My Redacted Life: Chapter One (Cont. 7)

It was Day Two of my civilian life, November 13, 1970 if I remember right, and I was home. My mother and I had met on the steps of our country store and shared our greetings. We weren’t an overly demonstrative family, but she made it clear that she was glad to see me finished with military life.

As she put it in her eloquent and feminine way, “I was always so goddam afraid they would send you back over yonder.”

We went inside where my father sat on his stool behind the store’s counter. It was his throne, and none entered his domain without recognizing his rule. He nodded my way and said, “Make it home all right?”

That’s the German equivalent of a scream of joy.

You remember a lot of things about your father as you grow old. Strange things. I think back often to how it must have been growing up in the deep woods of Arkansas in a tortured home life that would end in a separation and bitter estrangement.

His father had been hired out as a youth to a farmer in the German colony of Golconda, Illinois. Part of the money he had earned went to the education of brother who became a highly respected PhD, at the University of Iowa, teaching and studying about rural sociology.

Granddaddy got to keep some of the money, and later narrowed the choices of how spend it to purchasing a small flour mill in St. Paul, Minnesota, or buying a sizable chunk of timberland in the wilds of Arkansas.

On such decisions ride the gods who dispense the vicissitudes of life, laughing all way.

Of all the stories Daddy told me, the one that stands out involved a band of gypsies who stopped at their isolated homeplace wanting to swap a jug of milk for a wagon bow. “For your babies,” they said.

“Got no babies,” my grandmother said, threatening them with a broom and chasing them away.

They left, according to my father’s telling of the story, walking and singing,

“Up the road,

Down the road.

Here we go.

Got no baby.

Got no wagon bow.”

Don’t know if it’s true or not, but it’s a hell of a good story. Anyway, that’s the man who met me. He didn’t ask much about my service career. He never wanted me to join, but realized I had no choice. Having been called “A dirty Hun,” as a child during World War One, he didn’t consider military service any of his business, or mine.

He was a hard-headed, but mischievous man. He suffered the bitter prejudices of his day, but never refused a genuine plea for help from anyone in need, no matter the color of their skin. He was never cruel and never cheated a customer. He forgave many a credit bill for a family headed for Detroit and a better life. They would often offer him their plot of family land in payment.

He always refused. “What would I do with it?” Anyway, a lot of families who owned land went broke during the Depression.

He was a product of his time and place. He thought Franklin D. Roosevelt deserved a place as an addition the Holy Trinity. A “Blue-Dog Democrat,” his whole life, I am afraid that he could never have accepted an African-American as president. I suspect he would have changed political parties because of it, as so many of our people have.

That day, though, we didn’t discuss such things. He was most interested in the route I had taken home and how much traffic I had encountered. He had simple interests in a brain that whirled like a Cray computer. An eight-grade dropout, he could work algebra problems in his head without knowing algebra. He could envision and build a house, barn, or conveyor-device to load firewood without benefit of paper or pen. He could add long columns of figures, even those written in his tortured writing, without a single mistake.

He read the newspaper each day and was fond of comic books. He liked most white people okay, and all “colored” people it seemed, as long as they kept their place. He wasn’t fond of preachers or loafers. He could grow anything and butcher an entire hog with less effort than it takes me to mow a lawn.

He always kept a cow and a calf in a barn behind the house. It gave him pleasure, and it also provided an opportunity to enjoy a shot of Old Yellowstone after a long day in the store. More than one, though, and he faced the wrath of the tiny terrorists to whom he was married. Our mother was much the source of his strength and whatever success he enjoyed. He was a lucky man in marriage, a bit of good fortune I was later to enjoy myself.

Oh, I wish he had enjoyed an education. He might have helped with a cure for cancer. I regret that he suffered from the prejudices of his generation, but I’m glad that it didn’t make him mean as it has so many others. I wish at times that he hadn’t been so set in his ways, but then I think of others who got rich doing the same thing he did for a living and couldn’t have done it without pushing the boundaries of decency.

Is short, they gave him to us as we found him and that’s all I can write about. We could have done worse.

That day, we sat and talked for a long time about traveling, about traffic, about crops, and about fishing. If the weather held out he said, “We might just give it a try on Sunday.” I said I would like that.

Pre-Fishing Days