SURELY HAVING ASKED AS much of others, I must have asked this of my father, “Then can I go with you?” But my father, I was told, drove off alone, and he never came back, which is all the story I got, and no more from Arthur, who had said the field where my father was buried was farther north of where we lived.
My Aunt Frances said to me, “You were five years old when he died. You don’t know the man buried there. Even your Uncle Billy didn’t know him—and they were childhood friends!”
She said, “You can’t remember very much.”
But I remembered riding Father’s shoulders and fearing he would throw me off to feed whatever growled on the other side of the fence. I remembered being sick in his top-down car, the same he died in, stalled, adrift, moving off in rising waters broken up in spring; or that was what they told me: The waters took him. Those waters, rushed from the river that ran under Main Street, waters dark and skinny and mean, had swept away my father. Frantic waters moving out beyond the houses, the river was aflood whenever I was at the railing looking over, as my father had once helped me to do, lifting me to see the swell in spring. There was probably no way to guess how unhappy a man could be in the company of a child—and she, his daughter. There was no way of knowing what a man might yield to.