by Tim O'Brien
* * *
Meredith was driving Tad to the dentist one afternoon. “All this traffic,” Tad said. “Where exactly does it start?”
28
Home School
Back in the early 1990s, I received a letter from a twenty-six-year-old woman living in my home region of the American Midwest. I carried the letter with me for a long time, often reading passages aloud to audiences around the country. The letter was important to me. It made me feel things I had trouble feeling. But on a wintry night in Chicago, stepping out of a car, I stumbled. The letter was swept out of my hands and took flight down a dark and icy Michigan Avenue.
What a loss. Not just mine, but the world’s.
The young woman’s sentences had been so lucidly made, so carefully mortised, that the letter’s final effect was as radiant and devastating as anything I had ever encountered. Even years later, although her letter is gone, I remember glittering bits and pieces with reasonable exactness, and the rest of it I remember the way I remember “Snow White,” not the precise words, not every detail, but its modesty and its reflective tone and the flow of a very painful story.
In her opening pages, the young woman explained that as a little girl, around eight or nine, she had feared going to the dinner table. Night after night, her father would sit staring silently at his plate, the cords at his neck stiffening, his face reddening with a mix of sadness and inexplicable fury that to her was terrifying. The young woman’s mother would make chitchat, trying to pretend, but then she too would fall silent. The tension—the danger—at that dinner table did not go away as the years passed. At one point, when the young woman was in middle school, she happened upon a small wooden box under a cot in the basement. In the box were relics of her father’s history: a P-38 can opener, a pair of dog tags, a stripper’s tasseled bra, a handful of military decorations, and a dented bullet casing. For the first time, the young woman realized that her father had once been a soldier and that she was living in a soldier’s home. Later the same day, she dared to ask her father about the box in the basement. He shook his head. He made a joke. He shrugged and tried to say something but didn’t. It was a house of few words; it was a house without emotional language. By the time she reached high school, the tensions between the young woman’s mother and father had approached the intolerable. The girl felt more like a counselor than a daughter. And then one morning, not quite out of nowhere, her mother said to her, “You know, I’ve never really loved your father.”
A moment passed. The girl said, “Why did you marry him?”
Her mother said, “I married him out of pity.”
This is how it is, the young woman wrote to me, when your house burns down. This is how it is when the world ends. After a few seconds her mother explained that she had dated the girl’s father for a very short time. He had then gone off to Vietnam. He had come home silent.
“How do you love someone,” her mother said, “who won’t talk to you?”
There was a bit more in the young woman’s letter. The stresses multiplied, time went by, and then one day in her final year of high school, she was assigned a book called The Things They Carried, which she brought home and left lying on a coffee table. Her father picked it up and read a few pages, and at dinner that evening he said a few things, and the next evening he said more things, and then her mother said things and the girl herself said things, and in this way, very gradually, in fits and starts, a conversation began.
“What I wanted to tell you,” the young woman wrote near the end of her letter, “is that this conversation hasn’t ended—we’re still talking ten years later. Of course, my mom and dad aren’t perfect. They still have their problems. But they’re together. And I don’t think they would be if that book hadn’t been lying on a coffee table so many years ago.”
* * *
Essay Questions for Timmy and Tad
How do you feel about your own father’s silences? (Ten points)
How can the narrator quote directly from a letter that was lost and never found? (Five points)
Can a book sometimes do things an author never intended? (Five points)
Will you ever go to war? (Eighty points)
29
Turkey Capital of the World
From the year of his birth in 1914 until the outbreak of war in 1941, my father lived in a mostly white, mostly working-class, mostly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. He was an altar boy. He played stickball and freeze tag on safe, tree-lined streets. To hear my dad talk about it, one would’ve thought he had grown up in some long-lost Eden, an urban paradise that had vanished beneath the seas of history, and until his death a few years ago, he held fast to an impossibly idyllic, relentlessly romanticized Brooklyn of the 1920s and 1930s. No matter that his father died in 1925. No matter that my dad went to work as a twelve-year-old to help support a family of five. No matter the later hardships of the Great Depression. Despite such troubles, my dad’s eyes would soften as he reminisced about weekend excursions to Coney Island, apartment buildings festooned with flower boxes, the aroma of hot bread at the corner bakery, Saturday afternoons at Ebbets Field, the noisy bustle along Flatbush Avenue, pickup football games on the Parade Ground in Prospect Park, ice cream cones that could be had for a nickel and a polite thank-you.
Following Pearl Harbor, my father joined the US Navy, and soon afterward, without the dimmest inkling that he had stepped off a great cliff, he left behind both Brooklyn and his youth. He served on a destroyer at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, met my mother in Norfolk, Virginia, got married in 1945, and, for reasons unclear to me, set off with my mom to live amid the corn and soybeans of southern Minnesota. My mother had grown up in the area, but even so, why hadn’t they chosen to settle down in a more exotic spot on the earth—the Cayman Islands, maybe, or along the coast of Maine, or virtually anyplace other than the repetitive prairies of southern Minnesota?
I showed up in October 1946, an early explosion in what would become a great nationwide baby boom. My sister, Kathy, was born a year later. In the summer of 1954, after several years in Austin, Minnesota, our family moved across the state to the small, rural town of Worthington, where my dad became regional manager for a life insurance company. To me, at age seven, Worthington seemed a splendid spot on the earth. There was ice skating in winter, organized baseball in summer, a fine old Carnegie library, a decent golf course, a Dairy Queen, an outdoor movie theater, and a lake clean enough for swimming. More impressively, the town styled itself Turkey Capital of the World, a title that struck me as both grand and peculiar. Among the earth’s generous offerings, the turkey seemed a strange thing to boast about. Still, I was content for the first year or two. I was very close to happy.
My father, though, did not care for the place. It was too isolated, too dull, too pastoral, and too far removed from the big city of his youth.
He soon began drinking. He drank a lot, and he drank often, and with each passing year he drank more. Over the next decade he twice ended up in a state facility for the treatment of alcoholism. None of this, of course, was the fault of the town, any more than soybeans can be faulted for being soybeans. Rather, like a suit of clothes that may fit beautifully on one man but too snugly on another, I have come to believe that Worthington—or maybe the rural Midwest in general—made my dad feel somehow limited, squeezed into a life he hadn’t planned for himself, marooned as a permanent stranger in a place he could not understand in his blood. An outgoing, extravagantly verbal man, he now lived among laconic Norwegians. A man accustomed to a certain vertical scale to things, he lived on prairies so flat and so unvaried that one spot could be mistaken for any other. A man who had dreamed of becoming a writer, my father found himself driving down lonely farm lanes with his insurance applications and a halfhearted sales pitch.
Then, as now, Worthington was a long way from Brooklyn, and not just in the geographical sense. Tucked into the southwestern corner of Minnesota—about twelve miles from Iowa, fifty-some miles from So
uth Dakota—the town was home to roughly nine thousand people when our family arrived in 1954. For centuries, the surrounding plains had been the land of the Sisseton Dakota Sioux, but by the mid-fifties not much remained of that: a few burial mounds, an arrowhead here and there, and some borrowed nomenclature. To the south was Sioux City; to the west was Sioux Falls; to the northeast was Mankato, where, on December 26, 1862, thirty-eight Sioux were hanged in a single mass execution.
Founded in the 1870s as a railroad watering station, Worthington was an agricultural community almost from the start. Tidy farms sprang up. Sturdy Germans and Scandinavians began fencing in and squaring off the Sioux’s stolen hunting grounds. Alongside the few surviving Indian names—Lake Okabena, Lake Okoboji—such solidly European names as Jackson and Fulda and Lismore and Worthington were soon transplanted upon the prairie. Throughout my youth, and still today, the town was at its core a support system for outlying farms. No coincidence that I played shortstop for the Rural Electric Association’s Little League team. No coincidence that a meatpacking plant became, and remains, the town’s primary employer.
For my father, still a relatively young man, it had to be bewildering and depressing to find himself in a landscape of grain elevators, silos, farm implement dealerships, feed stores, and livestock sales barns. I don’t mean to be deterministic about this. Human suffering can rarely be reduced to a single cause, and my dad may have ended up with similar problems no matter where he lived. Yet, unlike Chicago or New York, small-town Minnesota did not permit a man’s failings to go unnoticed. People talked. Secrets did not stay secret. My dad, whom I loved fiercely, was a town drunk. And for me, already full of shame and embarrassment, the humiliations of public scrutiny began eating away at my self-esteem. I overheard things in school. There was teasing and innuendo. I felt pitied at times. Other times I felt arraigned, tried, and convicted. Some of this was imagined, no doubt, but some was as real as a toothache. One summer afternoon in the late fifties, I heard myself explaining to my Little League teammates that my dad would no longer be our coach, that he was in a state hospital, that he was sick, and that he might or might not be returning home that summer. I did not utter the word “alcohol”—nothing of the sort—but the mortification of that day still opens a trapdoor in my heart.
Decades later, my memories of Worthington are colored as much by what went on with my father—his increasing bitterness, the gossip, the midnight quarrels with my mother, the silent suppers, the vodka bottles hidden away in the garage and basement—as by anything having to do with the town itself. I began to hate the place. Not for what it was, but for what it was to me, and to my dad. After all, I loved my father. He was a good man. He was funny and intelligent and well read and conversant in history and a terrific storyteller and generous with his time and great with kids. Yet every object in town seemed to shimmer with an opposite judgment. The water tower overlooking Centennial Park seemed censorious and unforgiving. The Gobbler Café on Main Street, with its crowd of Sunday diners freshly invigorated by church bells, seemed to hum with rebuke.
Again, this was partly an echo of my own pain and fear. But pain and fear have a way of influencing our attitudes toward the most innocent, most inanimate objects in the world. Places on the earth are defined not just by their physicality, but also by all the joys and tragedies that transpire in those places. A tree is a tree until it is used for a hanging. A liquor store is a liquor store until your father almost owns the joint. (Years later, as a soldier in Vietnam, I would relearn this lesson. The paddies and mountains and red clay trails, all of it pulsed with the purest evil.) After departing for college in 1964, I never again lived in Worthington. My parents stayed on well into their old age, finally moving in 2002 to a retirement community in San Antonio. My dad died two years later.
* * *
A few months ago, when I paid a return visit to Worthington, a deep and familiar sadness settled inside me as I approached town on Highway 59. The flat, repetitive landscape carried the feel of eternity, a world without limit, the horizon bending away into foreverness just as our lives do. Maybe I was feeling old. Maybe, like my father, I was conscious of my lost youth.
I stayed in town only a short while, but long enough to discover that much had changed. In place of the almost entirely white community of fifty years ago, I found a town in which forty-two languages or dialects are spoken, a place teeming with immigrants from Laos, Peru, Ethiopia, Sudan, Thailand, Vietnam, Guatemala, and Mexico. More than forty percent of the town’s citizens are Hispanic, many of them first-generation immigrants, and soccer is now played on the field where I once booted ground balls. On the premises of the old Coast to Coast hardware store is a thriving establishment called Top Asian Food; the Comunidad Cristiana de Worthington occupies the site of a restaurant where, long ago, I’d bribed high school dates with burgers and French fries. In the town’s phone book, alongside the Andersons and Jensens of my youth, I discovered such surnames as Ngamsang and Ngoc and Flores and Figuera.
All this startled me. What had once been true was no longer true. I had grown up inside a Sinclair Lewis story; I had returned to a story by Sandra Cisneros or Dagoberto Gilb.
The new, cosmopolitan Worthington, with a population of about thirteen thousand, did not arise without tensions, resentments, and serious assimilation troubles. During my chats with longtime residents, a number of them expressed nostalgia for the all-white Worthington of my youth. Their nostalgia was mostly bittersweet, but once or twice the sweetness disappeared. “You can’t call it racism,” said one old friend. “It’s just that . . . like, you know, I can’t understand a word my neighbor says to me; he can’t understand me. It didn’t use to be that way. I mean, how do you build understanding if you can’t understand anybody?”
According to a county web page, the local jail hosts a hefty percentage of inmates bearing Spanish, Asian, and African names, and, as might be expected, non-Caucasians are rarely among Worthington’s most prosperous citizens. Although the town’s unemployment rate is low, wages are also low—substantially below the state average. At the local meatpacking plant, which employs about 2,400 wage earners, nearly a third of the workforce is Hispanic. The jobs there are grueling, monotonous, and often disgusting. (The blood-stink will suck mucus from your nose.) For many immigrants, I’m sure, any work is better than none, but no one is getting rich inside the plant where decades ago I stood trimming fat off pig jowls.
Altogether, in numerous ways, the town’s transformation has mirrored that of America itself, sometimes smooth and uncontentious, other times bumpy and contentious in the extreme. Once or twice, race relations in Worthington have turned outright nasty.
In the summer of 2016, during a traffic stop, a young resident named Anthony Promvongsa, whose background is Laotian, was violently kicked and beaten by a local narcotics investigator while the young man was still strapped to his seat and putting up no resistance. A second officer stood watching. A police dashcam captured the incident on video, which later led to an ACLU lawsuit charging both officers with the use of excessive force. Also named in the lawsuit were the City of Worthington, the Worthington Police Department, and a regional narcotics agency called the Buffalo Ridge Drug Task Force. According to the ACLU, the 2016 assault—along with the town’s subsequent failure to discipline the officers—was “part of a pattern and practice by the Worthington Police Department and the Buffalo Ridge Drug Task Force, who routinely fail to hold their officers accountable for their actions.”
The senseless, animal brutality of the incident is shocking to behold on internet websites. But compounding the shock, at least for me, is that it occurred not in Los Angeles, not in the Bronx, but on the streets of Ozzie and Harriet country, in the Turkey Capital of the World, amid fields of corn and soybeans, in a landscape as bland as a slice of Wonder Bread, within striking distance of a dozen or so well-attended churches, and not far from the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks.
* * *
I stayed th
at night in a motel on the outskirts of town. In the morning, after pancakes at a Perkins restaurant off I-90, I made the seven-minute drive to the first of two houses in which I’d lived during my years in Worthington.
I was alone in a rented car. I was feeling very lonely.
Except for the watchful presence of the kid I used to be, there was no one with whom to share my thoughts. Worthington had become a place populated by people as distant and unknown to me as the citizens of Pago Pago. Several old friends were now dead. Almost all others had fled for Minneapolis or wherever else soybeans did not grow.
I pulled over and parked in front of 1018 Elmwood Avenue. The house of my youth remained pretty much as I remembered it: tiny, low-slung, not quite ugly.
Oddly, or maybe not so oddly, I had trouble looking at the place; I’d steal quick glances, look elsewhere, then glance back again. Here, inside an undistinguished rectangle of nothingness, my dad’s late-night drinking had made the shift from now-and-then to all-out-and-always. And it was also here, in the hours after midnight, that I had lain awake listening to my mother’s weeping and my dad’s bitter yelling. I was a third-grader then. I was terrified. None of it made sense to me, especially the angry words that did not carry meaning for a third-grader. The word “bitch” was one. The word “divorce” was another.
Now, in the car, I smoked a couple of cigarettes, composed myself, eventually opened the door, and got out and stood in the center of Elmwood Avenue. It was just after 9 a.m. There was no traffic at all. The morning was sunny and motionless. Across the street, behind a row of much nicer houses, lay the velvety seventeenth green of the Worthington Country Club, where, as a fourth-grader, I had sold glasses of lemonade to golfers worn down by hole after hole of frustration. My buddy Mike Bjerkesett and I worked the lemonade stand as a tag team, sharing the toil and the booty through hot summer afternoons back in the early fifties. Most evenings, after dusk had fallen, Mike and I strapped on our helmets and played soldier out among the sand traps and water hazards. Mike was now among the dead: a terrible car accident, decades of paralysis, then suicide. Though he never knew it, and though it won’t help him now, my old lemonade pal had found his way into The Things They Carried,where I still hear his voice in the character of Norman Bowker.
