Booty

This story is closing in on forty years old--well, older if we're talking prototypes, because this one, most certainly, has a prototype: I lost my dad's Japanese bayonet, booty from his war-time experience, when, without asking, I took it from the closet upstairs and brought it along on our trapline--I was a seventh grader. 

Lost it. Absolutely lost it in the river on a trap line. 

A friend read this story all those years ago and said he wondered if I wasn't really flirting with a novel here. I'd written a novel just for kicks, the summer before we moved back to Iowa from Arizona, at a time when I knew nothing about writing a novel. When I finished it, I shut that cover and haven't looked at that manuscript again since--55 years ago. My novel Home Free was my doctoral dissertation.

Sometime in that time period, I thought I'd try a novel again, more teaching, more years, and more graduate education, some in fiction writing, now behind me.

So between 1982 and 1985, I started into a project that would, years later, become Romey's Place, where, somewhere close to the beginning of the story, you can find a variation on the story "Booty."

Is it true? --what happens? Yes. . .and no. 

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My father has lived his entire life in the way that Switzerland exists, unmoved by conflict swarming all around. But he is not neutral, nor has he ever been. He is adamantly, passionately Christian, and I am convinced his strength derives from a faith that rides the wings of angel warriors sent him by the God he has always sought to serve.

Years ago, he spent his thirtieth birthday hostage to a mob of union workers who laid siege to the foundry where he worked as a bookkeeper. He never resented those strikers or their actions. At church back then, he sat in the same pew and prayed with the men who stopped pouring the white-hot, liquid iron, and, with threats of violence, locked him up with management for five days. When the rest of the town I grew up in went to war at the factory at its center, he turned out plowshares in the church he led for as long as I can remember.

When I was a boy my mother died, an emaciated victim of the MS that shriveled her slowly, year after painful year. There must have been times when my father cried out to God in his pain, but I never saw a fragment of doubt or anger, never heard a raised voice. The image of my father I remember as a boy is a man with his hands in dishwater, a towel thrown over his shoulder, while he hums along with whatever comes over the Moody station. He served his three children as both mother and father and never complained; he scolded us only with the unswerving force of his own righteousness. In my entire lifetime he never laid a hand on me.

Now he is retired, and he reads a lot--mostly things about faith,­ books, magazines, Bible commentaries. I don't remember him reading much when I was a boy because he was running the village, the school board, and the church. The fathers who get headlines today tie their children up to bedposts and pour scalding coffee over their boy's genitals, but sometimes I wonder if the legacy of my father's abiding sense of justice, his commitment, his own long-suffering grace aren't themselves a kind of punishment to his children, who grew up in that shadow, as dependent on him as eglets nested on some mountain precipice, pro­tected and shadowed--but daunted--by the broad wing-span of his love.

For many years I haven't been to church. He knows it, but he doesn't ask about it, and he doesn't attempt to punish me with his disappoint­ment or fear. I stopped attending church in college already, but in my years as a lawyer I've come to appreciate the way religion, especially Christianity, creates and solidifies personal morality, as it did in my father. Like him, I live well, I think. Unlike him, I feel no need of a transcendent God.

He asked me once if I had found a suitable church, but that was years ago. He does not appear anxious, but I know he prays for me. His faith has laid out a road map of life, I think, a pattern of paths he thinks drawn by none other than God Almighty. I envy that trust.

Last Saturday, at the beginning of an early fall snowstorm, my father and I sifted through the assortment of family treasures in the upstairs closets of our family home. He is moving to an apartment now, so we sat, the two of us, at the top of the stairs, and when I glanced out the back window I saw the river that runs behind my childhood home, its banks grassy and gray from sodden afternoon skies. The storm was forecast already three days before, when the temperatures were still in the sixties; but I drove the hundred miles east to help him out, and when I saw the river again from the top of the stairs and sensed the snow in the air, I remembered trapping it, years ago, a couple miles west. What unearthed the memories was the river, and the closet, the top of the stairs, and an old Japanese bayonet that wasn't there, as it should have been.

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Tomorrow: the childhood story returns.