Learning to ride, falling down, getting back on
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— for my father
On Saturdays when your brothers and their sons drove pickup trucks north towards the dam, searching in coulees for animals, boxes of rifle cartridges rattling a song of bones among the thermoses of dark coffee and layered sandwiches made by drowsy wives in half-lit kitchens — you drove our station wagon ten miles to the county dump, walked alone through sagebrush and gravel to shoot broken washing machines, line up the empty mayonnaise and applesauce jars Mother saved for you under the kitchen sink. You bought your shotgun shells at Kmart, two boxes a year, never ate the venison and elk your brothers stacked in our freezer. You kept your only gun in the cabinet you’d carved in wood shop with your best friend Doug the year before half the class was sent to Vietnam.
At the First Baptist Church, you helped the other deacons dispense tiny cups of grape juice like vials of blood, bestow broken crackers of flesh to rows of bowed recruits. For years, Father, you took turns driving the Sunday-school bus, making sure each kid arrived home safely, even the Sunday in May when Mount Saint Helens blew and the sky turned black, a blizzard of ash like the end of the world. . . .
But you never went fishing with the other deacons, not even when Pastor Lind invited you himself. The only time you said yes was when an old man I’d never seen before stopped by with a new silver boat and a beat-up truck and offered to take you fishing on the Columbia like he bragged he had years before on his son Doug’s sixteenth birthday. When you got home, you slept for a week, wouldn’t let Mother clean the salmon stinking in the ice chest.
You talked about Doug only once, when my sisters and I found your old high-school album. His picture had a black circle around it, BEST FRIEND DOUG written in bold letters over the faded faces of other classmates — some of whom, like you, never went to Vietnam. Some, like Doug, have their names etched now on a wall you can’t hurdle, Father, even in sleep.
Though you always claimed otherwise, Mother told us you’d hoped one of your daughters would be a son, to name after the friend whose pickup truck you worked on every weekend your senior year in a garage that smelled so strongly of gasoline Mother could detect it days later on your hands, especially the time you skipped history class to make love with her in the bed of Doug’s truck — the very act that in ’68 would keep you alive and working double shifts at American Potato to pay for rent and diapers and milk and gas while your best friend disappeared into a jungle, taking with him all the sons he and you would never have.
Heather Brittain Bergstrom