of that. Soon the room began to sway like a boat, and the searing pain eased down to a dull throb. He thought the worst was over, when his daddy suddenly seized hold of him, wedged his face between his knees, and gripped both wrists. Then the doctor cut all the hair off the back of his head and doused it with something that burned like fire. My father said he’d never forget how it was dark as night and hard to breathe with his face mashed into the course twill of his daddy’s trousers. If he thought about it hard enough, he could just about gag on the memory of musky sweat and stale tobacco that didn’t quite obscure the acrid odor of dried urine.

The doctor put in twenty-some-odd stitches. My father declared that when he rubbed the back of his head, he could still feel that needle tug at his flesh—said it hurt worse than the damned pitchfork. To add insult to injury, while he was pinned like a prisoner in the stocks, the doctor gave him an injection to ward off the lockjaw. Dad would spread his thumb and forefinger about five inches apart and insist that the needle was this big . . . “jabbed it right into my heinie with nary a warning.”They gave him another swig from the bottle for good measure and put him to bed, mercifully resting in drunken sleep.

For the rest of his life, my father wore the back of his hair a bit long in an effort to conceal the scar, but the hair refused to cooperate. No matter how much Brylcream he applied, the greasy locks stubbornly parted along either side like the Red Sea. Mom sometimes tried in vain to arrange it for him but invariably gave up with a shrug and by way of consolation, said it was a darned good thing he was looking away when the pitchfork fell.

Whenever Dad told the story at a cocktail party, he left out the part about Grandpa’s stinky pants and amused the guests with the finale: “So that’s how I came to develop a taste for single malt whiskey at the tender age of eight years old.” While they were having themselves a good chuckle, he’d zing ’em with, “And to this very day, I still can’t stand chickens.”

 

THE BENCH SEATS in the 1949 Ford station wagon were so deep and wide I could’ve stretched out full length and still had room to wiggle my toes, even though I’d brought along two big dolls, a stack of coloring books, and the Etch A Sketch I got last Christmas. Instead, I lay on my side and drew my knees up as if to keep my innards from spilling onto the floor. I wrapped that musty Indian blanket close like a papoose, never mind it smelled of auto exhaust and cigarette smoke. I’d known that blanket since I was very small—used to rub the fibers between my fingers while I sucked my thumb. It had given me comfort on many a long ride and was more like a traveling companion than a blanket, permanently relegated to the backseat of the station wagon and always referred to as the car blanket.

Come to think of it, every American family with a car seemed to have a car blanket. My parents picked theirs up at an Indian reservation gift shop in Arizona on a driving tour through the American Southwest they took before I was born. I vaguely recall the zigzag pattern of the weave as bright turquoise and blue against buttercup yellow, back when the blanket, the car, and everything else about our family was new and shiny. Somewhere along that sunny road the fine Indian handicraft had all but faded away, bleached out like old bones in the desert.

 

IT’D BEEN TWELVE years since my father bought the Ford-Mercury station wagon—the model with the doors and sides paneled in real wood, affectionately known as the Woody. It was a stunner and expensive back in the day, but he was riding a wave of financial success in his new career as an insurance salesman. 

Only a few years after the Second World War, insurance was still a highly misunderstood concept, practically unknown to most ordinary folks. My father didn’t know a thing about it before he got started but apparently hit the ground running.

They said no one could match George Parsons for energy and endurance. He’d dress up like a preacher on Sunday, drive out to the Wisconsin countryside, and knock on the doors of unsuspecting farmers. They were usually too polite to shut the door in his face—I think having the name Parsons helped. And once he managed to squeak his skinny heinie past the threshold, he’d keep on talking until they gave up like a spent fish.

It could take a lot of talking because they were a wary, skeptical bunch. Some of the Baptists actually believed that to purchase insurance was to gamble with God. After all, if the Good Lord saw fit to send a bolt of lightning and burn your home to the ground, who were you to hedge a bet against His will?

I think my father missed his calling as a minister or maybe a politician because he was a natural born master of the art of persuasion. To those with religious objections, he’d explain in the most biblical terms why God was not against insurance; in fact, He was all for it. “Insurance,”he insisted, “was like all the neighbors coming together each year to put some money into a big pot, just in case one of them had an accident. So you see, my friend, to purchase insurance isn’t gambling at all, but a wayto help others through a time of misfortune, fulfilling the commandment to love thy neighbor.”

His passionate delivery could move women to tears and changed many a man’s perspective on the matter.

I’d heard my father brag that he could sell a truckload of ice to a village of Eskimos. He said that when it came to selling insurance, everyone had a weak spot, and you just had to find it—whether you had to coax and cajole, frighten and alarm, or flat out shame ’em into buying a policy. “Now, you wouldn’t want to go and leave your family destitute, would you?” But his ace in the hole was to flash a smile that could charm a dog off a meat wagon and declare, “Clearly, a man of your stature and standing requires an insurance policy equal to his worth.”

 

WHEN I WAS so young I could barely see over the hood of the Woody, Dad used to scrub and meticulously wax it on a regular basis. I remember standing by him on a warm Saturday morning, polishing the finish of the wooden panels to a high sheen with an old diaper, while he attended to the parts I could not reach. If it was summer and hot, he might squirt me playfully with the garden hose.

I’m not sure why or exactly when, but my father gradually stopped caring about the car. His zest for selling insurance and for life in general slowly sifted away, until all that remained was a haphazard attitude toward his job and only a marginal interest in everything else, including me. By the time we left for Blackstone, the side panels of the Woody were rotting away, and the paint had diminished from a shimmering tropical-sea aqua to a washed out, nondescript hue that hardly deserved to be called a color anymore.