My Father Behind Me

I turned 72 yesterday, and today I've been thinking of my father, who died, at 76, in 1987. As the saying goes, I hardly knew him, though we worked on our farm together, in the barn or in the fields, nearly every day when I was growing up.

Almost the last time I spoke with my father, by phone, from our respective homes in British Columbia and Minnesota, he expressed disgruntlement at not being able to work anymore. He'd worked hard physically all his life, and now, like a betrayal, his body was failing him.

I'd been talking to my mother when I asked how Dad was. After a couple of years of ignoring chest pains and breathlessness, he'd finally gone to a doctor. That led to by-pass surgery and a few months’ respite. Now, he was suffering angina, having to pop nitro-glycerine pills, and finding his prescribed aerobic walks a daily torture. Just walking down the block in my parents’ suburban Minneapolis housing development exhausted him.

"He's on the other phone," my mother said. "Why don't you ask him yourself?"

"Hello, son," he spoke up now--from the bedroom, I guessed.

"How are you, Dad?"

"Aw, I'm not worth a shit anymore."

His voice was weak, gravelly.

"I'm looking forward to seeing you, Dad. I'll go out with you on your exercise walks. We'll be able to talk."

I was looking forward to some talks together, and maybe he was too—the kind of talks a father and son never seem to have while the son is growing up, talks my father could never have had with his father, an expatriate American and a CPR engineer, who was killed in a train wreck during a blizzard on the Saskatchewan prairie when my father was five. My father’s widowed mother, then, with his two brothers and a sister, had moved from Moose Jaw to Minneapolis to live with her aged father.

"I hope so," he said.

A month later--and two weeks before our scheduled flight to Minnesota for a two-week visit—he was dead.

What I remember now, what seems to typify him, was the rolled-up wool sock he'd stuff into his left shoe to replace the missing half of that foot, lost to the instep in a farm accident. There's a snapshot of my father on crutches, taken a month later, just home from the hospital, that notes the date: Sept. 8, 1943. He’d spent his 33rd birthday in the hospital, fighting gangrene (one of the new "miracle" drugs, penicillin, saved him). I was eight, and in the Catholic school in a nearby town that frightful day of his accident. I remember my regret at having missed it.

He might have bled to death that day, might have gone deeper into the knives of the machine that took corn stalks, chopped them into bits and blew them into the silo, if my uncle Gerry (he and my father were farming together) hadn't been there to think quickly and reverse the machine, then run to the house for my mother and my folks' car. My uncle had driven to the doctor, my mother rigid and silent in the front seat beside him, my father rocking and silent in back, white but conscious, gripping the towel wrapped around his mangled foot.

I remember his shoes, the left one turned up at the instep, which together with his slight limp always told of his accident. A year after he was dead and in his grave, I found a pair of his dress shoes (his church shoes) in the trunk of my mother's car, the one shoe turned up like his mark left in the world, and felt my throat tighten, felt his loss even more than I had at the sight of him laid out in his coffin. What moved me then, as I stared down at his body, were his hands, his gnarled, working man’s hands, crossed on his chest.

I think of him now when I'm working outside, working with my own hands. I feel his eyes on me as I strike a nail. I sense his presence as I wield an ax, use my chainsaw, split firewood that will keep my wife and me warm in the winter. All those years we worked together and I tried to keep up with him and seldom could. I still want his recognition. I still work for it.