My Father Like a River
My Father Like a River
Ron Rash
F
ifty
years, half a century, have passed since the November afternoon my father
watched from a sandbar as my brother surfaced and then disappeared in a river
that, like my father's life, was moving in the wrong direction. This was the
autumn of 1962. He was thirty-five years old, a man with a wife, four children,
and, suddenly, no job.
“I can't believe he fired me,” my father had said a
month earlier when he sat down at the dinner table. He sounded puzzledâno
bitterness or fear in his voice, not yet. My mother and I, even my nine-year-old
younger brother, let our roast beef and mashed potatoes lay untouched. Only the
twins in their high chairs continued to eat.
“Maybe he will reconsider, realize the mistake he's
making,” my mother said.
“No,” my father answered. “He's been setting this
up for weeks. I just refused to see it coming. He wants to show he's in charge,
not his daddy-in-law's ghost, and he's using me to make that clear. He didn't
even offer me my old job back.”
My father shoved his chair back from the table, his
plate untouched.
“I wish Mr. Hamrick had left me in the weave room,”
he said and walked out the front door.
Through the dining room window we could see him in
the yard, the flare of his lighter as he lit a cigarette. He stood at the edge
of the cul-de-sac, looking across the street at houses as new as our own, as
heavily mortgaged. Brick houses, unlike the wooden house we'd lived in before, a
house on the same mill village street where my father had grown up. There's
nothing more solid than brick, my father had said the day we moved.
“You all need to eat,” my mother told my brother
and me.
“It's cold,” my brother said.
“Eat it anyway,” my mother said sharply.
“A man doesn't have to have a college degree to
wear a tie,” Mr. Hamrick had said at the mill's Christmas party, then announced
the third and final promotion that had taken my father from weaver to shift
supervisor to management. “Hard work and experience are more important than some
rolled-up piece of paper.”
Mr. Hamrick had waved us up to the podium to join
our father. He had kissed my mother on the cheek and shaken hands with my
brother and me.
“You boys should be proud of your daddy,” Mr.
Hamrick had said.
But Mr. Hamrick's philosophy was not shared by his
son-in-law, and two years later when Mr. Hamrick died of a heart attack, my
father's rise became a free fall.
He started looking for work the morning after he
was fired. By afternoon he'd found a job. Clyde Harmon, a contractor my father
had known since they'd been in first grade together, added him to a crew
repainting the junior high. The job would last a month at most Clyde told him.
After that my father would need to find something else.
And so my father returned to a school he had
attended two decades earlier. Instead of a white shirt and tie, he worked in
white coveralls crusty with dried paint. His coworkers were two brothers, one
twenty and one eighteen. Each Friday when Clyde Harmon took his thick roll of
ten-dollar bills from his pocket, my father placed two fewer in his wallet than
his coworkers. He had never painted before, so he learned from men half his age
the art of staring at walls day after day.
For that month my father was a looming presence in
my lifeâin hallways when I changed classes, up on his ladder as adolescents
moiled under him, or peering into my classrooms as he painted window frames.
That I pretended to ignore him was only natural for a fourteen-year-old, for at
that age a parent's mere presence is a source of embarrassment, but I'm sure my
father believed my downcast eyes were caused as much by shame. He was as
uncomfortable as I when we saw each other during the school day, our
acknowledgment a quick turning away of eyes.
In the middle of my father's monthlong career as a
painter, Turner Realty raised a
FOR SALE
sign on our lawn. Almost every evening
strangers snooped and poked around, sometimes under our house, while my father
searched via phone or car for a permanent job, a less expensive house for when
we sold ours. We ate on paper plates and quickly, our suppers a tense silence.
Someone was always coming or my father always leaving, sometimes my mother with
him if house hunting. They would strap the twins in the backseat and leave my
brother and me to let in the Realtor and her latest entourage.
By November the
FOR SALE
sign was no longer needed
and we moved into a small wooden house in the mill village where my father had
grown up. Unlike his parents, my father would, if he kept up the mortgage
payments, own his house, but how could he not sense that he was back where he
had started eighteen years ago?
My father still had not found a permanent job, and
the inside painting at the junior high was done. Now it was odds and ends, poles
and doors. On the Friday afternoon of my father's last day, I came out for
recess and saw him in the distance climbing the water tower ladder, a paint
bucket and brush grasped in one hand, gripping the metal rungs with the other.
Except for the faded black letters that proclaimed our school's name, the water
tower was white as the clouds that filled the sky that afternoon. As my father
rose, it seemed he might ascend into the clouds themselves, but then he stopped,
halfway between the ground and the sky, and dipped his brush in the paint. I
watched him raise the brush, follow the faded letters, his arm moving above and
then out to his side as if semaphoring. The letters slowly brightened into
blackness, my father filling in each letter's outline like a first grader
learning the alphabet.
It was my mother's idea for us to go fishing the
following day. Perhaps she thought it might take my father's mind off our
uncertain future, give him a chance to spend time with his sons, something he
had not done much in the last month. He grumbled about paying eight dollars for
a license, but my mother told him a stringer of trout would give us a nice
supper. She filled a picnic basket with sandwiches and Cokes and an old quilt.
My father gathered the rods and reels and rusty tackle box from the cellar while
my brother and I shoveled up earthworms in the backyard. We stopped at Lenior
Sporting Goods where my father took a hard-earned ten-dollar bill from his
wallet and handed it to the clerk. As the clerk filled out the license form, my
father studied the fishing lures in the glass case. He signed the license and
was about to stuff the two dollars back into his wallet when he changed his
mind, set the bills back on the case, and pointed at the Rapala.
It took an hour of driving curvy two-lane roads to
get to the upper corner of Watauga County where the New River flowed into
Virginia. One of the oldest rivers in the world, my North Carolina History
teacher had claimed and showed us how, unlike other rivers, the New flowed north
instead of south, all the way to the Ohio before that wider water bent its
current south toward the Gulf of Mexico.
Once we entered the gorge, the road was no longer
paved. We bumped and jolted down to the river, meeting no other cars. People had
lived in this gorge before the government bought the land, but all that remained
of their having done so was an occasional chimney crumbling amid rotting wood
and rusty tin.
The state of North Carolina stocked rainbow trout
under the bridge where we parked, and these fish along with an occasional
knottyhead were what my brother and I had caught on previous trips. My father
usually fished with worms as well, but this day he tied the four-inch Rapala to
his line instead of a size ten hook. There were smallmouth bass in the New, some
reaching four to five pounds, and a few brown trout even bigger. Perhaps my
father believed a trophy smallmouth or brown would signal a change of luck in
his life.
As with most fishing trips we took, he had little
opportunity to find out. Every time he moved up or downstream, my brother and I
brought him back with a bird's nest in our reel, a hook hung on a rock or
drowned log. My father was usually a patient man in such situations, but on this
afternoon his face darkened each time he laid down his rod and traversed the
rocky bank to untangle a line or wade into the water to free a hook. The casts
he did make brought no strikes, not even a swirl or follow. The day was warm for
November, but we were deep in the gorge. By three o'clock the sun was falling
behind mountains, the air chilly.
My brother complained he was cold and wanted to go
home, and though I said nothing I was ready as well. The fishing had been slow,
three small rainbows in four hours. We were bored, the bait unchecked on the
stream's bottom. My father ignored my brother and waded out onto a sandbar fifty
feet downstream. He fished with a concentration I had never seen before, making
long, looping casts toward the far bank, changing the speed of the retrieve,
even adding a sinker to the line in hopes the different depth might bring forth
the miracle a big fish always is.
“I'm going to the car,” my brother whined. He
picked his rod up off the rocks and reeled for a few moments before the line
tightened and the rod bowed. “I'm hung up, Dad,” he yelled.
“Unsnag it yourself, dammit,” my father yelled
back.
My brother hesitated, waited for my father to say
or do something else, because we'd been told to never enter the water without
him close by. But the river had our father's full attention. My brother placed
his hand on the taut line, followed it into the swift current. He was up to his
knees when he lost his footing and floundered into deeper water.
When I yelled, my father looked around to see his
youngest son appearing and disappearing in a current that shoved him toward and
then past the sandbar. I stumbled into the shallows, shouting at my father to do
something. I was close enough to see his eyes, and, in that moment, I believed
he was about to let my brother drown. Then he entered the river, tripping and
bloodying his knee in the rocky shallows before flailing into the deeper
current, tumbled and spun downstream himself as he closed the gap between my
brother and himself. He caught my brother, then lost him as a drop-off pulled
the riverbed out from under their feet.
Twenty yards farther downstream he collared my
brother again. They had been pushed closer to shore, the water shallow now. My
father lifted my brother to his feet, held him there as they both gasped and
sputtered for breath. I watched my father's hand as it slowly reached back and
touched an empty pocket. I was with them now, and I held on to my brother's arm
as well, as the three of us stumbled toward shore.
We looked like shipwreck survivors, each of us
dripping and shivering. My father carried my brother to the car, stripped off
his clothes and then mine, and wrapped us in the quilt. He placed us in the
front seat, cranked up the engine, and turned the heater on high. “When you and
your brother get warm, cut off the engine,” he told me.
He walked the shoreline for an hour, his eyes searching
the shallows, occasionally wading into the river to get a better look. The day's
last light had faded completely when he gave up. My brother had fallen asleep,
his head on my shoulder. We drove back in silence. We pulled into the driveway,
my brother between us, still asleep. My hand was on the door handle, but then I
felt my father's hand on my shoulder. The porch light came on and I could see
his face. He nodded at my brother.
“He's okay,” my father said, his voice husky.
“That's what matters.”
We lived close to the bone that winter, and the
money the river snatched from us must have been a festering memory to my parents
each time they sat down at the kitchen table to decide which bills to pay, which
not to. It was January before my father got a full-time job at Shuford Mill in
Hickory. We moved for the second time in five months. Though he would work at
Shuford Mill for thirty years, he'd never wear a tie or make the salary he'd
brought home those two years he was a manager. No one ever told him again that
hard work and experience meant more than a rolled-up piece of paper.
We make our own choices on how we remember our
parents. I remember my father on a November afternoon as he stood midstream on a
sandbar as if marooned. I remember how he watched his son sweep past him. What
he felt at that moment, what he didn't feel, I will not, as I did at fourteen,
presume to know. Instead, I will remember how he found something worth holding
on to in that wrong-flowing current that carried all our lives.