He’d wanted Dad to become a man of the cloth. He confessed this to me in one of the few conversations we had when I was a child (the men in my family were as notoriously short on words as they were on forgiveness).
“Especially then — the postwar years — I wanted him in the church. America was having a party,” he said. “On top of the world, we were. Money and booze. A housing boom. Terrible.”
“Why was it terrible?” I asked.
It was August. My father and I had driven up from Dallas for a visit. My mother must have been with us, but I don’t remember her being there. She was already pulling away by then.
I was sitting with my grandfather in his backyard garden, late in the afternoon, watering his fat tomatoes. Dad was inside. He’d found an old sketchpad of his in the basement and was thumbing through its pages.
“Why? Because we were in danger of succumbing to the pleasures of the material world, that’s why. We were celebrating, blindly, when what we should have been doing was thanking the Lord for our blessings. More than ever, right then, we needed men of the Word, to keep America on its path to greatness. Do you understand?”
“Mm-hm.” I didn’t.
“But your father never paid me any mind.” He squinted at Dad through a dusty bedroom window. “As a boy, he was constantly daydreaming, your father. Collecting rocks, listening to crickets, drawing pictures.” This was the first I’d known of Dad’s art. “Idle nonsense.”
He leaned over me, then. I felt the heat of his breath. “Don’t ever forget this, son: God demands of all His children a life of full atonement for our sins.”
“What sins?” I said.
With two large fingers, Grandfather Darnell lifted my elbow so water gushing from the hose in my hand would hit the right spot. “The sins of the fathers,” he said. “Someday you’ll have to decide. Are you going to run from the truth like your dad, or are you, perhaps, going to assume my earthly burden and joy?”
I stared at him, wildly confused. My arm was tired. I dropped it a little, splashing mud on the side of his pinewood garage.
He snatched the hose from my hand. “I’m talking about the ministry, Kelly. You’ll know it if you ever hear the Word. You know what I’d like you to do?” He sounded furious. “I’d like you to listen for it. Will you? Listen close, for me. It could come tomorrow. It could come many years from now.”
Right then, the only word that came to me was duffer.
He placed a palm on my head and spoke to the clouds in the sky. “Lord, it would please me so if this boy were to take up my calling.” He inspected me closely — my posture, my nervous smile — as if I were a struggling, sad patch of his garden.
Later that evening, I was in the yard with Dad. At first he said he was getting some air. Then he admitted, “I needed a break from the Old Prophet.” He laughed. He lit a cigarette. “Always on my ass.”
He never said much, but when he talked to me, I think he talked straight.
I asked him about the ministry. For a while he didn’t answer. Then: “I considered it seriously. Atonement. That was the word he used on me, year after year, and it certainly had an effect.”
Crickets whirred beneath lightly stirring, moonlit leaves. Through the house’s open windows, TV laughter.
“Why didn’t you end up preaching?” I asked.
“College.” He bent down, plucked a chalky rock from the soil. “You’ve heard your grandpa talk about God’s Plan, right?”
“Again and again.”
Dad grinned.
From time to time I’d attended Grandfather’s church, a milk-white A-frame near several old farms, south of Lawton, and heard him stress God’s Plan. The days I went, I felt sheepish, climbing its steps dressed in a pressed cotton suit while in the grasshoppery fields all around us, men grunted and sweated over tractors. Grandfather Darnell said they’d never make it into Heaven, putting work ahead of the Lord. “Indigent souls,” he called them.
“Well, in college, I learned how these suckers are formed,” Dad said. He dropped the rock in my palm. “I learned about the fire in Earth’s belly. And I couldn’t believe any more.”
“In God?”
The TV roared.
“God. Atonement. The whole shebang.” He squeezed his hand over mine, around the rock. “There now. Feel that? What does it tell you?”
“I don’t know.” I rubbed the grainy edges.
“Feel any Plan?”
“No.”
“Anything at all?”
I guess not.
He took the rock from me. “Accident,” he said, waving it. “That’s all. Sometimes, in life, it’s a blessing. Most times it’s not.” Ashes dribbled from his Camel onto the grass. He tossed the rock over a low wire fence, into the alley. “Ah well. End of sermon. Sorry about that. I guess I’m my daddy’s son after all.”
“Ah well,” I echoed.
“We’d better get back inside or he’ll think we’re out here sneaking smokes.” He laughed and shook my shoulder.
On that same trip, I asked him to show me where the theater used to be. The place he’d burned to the ground. We were walking downtown with Grandfather Darnell, past a Rexall Drug Store, a bowling alley, and a beauty parlor. “I don’t remember, exactly,” he said, scratching his head, walking quickly. “I think it was near the end of the block here.”
Grandfather Darnell broke away from us and went to stand in a vacant lot, up to his knees in sticker burrs. “Here,” he said. “Or there.” He pointed across the street to another empty field. “It doesn’t really matter. Many of the old buildings along this street are gone now, but if you concentrate hard, the Lord will help you feel the pain of those who suffered here.” He shut his eyes. “Can you feel it?”
Dad stared at him with what clearly was dismay.
“Who?” I said. “Who suffered here?”
“Indigent souls. From the poorhouse up near Lawton. From the farms when they failed in the dust and the wind. In the winter’s bitter cold, all the lost sheep would flock into town, along Main Street here, looking for a place to spend the night, to get warm. War veterans, Indians, Old Lady Jones — ”
“That’s enough,” Dad said.
“Who’s Old Lady Jones?” I asked.
“Enough gloomy talk. This was a booming little town after the war,” Dad said. “Folks had it good here.”
“Not all folks,” Grandfather said. “I tried to help your mother’s family get established here. Did you know that?” he asked me. “Good businessman, your mother’s father. Long before the fifties, I was after him to open up a store here, to boost our local economy. The picture wasn’t quite as lovely as your dad makes it sound. A lot of the buildings here were already old then. Rickety, unsafe. Like the theater — ”
“Okay. Really. That’s enough,” Dad said.
“If we’d had a Duffy’s back then, it could have started an economic renaissance here, and we’d all have been better off.” He patted my head. “A minister has to look after his flock, not just with prayer, Kelly, but with an eye on the world as well. Sadly, the city fathers didn’t see things my way. Not for the longest time.”
Dad looked at Grandfather, and I thought I saw in his pained, tightly drawn lips the frightened young man he must have been the night he lost his watch in the blaze. “Goes with the territory,” he said quietly. “Fathers. Not seeing things.”
Dad liked his work in Dallas and he made a decent living. He bought a nice house for us, hit the links every Saturday and Sunday. The old scar on his arm — parchment-brown now, scrunchy as tinfoil — glowed whenever he wore his pastel golf shirts.