Remembering "Voice of the Body"

It came back to me in class one afternoon. I was at the blackboard, writing something down in front of class--ENG 200, Responding to Literature, maybe my favorite class through all those years of college teaching. I remember the room. What I don't remember is whether I stood there and told the story. Chances are, I did. Suddenly, it came back to me.

A van full of black kids from Milwaukee, early morning, tugging a trailer hung with canoes, a hippy guy driving, the social worker, kids in the back.

I knew it wasn't smart to take canoes into Lake Michigan. And there was wind, I remember. I actually remember a strong west wind, and I remember thinking maybe I ought to say something. But I didn't--who wants to be a pointer finger, you know? I figured that hippy social worker wouldn't be stupid. I sold the guy the sticker, and they went to the beach.

Four drowned. All day I stayed in the booth, so I wasn't part of what happened on the beach; but the part of the story about the boss, a great guy actually named Cecil, wasn't made up. He chewed me out. In three summers at the State Park, I never caught his wrath as sharply before or after. I should have told them not to put a canoe in rough surf, he said.  I was born here. I should have known. I should have told them.

A kid named Rammer got the job, I remember: take the old gray Ford and go up and down the beach to look for the body. I didn't do it, Rammer did; but that trip along the water, early morning, searching for death--just the thought of it was stunning. So when I first put the pen to paper, it was that trip I was aiming for, those trips I wanted to take in my imagination. Rammer didn't find the body. I didn't know if my character would. I just wanted to get to a tractor ride up the beach.

I suppose I became the father in the story because I was already worried, as most of us are, about being a good father to my son, who was not yet in high school. I chose the father's narrative voice for no reason I can remember except that it wasn't a difficult choice. Who's going to tell the story? Dad's going to. 

Even though Brad is more me than Dad was. 

Writers love to talk about how their characters tell them what to write, how their stories finish themselves, Zen-like. It had happened to me before I was writing "Voice of the Body," a terrible title by the way, but only infrequently. But I sat there at my desk being Brad's father, and it just hit me like heavy surf--"he's going to jam the bread in his son's mouth. Oh my word! He's going to make the kid eat Christ's body! 'Remember and believe. . .'" 

There's no accounting for taste. You may not like that ending, but it fits over everything. The dad forcing his son to eat the communion bread carries the father's faith, his anger, his frustration, even his love, all at once. 

And he knows Brad, at his age, knows all of that too. 

Take it, even as Jesus said it. It's good for you. When the kid lollygags, Dad takes the law into his own hands. The story is at least a quarter-century old, but it still moves me.

And it's fiction. The drownings are very real, but there was no moment in church when my dad forced a sacrament. 

If you go back to the morning I started the story running on the blog, the intro says a former student asked about it. I was wrong. She never went to Dordt College. She'd read it somewhere and never forgot it.

That's the story.