Following Atticus

by Tom Ryan

  He thought for a bit. “They have a kid.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “A boy. He’s half white, half black. Mulatto.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Atticus.”

  Atticus, who was sitting near us, looked up when he heard his name.

  After all those questions, we took my father back upstairs, and I asked the nurse if he could have some ice cream. My father loved ice cream. He kept several varieties in the freezer and ate it every day.

  “He hasn’t had dinner yet,” she said.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “We don’t allow them to have ice cream until after dinner.”

  I couldn’t believe it. She actually looked like she enjoyed what she was saying.

  “You’re not serious,” I said.

  “I’m very serious. It ruins their appetites.”

  “So tell me,” I said, doing my best to be respectful, “how will you feel if you live to be eighty-seven and some nurse tells you to eat your dinner before you can have ice cream?”

  “Sorry, no ice cream until after dinner,” Nurse Ratched said.

  “Can I speak to your supervisor, please? Or better yet the director?”

  Nurse Ratched returned a few minutes later and thrust something they give diabetics instead of real ice cream into my hand.

  My father, who watched appraisingly throughout the exchange, was happy to be getting ice cream. But when I opened up the little container, it didn’t look the least bit like ice cream. And judging by my father’s face as I fed him a spoonful, it didn’t taste like it either.

  “How is it?” I asked him.

  “Tastes like shit.”

  Atticus and I left and went to the grocery store, and I bought a half gallon of ice cream. When we returned, I fed him some. After the first few spoonfuls, a veil had lifted.

  My father, who hadn’t realized who I was since I’d been there, saw Atticus sitting on the floor in front of him and out of the blue said, “You’re a good dog, Atticus.” And Atticus moved closer.

  “He’s a good dog,” my father said.

  “Yes, he is,” I said.

  “Better than you deserve,” he added.

  Ah, he’d finally realized who I was, and I laughed. From that moment on, he was clearer, and we talked and he was friendlier, but he grew tired.

  My brother David showed up, and we talked for a bit. He told me that a few days earlier my father had been really confused, and when David had shown up to see him, my father had said, “Good, you’re here. Now get Eddie and Tommy and get me out of here.” We didn’t quite know what he meant by that, and David suggested he was just really gone. Perhaps he was, or maybe there was something else going on.

  I drove home that night and tried to hike Jackson the very next day, but I couldn’t. The weather was fine, but I wasn’t. And so Atticus and I got up early, before the storm came in, and tried again.

  That’s what I was thinking about looking off into the cloud while I held Atticus.

  I said some prayers and thanked my father. For all his sadness and pain, he’d passed many things on to his children. I loved the mountains he’d given me. But more than that, he’d also passed something else on to me, the best part of who he was. The part of him that had once been a dreamer. For whatever reasons, he’d let his dreams die, or he’d covered them up and didn’t want us to see them. I would never understand that part of him, just as Jack Ryan would never understand that a father is never a failure as long as his children continue on, even if it is with but one or two lessons or traits once carried by the father.

  We also differed on something else: what happens after death.

  When he looked into the belly of a cloud, the same kind I saw that morning, the same kind he saw around him as he neared the end, we saw two different things. He saw nothing. For him the world was closing in on him, empty, cold, a dead end. He’d always believed that once he died, that would be it. Nothing would follow. For me . . . well, I liked to think different. I liked to think that clouds, no matter how dense, how seemingly immovable, were all the more reason for faith and that something else awaits us. To that end I held on to something C. S. Lewis had written: “Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.”

  There is much I don’t know. However, I believe those mountains have a mystical power to them—the genius loci. They bring us closer to death, hence closer to life. They are fierce and wild, but life-affirming at the same time.

  Looking off into the gray mist with tears rolling down my cheeks, I felt Atticus licking my face. A smile was born out of the sadness. Love was near, even in the darkness.

  If only . . . if only there were some way to bring that mountaintop home to a man who was at the doorstep and ready to walk through, some way to ease his struggle, bring him to the mountains, and give him something to hold on to.

  As Atticus and I made our way down from the summit, I tried my best to bring the mountaintop home with me to ease my own pain. Mount Jackson had been our fifty-ninth peak of the winter, far below what I’d hoped for when it all started. But the number meant very little when compared to the wealth of experience the mountains had given us.

  29

  Mount Washington

  On the last day of winter, Atticus and I finally made it to Mount Washington. The weather had been horrible, and I didn’t want to chance it. But the sun was out, the temperature warm, and there was not even a trace of wind.

  Although it was a workday, the trails were crowded. We made our way up the Jewell Trail, to where it goes above tree line and intersects with the Gulfside Trail. We stopped there to take a break, and a large group of eighteen hikers were coming up the trail behind us. When they saw Atticus, most of them calmly greeted him by name. By that time it wasn’t out of the ordinary to see the little black-and-white dog with the funny eyebrows on a mountain in winter. A few of the others were very excited and while approaching got out their cameras to take his picture as he stood on a rock above them and watched them.

  While most of the crowd went left on the Gulfside and headed for Mount Jefferson, Atticus and I climbed up the shiny ice toward Mount Washington. It was so hot that I wore only a T-shirt, and the glare was so severe that I could feel a sunburn coming on.

  We moved carefully, me wearing crampons and Atticus taking his time over the ice. We ran into two more people who recognized Atticus, then saw a fellow off in the distance setting up his tripod. When we drew closer, he said, “Would you mind if I got a picture of you two?”

  On the summit we stopped for lunch, but soon a party of three thirty-somethings were standing near us. They were all trying to make cell-phone calls but weren’t having much luck. Then one of them pulled a satellite phone from his backpack and said, “This will work!”

  When I heard him yelling to whoever was on the other end of the phone—“Hey, you’ll never guess where I am!”—I knew it was time to leave. We had come to the mountains to get away from just that kind of thing. In contrast, at the closed Lake of the Clouds Hut, a half mile below the summit of Mount Monroe, there was a man sitting with his back to us. The hood of his jacket was pulled up, and he was holding a newspaper and a pencil. Atticus startled him when he walked by, and the man looked up. He was thin and weathered. He wore glasses and had a tanned face. I guessed him to be in his sixties. His coat was a mess: faded orange with long strips of gray duct tape covering large sections of it, placed where the worn fabric had ripped through.

  He was working on a crossword puzzle and deep in thought.

  Imagine that. Coming off Washington, standing at the base of Mount Monroe, the fourth-highest peak in New England, encountering a man in such worn clothing that if he were in downtown Boston he would pass easily for a street person. He was sitting on a rock working
on that puzzle as if he were waiting for a bus.

  He was absorbed in what he was doing, so I respected his privacy as I readjusted my crampons, took off my pack, fed Atticus, and swallowed some honey. When we were getting ready to set off for Monroe, he asked about Atticus. A few questions turned into a wonderful conversation.

  His name was Richard, he was seventy-eight years old, and he climbed Washington because he and his wife had climbed Washington every year. I asked where his wife was, and he told me she had died a year earlier. He told me she was one of the first women ever to hike all the Adirondack four-thousand-footers in winter. She was originally from Switzerland. They’d shared a love of the mountains and gotten married long ago. They had two children.

  Richard and his wife had made the move from New York to the White Mountains twenty years earlier. Even though he was alone, he liked where he lived and said he would never leave. He loved the mountains and climbed them whenever he could, but he didn’t bother with lists anymore. He also appreciated snowmobilers.

  “Most people don’t like them,” he said. “I like them because I can use my mountain bike on the groomed trails.”

  As for his coat, he told me it was at least fifty years old and that his wife had always wanted him to get rid of it, but he refused. His crampons were just as old, if not older, he told me. They had leather straps, but he kept the spikes sharp. His wooden ice ax was equally ancient.

  He proudly showed me his mittens when he took them out of his backpack. They were oversize, made of wool, and liberally patched with duct tape. His wife had wanted him to get rid of those also, but he reminded her they’d once saved her nose, so she suggested he keep them.

  “We were up on Mount Marcy in the winter, and I was having a conversation with a man when he pointed out that my wife’s nose was turning white,” Richard said. “So I just held one of my big mitts up over her nose and continued my conversation. She got to keep her nose.”

  My conversation with Richard was enlivening and just the opposite of what I’d experienced on top of Washington.

  Of course, it had me thinking about my father and wondering how different things would have been had my mother not dropped a cigarette in her hospital bed. The other thing I noticed was how freely Richard talked about his life and his wife and how much he loved her. In some ways I knew more about him than I did about my own father.

  As we walked over the last few mountains of the winter, my thoughts drifted back to Atticus and me. We were finishing with sixty-six mountains, thirty fewer than what I’d planned and hoped for. But in a winter with a record snowfall of more than 250 total inches, I’d come to terms with the things I could and could not control. I had Atticus and the mountains themselves to thank for teaching that to me.

  Over the last two winters, we’d climbed 147 peaks, stayed safe, raised thousands of dollars for two great causes, and transformed our lives. Not bad for a little dog and a middle-aged, overweight newspaper editor with a paralyzing fear of heights who supposedly never belonged in the mountains in winter.

  30

  Good-bye

  With winter over, Ken and Ann Stampfer invited Atticus and me to join them on a hike. After three months of “having” to climb only four-thousand-footers, it felt good to do something not on a list. It was my first time on the Boulder Loop Trail, and I enjoyed it immensely, from the gentle climb, to the views, to the small, twisted trees on the ledges etched against the rich blue sea of sky.

  As I sat down to write about the hike the following night in my journal, Atticus knew that something was different. He always sat within sight of me, often in contact with my foot or a leg. But on that night he was right by my side.

  I was sitting on the couch with my legs up, and he was stretched out, not at my feet as he usually was when we were on the couch but lying parallel to me, his body in full contact with mine, his head against my hip. I could feel his heart beating. He wanted to be close, just as he had when he was blind and feeling lost. But this was different from that last time. Back then he was looking to be held; this time around he was looking to hold me.

  It was Monday, and my father’s wake was scheduled for Wednesday down in Medway, with the funeral on Thursday. The wake and the funeral meant nothing to me. What did mean something to me was the last time I’d seen him.

  It was Saturday, and he was lucid, smiling, happy to see Eddie, David, and me when we arrived at Milford Hospital together. And it was just by chance that we were together. Atticus and I had arrived from Newburyport at the same time my brothers arrived. When the four of us walked in the front door, the receptionist took a look at Atticus and said, “I’m sorry, we don’t allow dogs.”

  “How come?”

  “We just don’t. It’s against the rules.”

  “He’s always been allowed in hospitals,” I said with a smile.

  “I’m sorry, it’s not allowed.”

  When I said, “Okay, can I see the rules, please?” my brothers took a step to the side, and Eddie looked as if he wanted to crawl away.

  I told them I’d be up in a minute, and they escaped.

  After I talked with the receptionist a bit, I brought Atticus back out to the car. I took it as compliment that when I entered the room and Eddie told my father they wouldn’t allow Atticus in, he said, “Oh, that’s too bad.” And I could tell he meant it.

  My father was different that day. He’d gotten rid of all his anger and pain in the nursing home, and he was lighter.

  At one point during the visit, David pointed out that it was Easter weekend and that some of our brothers and sisters would be in the area. He told my father to be ready for visitors. I joked that since so many members of the family would be dropping in on him, it would be a great weekend to kick the bucket. He laughed at this. His humor had returned. Although my brothers didn’t seem to think it was funny.

  Eddie told him that the doctors thought he was getting better and he would be out of the hospital soon and back at the nursing home. My father simply shrugged and said that it didn’t really matter where he was. He then said, “What’s next? What’s after all this?”

  I took comfort in that, for he’d always said there was no tomorrow after death, no next chapter. He seemed resigned to that fact, but on his last afternoon, with the sun splashing in the windows and his eyes bright, he seemed to sense, or at least maybe hope, that there was more to it all than just the closing of a book.

  I also took comfort in my father’s last words. They occurred just after midnight while two nurses and a doctor were with him. One of the nurses was yelling at him to “Breathe . . . breathe . . . breathe!”

  My father’s response was precious and typical of Jack Ryan. The last words he ever spoke were, “Why? Am I giving birth?”

  He loved joking with those he didn’t know well, especially women, especially pretty women. I’m sure he was happy that two nurses were with him when his heart gave out. And I took solace in knowing he wasn’t alone.

  He once joked that he thought for sure he would die in the spring, after a long, dark, and cold winter, when young women wore less clothing and he was more distracted while driving by them. I always thought he would die around that time of the year as well, but for a different reason: It was between the end of Patriots season and the beginning of Red Sox, and he had little to care about.

  In the weeks to come, I thought about the time David had arrived to visit my father and he’d said, “Good, you’re here. Now get Eddie and Tommy and get me out of here.”

  As it worked out, the rest of my brothers and sisters never got to see him. David, Eddie, and Tommy arrived together, and my father was getting out of there.

  I’m not sure why he chose the three of us. I believe it was because we were the three who were near him the most after he crashed his car, but more than that, Jack Ryan had a plan. David was the responsible, stalwart one. He’d handle the money and pa
y for the getaway. Eddie was the golden son with a good heart. He would take care of my father. As for me, I was the younger version of him, but the one who didn’t give up on his dreams, the one who was bold enough to drive the getaway car.

  After that accident when I was filling in for David and Eddie, I showed up on occasion to take my father to a doctor’s visit. On the way home one day, I asked him if he wanted to drive in and see the new high school.

  “They won’t let us drive up there,” he said.

  But I drove him up, and we watched them working for a couple of minutes before a man with a hard hat came up to the car. He looked in and saw a middle-aged man, an old man, and a little black-and-white dog.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  My father looked a bit nervous.

  “We’re just watching,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, but you can’t be here,” he said.

  There was the slightest tinge of disappointment on my father’s face, and I looked at the construction worker and said, “Do you know who this is?”

  “Um . . . no. I’m sorry, I don’t,” he said.

  “You’re obviously not from around here, are you?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “This is Francis Burke, former superintendent of schools.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I had no idea. Do you want to get out of the car and take a closer look?” he asked.

  My father was tired and shook his head just enough so I could see it.

  “No, we’re fine here,” I said.

  After I drove my father home, he had the silliest grin on his face and said, “That was kind of fun.”

  Yep, I was with David and Eddie because I would be driving the getaway car.

  I did not learn of his death until I returned from our hike along the Boulder Loop Trail with Ken and Ann Stampfer, later on Sunday. In hindsight it was just as well, as I spent much of the day telling them about my visit in the hospital with him and his better qualities. I noted that while he’d never climbed a four-thousand-footer, he’d loved being in the mountains and he’d taken us up Cannon and Wildcat on their gondolas, and Washington by way of the auto road and the cog railroad.