Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things

by Amy Dickinson

  I nodded. “Sell everything,” I said. “And keep an eye on the nurses.”

  For much of my life I have been afraid of my handsome father. He was physically strong, for one thing, and because he was volatile and unpredictable, when I was a child he seemed capable of violence. Watching him manhandle our livestock was like witnessing someone always on the verge of losing control. He would push and shove our cows and sometimes beat their backs with a wooden cane when they started heading the wrong way in the barn. Buck could hoist a 150-pound calf into the back of a pickup truck and walk into the barn balancing 85-pound bales of hay from each hand. He had bulging forearms, like Popeye.

  My mother always claimed that Buck’s most lethal weapon was his big mouth, and as I grew older, I decided this was probably true. About half of my encounters with him over the years had ended with me telling him to stop saying something he was in the midst of saying. He made mean-spirited comments about my mother and her family, my siblings, and other members of his own extended family. His working theory seemed to be that as long as he wasn’t trashing you to your face, you shouldn’t have a problem. But listening to someone unfairly put down people you love is sort of like watching someone beat a defenseless Holstein. You know that the person doing it could do it to you if they felt like it.

  Buck mainly chose to keep his distance from his children, and that came as a relief to me. As the child of a troublemaker, I possess some of the characteristics common to children of addicts or alcoholics: I am protective of myself and of others. I’m a worrier. Over the years, my fear of Buck seems to have morphed into an anxiety that I am somehow like him. I’ve made many life choices trying to prove to myself how very unlike my father I am, all the while worrying that I will turn out to have had his disease all along. Every time I act like a jerk at a party, telling someone loudly what’s for, or going on for too long about myself, I think, Oh no, I’ve inherited the jackass gene. I’ve compensated for our poor father-daughter relationship by using Buck’s instability as a way to proactively highlight my own relative success. It’s easy to feel like a winner when compared to someone who once sank everything into speculating on sugar beets.

  When I was ten years old, Buck announced his decision to devote all of our arable land to the magical sugar beet (promoted as the cash crop of the future by a seed salesman he’d probably met in a bar). Buck’s scheme to switch from growing corn to sugar beets, like so many of his ideas, sounded like a disaster in advance, was a disaster in the making, and had completely predictable consequences. Well into the growing season, when no sugar beet plants were visible, my sisters and I were sent into the field with a picture of a sugar beet plant in hopes of finding a hidden pocket of beets somewhere within the weeds. In the fifty acres our father had devoted to this crop, not one sugar beet plant germinated. Buck did not become the Sugar Beet Baron of Upstate New York. His field of dreams grew into a field of weeds, and that winter we had no corn for the cows.

  Given my sporadic contact with Buck, my knowledge of him was confined to him reporting on his latest scheme and then waiting several months to find out how things had turned out. There was the 50,000-gallon tank he purchased with the idea to fill it with oil (this is how he would beat the Arabs at their own game), the plan to turn his farm into a hunting camp, the idea to corner the local market on honey, and the latest woman he planned to marry. To me, none of my father’s various life plans ever seemed plausible or even possible. He could pitch something as if it were the best idea in the world, and even during the rapid-fire recitation, I’d think, Oh no, this will not end well.

  Because he combined a sense of daring with poor choices and perennial bad luck, Buck has led an anecdote-rich life. My friend Elizabeth used to prompt me to rattle off the names of Buck’s wives: Jane, Joan, Jeanne, Jean, and Pat. He’s the only father among my friends dragged into court (at the age of seventy-two) for shooting a bear. Well into old age, he continued to behave as if he were invincible, and as far as I could tell, he was.

  Seven years ago, Bruno and I were having a little Fourth of July picnic on our porch. Jane was there, shielded from the summer breeze with a lap robe over her wheelchair. Her two sisters, Millie and Jean, were also with us. Rachel, Tim, and their children were on the way. My cell phone rang. It was Rachel. “Watch out; Dad’s coming your way,” she said. He had stopped by her house in Freeville, and she had a feeling he was now driving the six miles toward the house where Bruno and I lived with our children. Buck had a habit of doing “drive-bys,” where about twice a year he would simply show up, unannounced. He’d stay for a half hour or so, talk incessantly about himself, and then leave as suddenly as he had arrived. Rachel was waving a warning flag. I said I’d text her when the coast was clear.

  I didn’t particularly want my father to see my mother on that day. There was no bad blood left between them, and on the very few occasions over the years they had seen one another, they were always cordial. But I didn’t want him to see how much her health had declined. I knew that if he saw her in her wheelchair, he would say something ruinous. Something along the lines of, “Jesus Christ, Jane, what the hell happened to you?”

  I saw a vintage powder-blue Mustang convertible pull up our quiet country road and turn into the long driveway. Bruno and I excused ourselves from our company and met him in the driveway. Buck bounded out of the car. “Hey ho, kid,” he shouted. As usual, I was wondering if my father remembered my name. This was not a function of his age (he was seventy-eight), but more my experience of a lifetime of his sporadic attention. I knew for certain that Buck didn’t know my middle name, or my birthday, or where I had gone to college. He did not acknowledge the existence of my daughter or stepdaughters. He only seemed certain about what I did for a living, because this gave him currency at roadhouses and diners, where he spun hangover lies and engaged in braggy big talk about his youngest daughter’s career. My column appeared in his local newspaper and other newspapers along his tangled travel routes, and he could therefore prove my bona fides as a chip off of the old blockhead.

  Buck’s hearing had declined, and every encounter was high decibel. Bruno and he shook hands, and we hollered our greetings. “What’s up, Dad?” I asked. This is the sort of open-ended question that could bring on virtually any answer, ranging from a recitation on the scourge of honeybee mites (at that time he was working as a beehive inspector) to “I just got married.”

  “Well, I’m moving,” Buck said. The year before, his most recent wife, Pat, had died after a long illness. Two of the four women my father had married since he’d abandoned my mother in 1973 had died on him (as he put it). Though he operated on the “cut and run” end of the relationship spectrum, and I don’t assume he had remained faithful to any of his wives, he seemed to have cared tenderly for both women through their final illnesses.

  My sisters and I attended Pat’s funeral in Pennsylvania, and at the post-funeral luncheon at the church, my father turned to me and shouted, “WELL, NOW I’M RICH!” Pat had property and an insurance settlement of some kind, which she had somehow managed to protect during their marriage of several years. Pat had squirreled away her money, and now it was Buck’s. On hearing this, I reflexively glanced around the crowded church dining room, pushed my paper plate of Jell-O salad a little bit closer to my father, and attempted to shush him. He told me the amount of money he thought he would be receiving, which was indeed a windfall—especially for someone like Buck, who lived his life like a character in a George Strait song and who seldom planned beyond his most recent payday.

  There in the church I asked him what he was going to do. He said, “Well, the first thing is, I think I’m going to buy a kayak.” I pictured my elderly father being swept down the Allegheny River and wondered who among his children would be called upon to identify his bloated body. I feared it might be me.

  I told him the money could be gone very quickly if he wasn’t careful. I urged him to visit a financial planner, which I knew he would never do. In my fa
ther’s world, planners and advisors are for people who don’t know what they’re doing. Uncertainty, like monogamy, was a concept he had never embraced.

  In the year since Pat’s funeral, Buck seemed to have fought off her other relatives and gotten ahold of and spent his inheritance, hence the cherry Mustang and the plan to move on.

  “Wow, Dad, where are you moving to?” I asked him. He reached into the car and pulled out a large folding map of the northern United States and Canada. He pointed to a large blob in the middle of enormous Lake Huron—his gnarled finger landed on an island called Manitoulin. He said he had bought a farm and had decided to raise sheep there. I was surprised that my father was moving to Canada. Throughout my life, he had made it very clear that he didn’t like foreigners.

  Buck pulled out some snapshots of his new property. It was pretty, with rolling hills and giant round hay bales, the sort of landscape he was always drawn to.

  Manitoulin Island, he explained, is the largest island with freshwater lakes in the world. Some of these lakes on Manitoulin Island are so large that the lakes also have islands on them. One of these islands, within a lake on Manitoulin Island, is the largest island in a lake, on an island in a lake in the world. I tried to follow this world-within-worlds concept, which sounded more like a marijuana fever dream than a geographic reality. He pulled out a close-up map of Manitoulin and pointed it out.

  I asked Buck when he was moving, and he told me he was shoving off and leaving Pennsylvania for Canada the next day. “Whoa, so soon?” I asked.

  “Well, I’ve got my goose and my cat all packed up, and I’m ready to go,” he said.

  My father is the world’s most ardent cat man. I didn’t even ask about the goose. There are some questions you don’t really want the answer to.

  “What, Dad, no woman?” I asked him. I’d never known Buck to stay unattached for long.

  “Naaaaah,” my father replied in his distinctively nasal Upstate drawl. “I’ll get one out there.”

  And then Buck drove away. In the time it takes to pour fresh glasses of iced tea, Bruno and I had returned to our guests on the porch.

  Once Buck moved to Canada, his drive-bys were curtailed, and aside from the occasional note or one-sentence postcard from him (sample: “The geese are flying overhead”), I had no idea how he was doing. However, my cousin Tom spent several months living with Buck on Manitoulin Island, and Tom reported back the predictable details. Buck slept on a rollaway bed next to the smoky woodstove in the basement of his small, dirty, and cluttered house. He ate cornflakes for breakfast and a can of tomato soup for lunch. He shopped from the expired food section of the local supermarket. He had two tractors, a truck, an ATV, and a wood splitter. He spent a lot of time cutting and splitting wood. He had three cats, all named “Kitty.” He corresponded by mail with several women, whose names he got from the classifieds section of farming magazines. Occasionally he left the island and traveled great distances to meet them.

  It was about four years after our meeting in the driveway until I saw Buck again. He was lying broken and near death in a hospital in Buffalo, after a strange one-car accident that happened in the middle of the night along a state road near Buffalo. The state police found his license (expired) and managed to get hold of Rachel. The police told her Buck’s body had been found down an embankment, when a passerby noticed a pickup truck toppled over on the icy roadway at 3:00 a.m. The police couldn’t estimate how long he had been there. It was February, and the temperature was 10 degrees. The truck Buck was driving was registered in someone else’s name and didn’t appear to belong to him.

  Buck wasn’t expected to survive. My sisters and I exchanged tentative phone calls about what to do. None of us seemed to want to claim him. Anne, a master of detail and paperwork, immediately set about trying to figure out what had happened. The last any of us knew, he was farming sheep in Canada. Anne managed to locate a neighbor of his on Manitoulin, who said that our father had a habit of taking off and leaving his livestock to fend for themselves. The neighbor said my father’s neglect bordered on criminal and that several of his sheep had died in the field. Anne arranged with the neighbor to get the sheep fed. She contacted a funeral home.

  I said I would go to see him.

  Buck was in an acute care ICU in a very large and busy metropolitan hospital. I drove the three hours from Freeville, fretting the whole way about what I would find when I got there. In my whole life, encompassing my childhood and the various random encounters I’d had with him over the years, I had never actually wanted to see him. I especially didn’t want to see him now. I sat in the hospital’s large parking lot, knowing that I could turn around and drive back home and still get some residual credit for giving the tiniest crap about my father. Bruno was urging me to do “the right thing” but wisely refused to say what the right thing was.

  I forced myself to enter the hospital, walk through the chaos of the emergency department, and up to the ICU. All the while I was thinking that I could turn around and leave, able now to truthfully say that I had “visited” without actually doing so.

  Down every hospital hallway, I told myself that I could turn around and go back home. This is how I force myself to do things I don’t want to do. Most people give themselves pep talks to urge themselves forward, but I’m the opposite. When I’m faced with a terrible task, I tell myself over and over that I can quit anytime I want to. I guess I’m like my old man in that way. And yet, unlike him, I’m not much of a quitter. Ultimately, I almost always decide to press on.

  My siblings and I all seemed to share a fear that we would somehow end up responsible for Buck. It seemed the final ironic injustice that our mother, who had been so steadfastly in our corner and who had lived so well, would die first, while our father, who had been such a perennial problem as he careened through life, remained healthy and vigorous into old age. During one meeting with my sisters, we each shared our private fear that Buck would land on our doorstep. Each of us had worked up an imaginary scenario where he would show up at our house and we would have to take him in. Knowing that he sometimes traveled with a goose in tow made this prospect even less appealing. Yet I knew that this was unlikely. Depending on his children didn’t fit with how he seemed to move through the world. In old age, especially, Buck seemed like an old cowpoke whose wanderings were a way of life.

  The ICU was quiet, like a library. I was led toward the glassed-in room where my father lay. I double-checked the name to make sure it was him because the body in the bed did not resemble him—or really anyone. His head was bandaged and swollen, almost twice its normal size. His face was black and blue. A trach tube was attached to his neck. He was in an induced coma and had been for several days.

  I sat in a chair just outside his room, looking in. The nurse told me I could go into the room, but I said no, I was already close enough. His injuries were extensive: He had several broken ribs, a back injury, and swelling in his frontal and temporal lobes. The doctor said, “He’s a fighter.” I had to agree that this was one of his defining characteristics. I asked to see a social worker.

  The social worker was in her mid-twenties. She asked, “Are you his next of kin?”

  “Um, I’m his daughter. But I’m not sure if I’m his next of kin,” I said.

  She asked me if he was married, and I told her that I wasn’t sure; I didn’t think so, but it was entirely possible. “There’s, um, some estrangement. But he does have children,” I said.

  She then told me that two older women had been to the hospital over the last few days, each claiming to be engaged or related to him. “Yes, that sounds about right; you can expect more of that,” I told her. I contained my amazement that my father continued to find women who wanted him, and yet I knew that his practice was to lead with his imaginary assets and brag about his property, and insinuate or flat-out lie about his wealth. Perhaps this made him attractive.

  Buck survived his car accident. He was in a coma for three weeks and then graduated fr
om one level of care to the next over the following two months. I visited him most weeks, and the visits got easier. I moved my chair closer and closer to his bed. I was genuinely happy when he recognized me and when they finally removed the trach tube so he could talk. He had no memory of what had happened and wasn’t able to say why he was on the road near Buffalo at 3:00 a.m. driving someone else’s vehicle.

  After my hospital visits, I would call my sisters and my aunt Anne to fill them in on his condition. Aunt Anne is my father’s older sister. She was one of my mother’s oldest friends. After Buck left our family, she maintained her close relationship with us. Watching my mother and her former sister-in-law maintain their close and generous friendship taught me a lot about how people could pull close (and stay close), if they wanted to. Like me, my aunt seemed mystified by Buck and was not able to explain him to me over the years, but at least she could commiserate. We periodically warned each other not to give him money.

  After two months, my father was ready to leave the hospital. He was too impaired now to live on his own, and I found a nursing home near his former home in Pennsylvania that would take him. When I talked to the home’s manager on the phone, she said with a knowing sigh, “Oh yes, I know Buck.” She had been his neighbor. Even though she probably knew better, she agreed to take him on.

  My father has lived in the nursing home for two years. Despite a lifetime of smoking, drinking, and overall terrible choices, his impressive vigor has kept him going. He has engaged in a stripped-down version of his familiar dynamic with people—getting into nasty and foul-mouthed disputes with at least one resident, making petty and sometimes cruel statements about others, and ingratiating himself to the female aides.

  I drive to Pennsylvania about once a month to see him. Sometimes Bruno or Rachel comes with me, and a couple of times my aunt Anne has met me there. We have brief awkward meetings and engage in shouted chitchat with my father, who is usually in a wheelchair. Buck has cycled through bouts of teary depression, where he can’t seem to explain how he feels, or why. His doctor affirmed this and told me that depression can come on after a head injury. During one visit, I sought out one of his favorite aides, who walked me down the hall and explained her theory. She said that as he slowly recovered from his brain injury, he was now trapped into thinking about his life. “He can’t just jump into his truck and drive off,” she said. “He’s feeling things. He’s feeling all the feels.”