The Christian

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My father came to me several days later and asked if I wanted to go to the feed store with him, and I got really excited and said sure even though I’d miss the Saturday morning cartoons.  He said he had to change out of his mud boots first and went out onto the back porch to do so, and I snuck back there and watched him through the rear screen door, and that was the first time I thought maybe something was wrong with him still, that the doctors hadn’t fixed everything after the accident.  First, he couldn’t get his one shoe off, and he drooled all over as he was trying to kick it off the way a kid does instead of untying it, then when he went to put his other shoes on, he tried to put the right on the left, and instead of just lifting his other foot or setting the shoe down and picking up the other one, he set the shoe down, then put his leg down, then tried to do the exact same thing again – wrong shoe on the wrong foot – before finally figuring it out.  Then he couldn’t figure out how to tie the shoes, and I pushed through the door and went out there, and he looked up at me and started laughing and said, “I can’t quite figure this out, son.  I don’t know what’s gotten into me,” and I said he was silly, and he laughed some more, turning beet red in the face, and said, “Can you help out a drunken sailor?” which was something he always said, joking around with us, and he’d sway back and forth and pretend he was drunk and hang all over us making silly faces, and we’d tell him to stop, and he’d do something worse, and by the end of it we’d all be laughing, even our mother.

 So I did.  I tied my father’s shoes for him.

My father, forever after, was afraid to go to the feed store by himself.  If Michael or I wasn’t around, he’d have our mother go with him, and if she wasn’t there, he wouldn’t go at all.  Now, part of that I know must have been a superstition that he’d get in a wreck again, but it turned out to be more than that.  And my father wasn’t a weak man, and he wasn’t afraid of anything I could think of.  The only time I saw my father scared was when I went with him to the feed store, and every bump in the road and every passing car, and if a horn honked, he’d flinch.  But that was understandable.

When I was ten and summer had come around again, Michael and I and our friends at church were all excited because we’d get to play in the Church baseball league.  There was one for kids and one for adults, and my father usually coached one and played in the other, and my mother even played one year, though it was just for laughs.  Todd got excited, too, because he was finally going to get to play in the adult league and show off his muscles to the girls, and when we went home, I ran into the barn to tell Dad, and I asked him, “Daddy, are you gonna coach the team this year?”

And he said, “No, son, I’m not.”

“Please, Daddy?” I begged, and he shook his head at me.  He had been waxing the tractor’s fenders.

“Get out of here,” he said.  “Go in the house with your mother.”

I started crying then, and I ran inside, and mother asked why I was crying, and I told her, and I could see Todd getting angry at the table, and later that night when I was up in my room, I heard Todd talking to Dad.

“Now, why would you say something like that to him?” he asked.

“Well, because it’s the truth.”

“Well, why aren’t you?”

“Hey,” my father said, “I’ll coach a team all right, just as long as it’s not affiliated with any church.”

Todd had mumbled something, and my father had gotten angry at him and said if he heard anything else out of him, he was going to take the car away from him for a week, then he decided to do it anyway.  They had been lending him the pick-up truck with an eight PM curfew as long as he kept his grades and chores up.  I don’t think Todd talked to my dad much for a month after that.

Michael and I ended up playing on the Church team anyway, and my mother went  to all the games, and sometimes Uncle Don would show up, though he always looked like he wanted to be somewhere else.  We made it to the finals, and I asked Dad if he was gonna come to the big game, and he said, “No, son, I’m afraid I’m too busy,” and that was probably the truth since the crops were being harvested.

I really missed my father that summer.  He was always out in the fields working them harder than ever.  Even when my friends came by, he hardly seemed at all to be interested in what we were doing, and one of the times he did come over, he forgot Derek’s name, even though Derek had been coming around since we were both in kindergarten.  Most of the time, he just stayed locked in the barn or out in the fields with the corn and the beans.

This went on for a long time.  I tried out for my junior high football team in the fall hoping my father would come to the games, but I got cut.  I had tried out for wide receiver, but I was short and the other guys could run faster than me, and on the defense I kept getting knocked down because I weighed barely a hundred and ten pounds.  The following summer I decided not to go for the Church’s baseball team, because I knew there wouldn’t be anyone out there in the stands rooting for me besides my mother, and I didn’t want her out there sweating all the time.

My brother Todd decided not to go to college and got a job with the highway department, and he moved out when he was eighteen.  I was just entering high school then, and Michael was already there, and all of us, my dad included, helped Todd move into the house he shared with three other guys, and my father gave him some money and said, “You need anything, just call,” then he told him that he loved him and Todd said he loved him back, and they hugged each other and Todd actually cried.  He cried when he hugged my mother, too.

It was like that with all of us.  It was like my father hadn’t changed at all except for this one thing.  He still sat down at the table with us, he just didn’t bow his head.  He worked just as hard and sold his crops to the markets, and he got a big purchase from a cannery under Dole for his corn, and the small field he kept of turnips, beets, and cucumbers and so forth he started selling at the farmer’s market down on Grand View while we were at church.

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