The Book of Dads

by Ben George

  It’s a fairly common condition, the doctor tells us, and as long as we monitor it, everything should be fine. There can be cases, however, when it is more serious.

  Ever since we received this news upon our return from Port Townsend, Kelli has been on bed rest, and I have been frantic to clean the house and fetch her meals and drinks and extra pillows and movies and books and anything she needs. The constant bustle keeps me busy and that is what I need, what we both need. Even though I am an agnostic, nights find me issuing crazy, desperate prayers to gods unknown. “Please,” I beg while wringing my pillow. “Please—let the baby and Kelli be OK and I will be the model father. I will.”

  Mason was born without incident in the small hours of September 11, 2000. I remember cutting the umbilical cord (which I hadn’t expected to do). I remember weighing him. I remember wanting to sleep. I also took pains to remember the data because that seemed like an important thing to do. His weight, length, time of birth. Memorizing the data seemed like something a model father would do, and I wanted to start out right.

  In those early days, when I wasn’t reading What to Expect the First Year, I was reading John Irving’s The World According to Garp. For all its quirky, frightening, and hilarious moments, for all the high jinks and madness, Garp laid bare many of my insecurities as both a wannabe writer and a wannabe father. It was alarming, in fact, just how easily I recognized myself in Garp. Yes, like me, he was a wrestler in school and a writer. But more than that, he was fatherless and this absence in his life explained much of his panicked and bumbling attempts at fatherhood. He had a fever-pitched paranoia that the world, as Irving put it, was simply too dangerous for children. When Garp ran after and cursed at the cars that sped through his neighborhood, I felt the sheer inevitability of disaster not just in his life but in my own. Dangers lurked everywhere. In our family history. In our blood. In our neighborhoods. Our home abutted the property of the local high school, and daily a league of pimply hotheads gunned their junkers down our street. I would stand on my lawn and watch in jaw-set anger as they roasted their tires in front of my house, forcing me to tuck Mason’s head into my jacket as the foul black smoke swirled around us. “Sons-a-bitches,” I’d mutter. I was angry at the very presence of these feckless boys, and I was angry, too, because I still had a lot of their drag-racing ways roiling inside me. There was much boy yet inside this man I was now supposed to be.

  Three weeks after Mason was born, I applied to graduate school at Utah State University. Every day after work, I would come home, put Mason in his crib, and check the mail and phone messages. For weeks, I heard nothing. And for weeks, I drank myself to sleep. Finally, after nearly two months of hand-wringing, my worst fears were confirmed: my application had been denied. The abysmal grades, my iffy letters of recommendation, my murky letter of intent, and my noodling paper on Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene all amounted to an apologetic nay. Sort of. “Take some upper-division courses,” they said, “and we might reevaluate your application.” Here was a glimmer, a backdoor in. I was by turns dejected and hopeful, and so I would drink nightly to the gloom and hope in equal measure.

  That spring, I enrolled in two classes and quickly became the embarrassing nontraditional, nonmatriculated student with too much to lose, and too much to prove in every class. My arm ached from raising it all too often: “Call on me! I know the answer!” My arm stretched toward the ceiling as if my son’s life depended on my answering every question correctly. Here was my chance to reorder the circuitry of genetics, to rechart the future, to rewrite the story of who I had come to be.

  Which was who, exactly? Consider this brief comparative history:

  CRIMINAL HISTORY OF BRANDON’S FATHER

  One count burglary, January 1974.

  Felony burglary, January 1974. (This was the pharmacy job, executed when I was not yet two years old.)

  Drug possession.

  Drug-trafficking charges.

  Various moving violations.

  CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MASON’S FATHER

  Felony drug possession (charges dropped to a Class B misdemeanor).

  DUI.

  Drunken disorderly conduct (arrested two weeks before my wedding day).

  Various moving violations.

  The trouble with criminal histories is they are not read in the past tense. They never purport to explain who a person was; they mean to explain who a person is. They are read less as static documents recording time-swallowed events, and more as clues telegraphing the future.

  So, to take a thoroughly dour view, I wasn’t merely becoming my father. I had already become him. And, following this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, my son would become me. The blood circuitry fulfilling its genetic promise of hardwired danger.

  That’s the dour view.

  The hopeful view said that I was nothing like my father. He never graduated high school, but here I was finally admitted into graduate school, after all my hand-raising and showmanship during the spring semester. The hopeful view said that there are ways to outrun your blood, that nurture trumps nature. The hopeful view said that the hotheaded boy inside me would die out and the model father (or some semblance of him) would grow in his stead.

  Sometimes the hopeful and dour views collide in unexpected ways. Consider the morning of Mason’s first birthday. It comes to me in snapshots. I was brushing my teeth in the hallway, where I could keep an eye on Mason, who was in his high chair in the dining room, and still talk to Kelli, who was in the bathroom. We had been discussing his birthday plans for later that day. Kelli was blow-drying her hair. Then someone on NPR said something about a plane or maybe two planes having hit the World Trade Center. “Can you turn that off?” I asked, motioning to her hair dryer.

  “What?”

  I pointed to the radio. Mason’s birthday cake sat on the dining room table. “Something’s happened,” I said.

  It is nothing new to say that the country moved into an uncertain time, but it was, and had been for a while, an uncertain time for me personally. On the one hand, the father in me took seriously my new station as a graduate student. I was teaching freshman composition and reading truckloads of books. I was distinguishing myself in my seminars and doing good work. On the other hand, the boy in me found a crowd of beer-drinking grad students in whose company I could fully express that unhingedness lurking within. We would pass every Friday at a bar downtown. It seemed like a grad-student thing to do. We met for lunch and left two or three hours later, drunk and sedate. Then it became five hours later. Then we took both lunch and dinner at the bar, and I would stagger home stupid-drunk and broke, pulling crumpled bar receipts from my pockets, these verdicts of excess. I’d stumble into the nursery and sway over the crib with a big dumb smile on my face. One night I woke to take a leak but never made it to the bathroom. Instead, I mistook the bed for the toilet, and pissed all over the covers and the hardwood floor. On another night, I fell down a friend’s staircase, ripping the handrail out of the wall on my way down. Everything was coming unhinged, and suddenly I was both absent and present. During the semesters when my teaching schedule included Fridays, I would frequently call my office mate from the bar, and have him walk to my class to announce that I was home with a sick baby, or that I had to take my infant son to the doctor and that class was canceled.

  Every staggering and red-faced minute I spent in that bar, every wasted moment I spent swaying over the urinal in the stinking bathroom, with my hand flattened on the wall to steady myself, was time I wasn’t spending with my wife, my son. But what to make of this misbehavior? I was not the man or father I had hoped and promised to be. I was still the frat boy who had been hauled into the drunk tank, who had been cuffed roadside, who had stood before a judge like my father so many times before me. What, really, was the root of this trouble? It wasn’t the buildings crashing to the earth in New York on my son’s birthday. It wasn’t that fatherhood was simply too much to bear, and so I sought escape at the bar around the corner. I
loved my son in that kill-anyone-who-harms-him kind of way. But I also loved knocking back beer after beer at the bar. If I am troubled by the version of me in those days, I am even more troubled to think that my misbehavior then was an improvement on my misbehavior in my college years. In my mind, the two Brandons didn’t compare. At least I wasn’t failing out of school. At least my criminal history ended before I married. Or so I reasoned at the time.

  Unconvinced, Kelli grew tired of my marathon binge drinking, and, with Mason in tow, she started to spend the weekends at her mother’s house, two hours south. We hadn’t been married three years, and already she was spending time at her mother’s, which, in our unspoken way, was a euphemism for trouble at home. What’s worse, I didn’t seem to give a shit. The danger in our small delicate circle didn’t entail planes falling from cloudless skies, or circuitry gone haywire. It entailed me. I had become the danger.

  What saved us, I think—what saved me, really—was the decision to move twelve hours north from Logan, Utah, to Moscow, Idaho. Having graduated in May of 2003, I had been accepted into the MFA creative writing program at the University of Idaho, another second chance to prove myself. Kelli got a good job with the university but she had to relocate immediately. This meant that I had to stay in Utah and sell our house (we were lucky in that, unlike most grad students, we owned our home), while she and Mason moved into unknown country. Two months and hundreds of miles separated us. At night, I would walk around our empty home listening to the haunting echoes of my footfalls on hardwood, and I started to imagine in gut-rending detail what life might look like or feel like without Kelli, without Mason. I would drag my camping mattress into the nursery, slump to the floor with a beer in hand, and try to smell some hint of his skin or his shampooed hair. It sounds sentimental to me now, but maybe I was in a sentimental place, and maybe that was what I needed.

  At the end of the summer, I joined them. I left behind the empty house and let my ghostly echoes die there. I couldn’t get to Idaho fast enough. I raced the entire way, leaning into the steering wheel for twelve hours straight. We had rented a two-story Victorian home in a tiny logging town eleven miles east of town. The air smelled like ripsawed lumber and you could hear the continual whine of the mill working day and night. Our house had a wood-burning stove and I ordered two cords of tamarack and would spend the cool autumn afternoons splitting and stacking wood. We canned tomatoes and green beans and Kelli made bread and I would play with Mason on our spacious living room floor. I wrote in the mornings to the hiss and pop of the stove and prepared for class in the evenings. We were alone, which is another way of saying we were together for the first time since Mason was born. I was learning how to be a father and husband again. Our small town huddled in a wooded gorge with steep streets, and from our porch we could see wood smoke in the air, and the rooftops of houses farther down below us.

  It was our routine that I would pull Mason in his wagon to the post office, where I would mail essays to magazines and pick up rejection slips. I would then pull him to the market for an ice-cream cone and then on to the park, where I would read the mail and watch him play. Or I would stand at the bottom of the slide urging him to let go, assuring him I would catch him, that it wasn’t dangerous. Or I would chase him across the baseball diamond and we would crash in the outfield. There was no epiphany in those days. No lightning strike, no sudden moment of clarity. But there was the slow and inevitable accumulation of days beneath the sky and the rhythms of activity you might call life. The dour view, in other words, was losing ground to the hopeful view.

  I recall from that period taking a class, from the writer Kim Barnes, called “Finding the Father.” The seminar called for an impressive list of works. Adam Hochschild’s Half the Way Home, Christopher Dickey’s Summer of Deliverance, Susan Cheever’s Home Before Dark, Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and others. For years I had been trying to find my own father, and during those falling-down years in Utah, I found him in the mirror every morning throwing a bloodshot gaze back at me.

  I was now in the process of finding the father within.

  I recall that class, too, because halfway through the semester, Kelli took a pregnancy test and it was positive, a result that, because we had been trying, left us elated.

  On December 1, 2005, our daughter, Madeline, arrived in the midst of a horrendous Idaho blizzard. When we brought her home from the hospital, winter was barreling down on us. Snow drifted against the house, punctuating our new togetherness. We were socked in. I split kindling in the snow and loaded the stove and tried to keep the large house warm. The woodstove wasn’t the only source of heat (we had a furnace), but it was the most cost-effective. Mason helped me feed the fire, and I taught him about draft and fuel. This was another of our routines. Lighting fires. “It’s important,” I told him, “to know how to start every fire with only one match.”

  “How come?”

  “Because,” I said. “One day you may find yourself having only one match.” It was one way of teaching him how to guard against the unexpected.

  At five years of age, Mason was excited to be a big brother. But he was also nervous to hold his sister, nervous that he would do something wrong. I recall holding her out to him while he danced from one foot to another. “What if I drop her?”

  “You won’t drop her,” I said.

  “But what if I do?”

  He gets his nervousness from me. When he is a father, I imagine, he will chase speeding cars down his street, waving his arms in the air, cursing their feckless ways.

  But if he is nervous, he is also curious. He asked questions about his sister, about childbirth, about breast feeding. And I talked with him. I told him the story of his birth and Kelli’s preeclampsia and bed rest. Each story prodded more questions. As with most five-year-olds, his world was made up of questions, which became more complicated over time.

  “Dad,” he said one morning over breakfast. “Did the big buildings fall on my birthday?”

  It was a subject that came up infrequently, but one that he had keyed in on whenever someone asked when his birthday was.

  I paused, considered my response, and set my coffee cup down. “Yes, they did,” I said, taking the less-is-more approach.

  The question came almost as a non sequitur, catching me off guard. One day, I knew, we’d have to have the talk about how those buildings crashed to the earth. We’d have to talk about outward, unforeseen dangers.

  It is a Saturday morning not long after the New Year, Madeline just beyond a month old. I am in my office writing, Madeline cooing on a blanket near the bookcase. Kelli is cooking breakfast. The thick scents of bacon, coffee, baked bread, and tamarack hang in the air. Outside, the skies are clear but with the kind of cold that waters your eyes. From the living room, where Mason is playing with his action figures, the stove radiates waves of dry heat. I slip into the kitchen to refresh my coffee and talk with Kelli.

  “Dad?” we hear Mason call from the living room.

  I sip from my coffee and turn.

  “Dad, something’s wrong.”

  He is standing in front of the woodstove, pointing up. The white sting of fear strikes fast and electric. The black stovepipe that runs from the stove top to the ceiling has popped its seam and come loose from the ceiling plate. The pipe leans slightly and spews foul black smoke and soot, and sparks shower the carpet and couches. I tell Kelli to get the baby out of the house. “Mason, get outside.” He starts to cry. “We’re fine, buddy,” I say, softening the tone. “Just go outside.”

  The smoke detector begins chirruping steadily. After I shut down the damper, I put my leather gloves on, stand on a chair, and grab the stovepipe. But the gloves are too thin, the pipe too hot. In one fluid motion, I leap off the chair, dash to the kitchen, and return with four hot pads. Back on the chair, I try with no success to reconnect the pipe to the ceiling plate. Sparks are singeing my hair and the house is filling with black smoke, and even with the hot pads and gloves,
the pipe is burning my hands. Desperate, I cock the stove pipe at an angle so that the upper sleeve binds against the lower shank, preventing it—I hope—from crashing down, and begin pulling burning wood from the belly of the stove and dropping the chunks in threes into a scuttle. It takes three trips to convey the burning wood from the house. I have dumped each load into a backyard snowdrift. Kelli and the kids are standing in the front yard. Are they silent? Are they crying? Are the neighbors watching this whole thing unfold? I have no idea. I cannot see them nor can I hear them for the quick rush of blood in my ears.

  A half hour later, the fire is dead, the smoke mostly cleared, and Kelli has brought the kids back inside. We’re fine, if shaken. That night or maybe a few nights later, I have a nightmare that the house is burning to the ground and I can’t get to my children. They aren’t screaming, but I can hear Mason’s searching voice, hauntingly calm. He just keeps saying, “Dad? Dad? Dad?” The dream rattles me so much that I get up, grab Mason from his bed, and pull him into ours. Madeline is fast asleep on Kelli’s chest and I lie awake looking at all of them and thank those gods I have cursed and thanked before for this—for this very moment right here in the long quiet of night.

  Those years in that hamlet seem marked by improvement. I was less idiot, and more writer. Less boy, and more man. Less barfly, and more husband. Less son, and more father. Eventually, though, we had to leave. Rising gas prices, the quality of schools, and a range of other variables made our move into Moscow inevitable. Two weeks before we moved, though, the grain elevators caught fire and nearly took the town with them. A black cloud hung over us. The mood was grim. The silos had been packed with wheat and dry peas when they burned. The entire yield was gone, and the fire meant not only crop loss, but job loss.