Charles P. Norman received the Outstanding Achievement Award in the 2009 Prison Writing Contest.
I Wore Chains to My Father's Funeral
I lay on my steel bunk in the
dark of my prison cell, staring at the ceiling, thinking about the
phone conversation I’d had with my mother a few hours before. She’d
just gotten home from University Community Hospital, where she and my
brothers held vigil over my father. She was exhausted.
“How’s Daddy doing, Mama?”
“Every day he dies a little more, son, and every day a little piece of me dies with him,” she said, voice quaking.
Tears pooled in my eyes, ran down my cheeks, and flowed into my pillow.
My mother’s words haunted me. It seemed like a claw penetrated my chest
and clasped my heart. Time passed in the dark.
The sleeping building around me was quiet. I heard leather soles slapping down the hallway, toward my cell door.
“Norman, you awake?” a young guard spoke through the window slot.
“I’m awake.” I couldn’t sleep.
“Get dressed. Lieutenant Barber wants to see you downstairs.”
“I’m dressed.” I’d never undressed.
He opened the door, and I walked quickly to the stairwell.
Lieutenant Barber met me at the foot of the stairs. He had a strained,
uncomfortable expression on his face. He didn’t want to be the bearer
of bad news. You never know how people will react in prison.
“Norman, call your brother at home.”
“Yes sir.”
I walked over to the pay phone on the wall. We could only make collect
calls. I dialed my brother’s number. The lieutenant stepped away, gave
me space, but remained within earshot. He was doing his job. I didn’t
begrudge him that. My brother, Danny, picked up on the first ring.
“Charles.” Everyone called me Charlie, but from the time he could say my name, Dan had always called me Charles.
“Dan.”
“Charles, Daddy’s dead.”
“I know.” How could I tell him I felt it?
“I just got home from the hospital.”
“Does Mama know?”
“I called her first”
“I want to go to the funeral.”
“Okay.”
“You’re going to have to call the sheriff.”
“I’ll do it first thing in the morning.”
“Don’t take no for an answer.”
“I won’t.”
“It’s going to cost some money.”
“I don’t care.”
“Are you all right?”
The line was silent for a moment. I heard a sob.
“Daddy’s dead, Charles.” His voice was anguished. I was the big brother. I had to be strong for both of us, for all of us.
“I know, Dan. It’s okay. He’s in a better place. He’s not suffering any more.”
“But dammit, why did he have to die now?” He was fifty-six years old.
How could I explain it? I didn’t understand it either. I was
thirty-six, twenty years younger.
“I don’t know, Dan.”
I heard him blow his nose. “I’m okay. Call me in the morning.”
“I will.”
I hung up the phone and turned back to the lieutenant.
“You okay, Norman?”
“Yes sir. We’ve been expecting it for awhile. He was a fighter.”
“You need to talk to someone, the chaplain will be here in the morning.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“Good man.”
Sunday morning I am standing on the front porch of the chapel with
several fellow prisoners, waiting for them to call me. Through the
double fences ringing the prison I see a Hillsborough County Sheriff’s
car turn into the parking lot from Highway 301 and approach the
sallyport entrance gate. Two uniformed deputies take out their sidearms
and other weapons, locking them in gun boxes on the wall by the
gatehouse. A squawking P.A. speaker on a light pole orders me to report
to the gatehouse immediately. A guard hands me a garment bag containing
a suit of clothes. I go into the bathroom to change.
In her grief, my mother bought pants the same size as I wore in high
school, forgetting that I had added thirty pounds in the past eighteen
years, but I made do. In the mirror I adjusted my tie and stared at the
well-dressed stranger who stared back at me. Who was that man? I folded
up my prison blues and went back out.
Two young deputies stood there holding handfuls of chains. First they
put on the handcuffs in front of me, double-locked them, then did the
same thing with the ankle chains. They threaded a chain through my belt
loops, padlocked both ends to the handcuffs, then did the same thing
with a chain connected to the leg irons. I rattled the chains. So this
was how Houdini felt.
One deputy held a file folder open, looked at it, then looked at me.
“Your name Charles P. Norman?”
“Yes, it is.”
“You born nine-four-forty-nine?”
“Right again.”
“Let’s do this.”
I shuffled my feet six inches forward at a time, the limit of the tight
chains, tiny steps, but eventually we got to the deputy car parked
inside the sallyport. I heard my name called, looked back toward the
chapel, and saw perhaps fifty prisoners on the front porch watching me.
Some waved. I couldn’t wave back, with my wrists chained at the waist.
The deputy opened the rear door, and I struggled to flop onto the seat,
scoot over, and sit up. With the security screen separating the front
and back seats, there was no leg room. I adjusted the best I could.
After they’d retrieved their nine millimeters, their ankle guns, their
Buck knives, canisters of pepper spray, police batons, and twelve gauge
shotgun from the trunk, the car backed out, and we were on our way.
My mind swirled with thoughts of my father. He and my mother were
teenagers when they married. My mother turned twenty just twelve days
before my birth. I used to tell people that I’d known my parents since
they were kids, and we’d grown up together. I was fourteen months old
when my grandmother, Memaw, gave birth to Cherry, my youngest aunt.
Memaw was just thirty-nine. Cherry and I grew up together, more like
brother and sister than nephew and aunt, and maintained that closeness
until she died.
When we were both babies, my father once held each of us in his arms
while my mother and Memaw bought groceries at the Piggly Wiggly store
in Texarkana. Approaching the checkout stand, a woman came up to my
father, admiring the babies. He must have seemed young to have two
children.
“Are those your babies?” she asked.
Looking at each of us in turn, my father answered the lady, “This is my
sister-in-law, and this is my son.” Upon re-telling the story at later
times, he said the lady walked away with a confused look on her face,
as if she was trying to figure out the relationship.
My earliest memories of my father must have been some time near three
years old, perhaps a little younger. Early Sunday mornings were a
special time. My father was home, not working, as he was the rest of
the week. By the time I woke up in the mornings during the weekdays, my
father would be long gone. But Sundays he stayed home.
It would scarcely be daylight when he’d bring in the Sunday newspaper, The Texarkana Gazette.
He’d take off the rubber band, take out the Sunday comics, spread them
open on the wood floor, lie down, prop himself up on his elbows, and
read each one aloud. I’d lie beside him in the same pose, my finger
pointing to each comic pane as he read it, and we’d both laugh at Mutt
and Jeff, Joe Palooka, Alley Oop, and Tarzan of the Apes. He’d slowly
read each comic to me, then I’d beg him to read them just once more. By
then the smells of biscuits, bacon, and eggs would be emanating from
the kitchen, and my mother would call us in for breakfast.
It was just the three of us. All was good in the world. I had no
concept of rent, grocery bills, car payments, or the impending job
market crash as the Korean War was shutting down, causing the heavily
defense-oriented industries of East Texas to lay off thousands of
workers. I had no idea how complicated life could be for a struggling
young married couple with a child, and two more on the way.
One morning I couldn’t get my father out of bed. He’d worked late
Saturday night at another job, earning extra money, and was too
exhausted to get up and go out for the Sunday paper. I couldn’t wait to
see how my friends, Alley Oop, Little Orphan Annie, Nancy, and the
others were doing, so I toddled out the front door, down the steps, out
to the road, and brought the newspaper in myself.
I finally got the rubber band off and separated the comics. I lay there
on the floor, sprawled out on my stomach, propped up on my elbows,
knees bent, feet wiggling in the air. My finger pointed at the
individual words, and I pronounced under my breath the ones I’d
memorized, watching as my father had read to me each week. It took me
awhile, but I understood, and laughed.
My father stood in the doorway between the kitchen and living room watching me while my mother cooked breakfast.
“Lucille, look here,” he said. My mother joined him in the doorway,
watching me as I slowly traced the words with my finger, moving my
lips, pronouncing them to myself, then laughing as I understood the
punchlines.
“I’d swear it looks like that boy is reading those funnies.”
“I am reading them,” I said. “You wouldn’t get up.”
He plopped down beside me and watched me move my finger from word to word.
“Show me, “ he said.
“I carefully spoke each word that I knew. I struggled with one, and he
said it for me. He shook his head, smiled, and asked my mother what she
made of that. She shook her head, too.
“I don’t know. He’s not even four years old.”
What could I say? I wanted to read, so I did.
On Sunday afternoons, my father would lie down on the wood floor and
doze off. I’d doze off with him. What he did, I did. I lay my head on
his stomach and listened to the noises inside him. The various rumbles
and squeaks sounded so strange to me.
“Daddy, what’s the sounds in your belly?”
“That’s my guts growling.”
“Why are they growling?”
“They growl when you’re hungry, calling for food, and they growl when you’re full, telling you not to eat any more.”
“Oh.” That explained it.
Life went on. I gained two little brothers, Dan and Tom. Times were
hard, though I never realized it. Friday evenings were always a thrill,
waiting for Daddy to come home from work. I had little concept of time,
but when that big red orb of the sun got down low and touched the trees
to the west, I knew Daddy would be home soon.
What was so exciting about Fridays was the surprise—wondering what kind
of car Daddy would be driving home this time. Not every week, but
fairly frequently, a strange car would slow down on the highway and
turn in at our house. The car would stop, Daddy would get out, and I’d
run to him, begging him to take me for a ride in the new car. My mother
would be standing in the doorway holding the baby, a frown on her face.
I didn’t know until years later that when he couldn’t make the weekly
payment, the used car lot would repossess the car he had, and he’d have
to go to another used car dealer to get another one on a weekly payment
plan. All I knew was that on Friday evenings, Daddy would take me for a
ride to the store for an ice cream in his new car, and he’d let me sit
in his lap and steer, or at least pretend to.
Early one Sunday morning, I went out to get the Sunday paper while my
parents slept. Across the road, a herd of deer grazed on the other side
of the barbed wire in a clearing that was part of U.S. Army reservation
land. Miles away was Lone Star Ordnance Plant, where Daddy worked, and
a bombing range, from where sounds like distant thunder often came. I
crept back inside quietly and shook my father awake.
“Daddy, there’s some deer across the road.”
He jumped up, pulled on his khaki trousers, grabbed his .22 rifle from
the closet, and looked out the front door. A dozen or more deer
nonchalantly grazed a hundred yards away. It wasn’t hunting season, he
didn’t have a hunting license, but times were hard, and he had a wife
and three boys to feed.
My father propped the rifle on the car’s fender, took careful aim, and
fired one shot. Across the road a deer jumped straight into the air. To
my young eyes it seemed like he jumped a hundred feet into the air. It
was much less than that, of course, but when the deer fell to the
ground without moving he was alone. In that second the herd had
disappeared into the woods in a flash. The only evidence they left was
a faint cloud of dust settling to the ground. I hadn’t heard a sound.
He left the deer where it lay, drove to my grandfather’s, Bebaw’s,
house, and came back with Bebaw and my Uncle David to help him. Bebaw
was the expert at skinning and cleaning a deer.
Bebaw sent David across the road and through the fence to retrieve the
deer. He was a scaredy-cat. He got the deer by the hind leg and dragged
it to the fence, looking every which way, although everything was quiet
and no cars were to be seen in either direction. David tried to slip
between the barbed wires and drag the deer under the fence at the same
time, but only succeeded in hopelessly snagging himself on the barbs.
He cussed, struggled, only got more tangled, and Bebaw and Daddy had to
help get him loose from the fence. Good thing no one was coming, or
he’d have been caught.
Bebaw butchered the deer in the barn, cut it up into pieces, which were
then shared with all the relatives, which were many. Everyone ate
venison steaks and venison stew. All that fresh meat was a godsend. I
felt good that I’d seen the deer, not spooked them, told Daddy, and
helped contribute in a small way to feeding our family.
When I was nine years old, we packed up, left Texas, and moved to
Florida. There was no work in Texas, and my Uncle Rufus in Dade City
told Daddy that there were plenty of jobs in Tampa for a young man
willing to work hard. That described my father.
I hated it. I didn’t want to leave Texas. How could we just leave Memaw
and Bebaw, Cherry and Alice and Pat, Junior, all my aunts and cousins,
Uncle Albert, Aunt Bonnie, Linda and Paulette? How could I live a
thousand miles away? I cried, Cherry cried, and Bebaw cried. He was so
soft-hearted, they’d say. Memaw was the strong one, always keeping it
inside. She hugged me and patted my back. She called me “Pakick,” from
my middle name, Patrick, the only person who ever called me that, her
special name for me.
“You be a good boy, my Pakick. It’ll be okay. You’ll be back to see us, and we’ll come see you in Florida some time,” she said.
“Promise, Memaw?”
“I promise.” She gave me a silver dollar from a jar she collected coins in, told me to keep it to remember her. I did.
So began my trip to Florida, Land of Sunshine, where nineteen years
later that little boy would be accused of murder and wind up in prison
serving life.
“Charlie Norman! Charlie Norman! I can’t believe it.”
I snapped out of my reverie. I was in the back seat of a sheriff’s car.
We were passing Hillsborough River State Park, where my family had held
many picnics, and I’d camped out often with my Boy Scout troop years
before. The younger deputy, the passenger, had turned in his seat and
was speaking to me.
“Excuse me. I missed that. What did you say?”
“Charlie Norman!” He was grinning broadly at me. He looked over to his partner, who was staring straight ahead at the highway.
“When I was a little kid, I used to watch Charlie Norman fight. I
couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t even in first grade yet.” He turned back
to me. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”
“No, sorry.” To my knowledge, I’d never seen him before in my life.
“You went to junior high school with my sister.” Benjamin Franklin—toughest junior high in Tampa in the 1960’s.
He told me her name. I’d known her for years. She was a nice girl, shy,
who’d gotten pregnant in tenth grade, dropped out, gotten married, had
three children, was an old woman before her time. Her younger brother
had become a major dope dealer in Tampa years later. This one must have
been the baby. Weird, I thought, one of them a drug king, another a
deputy.
He looked back to his partner. “One time I saw Charlie Norman at the
bus stop get in a fight with three boys, all older and bigger than him.
You should have seen it. Those guys were all over him, fists flying and
punching, you couldn’t even see Charlie Norman under all those guys. I
thought they were going to kill him. Everybody just watched. Nobody
helped him. Hell, I was just a little kid, but I never forgot it.” He
spoke as though I wasn’t there.
“What happened?” his partner asked.
“He wouldn’t go down. He was throwing fists, and turning and ducking
and taking punches and kicking and in about a minute one of them went
down, and then the second, then the third one just stopped and looked
at him. Charlie’s nose was bleeding and his lip was split, his shirt
was hanging half off of him. He lit into that guy, knocked him down, he
didn’t get up. The school bus came, Charlie got on, my sister and the
other kids had to step over them to get on the bus. The driver shut the
door, and they went to school. I walked home. He beat the shit out of
those boys. It was three to one.”
“That was the Wechsler brothers,” I said. “Victor was my age. He spit on my shoe and laughed.”
“I bet he never did it again, did he?”
“No.”
“You were my hero when I was a kid. I took boxing lessons when I was a
little older. I went to your karate school for awhile. I wanted to
learn how to fight like that.”
“I don’t remember you.”
“I was a kid then. I was in high school when you were on trial. I went a couple of times.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I never thought I’d meet you like this.” Me neither.
We were approaching Highway 579. My mother’s house was less than a mile
off 579 in Thonotosassa. I hadn’t seen it in years, and might not get
another chance.
“Since we go so far back and all that, why don’t we take a little
detour down 579, cut over to Grovewood, through the old neighborhood,
loop right to Main Street? Won’t take an extra two minutes.”
The silly grin on the young deputy’s face vanished. He looked to the
driver, who glanced toward him then faced front to the highway.
“We can’t make any, uh, detours. Sorry.”
They both looked nervous, uneasy. The younger deputy suddenly became
interested in the double-yellow center line whisking past us and
behind.
“Can’t or won’t?” I wasn’t going to let it go. It had been over seven
years since I’d left my family home that fateful day after visiting my
father. He’d been sick that day, too, but not nearly as sick as he
would become. Neither of them responded. If I didn’t see our home, the
yard, the huge hickory tree shading the front, the sycamore trees in
the back I’d planted sixteen years before now, I might never see them
again.
“Do you know how much my family’s paying for this taxi ride?”
The driver answered. “Six hundred and fifty-one dollars.”
“Six hundred and fifty-one dollars!” I whistled. “For a twenty-five
mile trip each way? What’s that, thirteen dollars a mile, more or
less?”
“More or less.”
“It’s hardly a mile detour—nobody’s at home, everyone’s at the funeral
home, why don’t we just tack on an extra twenty, pay for you guys’
lunch when you leave, call it even?”
Silence. Not a word. Eyes front. No more youthful reminiscences. I
watched 579 recede to the left, Spanish Main Campground bustling on a
Sunday morning.
A mile farther and I saw Fowler Avenue’s turnoff approaching on the
right, the orange grove and the little white house on the hill where
we’d lived our first ten years in Florida, when we were all so small,
it seemed.
My father was a giant in those days, a big man whose height and size
seemed unattainable, like a tree. I remembered how as a child I’d
examine his worn leather billfold that curved in the shape of his body
over the years of twelve-hour workdays stuck in his back pocket.
I especially loved looking at his driver’s license, before they had
photos, a piece of paper that described the man I knew as Daddy. Brown
eyes, black hair, weight one hundred seventy-nine pounds, five feet
eleven and three quarters inches tall Holding onto his pant leg and
looking up in the stratosphere to his face, I could never picture
myself growing to such an altitude. Imagine my surprise when one day
years later, I was walking my father to the exit door of the prison
visiting park and realized that I was taller than he, by a small
margin, bigger and stronger. He was shrinking before my eyes, and it
deeply saddened me. Could this be the same man who used to pick me up
and throw me in the air and catch me before I fell?
One of my clearest early memories of my father came from when we went
to the circus. I was three and Cherry was two. Although I grew up near
Redwater, Texas, with all its connotations of cowboys, cattle, and
horses, I rode an elephant before I rode a horse.
The circus had an elephant ride for children. A baby elephant with a
blanket on its back grasped its mother’s tail with its trunk, following
her around in a circle. Daddy lifted me onto the baby elephant’s back,
which was head-high to my father, and Bebaw held Cherry in place next
to me. I touched the stiff straw-like hairs that thinly covered the
baby elephant, marveling to be sitting up so high.
Cherry began screaming. She wasn’t having any of it. She did not want
to be sitting on a baby elephant’s back, and let the entire midway know
about it. After the second scream Bebaw handed her off to Memaw, where
she quieted down I continued the circuit, my father’s massive hand
holding and steadying me. I wasn’t the least bit frightened. I knew I
was safe.
The second thing I remember about that night at the circus was the blue
helium balloon he bought for me, wrapping the string around my wrist
several times so it wouldn’t fly off. When we got home and my mother
put me to bed, the balloon hovered against my bedroom ceiling, the
string dangling.
The next morning, I couldn’t wait to rush next door to Mrs. Clary’s
house, tell her about riding the elephant and show her my blue balloon.
I grabbed the string, tugging the balloon behind me, and rushed down
the steps outside. No sooner than I’d cleared the door a gust of wind
snatched the balloon out of my tiny grip. I stood there and watched the
balloon float higher and higher, smaller and smaller, until the blue
latex blended into the cerulean sky and disappeared. I cried for what
I’d lost.
In silence, we approached Duval Funeral Home on Florida Avenue in North
Tampa. As quiet as the two deputies had been, you’d think each of them
was alone. The parking lot overflowed with cars. Hearses lined the
drive at the front. The deputy drove us around to the back.
The last time I’d been here had been for the funeral of my tenth grade
basketball coach, who’d been stricken with stomach cancer toward the
end of the school year and was dead in four months. In the fall, just
as my junior year began, he died. It seemed like all fifteen hundred
students at King High School lined up to enter the funeral chapel, pass
by his open casket, and pay their respects. Girls wailed as they neared
him. I got closer, saw the tiny shrunken figure lying there in that big
box and wondered who it was. Coach had never been a big man, but this
couldn’t possibly be him. What happened? Someone nearby mentioned that
the stomach cancer had eaten him up, to less than half his healthy
size, and I believed it.
Now I dreaded going inside that same building and discovering what ravages death had dealt to my poor father.
The main chapel was crowded with family and friends. Relatives on both
sides had come from across Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina,
Texas, and California. Some I recognized, some I didn’t. I noticed men
who’d worked for my father, laborers, black and white, solemn, paying
their respects. I’d grown up around those men, accompanying my father
to work at Booker and Company Warehouses for years, and knew them all.
They nodded. I nodded back. I saw an open casket to my right, against
the far wall, but too many people filled the area to get a clear look.
When I entered, clanking like Shakespeare’s ghost, deputies on either
side of me, all conversation stopped. All eyes turned toward me. The
prodigal son had returned. There was no fatted calf, no celebrations.
My father was dead, and I was in chains.
My brothers, Dan and Tom, rushed through the crowd over to me. As Dan
neared me, one deputy stepped forward, held out his hand, fingers up,
in the stop gesture.
“Don’t come any closer,” the deputy said.
If he thought that an armed deputy was going to keep him away from his brother, he didn’t know Dan.
“You listen to me, you son-of-a-bitch. He’s my brother. And that’s our
daddy lying dead in that coffin. If you think you can stop me from
hugging my brother at our father’s funeral, you’d better pull that
pistol and shoot me now.”
He pushed past the deputy’s outstretched arm and embraced me, followed
by my youngest brother, Tom. They stepped aside, and my mother stood in
front of me. I hadn’t even seen her. We hugged, and I realized she’s so
small. How did she ever get so small. She had been a giant, too, in my
childhood, but now she looked so frail and light as she held my arms.
Emotions washed through me. To this day I can’t remember what either of
us said.
Faced with a losing battle and heavily outnumbered, the deputies
retreated. Family and friends, cousins, aunts and uncles I haven’t seen
since childhood crowded around and hugged me, chains and all. I
couldn’t do much myself, trussed up the way I was, but I accepted their
embraces, touches and condolences the best I could.
Rufus, my father’s last surviving brother, seven years his elder, came next. “I hate to see you like this, son.”
I saw a flare of that Norman anger, the fury that must have terrified
the English at Hastings in 1066, that Uncle Rufus turned on the
outmatched deputies.
“What’s wrong with you bastards?” he growled at them. Eyes wide, they each took half a step back.
“What do you think you’re doing, bringing this boy in here like this,
chained up like a beast? Don’t you have any respect? Why couldn’t you
take all this . . . crap . . . off him before you brought him in here
to his mama? You aren’t afraid of him, are you, big, bad deputies,
armed to the teeth?”
His face had turned so red, I thought he was going to have a stroke.
“It’s okay, Rufus,” I said. “At least I got to come.” Rufus was always
the joker of the family, and at gatherings, he’d keep everyone in
stitches with his jokes. I thought I’d take a cue from him and try to
defuse the situation. “Besides, when we leave here, they’re going to
stop on the Hillsborough River bridge, toss me in the water, and if I
can get loose, I’m free to go.”
Everyone laughed. The deputies looked decidedly uneasy.
Then I noticed my father’s two surviving sisters, Frankie Lee, the
oldest, and Eloise, the youngest, across the room together looking
intently at me. They were crying. I stood where I was as they slowly
approached. I hadn’t seen them in twenty years, since a family
gathering when I was a teenager.
With the exception of Uncle Rufus, I’d never felt particularly close to
or identified with the Norman side of my family. Part of it was that
I’d rarely been around most of them but for a day here or a funeral
there throughout my youth, and that most of them lived elsewhere. Also,
the Normans seemed more emotionally detached, sterner, not like my
mother’s family, the Walkers, who were emotional and demonstrative with
their love in most cases. I was Memaw’s and Bebaw’s first grandson, had
always been special to them, but to the Normans, I was just another
cousin. But now, the way Frankie Lee and Eloise were looking at me, I
sensed something had changed. They came up to me and Aunt Frankie Lee
touched my cheek, tears flowing.
“Charlie, honey,” she said, “When I saw you walk in, my heart stopped for a second.”
“Why?”
“You’re the spitting image of our father when he was a young man. Your
grandfather. He’s been gone so long. You look just like him, so
handsome. It breaks my heart.” Her words deeply touched me.
She fingered the chains around my wrists. I wanted to hold her, but I
couldn’t. I cried instead. Eloise and Frankie Lee hugged me together.
“You do, Charlie,” Eloise said, smiling. “You look just like Daddy. I
was just a little girl when he died. I wish I could take you home with
me.”
“I do, too.”
My brothers took my arms, and we walked slowly to my father, feet shuffling. Everyone moved back and made room.
It wasn’t him, not the man I knew. I could see little resemblance to my
father. He was gone. What was left was little more than artifice.
Cigarettes killed my father. Slowly. Forty-four years, from the age of
twelve until his last breath at fifty-six, my father smoked cigarettes.
He couldn’t quit, no matter how he tried.
When I was four years old, my mother pregnant with Dan, it was freezing
cold in the Texas winter. The only heat in our little house came from
the kitchen stove, which my mother wouldn’t turn on till five AM, when
she got up to cook breakfast before my father went to work.
I was sleeping soundly under quilts Memaw had made when my father’s coughing woke me. It went on and on.
I climbed out of bed and my bare feet touched the cold wooden floor. I
raced to my parents’ bedroom and climbed into bed with them, where it
was warm. My father continued hacking.
“Daddy, why are you coughing so much?” I asked. “Are you sick?”
“It’s these damned cigarettes, son. Don’t ever smoke them.” He was just twenty-four at the time.
Thinking back over all those years, I realize that long ago admonition
was one of the few pieces of advice my father gave me that I obeyed. I
never smoked a cigarette in my life. I never wanted to cough like that.
For that I am grateful. I am three years older now than my father was
when he died, and my lungs are clear and strong. On the prison tennis
court, I wear out players half my age with shots from side-to-side that
leave them bent over and gasping. Even at thirty, cigarettes have taken
a toll on them, and I gladly collect it.
I begged him to quit for years, as did my mother, but nothing could
overcome nicotine’s siren song of death. We feared lung cancer, but
emphysema got him first, with complications from lupus. He was in and
out of the hospital for a couple of years, but the last time inexorably
approached.
His kidneys began shutting down, and they put him on dialysis. That
worked for awhile, but other systems began failing. The toxins built
up, and his extremities, his hands and feet, began darkening,
gangrenous. The poisons climbed higher. My father was in terrible pain,
but he fought to live.
He and his doctor were friends. He came to talk to him about his
choices. My father couldn’t talk with the respirator helping him to
breathe, but he had his mind, and he could nod his head.
“Gene, we’ve been friends for a long time, and I’m not going to
sugar-coat it. You don’t like b.s. It’s not good. Your kidneys are
failing. I can save you, but it will be drastic. You’re getting
gangrene. If I amputate your arms and legs, you will live. I don’t know
how long, but it could be awhile. But I know you. I know what kind of
man you are, and I don’t think you want to live like that, helpless.”
My father shook his head no.
“You say the word, I’ll do the surgery now. If you say no, I won’t Do you want me to do the surgery?”
My father shook his head no.
The doctor patted his shoulder. “Then this is goodbye, old friend.”
He left. My brothers stood next to my father’s bed. He had been so
strong, the toughest man I ever knew. Next to him I was a weakling. He
had held out for longer than anyone expected, for whatever reason, but
when the doctor gave him his options, it was like my father decided it
was time to go. He looked at my brothers, closed his eyes, exhaled, and
he was gone. An hour later I was calling my brother, Dan, collect from
a prison pay phone in the dark.
There is much I want to say about my relationship with my father, but
even all these years later, I realize that the emotions pierce me too
deeply. As I write this, tears drop onto the paper and dimple the
sheet. Perhaps the cathartic experience of reliving those years as I
write them will strengthen me to where I will write again, about things
too close to my heart, and get them out in the open, where they belong.
But that will be another day.
When the deputies brought me back to Zephyrhills prison and left with
all their chains and cuffs, a prisoner friend held out my blues for me
to change into. He knew my family well, and offered me his condolences
the best he knew how. He had a difficult time sharing his feelings. I
knew he wanted to say something, so I stood there, unspeaking, waiting
him out.
“Charlie, when I first knew you, and met your family, several years ago, I knew you and your dad had unfinished business.”
“Yeah?”
“I had unfinished business with my father, too, so I recognized it in the both of you.”
“Okay.”
“I admire what you did,” he said. “Over the past few years you spent a
lot of time talking with your daddy, healing wounds, I don’t know what
they were, but you took it upon yourself to do it, and you and he
reconciled whatever it was.”
“We did”
“I could tell. Even when he was here last time, real sick, I could see
that you loved your father, and he loved you. You settled your
differences, and that was a good thing.”
“It was”
“It gave both of you a peace you didn’t have before.”
“I appreciate you saying that, Mario.”
“You see, the reason I’m saying this, is that I didn’t get that chance
with my father. There were hard feelings between us. He said things, I
said things I’ve always regretted. I wanted to make it up to him, like
you did, but he died before I got the chance.”
“I’m sorry.”
That big strong man with the bulging muscles broke down, leaned his
head on my shoulder and cried like the little boy who still lingered
inside. His tears soaked into my suit coat. Unchained now, I patted his
shoulder and sobbed with him. It was the least I could do. Even tough
guys must sometimes cry.
