The Best American Essays 2016

by Jonathan Franzen

  Notes

  1. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 237.

  2. The number of casualties in these conflicts vary somewhat by source, but the numbers here, which include civilian deaths, represent a general consensus.

  3. “PTSD: A Growing Epidemic,” NIH MedLinePlus 4, no. 1 (Winter 2009), http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/magazine/issues/winter09/articles/winter09pgl0-14.html.

  4. Janet Kemp and Robert Bossarte, “Suicide Data Report, 2012,” U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, http://www.va.gov/opa/docs/Suicide-Data-Report-2012-final.pdf, 15.

  5. Ibid.

  LEE MARTIN

  Bastards

  FROM The Georgia Review

  The summer before I started high school, my parents said we were going home. We’d spent the past six years in a suburb of Chicago where my mother had taken a teaching job, but now that she was retiring, we’d decided to move back downstate. Instead of remodeling the house on our farm outside Sumner, we started looking in town. My parents ended up buying a modest frame house with a front porch and clapboard siding—a well-kept home.

  “Now this is all right,” my father said. “This is just fine.”

  He insisted on vigilance, perhaps because when I was barely a year old his life, and my mother’s and mine, irrevocably turned because of his own carelessness. On a November day in 1956, he lost both of his hands in a farming accident. He was harvesting corn when the shucking box on his picker clogged. Instead of taking the time to shut down the power take-off, he tried to clear the corn from the box while its snapping rollers were still turning. The rollers caught his hand, and when he tried to free it with his other one, the rollers took it too. As long as I could remember, he’d worn prostheses, or as he called them, his “hooks.”

  Our new house sat on a double lot. My father plowed the second lot and put in a large vegetable garden, then lined a row of peach saplings down the center of the backyard. We tilled and hoed and weeded. We watered and mowed and raked. My mother’s flowerbeds were lush with peonies, zinnias, marigolds; she planted iris bulbs, tulips, daffodils. Our grass might have been full of clover, as most yards were, but we kept it mowed and trimmed.

  A family was known by how well it took care of what it owned, my father said. On the farm, we could let things slip a bit if we got too busy to keep it all shipshape. There, our house sat at the end of a long lane and was invisible from the road.

  “That won’t fly in town,” he said. “Here, people are always watching.” Evenings that summer, he walked through the backyard to check on the peach saplings and the garden. Then he sat on the front porch in a lawn chair and watched the night come on. In the twilight, he must have taken a last survey of our well-tended yard and felt the pride of having everything in order.

  We were making a fresh start after those years in Chicagoland, where our lives had felt odd to us. My father was no longer a farmer. He didn’t work at all and had a hard time knowing what to do with his days. My mother, a soft-spoken, timid woman, was ill-suited for her life among people who were bolder and more assertive; in fact, we’d gone to Chicago because my mother had lost her teaching job in Sumner when the school board thought she wasn’t a tough enough disciplinarian. I, on the other hand, started to think too much of myself. I had entered my teenage years headstrong and ready to test my father’s limits. We had raucous fights during which we shouted and swore and otherwise behaved like the heathens our neighbors in the apartment building surely believed us to be.

  “I’ll take you down a notch or two,” he often said.

  We ended up in confrontations that sometimes turned physical. We shoved at each other. He whipped my legs with his belt. We screamed at each other. We said vile things.

  “Mercy,” my mother sometimes said. “Just listen to you.”

  My father and I often ended up in tears and then retreated to the stony silence of our shame.

  That was what we were trying to put behind us when we came back downstate. In our new house, though we never spoke of this, my father and I promised ourselves we’d be better.

  We had a detached garage where he kept his Ford F-100 pickup truck. One night, someone let himself into the garage under cover of darkness and walked out with some of my father’s tools.

  “Thieves,” he said. He padlocked the garage doors. “Let ’em try to get in there now.” He banged his hooks together. “The bastards,” he said.

  This all happened in our small town of Sumner, Illinois. Population: 1,000. A town of working-class people in the southeastern part of the state, some 250 miles from Chicago. A town that prospered from the sweat of farmers like my father, and oil field roughnecks, and refinery workers, and those who worked in the various factories in neighboring towns. We were blue-collar folks, and we knew the value of hard work and what it took to have something worth having.

  The three of us wanted to have kinder lives, and for a time in our new house, we did. Summer nights, my father and I sat at our kitchen table, listening to a Cardinals game on the radio. My mother popped corn and pared apples. We drank Pepsi-Colas and let ourselves imagine that such evenings could become our regular come and go.

  My aunt and uncle and cousin paid us frequent visits. We had supper, and then we brought out the cards and played pitch, a bidding game that pitted a pair of partners against another pair. As we played, we engaged in good-humored teasing and taunting, and I reveled in the fact that my father and I could enjoy picking at each other the way family members did who didn’t live in anger. A dig here or there surely wouldn’t do any harm.

  One night I made a bonehead move, leading with the king of hearts before the ace had been played. My father, who was partnered with my cousin, shook his head and said to him, “I can’t believe that move. Can you, Phillip? Did someone just open the door and let Stupid walk in?”

  Because he couldn’t hold the cards in his hook, he kept them laid out and hidden behind the raised cover of a Look magazine. My aunt held up the magazine cover so no one else could see them. He would tell her which card to play and she would put it on the table—but when I led that king of hearts, he used the point of his hook to slide out the ace and take the trick.

  My uncle tried to ease the sting by saying, “That’s just one trick. That’s nothing to worry about at all. Let’s see what the old man does now. Let’s see if he’s got the cards.”

  Maybe everything would have been all right if I’d said, Yeah, old man. Show us what you’ve got. But then my father looked at me and said, “You’ve got to pay attention. You’ve got to know what’s been played and what hasn’t. You don’t see Phillip making any goofs like that. Now get with it, or no one will want you as his partner anymore.”

  My aunt said, “Oh, leave that boy alone.” Her defense of me only called attention to my shame. “I’m sure he’s doing the best he can. No need to ride him like that. After all, it’s just a game.”

  But it wasn’t just a game. It was another reminder of all that boiled between my father and me, all that we tried to keep locked up on nights like this when we were with people, all that bad blood. My face was hot. An ache came into my throat and I choked back tears. I kept my head lowered and my eyes on my cards. I waited for the game to continue, but for what seemed like the longest time it didn’t. The clock on the wall hummed. The refrigerator’s compressor kicked on. My uncle cleared his throat.

  I realized then that everyone was being cautious about what they said. My aunt and uncle and cousin knew my father’s temper. They must have suspected that he and I were in the habit of knocking our heads together, and no one wanted to be the one to say the next thing, the thing that might cause us to explode.

  Finally my father returned to the game and pushed a card out into the center of the table. Even he could tell we were on the brink of something dangerous and was trying to get us back on safe ground.

  The one thing my father and I shared was shame. I wish I hadn’t been so sensitive. I
wish he hadn’t been so rough. I wish he’d shut down that power take-off and made it impossible for his accident to happen. I wish he’d never had to put on those hooks and the anger that came with them. I wish he hadn’t been so stupid in that cornfield. But I never said any of these things to him. I never told him I was sorry for all that he suffered. We never talked about his accident, which was one more thing we tried to contain and put away from us. Not until years later, after my father was dead, did my aunt tell me stories about him and the rage he brought into our home after his accident—stories I couldn’t recall because I was so young at the time.

  “Oh, it was terrible,” she said. “He’d rant and rave. It was like he was out of his head.”

  I did remember the white packets of phenobarbital tablets, prescribed those days as a sedative, that I found in the medicine chest at our farmhouse years later, when I was still a small boy.

  “That accident,” my aunt said. “It changed him. It changed his whole life.”

  If it hadn’t been for my mother that night around our kitchen table, who knows what might have happened.

  What did she do? Nothing dramatic. She came into our kitchen and stood behind me. She laid her hand on my shoulder. She held it there, not saying a word, and finally my uncle took his turn and played a card, and then my cousin, and then I did the same, and the game went on, and all the while my mother was there, her hand the lightest thing I could imagine at that moment, so light that I barely felt her touching me at all, but I knew she was—and that, as it would so many times thereafter, made all the difference.

  “Who wants cake and ice cream?” she finally said, and just like that we went on.

  A few months later, in the days of short light and icicles hanging from the eaves, my father noticed footprints in the snow around our house—the snow that gave away the voyeur. We tracked him around the perimeter of our house, this man who wore Red Wing boots. We could see the outline of the wing on the heels pressed down into the snow and the blurred letters of words we knew were Red Wing Shoes. The man had walked around our house, turning at every window so he could look inside.

  My father and I both owned Red Wing boots, as did a number of other boys and men in our town. I wore size ten, my father a size nine; whoever had left the prints in the snow wore a much larger size. How were we ever to know who it was?

  “Well, it was someone,” my father said, “and he better hope I never find out who he is.”

  On nights when I didn’t have basketball practice—game nights—I came home after school and went to my room, where I stretched out on my bed, a quilt over me, and read until my eyes grew heavy and the blue dusk began to deepen into night. Most of the time I was alone in the house. In her retirement, my mother had taken a job at the local nursing home, where she worked as a housekeeper, a cook, a laundress. My father was usually either doing something at our farm or loafing in the barbershop before making his way home.

  One evening shortly after my father had discovered the tracks, the house was, as usual, still. The only sounds were the roof joists popping as the sun went down and the frigid temperatures of night set in, and the wall furnace clicking on and off, the gas jets roaring to life. I made myself cozy in that silence. I didn’t have to be on guard, worried over the next thing I might do or say to provoke my father. I was free to settle into a sound and peaceful sleep.

  But now I had the eerie feeling of knowing that someone had stood at our windows and looked into our house. I hated thinking of what he must have seen—my fights with my father, my mother kneeling each night before bed to say a silent prayer, the times when my father called upon me to help him with something: to settle his eyeglasses on his face, to hold a drinking glass so he could close his hook around it, to unzip his pants so he could use the bathroom, to zip them back up when he was done.

  Those things were the hardest to imagine a stranger seeing, those private times when my mother was at work and my father had needs only I could fulfill. His voice was shy when he made these requests. He became even more timid as he passed into his old age, on the occasions I had to bathe him or clean him after he’d used the toilet. Our eyes would never meet, embarrassed as we both were. We’d be on the other side of our anger by then, but our language would still be the language of old foes, wary and reserved. The language of men who mistrusted our right to this love born from scars, considering it of questionable origin.

  I wasn’t sure I wanted my father to find out who was watching us. Part of me cringed to think of our privacy violated, but another part of me wondered whether the fact that someone was watching would keep us on the straight and narrow, make us kinder to each other. For several days running, no anger rose up between us. I came home from basketball practice to the supper my mother had kept warm for me, and as I ate, my father sat at the table with me. We talked in normal tones about how the team was playing, the games that were coming up, how I was doing in school. My father had always taken an interest in my athletics and my schoolwork, but now there was no criticism in what he had to offer, no “you can do better.” We were just a father and a son chatting on a winter’s night, and when I’d finished my supper I went to my room to do my homework and then later came out to watch television. My mother and father watched too, and we were just a family like that, finally switching out our lights and lying down to sleep.

  One night the movie In Cold Blood was on television. I sat in front of our black-and-white Zenith set, totally immersed in the world of 1950s rural Kansas and the story of the murder of the Clutters on a November night in 1959. They’d been a family—a mother and father and a boy and a girl. They’d been living their lives without a thought that something like this might happen. The mother belonged to the local garden club; the father was a successful farmer. The girl was busy with her boyfriend, the way girls are at that age; the boy played on his high school basketball team just like me. The depiction of the killers moving through the dark house set me on edge, and when they bound and gagged the Clutters and then shot them one by one, I felt that this was all too real, as it had been of course on that November night when Perry Smith and Dick Hickock—not the actors Robert Blake and Scott Wilson, who portrayed them—had committed those brutal killings.

  I went to bed that night unable to close my eyes, afraid to sleep. I kept seeing the Clutters, hands and feet tied with rope, tape over their mouths. I kept hearing the shotgun blasts. Then I thought I saw a shadow move across my bedroom curtains. I imagined I heard the squeak of boots on snow. I even swore I heard a faint tapping on the glass.

  Who was out there, or wasn’t it anyone at all? I was too afraid to lift the edge of the curtain so I could look outside. I didn’t sleep at all that night, one of the longest nights of my life, and in the morning there were no fresh prints in the snow.

  But something had changed for me. Even now, it’s hard for me to say what it was. Something, perhaps, about what it cost to live in fear, to live with the prospect of violence, to always be on guard against it. I’d acquired some knowledge of all that my father gave up when he had his accident: the joy and ease that came from living in the present moment, with no thought about what haunted him from the past, no dread of what might be waiting ahead of him. That’s what I’d inherited from him: this unsteady hold on life, this mistrust, this suspicion. Something about watching In Cold Blood and then later imagining someone at my bedroom window had made me understand what I’d long felt but always lacked words to call by name. I was imprisoned, locked up inside my father’s rage, held in a place I didn’t want to be but didn’t know how to escape.

  On a night soon after my In Cold Blood scare, our back door opened. My father and I were in the living room with the television on, but we heard the door, and we both turned toward the kitchen, where my mother was finishing the dishes.

  I heard her turn off the water at the sink, and I knew she was gathering up the hem of her apron so she could dry her hands as I’d seen her do so many times. I heard footsteps on the linoleu
m floor, heavy steps I knew didn’t belong to my mother but to whoever had opened our door and stepped inside—a man, from the sound of those steps, a man who was wearing heavy work boots.

  I heard my mother’s measured voice. “What is it that you want?”

  My father was already pushing himself up from his chair, the evening paper he’d been reading sliding to the floor.

  I felt cold air on my legs, and I knew the intruder had left the back door standing open.

  “We don’t have anything you want,” my mother said, her voice rising just a bit. “Are you lost?”

  Her question pierced me. Yes, I wanted to call out. Yes, I’m lost.

  But I didn’t, of course. I got up from my chair. I followed my father into the kitchen, toward whatever danger might be waiting there.

  The intruder was a boy of maybe twenty years of age, a tall, skinny boy with a CPO jacket too short for his long arms. The knobs of his wrists were blanched white from the cold. His face was red and inflamed with acne. He wore a pair of Red Wing boots with stains—oil? blood?—darkening the toes. His wild eyes darted about, first to my mother, then to my father, then over my father’s shoulder to me.