Cliff presses the cold glass to his forehead. He tries again to remove the picture of his father sitting in a rocker watching two mongrels getting to know each other, a tired old man spitting tobacco juice, rocking, spitting tobacco juice into a Maxwell House Coffee can.
“Damn dogs.” Captain Jack spits. “Hope that boy got a job.”
The old man is rocking on the front porch of a frame house next to Watertown’s Sinclair gas station at the wrong end of Smith Road.
“Martha!“ he yells over his shoulder. “Hey, Martha!”
His wife pokes her head out the front door. “What’s wrong? Don't you know I'm busy?"
“You think Cliff went to work after school?”
“Yes,” said Martha, “but--”
“Don’t give me no ‘buts’ woman.”
She shuts the door.
White paint is flaking on the house. In the window there is a card for the iceman who drops off a twenty-cent block twice a week. The porch is slanting toward the shallow front yard, spilling over a brick wall rising two feet above the clay road. In the backyard a clothes line hangs loosely between the trunk of a barren pecan tree and dilapidated woodshed. The yard is overgrown with weeds, wild strawberries,
and vines high enough to hide the running board of a weathered nineteen thirty-one Ford bed truck, abused by too many miles banging along rutted county roads in pursuit of dried-up markets for underfed crops. He grew his puny crops on a poor piece of sandy soil he bought for thirty dollars from a farmer who packed up his family and goods and joined the caravans west. Captain Jack’s Boat Yard is barely visible on the faded sign painted on the truck door.
Captain Jack Walker lost the boat yard to bankruptcy in 1936, about ten years after his general store burned to the ground. The owner of a competing store around a bend in the road was suspected of arson. Two years later he failed to make a go of the taxi service he set up to transport freight across the Watertown bay. He was often the victim of uneducated timing.
The old man yells, “Hey, Martha, bring me a glass of whisky!”
She returns to the front door. “Don’t you think you had enough?”
“Do like I say, woman.”
The old frame wasn’t much of a house: a coal stove in the kitchen, leaky pipes, linoleum in the parlor, a ragged throw rug on the living room floor, roaches that snap underfoot in the dark and bleed white blood. There was a smokehouse next to the back porch. Cardboard was nailed over the window of the front door. But the house was better than some Captain Jack encountered on his trips through the county.
Folks used to say, “Times are hard on everyone, for some more than others.” At least, Captain Jack had his crops and a truck to peddle them in to those who had the few pennies to buy them.
Martha hands her husband a glass of whisky. “You shouldn’t drink so much, ‘specially in front of the boys.” He takes the glass, spits out the tobacco.
Captain Jack is not a contented man when he sees the rangy boy of twelve trailing the scent of manure drifting from the piece of fallow farm land across the road, second-hand school books strapped to his back. On his right arm a sassing welt still not healed from the switch the old man snapped from the rose bush climbing the back porch trellis.
“Boy,” says his father, rocking and spitting into the Maxwell House Coffee can, “why you home so early? I told you not to come home today without no job.” His snarl was hidden in a gray mustache.
Cliff, fifth child born when the Captain was fifty three, says, “There are no jobs for boys my age, what with all the men standing around doing nothing but standing.”
“Boy, they’s too lazy to look for work.” He takes a drink of whisky.
“Besides,” says the son, “the teacher said I got to study more.”
“Don’t make sense to me,” growls the old man, corn whisky running down his chin. “Books ain’t gonna put no food in your belly, nor the bellies of the rest of us neither.”
“Mama says books is all we got,” says the son, “if we going to be somebody.”
"What kind of somebody?"
"Mama thinks I can be a good writer."
“Boy, women don’t know.”
Days tumble over days, culminate in years of substantial change, yet on this summer’s night the past and present are inseparable.
The old man rocking and spitting, his truss squeaking and a noticeable remnant of corn whisky in his eyes, is a scene that Cliff recalls often, usually in those hot damp fitful nights when he should be devising ways to undo the failures that linger in his own life: a broken marriage, a daughter who returns his mail unopened, another banknote overdue, his business and his life on the rocks, the realization that in his middle years Cliff is the reincarnation of the father the boy within cannot escape.
His boyhood continues to monitor his summer nights, not entirely the missing meals, the empty years, the loneliness, but also the hunger to learn that gladdened his mother’s life, kindled the father’s rage, tied the boy’s stomach in knots.
He recalls what his mother said the day before she died in 1942: "Clifford, be the writer I know you want to be. You and Steve watch out for your younger brother Lewis. And don't be too hard on your father. He did the best he could with what he had."
"I know," said Cliff. "but we'll never be friends."
The last time he saw his father was the summer of 1944, the day Captain Jack cranked up the truck and drove him to the train, Cliff squirming on a loose seat spring, the train going to the big city where he would be sworn into the army. Cliff Walker, just eighteen, was glad to be leaving Watertown, the war his liberation.
At the station, Cliff's father, a tall man bent by age and anger, stood and stared at him a minute. Then he slipped his son two dollars, told him to eat something on the train. Before Cliff could say thank you, Captain Jack banged the truck door shut, and drove out of his son’s life, hissing steam through the radiator cap, belching smoke and tobacco juice.
end
