The Bridge

A strange enchantment within the Mississippi earth drew my father to our grandparent’s little brick house year after year and us with him, the child within him returning to the remembered happiness and simplicity of home. Sometimes I like to think he made the trip to share with us his deep connection to the rusty clay of his youth, to give us – if such a thing was possible – the gift of joy he had once known there. At others I think the mystic call of home compelled his return year after year for reasons that had nothing to do with us at all.

For many years we took no other vacation. We would drive south for two days, our crossing of the Missouri River the moment when we would begin to count the hours till we would reach the Mississippi state line and our father would honk the horn to let his parents know their eldest son had returned home.

To my youthful eyes the bridge crossing the Missouri seemed much taller and longer than it really was, the railing a chattering blur as our station wagon rose higher and higher above the dark waters below us. The mile long bridge commanded sufficient respect that we would grow watchfully silent for the symbolic crossing. Something inexpressible would change as our car left the bridge behind, the passage from north to south promising my father a return to the rusty clay of home even as the rest of us experienced the jarring tingle of leaving the familiar behind.

Sleeping on the sofa bed in my grandparents’ living room, I often lay awake long into the humid nights atop its scratchy and lumpy bedding. Awakening before my siblings to the sounds of my grandparent’s black and white television, my eyes would open to my tiny grandmother as she stretched and exercised with Jack Lalanne. Afterward she would pull on her rubber boots and don a safari hat to work in her garden. Since the heavy morning dew made the rusty, viscous clay cling stubbornly to footwear, wearing her rubber boots eliminated the need to clean shoes each morning after weeding and harvesting her bountiful garden rows.

I liked to join her in the kitchen once she returned to the house and watch her as she prepared angel biscuits and corn sticks without measuring ingredients and began frying the morning bacon. She would start the scrambled eggs as the biscuits baked and would have the table set by the time my siblings, parents and grandfather sleepily entered the dining room.

After breakfast, the hot Mississippi sun would quickly evaporate the heavy dew on my grandparent’s lawn as a thousand humming bees swarmed the blossoms on my grandmother’s luxuriant rose of Sharon. Like a gateway to a forgotten land, a really hot day can still open hidden gateways of feeling, crossing its forgotten threshold tantamount to physically walking beneath the old railroad trestle across the street from my grandparent’s house to the magical land on the other side.

In the evening after dinner, we would join our grandfather on his porch as the sun set and the fireflies began to blink their tiny lantern lights, the ashes of his cigar glowing in the remembered darkness. Sometimes he told tales infused with a kind of hobo romanticism about shiftless years between his childhood and fatherhood. At others he would talk about the steam powered lumber mill where he worked as a foreman during the years when the remnants of Mississippi’s great pine forests still provided high quality lumber for a growing nation. The memory of the culture of story experienced on his porch led to my own efforts to record tales that otherwise might be lost to time.

In the wee hours of morning, I would sometimes slip quietly from the sofa bed to explore our grandparent’s darkened house, its magic calling to me out of the still night air with such power that I would brave my own fears of the dark to seek its source. The question – what did I find? – impossible to answer, for like all children I eventually entered the amnesia of adulthood, the magic in the night one of many childish attachments misplaced with the tender years of my youth.

What remains is not so much memory as the warm sense that in this house children were loved without respect to talent, intelligence, or behavior. There were no bad children in my grandmother’s home. As a result, I still visit the little brick house in my thoughts to bask within the enduring clasp of their remembered hugs, the fleeting innocence of childhood embossed like tiny unwashed fingerprints on the faded, papered walls of memory.

In spite of the shared connection experienced in my grandparent’s home, my father and I shared little else in common. He seemed born a pragmatist; I to dream. He wanted to know me, but I did not really want to know him until I had sufficient life experience to appreciate what he had overcome in his life. The generation gap that everyone blamed for the upheaval of the sixties had little to do with the divide that separated us, however. I grew up in a middleclass suburb as if my birthright and he in a succession of clapboard shacks, the last torn down in 1950 to make way for the home that we visited in my youth. Since he struck out on his own in 1949, he never lived in the little brick house at all. He often told stories of sharing a small bed with three brothers in a room with only a sheet hanging from the ceiling separated their side of the room from the one where his elder sister slept.

Perhaps if I had witnessed the poverty of my father’s youth I might have understood and appreciated him more. But the little brick house had amenities he had never experienced: three neatly apportioned bedrooms, a separate dining room with a large cherry wood dining set, and a spacious living room. As I explored the little brick house, I imagined myself entering my father’s deep past even though his parents built their home a scant six years before my birth. Unfortunately, I waited until my father was an old man before pressing him for a more detailed history than the handful of stories he enjoyed telling.

My father was born in sharecroppers shack in the autumn of 1929, the second of five children. Raised as farmers, his parents were poor as well as poorly educated. Save for a King James Bible, there were no other books in their home nor blocks for my father and his siblings to learn their alphabet. His parents held his older sister back from attending the first grade until my father was almost six so that they could attend the first grade together. Since my father was ashamed of the result of his early failure there, he did not share the story of their first day of school until he was in his eighties.

The two of them nervously gripping one another’s hands made that first long walk to the school unescorted. Justifying their fears, at the school year’s end the teacher held them back to repeat the grade, what the teachers charitably called High-First. Three quarters of a century later, I could see the anguish in my father’s expression as he shared his original reaction to failing. He mumbled, “I am dumb.”

As a child he refused to speak in front of a group for fear of humiliation only to later become a man who would face those same fears again and again as a commissioned officer in the Army and later still as a corporate executive in a large and successful corporation. But what had happened between his youth and that day in basic training when he was pulled from the ranks to attend Officer Candidate School?

My father always credited his mama. He had never known her to do anything cruel, the absence of such a fault painting a better picture of her character than any string of glowing adjectives. The stories of her capacity for love were legion. My father caught diphtheria in 1931 when the vaccine was difficult if not impossible to procure in the rural south due to the great depression. His mama nursed him back to health without the lifesaving vaccine. When medicine or money was lacking, her love found a way.

The night her fourth child was born, the doctor later said, ‘I just delivered the nearest thing to nothing I ever saw,’ not expecting her son to live past his first hour. His tiny face pinched and red with the desire to live, his mama never again experienced the dread she knew in the following days and nights, expecting each withering breath to be his last.

But the laws governing life and death were somehow suspended in the following weeks, her own mother stacking bricks warmed in the oven in the shape of a crude incubator before helping her daughter wrap the tiny boy in protective swaddling clothes. Even today, giving birth to a child under two pounds is a terrifying ordeal. Imagine doing that at home in a little shack at the height of the Great Depression.

In addition to his mama’s love and care, my father’s private shame at his family’s poverty and his father’s alcoholism likely influenced his efforts to better himself once he left home as well. As a youth, he often lay awake far into the night on Saturdays and Sundays waiting for sound of his father’s heavy tread as he returned home from drinking with his buddies. The family depended on his small paycheck for food and rent.

A weekend alcoholic, his father always reported to work Monday morning no matter how he felt and ensured that sufficient cash made it to his wife’s pocketbook for the meat and bread that supplemented the produce from her garden. During the worst years of the depression his family was no hungrier or poorer than they had been before. Finding work was tougher, but there were always jobs for men accustomed to hard living and the difficult choices that accompanied them. The soft, educated man would rather stand in the soup lines than stoop in the fields or handle rough sawed timber in the mills. His father hated to work as much as any man hard or soft, but he wasn’t too proud to sweat for his bread, just too proud to beg for it.

But my father told one story more times than any other from his youth, as if the keystone to his character and the manner he chose to live his life. At sunrise each morning, his mama would carry a pair of galvanized steel pails to a spring that was roughly a mile or so from their house as the family dog, Bruce, following protectively behind her. One day, as she neared her destination, she nearly stepped on a copperhead crossing the trail. Raising his triangular head in warning she stiffened, the snake’s wide mouth exposing fangs weepy with poison before disappearing in the blinding flurry of the bounding dog, Bruce’s head violently shaking the snake long after it had died. Standing fiercely at her side, both his cheeks punctured and bleeding, he paid a steep price for his heroics. When they returned home, he crawled under their shack, and they did not see him again for several days.

Anyone who has cared for a stray dog or cat knows that it will disappear from time to time. But after a week had passed and my father feared that Bruce might die, he persuaded his mama to help coax Bruce from under their house. It is at this point in the story that my father’s eyes would begin to well with tears, his words coming to a stumbling halt, the vision in his mind of Bruce weakly dragging himself into the light overcoming his ability to speak.

Like a shared trauma, the memory of his own helplessness was surely as painful as watching the dog he loved deeply suffer in response to their impassioned pleas. The seconds of silence passing slowly, he always finished the story in the only manner he could, pantomiming the old dog squinting in the bright sun as it struggled to sit up, my father’s trembling arms pressing against the imagined ground as they slowly extended and his elbows locked. With the tears sliding down his cheeks, our father would arch his back and slowly lift his chin skyward, howling a weak, triumphant howl, just as Bruce had done when he was a little boy.

Love called Bruce back, like an incomprehensible magic stirring in the darkness beneath the clapboard shack. As the dog slowly mastered his wasted muscles, my father, his mama and siblings wrapped their arms around their trembling dog and wept.

To a stranger it might seem a little thing, but the story highlighted the virtues my father most greatly prized, the beast’s howl ennobled by his loyalty, love, and perseverance. Perhaps he imitated the howl as if to punctuate its import as a grounding to something deep and incomprehensible within his own heart, the emotions the howl reawakened too visceral to distill into human language.

Due to the example of his mama and poverty of his youth, my father did not admit impediments, even when the cancer that eventually took his life weakened him to the point that he could no longer walk unaided. In his mind the illness was temporary and therefore would pass. This is not to suggest that he feared dying and therefore avoided thinking of it – but rather his positive approach to each and every obstacle he ever faced.

As if a final lesson of his philosophy for living, father lived his remaining weeks as if not dying at all. As long as he had the strength to sit up, he grasped his walker and labored to the family room just as Bruce labored to crawl from under the old house eighty years earlier. Why the family room? Because wherever family and friends gathered our father wanted to be. At the end family and friends meant everything to him.

In his last years, love continued to call our father home just as it had in our youth, the memory of long summer days filled with the thrumming of window fans and the buzzing whine of cicadas stretching across the years. It is hard to imagine a man dying who was happier than he was in the last few weeks of his life.

I cannot remember my father without reflecting on the love and acceptance that we experienced when we traveled south to the little brick house in the heart of summer. I can easily imagine how his mama’s daily influence and love shaped my father. Perhaps the sacred magic was not in the rusty clay at all, but in his mother’s capacity to tirelessly love her children back to health even when the odds were stacked heavily against her, the magic he still remembered even as he lay dying in his bed and the mystic dirt of home called to him softly for the last time.

Born to economic privilege, I can never fully understand the economic hardship that forged my father’s character. But remembering my youthful experience in my grandparents' house reminds me of the priceless gift his love of home gave me, my favorite memories the loving people who greeted us annually there. Our father was the bridge to the happiest place on earth. There were other bridges and other routes south that we could have driven. But there was only one man who drove us there even if the drive was long … the hot, dry air blowing fiercely through the station wagon’s open windows as anticipation gradually built to hear our grandmother’s high voice shrieking with happiness and to feel again the crushing grip of our grandfather’s strong arms.