Two years ago, I was divorced. I could give you a hundred reasons why, but none of them would be any good really. Anyway, I see my two kids on weekends, and I take them places but you get tired of amusement parks and malls. So I took them to the Dutch Festival in Easton yesterday, a half day’s ride north of Chicago, where we live.
Today I’m a teacher, special ed, in the schools there. My students are kids who don’t understand why it’s important to show up for work in the morning if you want to keep a job. And every year I get new ones, a new crop of sixteen-year-olds. This year I will too. And I wonder sometimes if I’d recognize that one of Cassie and me, the one I never saw. Maybe it was a girl.
Somewhere, I imagine, Cassandra Whoever-she’s-married-to is telling her story too, and it’s probably not at all the same.
But I couldn’t help thinking when I was sitting there yesterday on the curb, when I saw all those Dutch kids around town, all those preening girls and the boys with the developing shoulders, that somewhere someplace there’s this tall, gaunt, half-Dutch, sixteen-year-old, who could just as well be up in a stuffy haymow somewhere with my father, wearing out overalls by hoisting bales on his knee, his face sticky with sweat and chaff, and sometimes talking, sometimes talking.
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A couple of notes on this story:
On revisions: I knew where I wanted this story to be published, but it came back rejected, but with a suggestion. Some of the editors simply couldn't believe that the father could be that violent, that he would simply kill a kitten in his hands. I would have argued that farmers often have a different view of livestock and animals than the rest of us.
The suggestion was that I find a way to foreshadow the way his killing the kitten. A friend of mine had once told me a story about beating a cow. His father had seen him do it, stopped him, and told him if he ever caught his son beating an animal again, his father would beat him. I deliberately put that segment into the story in order to foreshadow what eventually happens to the kitten.
On his father's killing the kitten: I wanted the reader to buy his doing that, and I felt that way because I remembered the way my father hit a runt piglet with a hammer when it was clear that the sow had birthed too many children for the number of spigots she had to feed them. He told me that what would happen to the runt wasn't pretty, that killing that little thing before his or her having to go through it was an act of mercy.
I'm not sure I believed him, but I also understood that I'd never stood in the presence of a dozen little piglets before--I had very limited experience of working with animals. Once when I was a kid, I had a dog appointed to be my responsibility. I failed that creature badly, and he had a short stay in our basement.
On the final scene: Clearly, Gary Dirks links his own personal problems to some things in his past; whether that's fair is a good question. But it's just as clear that, in retrospect, he remembers those moments in the barn with his father because he's seen too many kids in his job who've missed the discipline his father brought to his own life and that of his children.
A political story? Well, yes, I suppose it is, but only because the issue of abortion is so highly politicized. I've always been pro-life, but never fanatic about it. I certainly wasn't thinking of sitting down and writing a pro-life story when this story came to me. Perhaps my attitude is not that much different than the narrator's. He mentions abortion only in passing. His father's dramatic means of explaining to his son the importance of life itself is the testimony of the story.
The story's sturdiness and popularity may well be rooted in its being seen as a pro-life/anti-abortion story; but more important than that, or so it seems to me, is that the father's case-in-point about life itself is so distressing and therefore memorable.
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