Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [135]
Looking back, I think I was the only one who didn’t cry. I don’t know why, but I never cried once over my father’s death.
IT HAS BEEN OVER THIRTY YEARS NOW since my father died and I still haven’t cried, though in my dreams it is different.
Not long ago I dreamed that my mother came to me. She said: “I have a surprise for you. We’ve found your father. He never really died—he ran away from us—but we didn’t know how to tell you.
“He came back the other day, and he wants to see you. But I have to warn you: He is very old now, and now he is truly sick. Be kind to him because he will not live much longer.”
She takes me into a room, and there is my father, seated on a chair. He is dressed in a plaid shirt with a string tie, and he is wearing baggy slacks with suspenders. He has his glasses on his face and his fedora on his head. As my mother warned, he looks terribly old and fragile. And yet when he sees me, he smiles and stands up and takes me in his arms.
“Oh, my son,” he says, “I am so happy to see you. How did I ever lose you?” Then, he begins to cry.
I hold him and I say: “It’s okay, Father. I’ve missed you too. I’m glad to have you back. We’ll be all right.”
It occurs to me that now I can learn the answers to so many bothersome questions. I can ask my father who he was and what he did, and he will tell me.
But as I think this, I feel him collapse in my arms, and I feel the life leave him. I am standing there holding my dead father, and finally I can’t help it: I cry.
MY FATHER WAS DEAD. He had been an often unreasonable and violent man—more so for my brothers than for me—and he had managed to sire and sustain a family at the same time he helped damage the souls and hopes of the people within that family.
My brother Frank and I have spent many hours in the last few years talking about the complexities of this man. We both suspect that so much of what was awful and strong in his sons came from someplace inside him. We also suspect that there were ways in which we lived out his legacy for him—ways that we carried on his fear and his damnation. But what has stymied us, as we have talked about him, is that we do not know what the sources are for all that ruin. We do not know the secrets that he kept, the secrets that he took with him. Without that knowledge, it’s as if there’s a part of ourselves we can never unlock. And it isn’t a small part. As I said before, it may be the deepest, most essential part: the part of us that has always turned love into ruin.
“I have never known what Dad’s big secrets were,” Frank told me one evening. “Whenever I would ask him about those things, he would just say: ‘It’s better to keep your nose out of other people’s business.’
“But even without those secrets, I think Dad would have lived the same life. I think being a drifter was important to him. He was basically in many ways a lonely man, but he also enjoyed being a lonely man at times. He really was a kind of a … I don’t know if you would call it a Jekyll and Hyde, because neither one of his natures were, in my opinion, bad. But he was a dual personality; there were two of him. One was a family man—he didn’t want to be without a family. But after a few weeks of that, the novelty would wear off and he had to go back to being a drifter. And after he was a drifter a while, he would get tired of that and want to come back to the family. So he was grabbing both sides of life, the two things he wanted: a family and independence. That was a large source of the trouble between him and Mom. She would fight with him about having to live that way, and he’d retaliate by hitting the bottle and splitting. There really wasn’t any pretense or mystery about it. He was tired of Mom and tired of the family, and he just had to go. In a way, he did that up until the end of his life. And he left behind him a family of drifters.
“The funny thing is, the more I’ve thought about him recently, the more I have come