My Father's Footprints (7 page)

So Edward’s death is not the kind of news I can deliver on the phone. Feeling like a Shakespeare walk-on [
Enter MESSENGER
], I drive to my mother’s house, where my son is spending the day.

[
MESSENGER delivers sad tidings. Business.
]

“Well, we knew he was sick. And they don’t live that long anyway. If he were in the wild, he’d be dead.”

This is Joey talking, not me. He’s stealing all my lines. He is often analytical when he doesn’t trust himself to be sad.
He never cries over Edward or Bob. I wonder whether it is because he is strong and secure or because he has a secret, darkened
architecture, a labyrinth of baffles through which he bounces his
sorrows. I honestly can’t tell, and it seems to me that both could somehow be true.

We are Sims again. Empty and yet so vulnerable that a sick guinea pig could polish us off.

HAMLET

Has this fellow no feeling for his business, that he sings at grave-making?

HORATIO

Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness.

HAMLET

’Tis e’en so: the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.

Thonk. Thonk. “Gwine see Miss Liza!” I try a bit of singing at grave-making, but the dirt will not budge. “Gwine go to Mississippi!”
It has been a green winter, but beneath the green, the earth is hard and resentful.

Edward will lie in state (in the garage) until I can figure out how to dig a hole.

I look up from all my troubles and see that Joey has been, in a funny way, neglected. He has the pasty, sunken-eyed look of
a boy who has spent too much time alone with Nintendo.

So we take a hike up Rattlesnake Mountain in Farmington, Connecticut, on a cold day. It’s a good place for us to go and drop
our burdens and get more connected to rock and sky. We have used the mountain in this way all our lives together.

Joey likes to dramatize a hike by falling deliberately from time to time. He is on the ground from one of these falls when
Roy, our old, old dog either fails to see him in time or simply cannot,
because of arthritis, manage to miss him. Roy steps on Joey’s face, leaving a muddy pawprint on his cheek.

Joey finds this interesting.

“Now,” he says, “I know how the ground feels.”

Maybe that’s my next job. Get myself oriented. Know how the ground feels.

After Bob dies, I discover that I have joined, willy-nilly, the Dead Fathers Society, the multitudes of other men who have
been clobbered in their forties when their fathers died.

What you see, in guy after guy, is a sense of wounded surprise. They didn’t know. They didn’t anticipate the lists of unspoken
truths and unanswered questions that would sprout, fast as June radishes, in the space where their fathers once stood.

I get letters from men who say they are still, after twelve years, in some kind of dialogue with the shades of the departed
dad. The acceptable obsolescence of fathers is deceptive advertising. “He’s big. He’s tough. He’s stoic. You won’t mind when
he croaks.” Humbug.

The guys in the DFS soften their voices when they tell you their stories. It’s our secret handshake, this bruised little voice.

It hurts and goes numb, hurts and goes numb. There are days when I want him around, for a dose of his odd politics, let’s
say. And there are harder days when I want to confess the secrets of my life to him and ask him how I should live from now
on.

But it’s never really bad, because Dad and I had all that time. I don’t regret a walk or a song or a diaper or a quiz question.
I could have done a lot more, but I did enough. Enough to show him love and give me peace. That’s all you can ask for.

If you’re lucky, now and then, you get more. You get something that feels like grace. Maybe you get a spot on the up end.

He is dead, and there are one million unspoken words. We were estranged for a lot of those years—not exactly enemies but wary
men, brushing past each other, as empty as Sims, as guarded as ghosts. I sit down again with his old scripts, turn the pages.
Absurdly, he starts talking to me again—this time about the afterlife.

[
Two knocks
]

SNOWBIRD TOOMEY

It’s him.

WILLIE BURKE

Is that you, Dennis?

[
Two knocks
]

Does two knocks mean yes?

[
Two knocks
]

SNOWBIRD

Wait a minute. Two knocks could mean no. In that case, when you asked him if two knocks meant yes, he could have knocked twice
for no.

WILLIE

[
Annoyed
]

Dennis, what’s no?

[
One knock
]

What’s yes?

[
Two knocks
]

[
To Toomey
]

I hope you’re satisfied.

SNOWBIRD

Are you in hell, Dennis?

[
Two knocks
]

Do you feel miserable?

[
One knock
]

Do you feel bereft and forlorn?

[
One knock
]

Do you feel repentant?

[
One knock
]

Is your spirit in deep despair?

[
One knock
]

Do you yearn for alcohol and women?

[
Two knocks
]

Do you yearn for poker and racehorses?

[
Two knocks
]

Is there any point in our praying for you?

[
One knock
]

WILLIE

[
Beams
]

He’s fine. He’s fine.

“When they asked you to write this book, I have a feeling they were picturing a more normal family.”

—T
HONA
M
C
E
NROE

Sarah Whitman Hooker Pies recommended with this chapter

Captain Jim’s Live Pigeon Pie with shotgun

Mary Beth’s No-Filling Pie for People Who Don’t Trust Anybody

Mabel’s Date Nut Marshmallow Goo

The Green Bastard

W
e scroll back twenty-two years. In July 1976, my father goes walking in the hot breath of the Connecticut summer and dies.

I get a call at the newspaper where I work. Something is wrong, my mother says. Come home now.

The air has the texture of hot Vaseline. His doctor had told him he ought to take walks for his high blood pressure. His doctor
had not thought it necessary to add, “Discontinue walking when the atmosphere around here resembles the inside of a vaporizer.”

So he sets out at a nice, brisk clip through the heat and humidity and ambles along until his faculties begin to veer out
of whack.

He stumbles into the house and collapses. He may have fainted. His body simply decides that his brain cannot be trusted and
temporarily relieves it of command. Ensign Unconsciousness, the bridge is yours. When I arrive on the scene, he has improved,
reaching the state of cognitive bleariness that passes, among adult male McEnroes, for normal.

I am twenty-two and need, at that exact moment, to jump into my car and drive without stopping to the Blue Ridge Mountains
of Virginia to see a woman. This is not a good time for me to preside over the death of my father.

“He looks fine,” I tell my mother.