The Book of Dads

by Ben George

  Ten years—why did it take so long, you might wonder, to get my feet back on the ground, why did it take so long to lose my sea legs? The book on how to deal with trauma had failed to say when change could resume, when one could go on, and so, year after year, I continued to row my body out, to scan the shoreline, to wait.

  The boat was built the same year my mother was born (1939, the same year The Wizard of Oz was released, the one film we waited for every year to come on TV) and therefore contained something of her, or so it seemed. We’d scattered her ashes in the Atlantic—you could say that living on the boat was as close as I could get to her, to something of her. You could say I felt held by the water. You could say I was, like Dorothy, only trying to find my way back home. It worked, for a while, to dissolve myself into something larger than myself, until by the end not even the ocean was big enough to contain it all. Until in the end I had to quit everything.

  Last night there was a lunar eclipse. I held Maeve up to the window to see it. I told her about the sun, about the earth, about the moon, about the eclipse. I said, “You are the sun, I am the moon, I am circling around you, and sometimes a shadow falls across your face, sometimes a darkness rises up inside us, but it isn’t real, we cannot believe it’s real.” I held her head like a sun, and we moved around the room, singing, “Little darlin’, it’s been a long cold lonely winter,” until she stopped crying and fell asleep.

  [PROTEUS REDUX]

  I have been on this train, heading south along this river, the river off to my right, forever it seems. I can’t complain, I got on early, I got a window, and if I want I can look up and see the river and whatever is washed up along its banks and the little fallen houses that I still imagine I will one day wander through—like that one, its door left open, as if someone went out for a look at the river on a day like this, a warm fall day, and simply never came back.

  Let’s just accept that Proteus knows your innermost fears, and that he plays on these fears, hoping you will let go, hoping you will give up, hoping you will stop asking your question, hoping you will lose hope. This, then, is a vision of Proteus as both torturer and tortured. He plays on your fears, he wants you to lose hope, but at the same time, you are the one with your hands around his neck, asking the questions.

  My terror with being a father, with having a child, was never the threat of some abstract maniac snatching her. It was always that I would look at her and it wouldn’t mean a thing. That she would appear and nothing would change. That I wouldn’t be able to feel, that I could simply get in my car and drive away, that I wouldn’t remember. My fear has always been with me—it has always been the fear of my own shadow.

  But it didn’t happen that way—minute by minute, day by day. Life is long, they say, and then it isn’t. The shadows will always be there, there will always be flying monkeys and a scared fat fraud behind a curtain telling you he is in charge. And you will always be able to tell him that he should be ashamed.

  And now some weeks have passed, some sleepless weeks, and I am less certain. That photograph of me in my father’s arms: maybe he is simply tired, maybe he’s been up all night, trying to get me to sleep, and what I see in his face is only that—exhaustion. Not unhappiness at this burden, but simply tired, bone tired. If you took a photograph of me one of these sleepless nights, pacing the apartment and singing “All you need is love” softly to Maeve, desperate for us both to return to the land of sleep, you might say that I, too, don’t look especially thrilled at this miracle I am holding in my hands. But you would be wrong. And so maybe I’ve been wrong, all these years, about my father.

  [THE POND]

  Hungry, Maeve cries her small cry with the first light (“cell by cell the baby made herself”). A few minutes before this she let out a coo (“the cells / Made cells”), a coo that became the texture of the dream I was having (“That is to say / The baby is made largely of milk”), a coo that to me meant that everything was going to be all right. I get out of bed, step into the cold of the barn, and make my way over to her room, which we insulated and now heat with an oil-filled electric radiator, like our room will be one day, once—if—we get around to hanging the doors. The rest of the barn, which I pass through quickly, is essentially the same weather as the outside world, and this morning the outside world is thick with fog, and cool. Since we’ve been living in the barn there have been nights when I’ve woken up to take a piss and been stopped on the way to the toilet, the darkness around me filled with fireflies. Or if there was lightning outside, then inside the barn would be bright with lightning as well. But those were summer nights, when we slept with the big sliding doors open, so the night and its weather and creatures could just wander in.

  After I change and feed Maeve we play together quietly for a while on the carpet, the same carpet we roll up each night so the shrew doesn’t leave its droppings on it. Then we make our way down to the pond, to let Lili sleep in a little longer, Maeve’s little body strapped to my chest like a parachute.

  We moved into the barn last May so that we could rent out the house. Money got tight after the baby came, so in the spring I offered to fix the barn up, since I knew how to do it, or at least knew enough friends I could call on to help, especially if I let them hold Maeve when I asked. For the last ten years or so, before I was here, before Lili and I even knew each other, the barn had become simply a place to gather junk: a lawn mower that doesn’t start; a hundred mismatched windows; another entire barn, dismantled and neatly stacked; a padlocked refrigerator, said to belong to Ronnie, though I’ve never met Ronnie.

  When I first got here, four years ago now, I’d wash the dishes in the house kitchen and look out at the barn—enormous, a cathedral. I couldn’t help but imagine what one might do in it. The barn is a hundred and fifty years old, held together by sixty-foot-long hickory beams, a quality of tree that hasn’t grown here, maybe anywhere, for nearly a hundred years now. The roof is slate, kestrels live in the cupola—anything could happen in that barn. It could be a theater, it could hold an airplane. You could build a room inside it, a hidey-hole for when things got bad, when things went south, as they say, as they do. You could set up a desk in a corner and write a book about it.

  By the time we make it to the pond my boots are wet with dew. Steam rises from the surface, the surface utterly still. The pond was never like the barn. When I first got here it didn’t even exist, not really, not as anything other than an idea. The land had overgrown it so much through the years that you could only glimpse it as you walked along the narrow path connecting one meadow to the next. At night you could hear the bullfrogs, but at night it’s hard to locate where sound is coming from. It seemed to come from the low point in the land, the place a pond would be, if there was a pond. I asked Lili about it, but all she’d heard was that in the winter one couldn’t skate on it because it wouldn’t freeze, and in the summer you couldn’t swim in it because it wasn’t big enough. This seemed contradictory, but not being able to see it, I couldn’t verify either claim. Every year the wild roses grew thicker, sending out their long tendrils of thorns, which tore at your arms if you tried to pull them back to see a little more. From what I could see, it was possible that the pond was no bigger than a bucket, which would mean it wasn’t a pond at all. In all likelihood it was simply vernal, evaporating in the summer and leaving only a muddy patch. When I first got here my mind was unsettled, and I’d have to drive off every day to find a pool or a lake where I could swim, which was the only thing I’d found to calm it.

  The land hadn’t been bushhogged for eight years or so, which is why the wild roses and the locusts and the sycamore had taken over. I found someone who had the machine and could do the job. He promised to clear away what he could, along with the rest of the overgrown land. By the end of the day he’d gouged a path to the pond’s edge, and I was able to walk up to it and look across to the other side. Hundreds of frogs splashed the surface as I approached, the water tea-colored, a few trees draping their branches into it,
their leaves floating on the surface. The pond wasn’t large, but it wasn’t small, either. One could swim the length of it in about ten strokes, I estimated, once a little more was cleared away.

  I spent the next several weeks doing just that, whenever I had an hour or so, usually when Maeve was napping. I had just finished a draft of a book that had consumed me for the past four years, and so I had time. It was now August, and a friend was renting the house. Later he’d tell me that he’d look out at me, hacking away at the undergrowth, and wonder if working on the book hadn’t driven me a little mad. From his window the pond was still invisible. All he could see was that after an hour or so I would come back up the hill, shirtless, sweat dripping off my nose, my legs muddy, my arms bleeding from the thorns. At night we’d all have dinner together and I’d talk about it, how beautiful it was, how at dawn lately I’d been seeing a heron, or perhaps it was a bittern, sitting on a branch, watching over it all. I didn’t know if the heron had always been there, no one knew, because until that moment no one had even seen the pond, not for many years. In the weeks I worked on it I didn’t write a word, and it is very possible that I didn’t have a thought in my head, beyond the thought of Maeve and that pond.

  [A BETTER PLACE]

  I need to write something about returning the key to my father’s apartment to his management company, about the end of something. About him being in a better place. Not dead, which I don’t necessarily think of as “a better place,” but a “long-term-care facility,” a nursing home. The first time I met him as an adult, twenty years ago now, he was in the middle of a five-year homeless odyssey, and then, for the past sixteen years, he lived on his own in an apartment near the Fenway. That apartment, by the end, was a disaster, and so was he. Now he has a bed by a window, his clothes are always clean, he eats three meals a day. He’s on a little Atavan, which seems to dissolve his anxiety. And he doesn’t drink—this is the first time I have ever known him outside of alcohol. His stories are different, he no longer tells the same handful, over and over. But his mind, sadly, is shot—he knows who I am, dimly, but he cannot remember when he last saw me, or anything about my life. I could tell him a hundred times that he is now a grandfather, and it simply will not sink in. “I have to talk to you,” he says, “they’re treating me like I’m a millionaire here, and I got no money. I don’t know what I’ll do when they find out.” “I’m working on it,” I assure him, and pass a few folded dollar bills into his hand.

  The next time I visit him is to introduce him to Maeve. By now he has met Lili a dozen times, and yet he is still uncertain who exactly she is. His daughter? His sister? His ex-wife? Even without the vodka his short-term memory is frazzled. “This is a beautiful woman,” he says to me. “Look at those legs,” and he begins to stand over her, but Lili orders him to sit back down, which he seems to get a kick out of. “You say her name is Lili? And this is my granddaughter? My son, Nicholas, should meet you two.” I’m Nicholas, I remind him. Lili takes a few pictures of us sitting together on a couch against a window looking out onto a hallway, each of us looking happy and bewildered in our own ways. After an hour or so, as we stand to leave, he takes me aside, asks sotto voce, “Are you leaving the woman with me?”

  [WIZARD OF OZ, WIZARD OF ID]

  At dawn I sit on the couch and slide The Wizard of Oz into my computer, Maeve asleep in my arms. Almost immediately, for some reason, tears well up in my eyes. Dorothy, right from the start, is trying to get back home—mythic, yet simple as a fairy tale, like following a trail of bread crumbs through a dark forest.

  Maeve stirs, smiles up at me, reaches for my nose, then gets distracted by the leafy plant behind my head. I shut the computer, a pure simple joy filling the room. The leaves she is staring at now, she can’t even see them, not the green, not the shapes, she’s simply staring into this world—everything hazy but slowly coming into focus. Soon she will have her Wizard of Oz moment, the rods and cones in her eyes will develop and the world will transform from black and white to color. I missed it as a child, because the only television we had was black and white. When I first saw the movie in color, when Dorothy opened the door on Oz, I gasped.

  COMPARATIVE HISTORY

  BRANDON R. SCHRAND

  It is July of 2000 and my wife, Kelli, is seven months pregnant. We’ve rented a guesthouse overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca, in the woods of Port Townsend, Washington, where I am enrolled in the weeklong Port Townsend Writers’ Conference. The drive from our home in northern Utah was long—thirteen hours—but I have it in my head that I want to be a writer. It is a crackpot notion, perhaps, especially for an expectant father whose dreams are often besieged by certain realities on the ground: seven frat-boy years in college, some time in jail, and an unhingedness that lurks within. At this conference I’ve been dreaming of the things I have dreamt of for so long: my future son, and what I imagine to be my future career. But fears compete with dreams, as fears are wont to do, and I begin to worry that my career is fantasy, and that my son will inherit too much of me—a bloodline from my own absent father and his genealogy of dirt-floor poverty and alcoholic unrest. At the time, I don’t know much about my hotheaded, dead-in-the-grave, felonious father. But I intuit a lot from what I have heard, and worry about genetic prophecies that might reveal both who I am and who might be growing in my wife’s stomach.

  I am at this conference not just because I want to be a writer, but also because I see writing as a way of recasting my future. If I am indentured to some genetic script, my reasoning goes, then I can write a new ending, and that ending begins with my not-yet-born son. I can upend what needs upending. It’s faulty, if not fatuous, thinking, I know now. You can’t write away your past or script your future any more than you can reorder the stars.

  In the evenings Kelli and I leave the guesthouse behind and walk down a path cut through the tall grass to a bench with a view of the Strait. I bring a glass of wine and a book—Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Kelli brings a book, too, and some lemon water. Foghorns moan in the distance. Orcas break the water’s surface. And I peer out into the Strait and daydream about one day taking my son on a motorcycle trip through the switchgrass plains and showing him the great system of systems we call the world.

  As an only child who grew up in the sagebrush town of Soda Springs, Idaho, I often thought of the absent fathers in my family, and would continue to be troubled by these broken linkages in the system of fathers and sons all my life. I never met or knew my biological father, Jerry Imeson. I knew only my stepfather, Bud Schrand, who married my mother when I was four. He has been Dad ever since, and so I took his name. The specifics of my ex-con, biological father are these: he died when he was forty-four. Heart failure, hepatitis C. He was a drug addict. He had served several prison sentences; one, for robbing a pharmacy. The drugstore cowboy and all-around ne’er-do-well. He was too much boy in a man’s body and he lived his life in accordance with a reckless streak, drag-racing straight to an early grave.

  Clearly not the model father.

  Perhaps because of this conspicuous absence in my life, or perhaps because Bud, too, had grown up without his father, my stepdad felt compelled to overcompensate—not in the touchy-feely ways of love and compassion, but in the pragmatic ways of discipline, work, and instruction. To my dad, an electrician, life was a complex system of circuitry. There wasn’t a problem that couldn’t be diagrammed with a mechanical pencil and a notepad. His was a world of positives and negatives. Diverge from the diagram, and you will know the consequences. To me, electricity was something dangerous (an idea reinforced by my dad’s stories), and he brought absolute order to that chaos. He bent it to his will. In a sense, I was impressed by the power he wielded, but I also found his occupation unremarkable and small-townish.

  Like so many young people who hunger to leave the trappings of their small towns and small houses and small expectations, I felt a bone-deep itch to create a life in diametric opposition to my parents’.
They had little means and even less education. They were lower-middle-class, middle-aged folks living in the middle of nowhere. It sounds haughty to me now, if not downright arrogant, but I suffered from an unnamed need to shuck off my blue-collar background. If accused of social-climbing, of trying to find meaning in the world through books, through writing, I would have happily pled guilty on all counts. The story I started writing in my head—the story of the future me—became the most urgent when I dreamed of having children, when I cast myself in the lead role of Father. Like a lot of people, I resolved to do things differently when it came time to take the fatherly reins.

  I wanted most of all for my children to know their father, to know the story of how they came to be. I wanted to give them a traceable, discernible lineage. The trouble was this: I didn’t want that traceable, discernible genetic map to be their actual lineage. I wanted to take someone else’s bloodline—a clean family history devoid of the drugstore cowboy and the romping, falling-down ways of my sagebrush kin—and overlay my children’s lives with it. I feared a pattern stirring within me, viral and inevitable, a kind of genetic foregone conclusion. We are judged by the fathers we keep, and I didn’t want my children to be judged as the progeny of trouble.

  Back in Utah, these final weeks of Kelli’s pregnancy haven’t been as smooth as we hoped for. She has preeclampsia. “It’s like high blood pressure,” the doctor tells us. “And it can affect both you and the baby.”

  My heart goes wonky in my chest, my body cold and inert like channel iron. “But it will be OK, right?”

  Kelli is the strong one here, back straight, inquisitive. While my questions tend toward the abstract, hers are calculated. She wants numbers, specifics, as if she has come prepared for this report.