Duet

(Best Non-Fiction, Best of Show Black Hills Writers Contest 2000)

© Kay Marie Porterfield

The first Saturday of every month church ladies come to the nursing home to play piano and sing old hymns. I try to be present on these occasions, sitting beside my father as close as his wheel chair will allow. Even though he can no longer read because the strokes have taken much of his memory, he smiles when I make a pretext of sharing a battered hymnal with him. Other residents crowd the day room, but we are the only ones in the audience singing. He cannot say what day it is or where he is. He has forgotten his age and most of his history, but he recognizes me and he remembers the choruses to In the Sweet By and By, Lead Me Onward Gentle Savior, Rock of Ages and Amazing Grace. Nearly every song the visitors select draws forth his ragged voice, at least for the chorus. At these times I suspect I am witness to a miracle.

"This is like old times," he says to me.

I lean over the chrome wheels of his chair to cover his thin, spotted hand with mine, unable to disturb his peace of mind or deny the truth of my own memories with words.

For most of his life my father waged a war against tenderness. Since children are by nature soft, my brother and I became the chief targets of this campaign. Throughout our childhood, he showed us no mercy. "Life is hard," he admonished us. "You better get used to it while you're young." He underscored his motto with the razor strop, which he wielded at the slightest provocation. We were whipped for disobedience, misbehavior and whipped some more for crying in response to the discipline.

When he let me accompany him on evening walks before Brother was old enough to take my place, my father taught me to march as he had learned in the Navy. "Left, right, left, right," he would count cadence. "I had a good home and I left it. I left it. I left it." To please him, I would take two short strides to one of his long ones until my feet hurt, and still he insisted I keep it up. I was learning a valuable lesson in endurance, he said. In spring he would begin the forced marches on gravel in my bare feet in order to toughen me up, and one summer he built an obstacle course in back of the house, insisting that I run it each evening while he timed me.

When I failed to master the rudiments of swimming through his coaching, he drove more than half a continent away from our land-locked Midwestern farm to throw me into the Pacific Ocean in the hope that fear of death would motivate me. It didn't, and when he finally pulled me sputtering and choking from the waves, he gave me no sympathy. "You're damned lucky you're not in the Navy," he said. "During the war they dumped the men who couldn't swim right into the middle of the ocean with the sharks." He glared at me. "You'd never make it as a sailor."

"It's just his way of showing love," my mother, the perpetual apologist, said. Throughout my growing up years I believed those words less and less each time I heard them. I wondered if she saw through the platitude.

Had my father's stern lessons stopped at these, perhaps I might have carried nothing more than a healthy respect for work and an overly developed sense of responsibility into adulthood. Instead they took on a darker tone. Repeatedly, he warned me not to get too "attached" to anything or anyone. "You'll only wind up losing what you love most," he would say at these times. "You'll get hurt."

When a great-aunt on my mother's side presented me with two angora kittens before my brother was born, he saw them as an opportunity for an object lesson. I loved those kittens and promptly named the orange fur balls, Fluffy and Muffy. Every morning after I finished my oatmeal, I scoured the farmyard for my cats. Unlike the barn cats that came and went and belonged to no one, these were my special pets and I spent hours trying dress them in doll clothes and coaxing them be still while I wheeled them down the driveway in my rusty Radio Flyer.

One morning when I called to them, they didn't come. I looked everywhere -- beneath the bushes, in the barn and all the outbuildings, up and down the road. Feeling utter abandonment, I ran back to the house and asked my mother where they had gone.

At first she seemed flustered and at a loss for words. Then she told me they had probably been run over. When I said that I had checked the road and pleaded with her to come help me look for my babies, she refused. "Maybe you should ask your father," she finally said.

When he came up to the house for lunch, I did.

"They're dead," he said flatly.

"How do you know that?" I hoped against hope he was guessing.

"Because I killed them. You got too attached to them," he told me. "They were going to die sometime anyway. Better they're gone now before you got any more attached."

I can't remember what I said to him, but I know I expressed my anger at what I knew, even at that age, was a terrible injustice. This time, instead, of giving me something to really cry about, he turned his back on me and slammed the screen door behind him so hard the pictures on that wall trembled. Mamma said maybe it was because his Dad had a mean streak; maybe it was the war; maybe it was him losing his baby sister to leukemia. "Don't take it personal," she advised. I did though.

Later I consoled myself with the thought that I would be reunited with Fluffy and Muffy in heaven someday so maybe no real damage had been done. After all they hadn't done anything wrong that I could see so they must have known Jesus as their personal savior. "Cats are animals and they don't have souls, so they can't be Christian," my mother told me. "You have to be a Christian to go to heaven."

"Where do animals go when they die then?" I asked.

"I don't know," she said and then thought for a moment. "Hell, I guess."

After Fluffy's and Muffy's execution, my father watched me carefully each spring as we searched for the barn cats' litters of kittens hidden among the hay bales that had been stacked in the barn the summer before. Looking for signs that I favored one kitten over another, he would remove it along with its brothers and sisters from their hiding place in the dusty-smelling hay and smash them with a shovel while I stood witness. "The tom cats are just going to kill them anyway," he would tell me. "It's better to do it now and get it over with. You're getting too attached to them."

The summer after I finished sixth grade, he handed me the shovel. "You've got to start learning about life," he told me, heaping a handful of kittens with their eyes still stuck shut onto a big rock behind the barn and looking at me expectantly. I did not disappoint him. Raising the shovel over my head in a huge arc, I slammed it down on the stone so hard, the shock of the impact rang in my ears and traveled up my arms. Blood and flesh flew in every direction so violently, even my father jumped back. Feeling only numbness, I glared at him, daring him to finally approve of me, and marched toward the house. This time I did not cry. Instead I wished that I had been adopted, so that I could have spared my father and myself the agony of being tied to one another by blood.

And now after many years, my mother's death, and my father's stroke, it has come down to this - him in his wheelchair and me beside him. I usually assume that position two or three times a week, but sometimes being in his presence is too much for me to bear. He is vulnerable now, a weak scrap of a man, pitiful and mewling like the kittens of my childhood. Even though I try to stay away, I am drawn back to be with him. A month of Saturdays turns into a year of Saturdays and then two and three years of them.

When I reach over to hold his bony hand, it is cold and so delicate that I can not imagine it was ever capable of inflicting damage. He is more like my child these days than the stern man who raised me. When his arthritis pains him, the man I never saw shed a tear cries without self-consciousness. The rest of the time, wide-eyed and serious, he passively observes the world around him. The bitterness he carried for most of the time I have known him has all but dissolved and what little of the past he remembers is good. In the instant of the stroke, all the lessons he tried to teach me about life were evicted from his mind. They will not budge from mine.

"Twas grace that taught by heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved." I cling to those words like a life raft, as my father's voice accompanies me.

Just as I am about to lose him for good, he allows himself to feel a softness toward me. I warn myself that it is too late and argue back, "Better late than never." Despite his prior coaching, I too am starting to feel an attachment. This connectedness we share transcends beyond mere words or religious feeling. His vocabulary shrinks smaller each time I see him and he seems to have no conscious recollection of God or of faith, at least none that he can express. Nonetheless, we sing our hymns together as if our lives depended on it, and maybe they do.

"Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home," we sing while the church ladies at the front of the room smile at the earnestness of our duet. In these moments when our two voices twine, I am filled with a tenderness for him I once believed impossible

Later as the visitors collect the song books to lock them away in the storage closet, I know it is grace that has kept my father alive for this moment when what was broken between us can perhaps be mended.

When I prepare to leave him, he tells me we have to stick together. "You and I, we're all we've got," he says.

It is true.

"Yes, we will stick together," I say and I mean it. After all these years, it is grace more than shared blood or history that binds us.