So I worked hard. No hunger strikes. Good grades, even with no pay. A reasonable approximation of the required weekly chore hours. And I followed him into the profession.
The father of my boyhood was small, but strong and wiry, able to lash a golf ball farther than any man his size. Over the years, he’d developed a slight belly, but, beyond that, when I’d seen him six months ago he looked fit. There was no reason to think he wouldn’t live forever.
He looked better than I had expected. But I could see the illness was already taking its toll. He was thinner. He had just begun to lose his hair in patches. He was already wasting away.
“Dad?”
“Son!” he said with genuine delight. He got up and put his left hand on my right shoulder and weakly shook my hand. “Where’s Delana?”
“Back at your place. I’ll give you a lift over there. How are you?”
He waved his hand. “Later.” He motioned me to a chair. We sat, his desk between us. “I’m good. I had a transfusion, a temporary fix. Red blood cells were down to nothing. But now I feel a lot better. How about you?”
“Okay. Worried about you.”
“I’m going to be fine,” he said dismissively. “I’ve already started chemo. Gonna need to get a wig, though.”
“How long do you have to do chemo for?”
“You mean, ‘For how long do you have to do chemo?’ Ending a sentence with a preposition is a practice up with which I will not put, to paraphrase Winston Churchill.”
“Thank you, Professor Harper. For how long do you have to do chemo?”
“Six weeks. It’s a new kind of chemo. If it’s working, we’ll keep going. If it’s not, they’ll try something else. It turns out the best guy in the business is here at the university hospital. They’ll throw whatever they have at it.”
We moved on to his journalism law course and the recent Supreme Court rulings about freedom of the press. (“There’s a reason the First Amendment is first,” Dad groused. “Those reactionaries out there haven’t figured that out yet.”) We talked about what it was like to teach. (“It’s like performing for a parade,” Dad said. “The parade stops in front of you, you give your performance and the parade moves on. When the parade stops again, you give another performance.”) We talked about the current crop of students and the ones who might make good interns for the Charlotte Times. (“There’s a junior, Lulu Sharpe. I like her energy. On a dare she once bit me on the ass at a J-school party. I like that.”)
I was feeling better. There was life in the old boy yet. It was reassuring to talk about normal things, about journalism and interns and the Supreme Court.
But I wanted more. Dad and I were just skipping across the surface. It was a conversation that could have occurred between any two people who had just met. I wanted something more fundamental, a meaningful talk between father and son. A discussion of death could be avoided today, but it was still the elephant in the room that wasn’t being talked about. We were running out of time.
Walker Burns has a saying about what a reporter needs to do when confronted with a distasteful task. “Stick your hand into the wound,” he would say, meaning don’t shy away, no matter how unpleasant or difficult. Confront the worst. That’s what I wanted. I wanted our conversation to be real. I wanted it to be about the important things. I wanted to stick my hand into the wound.
“Dad, how do you feel about the multiple myeloma?”
“Well, it makes me feel tired, like it’s hard to get my breath.”
“No, I mean how do you feel about having it. What do you think about it?”
“Think about it?” Dad shifted and cleared his throat. “What do I think about it?”
I sighed. I don’t know why my family became reporters and writers. My grandfather was once quoted as saying, “It beats plowing.” Maybe it was genetic, but whatever the reason, a lot of us had turned out to be pretty good reporters and writers. What we didn’t do much of, my mother used to say, was communicate.
I heard the squeak of the wooden floor in the hallway, followed by a quick knock on my father’s open office door. A young brunette breezed in wearing tight jeans and a too-small T-shirt. She feigned surprise.
“Oh, Professor Harper. I didn’t know I was interrupting.”
“Not at all,” Dad replied sweetly. Not at all indeed, I thought to myself. In my day it would have been, “Young man, you’re interrupting.” At minimum.
“Professor Harper, I have my paper. I know it was due last week. I’m sorry it’s late.” She literally batted her eyes.
“That’s okay,” he smiled. “The most important thing is that it’s good.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. This was the man who used to say that anyone could do a good job if they took all the time in the world. The true measure of excellence, he would insist, was getting the job done in the time allotted for it. Or in less.
“Oh, it’s good.” As if to assure him she grabbed his hand and drew it close to her body. “It’s five pages. I know you wanted ten but I ran out of time. It’s a good five.”
“I’m sure it is,” Dad answered gently. And then, remembering that I was there, he said, “I’m sorry, Darla. I should have introduced you. This is Matt Harper, my son. Darla Clark.” No mention of the fact that I was in the profession.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said.
“I’m so pleased to meet you,” she gushed. “You are so lucky. Your father is the sweetest nicest most understanding man in the whole world.”
“I can see why you feel that way.”
She kissed my father on the cheek, said her good-byes and whirled out of the room.
When she had gone I asked, “So does everyone get that kind of break from Professor Harper or just the cute coeds?”
He smiled. “So young. So pretty. And a head so completely filled with air.”
“I can’t believe you let her get away with it,” I said. “The thing was late and half the assigned length. You would have scalped us for that as kids.”
“You would have deserved it.”
“She didn’t?”
“There’s a difference. She’s paying, or her parents are. If she doesn’t take advantage, it’s her loss. She’s a supposedly responsible adult. It doesn’t reflect on me.”
“Whereas, we did.”
“Whereas, you did.”
I decided to plunge the hand into the wound. “Dad, are you happy about the way I turned out?” It was a long-shot opportunity to get him to open up but it was worth trying.
“Reasonably so.”
No score.
“Before she came in, we were talking about the multiple myeloma. You were telling me how you feel about having it.”
“Displeased. But there’s not much I can do about it.”
“Why you?”
He put his hands behind his neck, elbows out and leaned back in his chair. “I understand that’s a common reaction but I don’t look at it that way. We’re all going to die of something. I’m always amused by these Centers for Disease Control statistics—how we’ve pushed down the mortality rate for this disease or that. For Chrissakes, it’s a zero sum game. Push down the death rate for cancer and guess what? The rate goes up for something else. No one gets out of life alive. Multiple myeloma may get me. But you know what? Maybe it will be something else.”
“Well, I’m not worried about it,” I lied. “You’re going to be around for a good long time.”
“I intend to be. But I’ve been reading the obituaries for a long time and I’ve noticed that most people who die are between forty years old and eighty. I’m right in the middle.”
I felt myself growing angry. “I don’t see how you can be so philosophical about this.”
“Here’s what I’ve asked myself since I was old enough to think about it: if I died today, how would my obituary read?
Would there be a picture? Would the story be long or short? Would it be on the inside or the section front? Or possibly on the front page? Or would there even be a story?
“Right now, I think it would make a pretty good obit. Son of a famous newspaper man who become a pretty fair country editor himself, then a tenured professor. The Pulitzer Prize might even move it to the front page. I probably ought to make sure there’s an updated mugshot.” He chuckled at the thought and made a note in the reporter’s notebook he kept in his inside jacket pocket.
“Fine for you, but what about me?” I said angrily. “You may be okay with it, but I’m pissed off. I’m pissed off that you’re sick and I’m pissed off that you don’t even care how I feel about it.”
My father got up and went to the window. He clasped his hands behind his back and rocked back on his heels, watching the empty courtyard.
“Let’s go see Delana,” he said finally.
As we walked to the car, Dad looked even thinner, gaunt, a little stooped. His eyes blazed bright blue. An effect of the chemo, I wondered, or just the contrast with the pale parchment of his skin? He was starting to resemble the late-in-life pictures I have seen of my grandfather, his father.
At the townhouse, he greeted Delana with a kiss on the cheek and a hug. “How are you, cutie?” he asked.
“I brought you this,” Delana said, holding the picnic basket.
“I’ll bet I already know what it is.”
“You’re limping a little,” I said.
“Hip,” he said. “Apparently, the disease starts to work on the bone.” He pointed to a cane in the corner. “They gave me one of those, but I don’t use it.”
“Dad,” I said, “why didn’t you tell us about this before?”
My father ignored the question, opened up the picnic basket, carefully unloaded the crisp and peeled back the aluminum foil that covered it, releasing its sweet scent.
He breathed deep and exhaled. “Magnificent!”
“Now, you all sit down,” Delana commanded. “Colonel, do you have any vanilla ice cream?”
He smiled at being called Colonel, the name she had invented for him. It honored his Kentucky heritage but it was also a good way to deal with the problem of what to call your prospective father-in-law.
She served us at the kitchen table. Dad ate slowly, with precision, savoring every bite. He closed his eyes as he chewed and I imagined that he was capturing the taste and sensation, mentally recording every nuance, thinking that this crisp was likely to be one of his last.
“Takes me back to summers in the blackberry patch down by the creek, catching crawdads, skinny-dipping, and eating blackberries. I’d get a whippin’ when I got home because I’d spoiled my dinner.” He chuckled at the memory.
Delana served him a second helping and for the next hour we talked—about the university and the prospects for the college basketball team, about the stupidity of academic administration, about news—everything, of course, but about his disease.
I was flabbergasted. “Dad,” I asked again, “why didn’t you tell me about the cancer sooner?”
“I’ve got a pipeline straight into the circulation system,” he said, unbuttoning his shirt to show us the implanted port in his sternum. “The chemo goes right in there. No need for needle pricks. Pretty neat, huh?”
I frowned. There was nothing neat about it.
“Matt, you always worried too much. Your mother, too.”
Delana steered us from the rocks. “How does the chemo make you feel?”
“Okay. I’ve got it worked out pretty well. It’s every couple of weeks and I have it done on Friday. By Monday, I’m ready to teach a class.”
It struck me that he had it backwards. “So let me get this straight,” I said. “You schedule this so you can feel bad on your own private time at home and can be well on university time when you have to work?”
“Home life’s overrated,” he said.
It was a throw-away line. In another context, another time, I would have let it go. Or maybe even laughed. But what came to my mind was the image of my mother struggling to keep dinner warm, looking at her watch, and doing her best to preserve a family meal despite the vagaries of the news, defending Dad and his tardiness while Luke and I complained. I thought of Luke who lived each night for the sound of the Triumph roaring up our street and into our driveway and for my mom to call out, “Daddy’s home.”
And I thought of all the times Dad had ignored me—times I’d waited until bedtime for him to emerge from his study, the fortress into which he locked himself nightly after the ritual two shots of bourbon. On the day I won the eighth-grade writing award, desperate to have him read my short story that had won it, I cried myself to sleep outside the locked study door when he wouldn’t respond to my knocks. When I awoke my father was gone. But he had written a single comment on my prize-winning paper. “It’s ‘lie’ down,” he had written in the margin, “not ‘lay.’”
“Was family life always overrated?” I asked.
Dad looked surprised.
I felt a kick from Delana under the table but I didn’t care. I should have been used to it but he’d pushed me over the edge. For as long as I have known him the man who has so much compassion for people in general has shown zero to his family. Not once during our visit had he acknowledged my hurt. Whatever he felt, it was always all about him. Despite that, I should have done what Delana would have done. I should have told him that I understood. I should have decided that no matter what, from then until the day he died, I would show him all the love I could in all the ways I could show it. But I didn’t.
“No, that explains a lot,” I said. “Maybe if you’d cared as much about us as you did about the world, we’d still be a family.”
I braced for the withering fire that I knew would come in response. Dad loved a debate and didn’t care if it was personal. Words were his weapons and he was a master.
But it didn’t come.
Instead, he just sat there looking small, sick, and weak. This was no time to tell him about Delana and me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I know you’ve had a lot on your mind.”
We sat there until Delana broke the ice. “Matt,” she said, “tell the Colonel about the story you’ve been working on.”
And so I told him about Wallace Sampson, about our trips to Hirtsboro, our work at the Town Hall and our interviews with Olen Pennegar Sr., Mrs. Sampson, and Wallace’s girlfriend, Vanessa Brown.
“So where’s the story?” he asked when I was finished.
I told him about the last-minute development that had made us pull it.
“So, really, you’re nowhere closer to solving the murder than you were when you started,” he concluded.
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re no closer than when we started.”
We talked for a while more and then we said our good-byes. Dad escorted us to the door.
“Thanks for coming,” he said and shook my hand.
I stuck to my pledge not to tell him that I loved him until he told me first. “I enjoyed it,” I said.
He turned to Delana. “Thank you for the crisp. You have learned the way to my heart.”
Jesus, I thought to myself. And to think that all I had to do was learn how to make a damn crisp.
Delana scolded me when we got to the car. “What you did in there was terrible. I can’t believe you’re more worried about your feelings than his. I can’t believe you talked that way to a dying man.”
“Dying doesn’t get you off the hook from being a decent human being.”
“He’s a wonderful man. A wonderful, very sick man.”
My hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Let me tell you something about him, godammit,” I snapped, unleashing the
wrath on Delana that I had held back from my father. “If he has ever directly said, ‘I love you,’ I don’t remember it.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I am not kidding. I play this game where I try to get him to say the words, ‘I love you.’ I’ve never won.”
“What is it they say in your business? It’s better to show than to tell?”
“He showed his love all right. He showed it by closing the door on his family every chance he got.”
Delana sat quietly and I didn’t feel like talking either. We kept to ourselves the rest of the way home.
The sun was setting over The Farmlet’s front pasture as we rolled up the driveway and parked in front of the house. We watched it disappear into the longleaf pines and then behind the rusted tin roof of the neighbors’ barn.
“It’s all related,” Delana said finally, breaking the long silence.
“What is?”
“The garden writer. The thing with your dad. How uptight you are about the story.”
“What do you mean uptight?” I bristled.
“You know what I mean. Look at the pattern. You crave your father’s approval and are angry when you don’t get it. You need to reassure yourself by seeing if you can pluck some hot little tomato. You’ve never believed in yourself, Matt. It’s all about what you need to feel secure.”
“You’re way off base.”
“Let me ask you something. Why do you want this Sampson story? So you can measure up to your father and grandfather? So you can prove that you can play on the same team as the newspaper’s big boys? So you can put some rednecks in their place?”
“Something wrong with that?”
“When are you going to learn that you don’t need your dad’s okay or anybody else’s? Matt, it’s not about you. Someone killed Wallace Sampson and is getting away with murder. That’s what matters. Sometimes you just have to do the right thing and all else be damned.”
She got out, shut the car door and walked toward the house. At the stone bench by the front door, she turned around, and marched back toward the car. She stuck her head into the window just inches in my face.
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