Light as a Feather

by Dan Dillard

  Chapter 13

  The next morning, we were packed and ready to go by 9:00 am. Vicky and I hugged her parents and said our miss-yous and love-yous and promised future visits and phone calls right up until we were in the car driving down the driveway and as was tradition, everyone waved until we were out of sight. US 49 stretched out for miles, but I turned off well before the interstate and headed east.

  “Do we need gas or are you going where I think you’re going?” Vicky asked.

  I was choked up, so it took me a few seconds before I could respond. I checked the rearview for Sean, who was busy alternating between chewing on his hand and singing something that sounded like, “King Bobbigah!”

  “I think it’s time John McNeill met his grandson in person,” I said.

  She rubbed my shoulder and I saw a tear in her eye. Her hand went up to her mouth and she sniffed.

  “That’s a wonderful idea,” she said.

  We hadn’t been to see John since Vicky was pregnant with Sean. I don’t know if Danny had visited him once since the move. I don’t recall Danny ever being abused by my father, but they never had much to do with each other. When Danny graduated college, the look on my father’s face was something more akin to relief than pride. The look on Danny’s face was joy, but it was a joy he only shared with me, Vicky and his friends. It was his final freedom from John.

  John seemed excited at the idea of being a grandfather. Even then, though, he’d been drinking. He was pitiful.

  “You need to quit if you want to be in our baby’s life,” I told him during that visit.

  He’d looked at me with a mixture of anger and shame. I’m sure that anger wasn’t aimed at me. I meant it in two ways. I meant he couldn’t be a drunk and be around my son, and I also meant I didn’t think he’d live to see my son born if he didn’t quit.

  “I’m not sure I can,” he had said.

  It was that honesty that let me feel sorry for him back then. I never expected to, but there it was. He didn’t stop drinking. To be clear, he didn’t try to stop drinking and that’s why eighteen more months had passed and I didn’t feel sorry for him anymore. Especially if he was still pounding the booze.

  When I knocked on the apartment door, I never expected to see what I saw once it opened. The person who stood there was not intimidating, not stifling, and not the man I cowered away from even after I was grown. Instead, he was hunched over. His skin was a sickly gray and his hair had gone pure wispy white. He wore a tube in his nose that was connected to a small green tank which he was wheeling along with his left hand. It was not my…It wasn’t John McNeill, but a used up person. Everything about him said defeat. Still, when he saw us, his tired, drooping eyes lit up.

  “Todd? My God, boy. And Victoria? And who is…Well don’t stand out there, come on in,” he said.

  I let Vicky go in first with Sean in her arms and I followed, shutting the door behind us. His apartment hadn’t changed much, but he was a wreck, shuffling along like a man twenty years his senior.

  “What happened to you, John?” I asked.

  Vicky nudged me. He sat down on an overstuffed chair opposite the small couch and picked up his remote to turn off the blaring television.

  “Take a seat,” he said before looking at me.

  When he did look back at me, his face was a mixture of startled thoughtfulness, like he was about to deliver a speech that he had practiced many times, but hadn’t thought that day would be the day. I started to open my mouth, to apologize for starting our visit that way, but he held one of his hands up—slightly cupped with arthritis—and stopped me.

  “This is what happens, son, when you live in the wrong.”

  His mouth curled up in a smirk, but his eyes were hard.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “I drank myself to death, Todd. Now I’m just waiting around to give out. I’m stubborn that way. This…” He had a coughing fit which he directed into a liver-spotted fist. “This is what’s left over.”

  John smiled wide, showing the tobacco stains on his teeth. His receded gums made them look freakishly long. It made me angry. Anger wasn’t my intention for the visit, arguing about his vices, but I needed to know. I needed to speak my mind about his ways, his influence on my kids. I squirmed on the uncomfortable couch.

  “So are you still smoking? Drinking?” I asked, still agitated.

  “Todd,” Vicky said, interrupting. She had a harsh look on her face and her hand was on my knee, telling me to slow down.

  “He just wants you to take care of yourself,” Vicky told my father. “That’s all.”

  John nodded and held up that same cupped hand.

  “I haven’t had a drink in eight months, a cigarette in more than six. Doc said it was up to me. He said I could have all I wanted, but that I needed to decide if I wanted to live another five weeks, or another five years.”

  “But why now?” I asked. “Why quit now, John? Why not just plow straight on through?”

  The old man pressed his lips together and raised his eyebrows, then took as deep a breath as his lungs would allow. He opened his mouth to speak and said something else I was not expecting.

  “Say, why don’t you introduce me to your little friend there.”

  His hand was raised and pointing at my son. I looked at Vicky, who was already staring at me with hope. I nodded and sighed through my nose. She stood and walked over to John with my boy in her arms. That’s when I got it. He couldn’t quit for me or for Danny, or his precious Robin may-she-rest-in-peace…he couldn’t even quit for his wife who he pledged for better but only delivered or worse. I’m not even sure he was giving it the old college try for his grandchildren. He could do it now because he was finally afraid of something. He was afraid of death and John thought the old bastard might sneak up on him while he was too stoned and too weak fight back.

  “Would you do the honors, Todd?” she said.

  I joined them, kneeling next to his chair. I started to tuck the oxygen tube out of the way, but John took it off, pulled it over his head and hooked it on the handle of the tank’s cart. He held his hands out and Sean reciprocated. I’d thought, prior to that, that children could sense danger and smell evil. Either my son was oblivious to such things, or my father had mellowed. I suppose if I wasn’t afraid of him anymore, Sean had no reason to be. There was just a sickly old man in front of us. A man who was paying for the sins he had wrought on himself and he was going to die alone in that apartment.

  “John McNeill, this is Sean Riley McNeill. He is your grandson. Sean, this is your grandfather. He is…” I started. It was a tough sentence for me to finish. The words didn’t want to come up, but I forced them anyway. “He’s my father.”

  John grinned with his long, yellowed teeth, and propped my boy on his lap, holding him up by the armpits. Sean reached out to touch the old man’s white hair.

  “Da da…da da da,” he said.

  “Solid,” John said, testing Sean’s weight. “A good solid boy. And handsome too.”

  He looks like his mother.

  He cupped my boy and tucked him into a seated position on his lap, facing us. He held his arms around Sean with his thumbs up like he was signaling to a fighter pilot that it was okay to take off. My kid grabbed each thumb like they were amazing new toys. John laughed and wheezed and laughed again. Old hat, I thought. He may have, at least at the beginning, been a good father. That was not a Rockwell scene—not by any stretch, but it felt natural enough. It was messy, just like life.

  In a minute, John’s face crumpled from wrinkled joy to wrinkled worry and then into something that reminded me of a young girl who constantly asked her boyfriend if he was mad at her. When he spoke, it was with effort and just a hint of sadness. He cleared his throat.

  “I’m very glad you all stopped by, but I have to ask…what brought you?”

  Vicky looked at me, a look that said I needed to do the talking. It said this was about me healing, and about John healing. I u
nderstood that much from her eyes. I looked down at my son and knew the example needed to be set early and often. If I was going to be better than my…If I was to be better than John at the art of fatherhood and being a husband, there was no time like the present.

  “We were at a funeral. Do you remember my friend Matt?” I said.

  He thought for a moment.

  “Oh yeah. Sure I do. The Chambers boy, right? Lived just up the road. Did one of his parents pass?”

  “Bob and Sandy. No, John. No, Matt did. In a car accident.”

  He winced. “Damn. That’s a hell of a thing.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I remember when they lost their boy Sean. It was right after...”

  He didn’t finish but we knew what he was thinking. Right after Robin. Vicky patted him on the hand.

  He continued. “What a mess. Hell of a thing to lose both of your children.”

  “Yeah,” I said, surprised to hear something human come from him, something I’d just spoken to my wife about.

  “Any wife or kids?”

  “No. He was single,” I replied.

  “Well, that’s a good thing and a bad thing I suppose. None to carry on,” was his response.

  I agreed. No children to grieve for him, and no widow left behind, but also the end of the line for that branch of the family tree. It was something I hadn’t considered.

  “Yep, this little guy is my immortality. You asked why now, Todd? Why I decided to hang around and not cash it in. This little guy, I guess. That’s why. I hoped one day to meet him and knew the only way was as you said, to quit the way I was.”

  It was the only correct answer, and it felt like the start of something new.

  “Well then, you’ll be glad to know that we’re pregnant again,” Vicky said.

  His eyes burned brightly again and he flashed his pearly yellows.

  “Magnificent,” he said. “Little girl this time?”

  “That’s what my mother thinks,” she said.

  “Well, it’s settled then. Grandmothers know these things. Got a name picked out yet?”

  “We just found out,” Vicky started. “I’m only seven weeks—“

  I interrupted her. “Robin. Boy or girl, I think. Robin.”

  John’s smile faded and for just a moment he appeared hurt. He craned his neck around and Sean looked up at him. Again his voice had that raspy about-to-cry quality, but he didn’t squirt a single tear. Not then.

  “What do you think, boy?” he said.

  Sean blew a wet raspberry at him and then giggled and John McNeill laughed heartily, then coughed with equal enthusiasm. When he recovered, he patted my hand.

  “I think that settles it. Robin is a fine name, and a fine tribute,” he said.

  That was all we said about my sister. We didn’t mention my mother at all. Either way, my son and my future baby would have two grandfathers and I was good with that. I never have called him dad again. But the oldest demons—the ones that had done the most damage—were gone for good.