CHAPTER 4: COMING OF AGE

Chapter Three Papa

Papa died in the summer of 1985 from complications of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases. Six months later, I was sitting on a chair near a glass-doored exit at work smoking a cigarette. It was snowing softly outside. A frail old man picked his way along the icy sidewalk, with some kind of cane that had a pointed tip, and came inside. Stopping to light his own cigarette, he told me he had invented the cane himself. It was the sort of thing my father would have done - he could build and fix just about anything. Suddenly, the old man's presence faded and I heard my father's voice inside my head. "Don't worry child, it's your Papa. How are you doing? It's very gentle here where I am. I love you." And the voice was gone. The old man shuffled away. As a child, I had called him Daddy, but since this moment when I have a word to say to him from time to time, I call him Papa.

At first, when we came to the farm, we lived in the same shingled two-story house with my grandfather, my uncle and his wife, and their two boys - one of whom was my age, the other several years younger. My uncle's family moved into a home they built next door the following year. Then there were just my parents and I - and Grandpa - in our house.

My room was very small on the northwest corner of the upstairs of the house. It looked out into a huge maple tree. It was the room from which the trap door opened into the attic. Although I had been in the attic and seen what it contained, it was unfinished and used mostly for storage. Sometimes at night I would imagine the trapdoor opening in the dark and slowly, slowly I would raise my hand and pull the string above my head to snap on the light. Underneath my bed a long rope coiled with knots in it at intervals. It was tied to the leg of the bed so I could throw it from the window in case of fire.

In the basement of our house my mother stockpiled all the canned fruit and vegetables she produced in the summer. Several times during those years the Willamette River flooded, filling the basement, and everything would have to be carried upstairs. My father and uncle hoisted squealing pigs into the barn loft, and my father rowed to the barn from the back porch of the house to milk the cows in the morning and evening.

The work of the farm revolved around the main crop - hybrid seed corn. During spring and summer, planting and irrigating were done. Then came the work of detasseling some rows so they would cross breed with the others. It was done by hand, walking up and down the long plant channels in the heat. In the fall, the corn was harvested and in the winter months cured and dried in the seed warehouses (which my father built, drafting the plans himself). The men took turns sitting up all night stoking fires and reading Collier's magazine and the Saturday Evening Post.

My father taught me to read before I started to school, sitting with me while I puzzled over letters and shapes. School was a two-room building about four miles from our farm. Sometimes my parents drove me and sometimes in nice weather I walked with my cousin, stopping along the way to add other farm children to the group. The school was heated by a pot-bellied stove in winter and the bathroom was a wooden outhouse.

Aside from being naturally quiet from the hours spent isolated at home, I was carrying a family secret in these years. At times we had secret political meetings on our farm and strangers would come from miles away to gather in our warehouse and sing freedom songs and make some sort of plans. All I understood about it was that I must never tell anyone at school or my parents could go to jail. The deep bass voice of Paul Robeson sang the sad evidence of man's inhumanity from our victrola. This secret was the beginning of a lifelong sense of being an outsider, a desperado. Some years later when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg died in the electric chair, my parents wept. So I added to the terror in my adolescent heart the certainty that this could happen to them, too. At school, I retreated into the books that were so comforting to me and by the end of the first year, because I had read all the books for that year and the following year, I was moved directly to the third grade.

Now I became different in another way. If I showed my intelligence and love of learning, my father and the teacher were pleased - but not the other children. And how I longed for them to take me in. The farm children I recall were tough, practical and physical. They liked you if you kept up on the playing field of their very real world. In the end, I compromised, foregoing the rough and tumble world of the team players for a world that would include my father's love, and that of the gentlest of friends.

My parents were intensely involved in their relationship with each other, never peaceful, and they were busy with the work of the farm. They did, however, try to give me things that made up for my isolation. My father built a miniature green house under a large tree in the back yard. It had a swinging dutch door, a little window with a window box, and a window in the back. Over the years it served as a museum for abandoned birds' nests, a store to sell groceries from the garden, and a detective's office. My mother arranged 13 years of piano lessons and made sure I practiced. It was the kind of gift that is all the more loving for the comprehension that any gratitude that may come for it will be many years down the road.

On my seventh birthday, my mother made a list of gifts from friends and relatives:

"A Child's Garden of Verses" from Janet and Joan

two barretts from Annabelle Edwards

a small gold locket and chain from Aunt Ruella and Uncle Lud

a blue pinafore and scrap book from Aunt Louise and Chet

a dollar's worth of stamps from Aunt Bertha Scully

a dollar from Aunt Louise and Uncle Joe

"Heidi" and "Robinson Crusoe" from Grandpa Campbell

notepaper from Aunt Mary

a pink petticoat from mother and dad

bathsalts from Wayne Olson

a jigsaw puzzle from Marjorie

hankies and a bookmark from Mark Musgrave

notepaper from Davey

colored ink from Johnny

Of all these things, the one I can see in my mind, the one that brings the stirring of all magic things when I think of it is the colored ink. Secrets can be written out into the world, I have learned, and they come in the deep greens and purples and browns and blues of a child's deepest unformed fears and longings. There are giants, myths and angels which can only be drawn in colored ink.

My father was the giant of my childhood. By the time I had children of my own, the years with him had faded into myth. And somewhere now Papa is an angel.

Father, returning from the hay harvest, your face as I remember, full of nothing, like the sky is emptied from its long day's battle with the anxious birds. And I was timid, but I touched your head, the pollen on your hands, and felt you resting. And I planted, under all the garlands I had built into my hair, a stem from the anemone you brought me home.

The scattered fields of polished stacks and ambushed earth were always waiting. After I had risen, we went out together and they whispered, yonder comes the mad haymaker and his child. They knew you were the actor of my season and observed me follow faithfully across a stage of sun and grass. All day with diligence we worked to paralyze the flood and turn it from its sweating path, till finally the night with black sarcasm ranged itself in sudden recklessness above the grain. And leaning on your arm, I led you slowly back.

In time I had to flow, with what was coming to my heart, another way, but my resolves are saturated with the past and what I place upon the tables of my judges is the working of that graceful tune into a larger song. Be certain that this child is yours, and even ashes will not translate her into a different house.

I memorized in innocence the pure fugue of those years. Immediate and constant is the heart I proffer in salute to him who gave me courage rather than security to wear - the sides of time will see us pass in other voyages of love.

CHAPTER 4: COMING OF AGE