Dad died last September. We weren’t close. Never had been. States and ages and resentments separated us. In the last twenty years we spoke twice. Small talk. Like strangers, which is what we’d been. Once, in my brother’s garage, Mom standing next to him in the fog of Alzheimer’s, wondering who I was. Again, a few years later after it had taken her. At her funeral.
Stubbornness got him this far, to his ninety-second year. Stubborn, he’d say, as a goddamn mule. Sheer bullheadedness. Or spite. He seemed as reluctant to grow old, to give in to age, as he was unwilling to grow up. During all the years when my three brothers and I were kids on the farm, it was as if he didn’t want the responsibility of being a husband and father and sole provider of the family. And that’s how he carried on, far longer than he should have, longer than I ever imagined he could have.
For years he stocked the medicine cabinet above the sink with a red carton of Winston cigarettes and smoked two packs a day. He kept two refrigerators filled with Pfeiffer’s Beer: one in the porch off the kitchen, the other next to the workbench in the machine shed. He spent long weekday afternoons with drinking buddies at Sandy’s in Sleepy Eye and later at the Municipal Liquor Store in Lamberton, where he played buck euchre and slapped trump down with the reckless joy of a kid springing a prank on a teacher, the card snapping the table like the crack of a wet towel. One fall when the combine wouldn’t start and he didn’t have starter fluid, he made do with gasoline, sprayed it in the carburetor, and told Ken to hit the ignition; a funnel of orange flame shot out at him and set the shoulder of his jacket on fire. Another time he tried to siphon gas through a hose and that evening sat in the kitchen, unable to eat, belching fuel. And he drove — sober, hung-over, or three-sheets-to-the-wind.
More than once after junior high football practice I rode home with him, the pickup bouncing over potholes in the alley behind the Liquor Store, gearing up past the Elevator and Feed Mill, rattling across the railroad tracks and Highway 14, and gunning out of town on the dark county road. We weaved across the center line as he shifted and drifted back again, then veered farther right, the wheel below my feet gradually crossing the white line on the edge of the asphalt. “Dad,” I said watching the ditch slide closer and closer. Then, back into the right-hand lane and down the half-mile-long hill toward the Cottonwood River and the narrow bridge over the water thirty feet below.
The cab, dark except for the glow of the speedometer and the red cherry on the end of the Winston wedged between two fingers of his left hand, smelled of motor oil, cheap beer when he exhaled, and cigarette smoke. The truck seemed unruly under the guidance of his right hand at the top of the steering wheel. Down the hill we went, gathering speed on the long grade. Hell-bent for ’lection, as he often said. Then, the road leveled out in the river bottom and the black-and-white diagonal stripes of the warning signs that marked the two sides of the narrow bridge reflected the headlights. I braced my feet against the floor mat, held my breath as we hugged the shoulder and barreled down on the bridge, the right headlight lined up with the low concrete wall that separated road from river, and stiffened as the long drop to the water got nearer and blacker. Finally, Dad herded the truck left, aimed for the middle of the road, and straddled the center line over the bridge. I sighed, a small cloud fogging the window on my right. We climbed the steep hill out of the bottom and passed Shorty Skelton’s place before turning west on the gravel township road home.
Once inside the house, we sat at the long kitchen table for supper, Dad smoking at one end with his back to the window that looked out on the grove west of the driveway, Mom at the other end near the stove. Ken and Ron sat opposite Steve and me. We ate in silence, but eventually, when we got filled up and boys being boys, one of us, no matter how foolish or ill informed, said something—about letting our hair grow, wearing jeans to school despite the dress code, the Ali-Frazier fight, Deep Purple, the Vikings, My Lai, draft dodgers going to Canada, riots, Watergate, Tricky Dick. No matter what we said on any subject, Dad disagreed. When he was in that wasted state, he was bent on arguing. Not logically or reasonably. Angrily. Stubbornly. Drunkenly. Profanely. He didn’t care, hadn’t since Kennedy, and refused, as he said more than once, “after they shot the only President he ever voted for.” But he couldn’t resist the anger.
Those were the days these past few months recall. Since Dad’s passing last fall, through November and December’s deepening gloom, and amid the threats of January, I felt like we were all back there again, that we’d inherited something we thought had long passed: barreling down a long, steep hill toward a narrow bridge; veering left, then right; tasting that accelerated anger. Hell-bent for ’lection.
