Leave Out the Tragic Parts

by Dave Kindred

  At Fries, Virginia, a half-hour north of Mount Airy, Butch and Jared built a porch on a house. “He worked with the chop saw—a saw on a miter box—and he could do anything I showed him. One day we were having a problem with the porch, and he suggested a way to do it different. And he was right. Bright kid and good worker.”

  “Butch is fun to work with,” Jared told me in a call. “He’s old and he wants to teach me stuff. That problem with the porch, I told him, ‘Why don’t we run the joists this way instead of that?’ It worked out. We were happy that day.”

  Nights in Mount Airy, if you’re twenty-four years old and trying to save money and trying not to drink after years of drinking every day, what do you do?

  “Grandpa,” Jared said, “I saw a used Xbox for sale. Only $200.”

  “I’ll send you a check.”

  “I’ll get me some overalls for the summer too,” he said, “because all I have are these insulated ones for winter.”

  It was all good news. Jared in Mount Airy was the Jared we had known. Better yet, on February 28, 2013, he said, “I went to the doctor yesterday. My blood pressure is great, and my kidneys are doing perfect. He pretty much told me I’m really healthy.”

  Kayla hoped Jared had found reason to stop traveling. “His attitude had evolved. He had been someone who had no goal. Why that was, I don’t know, but he felt he had all these strikes against him when, in fact, everyone admired him. He had been someone who didn’t care from one day to the next. And while he was here, he became this guy who, ‘If I get disability, Maggie, we could be together, I’d work with Butch, you get a job, we’d settle somewhere.’”

  Maggie and Jared, in the attic room, talked in the night. It wasn’t Kerouac longing for a different life and writing, “I want to marry a girl so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old. This can’t go on all the time—all this franticness and jumping around. We’ve got to go someplace, find something.” It was better than that. Maggie and Jared were looking for more than an end to the moment’s franticness that would return him to a life he once knew. Maggie and Jared dared to imagine themselves becoming different people leading lives they had never known.

  Maggie said, “We talked about ‘Let’s get our own place, settle down, get off the road, have friends over.’”

  Jared’s thinking had taken such a dramatic turn that I heard him for the first time talk of plans that extended beyond the next hop-out.

  He said, “Maggie and me are trying to save up and get a truck or car. I think we’ll be here a while, so I’m trying for disability now too. I saw an ad for a job that sounded interesting. I forget what they called it, but it was like being the super of a building. Fix stuff, live there for free. I just put in an application at a fast-food place too, and Maggie’s talking about going to school for welding.”

  Welding?

  Welding.

  Maggie’s talking about welding?

  Welding never sounded so lovely.

  In Myrtle Beach, Lynn heard the talk. Her sons were twenty-four years old. Neither had been close to marriage. But now Jared, in Mount Airy, talked about a future with the beautiful welder named Maggie. That was enough for Lynn, as it had been enough for me twenty-six years earlier when she stood at my desk in Georgia and asked if it was okay to marry my son. Lynn’s response to the happy talk from Mount Airy was different from my response to her only in that she didn’t get specific about gender or number or time of delivery. She just said, “I was thinking, ‘Grandbabies!’ And I’d spoil ’em rotten.”

  THIRTEEN

  As content as Jared and Maggie were in North Carolina—like Lynn, I reveled in their joy—they had nothing on Mom in Illinois that same winter. One day she rolled her wheelchair along a hallway of her nursing home. At the end of the hall, she turned to look back to the other end. There she said an odd thing, as mothers sometimes do if they are lucky enough, and brave enough, to get really old. She looked down that long, smooth, shiny corridor and said, “I wish I had roller skates.”

  After escaping with her life from a hospital where a doctor had pronounced her condition as indicative of “the end of life,” Mom had regained energy and enthusiasm. Her standard greeting for visitors at the nursing home became, “I’m still here, believe it or not.” A physical therapist called her “my superstar” and reported that Mom, from her wheelchair, “was doing can-can kicks.” A man who lived in a room next to hers formalized Mom’s reputation as the nursing home’s happiest camper. “She’s our gigglebox,” he said.

  Here was Gigglebox, now ninety-five years old, wishing she could strap on a pair of skates and go swooshing down the hall the way she had once rattled down sidewalks. Her enthusiasm would have been remarkable at any age, in any place. It was extraordinary on this day because she lived with the knowledge that a lump in her left breast was most likely cancer.

  Mom didn’t see much reason to get excited. She had outlived two husbands, and she lived with really really old people, some of whom were at dinner one day and gone the next. She understood death was on its way, and if it was not all that welcome a visitor, it did no good to think the front door could be closed against it. I remembered that day in the Restmor dining room when she declared her agreement with fate: “When I’m old enough to die, I’ll die.”

  We’re all dying. It’s part of the deal. The people who do it best live during the dying. Others, frightened by what they cannot escape, die during the living. Montaigne wrote that a “contempt of death” produces “a soft and easy tranquility, and gives us a pure and pleasant taste of living.”

  Mom’s tranquility included her decision to be done with hospitals. The nursing home’s visiting doctor had proposed a biopsy to determine if Mom did in fact have cancer. My sister, Sandra, who had been at Mom’s side daily for a decade, immediately said no. No biopsy. No tests. Never another hospital. She said, “I promised Mom that.” Then Sandra laughed. “Anyway, Mom was at the age where she kept forgetting she had cancer.”

  A woman born during World War I could be forgiven for forgetting a detail here and there. Besides, the nursing home activities staff kept her busy. Mondays: arts and crafts. Tuesdays: cooking club. Wednesdays: hairstyling. Thursdays: for the first time in her life, she had her nails done. Fridays: garden club. Saturdays: Catholic communion with her nursing home sidekick, Lena Vignieri. Sundays: church services by assorted denominations. All this along with musical interludes, visits by local entertainers, physical therapy, movies with popcorn, bingo, and Scrabble. (Bless her, she loved wordplay.) Come September, in Morton, in the stinkweed hamlet that insisted it was the world’s leading provider of pumpkins, Mom and Lena rolled along the Pumpkin Festival parade route in their wheelchairs, tossing candy to the spectators.

  Forever a baseball fan, Mom wore her pink Cubs shirt to the annual Cubs-Cardinals Nerf-ball game in the nursing home’s hospitality room. I was the umpire, and Mom thought she perceived a bias in favor of the Cardinals. “Your fault,” I said, “for letting me stay up all those nights listening to Harry Caray.”

  I believe Mom simply ignored the cancer in her breast rather than give it the satisfaction of having disturbed her. She tolerated a morphine patch for the early stages of pain and later accepted more powerful medicine. Every day she knew where this was headed. But there was never a day when she wept, never a day when she asked anyone to feel sorry for her.

  In her last years, I heard her express only one wish.

  “Before I die,” she said, “I want the Cubs to be in the World Series again.”

  Dying, she was living.

  She had learned that trick in 1963.

  Dad showed her.

  Marie Magdalena Maloney was twenty years old when she married John David Kindred, age twenty-five, a truck driver, carpenter, and cabinetmaker from Atlanta, Illinois. They had met in Lincoln when she worked as a short-order cook at her mother’s restaurant, the Midway, a stop along Route 66. I was their first child, and Sandra came a year later. We lived in that Atla
nta house by railroad tracks running parallel to 66. I loved that house and I love it still. It will always belong to Sandy and me. We will keep it because Dad told us that however old we might be, whatever our circumstances, we always had a place to live, always a home with him and Mom. Even now, an old man, I sit on the landing at the bottom of the steps leading up to the bedroom where, once upon a warm and safe time, at about ten every night, a freight train rumbled past our house. If only Jared had slept in such a place.

  We owned all of a city block. Our house sat on one corner of it. Because I couldn’t get enough baseball, Dad created our own ball diamond on the south side of the property. He chopped out stumps, carried away stones, and leveled the ground with chain-link fencing weighted down by cinder blocks and pulled behind his black 1950 Ford pickup with the oogah-oogah horn. During a period when I thought to be a pitcher, Dad contrived to build an aid to my control. He drove two wood lathings into the ground and stretched two strands of twine between them; one strand was tied at shoulder height and the other at the knees, with two more pieces of string set seventeen inches apart connecting the top and bottom strands. A strike, then, was any pitch inside the twine rectangle. To improve my hitting, Dad pitched corncobs at me. Anyone who has ever tried to hit a corncob knows you might as well try to hit a bumblebee in a hurricane. After corncobs, baseballs looked like watermelons begging to be busted into pieces. The rest of our city block? We had pigs, with the occasional goat. Wasted, if you ask me.

  I wanted to be a major league baseball player—until the day that Dad, a relic of a man, forty-six years old, challenged me to a race to first base. Silly old man. Me in my Rawlings Fleetfoot spikes, him with a No. 2 pencil tucked behind his ear and wearing thick-soled carpenter work shoes that he called clodhoppers. That he beat me in that race by a step was all the reason a teenager needed to tell his father a flat-out lie, which was, “I’ll try the next time.” There’d be no next time. Losing a footrace to an old man suggested I was overdreaming on baseball. The dream ended forever the first time I saw a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball. I became a sportswriter.

  They were always together, Mom and Dad. He had come home from World War II in 1945. By 1949, he was coaching my baseball teams. He drove that pickup, with Mom riding shotgun, to corn towns all over central Illinois to see their son get dirty at shortstop. Once, after a Little League game, someone asked, “Who’s your coach?”

  I said, “Mr. Smith,” or some such.

  Mom took me aside. “David, your daddy is the assistant coach. Why didn’t you say something about him?”

  I had taken Dad for granted. He was always there. Only later, much later, did I learn that some fathers were never there.

  Come winter, it was basketball. Dad built a goal in the backyard, a tower of four-by-sixes nailed together to hold a hoop. He also built a trophy case for the high school’s Atlanta Redwings, using a jigsaw to carve a wooden “A” with wings painted red. A half-century later, that “A” is in our town’s museum.

  In the fall of 1963, Dad complained of stomach pain. It had been twelve years since doctors in Chicago removed a cancerous lump from his chin. He was thirty-nine years old at the time of the surgery. Doctors told him to come back every six months for an examination. They also told him to quit smoking because smoking causes cancer. Six years later, on June 12, 1957, the US Surgeon General, Leroy E. Burney, declared it the official position of the US Public Health Service that a causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer was supported by the evidence. My father, who had smoked since childhood, did not stop smoking. (Most likely, because of the cigarette manufacturer’s purposeful addition of addicting nicotine, he could not stop smoking.) He never returned to Chicago for another examination.

  In October of ’63, doctors did a biopsy of a mass in his stomach. It was a malignant tumor. They told him he might live six weeks.

  Mom called a family meeting, meaning her, me, and Sandra.

  “Dad thinks he should go somewhere else,” she said.

  Somewhere else to die, not at home, not with us.

  “We’re going to have a family vote,” she said, “and his vote doesn’t count.”

  The vote was 3–0 for Dad staying where he belonged.

  He was at home, dying of lung cancer that had metastasized throughout his body, when he said, “It has been a good year.” He had quit school after the eighth grade to work with his father in a sawmill; now he was proud that I had graduated from college that summer. Gussied up in his funerals-and-weddings suit, Dad had boiled in the midday sun during the Illinois Wesleyan University commencement. Cheryl and I also had given him a grandson. When Sandra and Jim Litwiller married in June, Dad put on that suit again to walk her to the altar. “Everything I’ve always wanted for you kids has happened now,” he said.

  I didn’t know what to say to him. We had never talked much. Dad was fifty-one, I was twenty-two, and we had lived together without knowing each other. He came from a generation of silent men who left school to work through the Depression and left their families to fight a world war. I was a kid who could read and write but had not learned to talk. I had been running for four years—to school and baseball fields, to work, and home to my wife and son. Now Dad was dying, and I wanted to help him. I wanted him to know I loved him. I didn’t know if he knew that.

  One night he sat at the kitchen table, silent. Finally, I put a hand on his shoulder. I said, “I’ll teach my son everything you taught me about baseball.” I didn’t know how to say I loved him. That was as close as I could come. We shared baseball.

  “No,” he said. “You teach him everything you know. You know more than I ever did.” That was as close as he could come.

  After the biopsy, Dad started a woodworking project. For years he had made muzzle-loading guns; his latest was a pistol with a walnut stock. He wanted to hang the pistol in a frame. He would leave the house for an hour at a time and go to an old shed where he kept his saws and miter boxes. He chose walnut for the frame as well, a lighter shade that allowed the pistol the prominence it deserved. He cut the four pieces of the frame to fit so precisely as to make their seams invisible.

  Only one thing was left undone.

  Before he could finish the frame—he planned a back panel covered in green velvet—he grew weak and was admitted to a hospital.

  “You can put the back on someday,” he told me.

  On Sunday, November 10, 1963, Dad left the hospital to go to one last turkey shoot. He had formed a club of shooters who used the muzzle-loading rifles of a century past. He rested on a gurney in an ambulance. As we came over the hills and headed toward the pasture alongside a country creek where his friends had set up the day’s targets, we could hear an occasional shot ring out. The sound made Dad smile.

  He wore his familiar black cowboy hat with a pheasant feather in the band, and when they lifted him out of the ambulance on the gurney, he asked someone to prop him up so he could see. Silent all the way to the range, once there he laughed and talked with the shooters. Someone asked for a picture. A group picture. Everyone. Family and friends. Twenty-two people gathered around him. He sat on the gurney, smiling.

  Everyone was in the picture except me. I refused. Mom asked me to get beside her. Sandra asked me. For reasons unknown then and little more known now, I would not get in that group photograph with my dying father.

  Years later, I asked a psychiatrist why I refused.

  He said, “Were you angry?”

  I suppose so, though I had no way to say it. Only later did I understand that I might be angry at having missed his life. He was sixteen when his father died of a heart attack. He left school to work and help his mother raise his three sisters. He enlisted in the Army at age twenty-nine and arrived on Omaha Beach thirteen days after D-Day. The next winter he was fifty miles from the Battle of the Bulge, stationed in Namur, Belgium, his battalion at risk if the Germans broke through at Bastogne and marched north to the North Sea. He was an old, decrepit man and I was a fleet-
footed teenager when he beat me in that race to first base. (Only later did I find his blue ribbons from the 1926 Logan County track meet.) I wished I had said, “Tell me about all of that, Dad, and how you met Mom at Grandma’s restaurant, the Midway, and tell me what it was like at Omaha Beach.

  Tell me.”

  Yes, I was angry. I wanted to know him. I was angry. I hated cigarettes and I hated cancer and I hated a God who would let my father die. I stayed out of the group picture, even when Dad waved me in. That happened more than fifty years ago, and there is still nothing I regret more than that moment when childish, petulant self-indulgence stole from me a chance to be with my father when it meant the most to him.

  There is only one thing I could have been thinking.

  It would be a picture of his death, and why should I be in a picture certifying his death, approving it, even celebrating it?

  If I stayed out of the picture, my refusal would be a vote to keep him alive, in our house, with us.

  Now I know that the day at the turkey shoot was a celebration of a man’s life. But on that day, celebration made no sense. No one close to me had ever died. I was confused. On that day in a pasture along a country creek, I was sad and angry. Maybe I refused to get in the picture out of a fear of emotions I’d never felt, a fear that I’d break down. That day I could not have said why I refused to get in the picture, I just did. I stood off to the side, stock-still, shaking my head no, no, I’m staying over here, go ahead.

  I look at that picture now. Dad is sitting on the gurney, propped up, his black hat set at a jaunty angle. There’s a blanket over his legs. Crouched in the shadows against his right shoulder is Sandy. Directly behind him, Mom. He is surrounded by people who love him, and he is dying and he is smiling. Smiling. Three days later, he died. On this day, he is smiling.

  I kept the pistol he made, and it hangs from two rawhide strips in its walnut frame. It has been more than fifty years now, and I still have not added a back panel covered with green velvet. I like to think Dad will come in from the shed and finish it himself.