So here we are, Daddy.
I did what you didn’t do. It took me a long time, all of your life, most of hers, perhaps even most of mine. But it is done. She wakes up in a house of her own, a real home, and she is as good as anybody on that road. She lives warm when it is cold and cool when it is hot and even has a bright light on a pole in the yard, to chase away the dark. She has cable, and garbage pickup, and county water. She still prefers to walk in the backyard instead of the front, out of sight. Some habits really do die hard, I reckon.
I couldn’t fix everything. I couldn’t take any of the pain out of her mind. I couldn’t give Sam back his childhood. I couldn’t save my little brother from the same demons that consumed you, and maybe I didn’t even try very hard. But there is time left for him. For reasons I cannot really explain, I believe that Mark will one day escape whatever it is that hunts him so mercilessly. I believe he has enough of Momma in him to just outlast it. I believe it.
I have had a lot of luck in my life, Daddy. Some of it, maybe, I earned, but most of it was blind, dumb, stumbling luck. Maybe, when it is all said and done, that is the only difference between you and me. I got the luck.
I hear it said a lot, especially lately, what a good man I turned out to be, considering. I always feel like a poser when I hear that, because I know it’s not true. I wrote once that I was “my momma’s son,” but that was a mistake, to claim that.
The truth is that, in so many ways, I am just like you. The meanness you had in you, I used to get where I am. But instead of spraying it out, like you did, I channeled it. I used it every time I told some loving soul that I had to say good-bye because my work was more important to me than them, or just because it was time to move on.
I used your coldness, the same way I used my momma’s kindness, in my work. Because of her, I could understand the pain and sadness of the people I wrote about, and could make others feel it. But because of you I could turn my back on them when I was done and just walk away, free and clean. Think about it. What kind of man can do that, as much as I have, and live with himself?
Your hatred of responsibility, of ties, is in me just as strong as it was in you. I have no home, no children, no desire for them. I picked one responsibility, just one, and I met it. But, any fool can meet just one responsibility. Any lame idiot can set the bar so low, and clear it.
There have been a thousand nights when I would rather have been you, nights when I wanted nothing more in this world than to give up and drink myself into a good night’s sleep. But that would have surely killed her, to see it. It would have put her in her grave. I do not know what will happen to me when she is gone, when the responsibility I picked up after you threw it down is fully met. I might be very, very tired then. The truth is that I can see myself wrapped around a bottle of bad likker for good company, that there are times when the very thought of that oblivion is so, so appealing. Luck or not, it has not always been easy being the raggedy-ass boy made good, the one the smart people like to have around, sometimes, to hear my rustic witticisms.
I am you, in better ways. I love the music as you did, and the women as long as they would someday go away, and sometimes a good fistfight just to let the rage out, and to see if my nerve is still there. Only it takes so much longer to get up now than it used to. I wonder, is that what finally happened to you?
I have never fought in a war, never experienced the hell you did. I have seen it, the killing and dying, but not on the scale of horror that consumed you. I wonder sometimes what might have happened if you had come home from that war crippled in body instead of spirit, if she had had to care for you, parking you in the sun, helping you to bed. Would you have lived? Would you have lasted?
There is no hate in me for you. I know that now. There is no profit in hating a dead man. I glimpsed the good in you when I was a little boy, and I saw it shine through you the day you gave me those books, the day you told me the story. I believe you told me the truth, mostly, about your war, and I believe that it took you from us, from me, allowing me only those glimmers of the man before. Like I said, I have to believe it. I have to, because without it there is only a clenched fist where your face would be, in my mind.
Some people tell me I should thank you, that by being the man you were, it forced me to be a different one. But I don’t buy that “Boy Named Sue” bullshit. If I could talk to you again, I would want to know one thing. Did you ever think of us, those years we didn’t hear from you. Did you ever think of us at all?
I am about the age you were, now, when you left us for that one, final time, when the telephone finally fell silent. Men in our family don’t last long, anyway, do they? We only look indestructible. We come to pieces in time, in such short time.
I will always remember that last time we talked, after you had given up on living but so feared death. Even with your life so tenuous, you unscrewed that cap and hastened your death with that amber liquid. And I understood. I would have done the same.
Some people say I am more like her, of course. They say I look like her. But I’m not much like her. I wish I was, but I’m not.
She has proved she can outlast anything. As hard as life has been for her, she hates death, she despises it. She even hates funerals because she does not like to feel its breath.
She is good and patient, and devout, so that she is never alone, like you and me.
I don’t really know why I think this, but I believe you would have liked to see Momma in her house. I think you would have liked it, since you always seemed to appreciate nice things. It is a pretty big house, not scary like the last one we lived in with you, but warm and big and friendly. It has no ghosts in it, not that I can feel. Still, ghosts have a way of finding your new address. You can’t fool them by changing zip codes. I know. As much as I would like to be a dam, some barrier to the sadness that rolls through her life and her mind, I’m helpless. In the same way, there is no guarantee that the memories we make in her new house will be good ones. We can only try.
She jokes, sometimes, that she gets lost in it.
There would have been room for you.