The Christian

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My father continued to not join us at the kitchen table, and Todd asked my mother one night, “What’s wrong with dad?”

“Oh, he’s just not feeling well,” she said.  “He has a hard time eating because of his headaches, and he doesn’t want you to have to see him that way, so he eats later.”

I heard her say this as I was scrubbing the dishes, and all I could think of was him sitting there not reading a book or doing anything, and wondering if that’s what he did every night while we were at the dinner table.

My father managed to get back to work with the use of only one crutch, and I saw him out in the fields not long after the ice melted, and I heard him get up in the morning to go out in the barn with the cows, and he started not even coming in for dinner, and when Todd asked, mother waved it off and said, “He’s just behind on his work, trying to catch up.”

He’d still come in and ask us what was new, and he’d make us do our homework and tell us when to go to bed and to stop monkeying around and shut off the light.  He was still our father in every other respect.  He just didn’t come to the dinner table anymore.

Now, he hadn’t gone to church the whole time, being bedridden, and we had gone without him as usual, and there was several weeks of that.  We had just gotten used to going without him, everyone asking how’s your pa, and is your father feeling better, and us telling them he was fine, he was just getting back to work, and then one day one of the men asked me, Well, if he can go out and farm the field, then how come he can’t come here and see us?

I didn’t think much of the significance of that until one night he did come to the dinner table and my mother asked, “Walter, are you going to say grace?”

“No, I’m not,” he said very directly.  “You can if you’d like, but I’m not going to join you.”

Now, if Todd had been there maybe he would have asked something, but he was at an away game for the football team somewhere over on the other side of the Appalachians, and my mother just stared at him kind of dumbstruck like she didn’t know what to do, then she started nodding her head, then she said, “Oh, okay.  Children, bow your heads.”  And we all clasped our hands and closed our eyes and bowed our heads and said the prayer, only I peeked once to see what daddy was doing, and he — I just remember him looking so disappointed, like mother was saying it wrong.

After a week of that at the table, with Todd the first couple nights looking the same as my mother had, we just got used to it.  To Dad not joining us for prayer, and then the next Sunday came about, and my father had been up bright and early, I had heard him, and when I went running downstairs, I saw his crutch left by the door — that he hadn’t needed it — and mother got us all ready for church in our little suits, and I asked, “Is Daddy coming with us?”  Figuring the crutch at the door was a sign he was better, and she said, “Why don’t you run out and ask him?”

So I did.  I went running out the front door in my black leather shoes and kicked up dirt behind me, and I didn’t see him in the field so I went to the barn, and there he was working a hammer to get a fence post through that rock-hard ground, and I said, “Daddy, are you coming to church with us?”

He shook his head first, and I could see he was out of breath, then he put the hammer down and wiped his brow and crouched down as he always did when he talked to us — at eye level, directly.  “No, I’m not.”

“Why not, Daddy?”

He smiled then and said, “Don’t question me, son,” then he stood up and went back to work.

I went in and told my mother what he had said, and she said he probably wasn’t feeling well.  Whenever anyone asked, she said that same thing, that he probably wasn’t feeling well.  And she said it the next week when we went down and he wasn’t there.  Daddy’s not feeling well.

Uncle Don came over after the service because my mother had told him that Dad needed help with some of the equipment out in the barn, and they had gone out and worked on it together, with my uncle changing out of his suit into overalls.  Todd and I had gone out to help.  It was a tractor engine, and they had it on a chain hoist, and Dad needed help lowering it into place after he had replaced one of the cylinder heads, and my Uncle and Dad talked about all kinds of things — about guys Don worked with at the transmission shop and people at the church and how they asked about him, and I kept wanting Don to ask why Dad wasn’t coming to church anymore, because I thought my Uncle Don of all people could get an answer from him, but Todd asked it for him.

“Dad, how come you’re not coming to church anymore?”

My dad wound down from laughing about something else, and at first I didn’t think he was going to answer or that maybe he’d admonish Todd as he had me, but then he said plainly and directly, “I’m not going anymore because I no longer believe in God.”  

I was nine years old when he said that.

There was a long pause before Don managed to think of something to say, and they started talking again as he and Dad reconnected all the wires and hoses and bolted the engine back down, and they continued talking as he climbed on up in the tractor and cranked on the engine until it turned over.  Then they adjusted some things, and he drove it on out of the barn with all of us watching and did a few loops in the field, and I wasn’t sure after a while that I had heard him right.

My father had been on the Church’s board as a Secretary of the Treasury, keeping the books tidy, and I had been curious and gone to a couple of the meetings with him years prior.  They had been boring affairs, talking about things that went way over my head which I didn’t understand until years later when I was on the Church’s board and suffered through the same meetings.  He got a call one Sunday that I overheard in the front room.  We only had a phone down in the kitchen, and it had a chord so long you could take it out on the back porch if you wanted to, which was what Todd did when the girls called him after school.  Well, my dad picked up and said, “Hey, Dean,” and Dean was one of the fellows down at the church I had seen banging a gavel at one of these meetings, and they started talking, and my dad offered some advice on how to handle some of the financial matters, and he said something like, “Well, then you don’t call a plumber to fix the back up because you got one right in your congregation, and if the budget’s tight you ask him to do it out of the kindness of his own heart,” and finally my dad said, “Listen, Dean, as far as I’m concerned Craig can have the post permanently, because I’m not coming back to the church.”  And Dean had said something else, and dad had said that’s right, and then Dean talked for a long time, and then my dad said, “Well, now, I guess I’ll just have to take that up with Barry,” and then he had hung up with enough force, I heard the phone receiver echo.

Barry was our pastor.

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