Fatherhood

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Just lay him down there,” my father said, and Mr. Withers gently placed Billie on the black cushioned table in the middle of the room.

  My father stepped over to the table and began loosening the patchwork quilt covering Billie. “How long has he been sick?” he asked.

  “’Bout a week,” Mr. Withers said. “He ain’t been no better in a while.”

  My father brought one of the kerosene lanterns over to the table for light.

  “Hi there,” he said brightly when Billie opened his eyes and stared languidly at the light.

  “You’re not feeling too well, I guess,” my father said, comfortingly.

  Billie squinted and tried to answer.

  “No, no,” my father said, “just rest still. We’ll have you out playing ball in no time.”

  Billie’s eyes closed slowly. He had a small, beautiful face, a mountain boy’s face, open and unvarnished as the day he was born. Beneath the glaze, his eyes seemed to be greenish with spots of brown. His hair was light brown streaked with blond. His skin was stretched tight against his cheek bones. In the lantern light it looked as smooth and shiny as unpainted porcelain.

  “You treat him at all?” my father asked Mr. Withers.

  “I dist wrapped ’im up and kep’ ’im by the far,” Mr. Withers said. He thought a moment, then added: “Mah wife’s people come over and prayed fer ’im.”

  My father tugged gently at Billie’s chin, slowly prying open his mouth. He peered in for a moment, delicately pressing down on Billie’s tongue with a depressor. He sniffed his breath then listened to his heart.

  I watched my father carefully and saw a slight wincing of his eyes. I had seen that look before, a tiny drawing together of the eyebrows and narrowing of the eyes. It was so subtle a gesture I doubted any but me had ever detected it.

  It meant Billie Withers was most likely dying.

  Mr. Withers watched my father closely. One of his hands nervously fingered the carpenter’s loop in his overalls while the other rhythmically squeezed his crumpled gray hat.

  Finally, my father turned to him. “Is your wife at home?”

  “She’s dead,” Mr. Withers said. He continued to stare at Billie.

  “I didn’t catch your name, I don’t believe.”

  “Withers. John Withers.”

  My father walked over to the medicine chest and took out a bottle of dark-colored serum. He filled a hypodermic needle with a large dosage.

  “Your boy has diphtheria, Mr. Withers,” he said. “Have you ever heard of that?”

  Mr. Withers nodded. “Can you hep ’im?”

  “Well, this medicine is supposed to do some good. Your boy has a pretty advanced bad case right now. This medicine sometimes has some bad things about it. Most of the time it’s all right though. I think we’d better go ahead and use it.”

  “Dist do what you can fer ’im,” Mr. Withers said. “I’d ’preciate it.”

  Billie’s body rustled gently on the table, and Mr. Withers’ lips parted as if his own breath were tied to the boy’s.

  My father smiled. “Could be he’ll be playing with his brothers and sisters in a couple of days,” he said.

  “Naw,” Mr. Withers said. “He’s mah onliest kid.” He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “He took sick all of a sudden.”

  My father held up the hypodermic so Mr. Withers could see it clearly. “I’m going to give him the shot now. It won’t hurt him.” He turned and quickly injected the antitoxin directly into Billie’s veins.

  “Can I take ’im home now?” Mr. Withers asked.

  “No, I think you better not. He’s pretty tired. He needs to rest. We’ll let him sleep, see how he is in the morning. To tell you the truth, there’s nothing to do but wait.”

  Mr. Withers nodded. “Awright.”

  My father turned back to Billie and ran his fingers through the boy’s hair. “Fine boy.” He circled his index finger gently around Billie’s ear as he sometimes did mine.

  “Could I stay with ’im?” Mr. Withers asked.

  My father bundled Billie up again and lifted him into his arms. “There’s plenty of room for both of you.”

  “I don’t want to be no trouble.”

  “Plenty of room,” my father repeated. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  Mr. Withers seemed to smile, and I could see the jagged, brownish teeth his closed lips had hidden. His face seemed softer now, less lined and pitted. The lantern light gave it an orange hue, making it look as if it had been carved out of the reddish clay of the hill country.

  “Eddie, go get me an extra blanket,” my father said to me.

  I brought the blanket into the back bedroom and watched as my father laid Billie on the bed. He listened to his heart once again, then folded the blanket double and tucked it delicately around Billie’s body.

  “We’ll keep him nice and warm,” he told Mr. Withers.

  Mr. Withers took the edge of the blanket and pulled it over Billie’s chin. “When he gits in bed, he goes all the way under the covers. Even covers up his head.”

  “Smart boy,” my father said lightly. “That heats the bed faster.”

  “Dist all of a sudden took sick,” Mr. Withers muttered. “Dist clumb in mah lap and took sick.”

  “I’ll bring a cot in for you,” my father said.

  Mr. Withers rubbed his eyes. “Naw, that’s awright. I couldn’t git no sleep. I’ll dist set in that chair there.”

  “You ought to get some rest.”

  Mr. Withers shook his head. “Naw, thank you.”

  “Well, I’ll sit up with you awhile,” my father said. “I haven’t been sleeping very well lately, anyway.”

  “Now don’t go to no more trouble on ’count of me,” Mr. Withers said insistently, drawing back from this last courtesy as if too much generosity could never be repaid.

  My father pulled another chair up and sat down near Billie’s bed. “No trouble,” he said. “Have a seat yourself, Mr. Withers.”

  “Can I sit up, too?” I asked.

  “For a while,” my father said.

  Billie moved gently under the covers and drew his small fist up near his lips. “Wife’s people prayed fer ’im,” Mr. Withers muttered. He paused, thinking. “I ain’t a churchgoer.”

  My father tilted back in the oak rocker. “You know, they’ll come a time when all of these childhood diseases will be gone. Little boys like your son here’ll never have to worry about them. Tremendous progress is being made.” He shook his head with wonderment. “Tremendous progress.”

  Mr. Withers continued to stare at Billie. “Bible says that the sins of the father are visited on the son,” he said after a moment.

  My father leaned forward and looked intently at Mr. Withers. “It’s just a disease. Nothing else.”

  Mr. Withers took a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his mouth. “I never was a churchgoer.”

  “Believe me,” my father said, “that has nothing to do with it. Don’t worry yourself about it.”

  “My sister-in-law said that one time her uncle worked on Sunday and his little girl got sick. Crippled her. For life.”

  Billie’s eyes fluttered open for a moment then closed. My father got up and listened to his heart. He glanced at Mr. Withers then at me. “Eddie, maybe you’d better get on to bed now,” he said softly.

  I stood up. “Good night, Mr. Withers.”

  “Thank you for your hep, boy,” Mr. Withers said. He moved to tip his hat, realized it was squeezed tight in his hand and simply nodded. “I ’preciate it.”

  In the room next door I could hear my father and Mr. Withers talking quietly, but it was hard to make out exactly what they were discussing. At times I could hear words individually spoken—a yes here, a no there, Billie’s name. Food and drink were offered and refused. I expected my father to leave after a while, but he never did. When the first morning light filtered through my window, I could still hear the slow, heavy tone of his voice. It sounded like a distant hor
n struggling through the fog.

  Sometime during the night, Billie Withers died. I saw Mr. Withers out my window when I woke up. He was leaning against a tree, one leg gently pawing at the ground. He was facing away from me, but I could tell by the slump of his shoulders, by the way that his head hung forward, that the worst had happened.

  “The boy died,” my father said when I walked into the kitchen.

  “I thought so,” I said. “I saw Mr. Withers out in the yard.”

  “He needs some time to be alone. We’ll be taking the body home this morning.”

  “Us?”

  “Yes. Mr. Withers was on foot. He walked down here last night.”

  “All the way from up the mountain?”

  My father broke an egg into the fry pan. “Only way he had.”

  After breakfast Mr. Withers gathered Billie in his arms, and we drove them up the mountain road to home. Except for giving a few directions, Mr. Withers did not say much. He sat in the back seat, sometimes staring out the window, sometimes watching Billie’s face as if he were hoping for some sudden sign of life, a tremble in the lips or a pulse beneath the eyes.

  For the whole noisy, jostling trip, he cradled Billie in his arms, supporting the back of his head like you would a newborn infant’s.

  The scene in the back of our Model A has always been to me the real Pietá, stark and beautiful as brown, wind-severed corn, unsoftened by blue light, unadorned, unsanctified, unknown.

  Billie Withers was buried two days later in an unvarnished wooden coffin. You could hear the muffled sound of his body bumping against the sides as the men lifted him onto their shoulders and carried him to the cemetery behind the Mountain View Church of Christ.

  It was a cold, overcast day. A small breeze fluttered the pages of the hymnals the people used to sing a farewell hymn. Their voices did not soar like the town choir I was used to. They sang in a flat, featureless monotone like ghosts rooted to earth, bound to it by invisible wires. The old people hugged themselves, holding their coats close about them, and the children watched the bleak ritual of Billie’s burial with patient, respectful eyes.

  A final prayer was said, and then the small congregation filed silently out of the cemetery. A few of the older ones lifted their collars against the wind.

  Only Mr. Withers remained. He stepped over to my father and shook his hand. “You didn’t have to come,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t help him.”

  Mr. Withers wiped a film of moisture and grit from his eyes. “Maybe it was meant to be.”

  “Someday it’ll be different,” my father said firmly. “We’ll find the answers to these things.”

  Mr. Withers nodded, allowing my father’s distant faith to pass without argument. “Well, thank you for what you done,” he said.

  He walked a few feet away, picked up a large, flat stone and sunk it into the ground at the head of Billie’s grave. Then he took a small one and placed it carefully at the foot. He stood for a moment, staring at the grave, then clapped the dust from his fingers and walked away.

  I looked curiously at the two stones. “Are those tombstones?” I asked. In the town cemetery they were made of marble.

  “It’s the way they mark the grave,” my father said.

  “But they don’t even say anything, even a name.”

  “Poor people,” my father said quietly.

  He took my hand, and we began walking toward our car. The clouds to the east gathered behind us, gray and dense and invulnerable like the mysteries of God.

  NEVERMORE

  My father’s last request was that I bring him a book. We had not been close, or even very much in communication, since the day my mother left him. Over the years, the many years, my anger with him had not abated. But in his final days, I’d decided to offer him at least an occasion for atonement, despite the fact that he’d never given any indication that he had anything for which he felt the need to atone. At times I’d even felt my presence in his hospital room reduced to that of a Shabbas goy, performing servile tasks like turning on a light or adjusting the volume on the television that hung opposite his bed.

  “I’m a rabbi,” I reminded him sternly one afternoon when my lowly status in his eyes became particularly irksome.

  “So was I,” my father said. “Almost.”

  Almost? I didn’t think so. For although he’d been a rabbinical student in his youth, he’d later chosen Columbia over Yeshiva, and from there gone on to the life of a liberal arts professor, complete with pipe, tweed jacket, and, as I’d been told, an occasional mention in scholarly magazines.

  “Poe,” he said one Friday afternoon when the sun was setting and I was hurrying to leave.

  “Poe?” I asked.

  “The poems,” my father said. “There’s a volume of them somewhere around the house.”

  He’d been in the hospital for several days by then, suffering from the usual infirmities of old age, though this time with the added problem of pneumonia. His breathing was labored, and he seemed generally exhausted, not at all the vibrant man who’d daily escorted me into his study, whipped a book from the shelf, and taught me the classics and ancient history.

  “Bring it on Monday,” he added with a tired wave of the hand.

  I recalled my father as a quick discarder of old books, always on the lookout for the latest edition, so when I got around to the latest humble task he’d asked of me, I found it surprising that his Poe was an old volume with yellowed, crumbling pages, a book that had the present look of my father, once sturdy and tightly bound, but now tattered beyond repair.

  It had been nearly fifty years since I’d entered my father’s study, but I found the look of it quite at one with the man himself. From the time he’d first left the Lower East Side, he’d been a “modern” man, with high, upwardly mobile ambitions. The glass-topped desk seemed perfectly in keeping with his character, as did the sleek leather chair with its gleaming chrome legs. There was a flatscreen monitor and an ergonomic keyboard, and just to the right, an iPod stood perkily in its white plastic stand.

  I shook my head at the sheer predictability of it all. How fitting that this was where my father did his thinking, beneath halogen lights, with the silvery louver blinds open to reveal a neat, suburban lawn. For he was not at all the somber black-clothed scholar I thought myself to be, a man of prayers and fasting, immersed in the Torah, not in some lengthy study of imagery in Lolita. The fact is, we’d gone in completely opposite directions, and because of that my father’s existence now seemed transparently thin to me, the man himself a cellophane soul, utterly without mystery, his life a story without twists or turns, one that surely would have proven an unfit subject for the inventor of the detective story.

  “Why Poe?” my wife asked when, after my return home, I showed her the book my father had requested I bring him on Monday morning.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “He taught Poe only that last summer.”

  My wife covered her head and prepared to light the Shabbat candles. “Maybe that’s what’s on his mind,” she said.

  I shrugged. “If so, it’s too late to make amends.”

  He took a severe turn for the worse two days later, so that when I arrived at the hospital that morning, I found him barely the shadow of the man I’d left the Friday before. He’d clearly been given something, as my mother had in her last hours. Like her, he’d been unable to speak coherently, though he appeared to be fully conscious. After offering my usual terse greeting I brought the book within view, showed him the spine. “The book you wanted,” I said. “Poe.” I drew a chair up to his bedside. “I thought I might read a few of the poems to you.”

  He stared at the book with what seemed the quiet affection and admiration he had once offered me, but which I had long ago rejected and continued to reject.

  “So, let’s begin.” I flipped past the melancholy visage of the author, the title page, the table of contents, to the first poem in the volume. “‘Al
one,’” I said like a speller cautious to follow the rules of the bee, pronouncing the word before defining it.

  From childhood’s hour I have not been

  As others were; I have not seen

  As others saw; I could not bring

  My passions from a common spring.

  My father’s eyes darted about, and for a moment he seemed disoriented.

  “You’re in Room 1213,” I told him. “Clark Memorial.”

  He squinted hard, like a man trying to bring something small into focus.

  “Shtorm,” he said, then much more clearly, “Storm.”

  “Storm?” I asked, glancing at the poem again, now focused on the last line I’d read, I could not bring my passions from a common spring.

  “Summer storm.” One hand rose and floated out and away, like a boat into vastness, and his gaze went to the middle distance.

  “What summer storm?” I asked.

  He seemed frustrated, grasping at words, determined to say something that either his weakness or the drugs prevented him from saying. “Poe,” he said softly, then louder, more emphatically, “teaching Poe.”

  So my wife had been right. He was thinking about the idyllic three months during which he’d held forth on Poe, often in a little arbor beside Lake Montego, deeply shaded and oddly romantic, with his few exchange students gathered around him.

  He struggled to speak again, faltered, then blurted almost vehemently, “Shiksa.”

  I stared at him, stunned. For although before leaving him my mother had often used the old world languge of her parents—meshugana, for a crazy person, mitzvah for a good deed—my father had shunned Yiddish entirely, thought it fit only for comedy, and even then for the lowest kind. He’d even corrected my English when it slipped into what he called “foreignness.” “In America we don’t ‘close’ the light, Alex,” he’d once said to me when I’d inadvertently used one of my mother’s phrases. “We ‘turn it off.’”

  “Shiksa?” I asked. “Since when do you …”

  “Summer, storm, Poe,” my father said, connecting all three words, though without giving the connection any decipherable meaning.