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By Root 391 0

the next day when he came in, it wasn’t done. I wasn’t trying to break his rules. But he wasn’t the kind of man you could explain things to. I couldn’t be honest and say, ‘Well, Dad, I’m worried about these allergies I have.’ He would have found a way to make sure that I did that particular chore all the time. It was safer to keep it to myself and to take the punishment that I took, which was to be kicked out. He came up to me; his fists were up. He told me to get out, and he wasn’t messing around. Said, ‘This is my house. You’re under my roof. You didn’t do what I told you. Get out!’ Hell, I’m not going to fight with him, so I got out. Went downtown and lived in a cheap hotel for three or four days, and then I came back. There were plenty of times when he hated me just as much as he hated Gary. And I would go for long periods when I wouldn’t even talk to him. We would be at the dinner table, and I wouldn’t even talk to him.”

My father’s minefield of rules became so treacherous that Frank grew tired of trying to traverse it. Toward the end of high school, Frank Jr. decided he wanted to learn the craft of carpentry. He found a good local carpenter’s school, enrolled in it, and took a part-time job to help cover the cost. My father agreed to pay the remaining tuition. But during the first week of the course, on four different occasions, Frank Jr. happened to run afoul of various house rules, and on each occasion, my father threatened to cancel the course.

My brother looked at the prospect of a year of school along these lines and decided it wasn’t worth all the pain. Frank Jr. went to my father and told him he was quitting carpentry school. He did not want my father holding that power over his future. “The idea that he could build you up to something like that,” Frank said, “and then four times in one week take it away from you … I thought, man, I’m not going to study all these months just to have him wait until the last moment and say, ‘Well, now I see you have something you really want. You’ve studied for nine months, you’re ready to graduate next week, but you’re not going to because I’m not sending the check; you displeased me or violated my rules in some way or another.’ Dad would always say, ‘My word’s my bond,’ but that only held true if he promised he’d punish you. If he promised something else, his word was not always his bond. That sort of thing … it takes something out of you. I felt like I was being half-killed sometimes.”

I hate to say it, but hearing Frank’s stories, I became grateful my father died when I was still young, before my own hopes got in his way. I say it in part because I’m glad I never had to fight with him, never got stepped on in the way my brothers did. I also say it because I know the range of my own anger and determination, and my own awful, unswerving stubbornness. If my father had held out the world to me and then taken it from my grasp, I know I would have hated him for it. I may even have killed him for it. Or worse, I might have killed the next person who did such a thing to me. I am glad that my hope and ambition weren’t murdered in this way, but more than anything, I’m glad I never killed anybody as revenge for my dispossession.

LIKE GARY, FRANK JR. WAS starting to find his own life outside the family. He was a little embarrassed to tell me about it, though he shouldn’t have been.

“I had a friend,” Frank Jr. told me during one of our evening visits. “His name was Ron. We were buddies for a long time, quite a few years, and we ran around here in Portland. We would just… Well, I’m going to try to put this so you don’t look down on me too much, but in those days there used to be a fair amount of prostitution to be found in Portland. Ron and me, we would save our money and go down to this one particular place, and we would mess around. At that time, it was a lot safer and we both ran kind of wild for a while. But then Ron, through his mother, got involved in the study of religion—in particular, a study of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He would talk to me about it all the time, but I wasn