Wally!”
My father acted as if they weren’t there, though his face became stiff and his eyes fixed harshly on some point in the distance. He just kept plodding forward, as if he couldn’t hear them. That was the look, I thought, that he had at the funeral.
The times in my childhood that I remember seeing him cry, they were always because of music. He was frequently brought to tears by some old, unbearably sentimental song. I remember this one called “Scarlet Ribbons,” and another that went:
O my Papa!
To me he was so wonderful!
O my Papa!
To me he was so good!
This song, in particular, used to drive me crazy, and when he would play it I would leave the room, if possible. It wasn’t only because of the maudlin tremor in the singer’s voice, or because of my father’s solemn canonizing of my grandfather, a man who had once burned my father’s arm with a red-hot fork, leaving a scar which still remained. (“It taught me a lesson,” my father said. He was being punished for having cruelly burned his younger sister with a match.)
It wasn’t the hypocrisy that repelled me. It was simply that I understood the implications of the line: “To me, he was so wonderful.” By which the singer meant, “No matter what, my father seemed wonderful to me.” And I knew that my father wasn’t weeping because he was extending this grace to his ownfather. No: He was weeping because he was wishing it for himself. He hoped that I would someday sing “O My Papa!” He cried for himself, and each tear said, “Someday you will love me unconditionally. Someday you will forgive me. Someday you will be sorry.”
Which was something I didn’t want to hear at the time.
I’ve suffered a little. Along with his sentimental side came a nasty temper. I got my share of what my father called “lickings,” a term which, even in the extremity of my punishment, would cause me to smirk into my hand. I was beaten with a wire brush, a belt, a length of hose. And I was the victim of verbal and emotional abuse. I don’t know whether I mentioned this or not, but once my father hit my mother. I stood by watching.
Nowadays, I meet a lot of people who were never beaten when they were children. They never witnessed any sort of violence in the home and the idea of striking a child is so aberrant to them that I enjoy shocking them with tales of my abuse—most of which are quite true.
My father would have been just as outraged to hear of a parent who
didn’t
use corporal punishment. You couldn’t really reason with a child, he would have said, but you had to make sure they obeyed. They had to learn to respect before they learned to think. The idea of a world filled with unspanked children would have made him frown grimly. For what would become of society, once these children grew up? The children would be spoiled, and the world would be filled with rude, disrespectful, dishonest, shiftless adults.
He worried about me being spoiled. By “spoiled,” he didn’tmean what my mother means when she says that she can hardly wait to see her grandchildren at Christmastime. “I’ll spoil them rotten,” she says devilishly, and I say, “Oh, they’re already so spoiled it’s not funny.” And we laugh.
To my father, the word still retained a large part of its older, more serious connotations: “Spoiled” meant “ruined,” and the act of
spoiling
had flickers of its archaic meaning—to pillage, to plunder. In my father’s estimation, a man who spoiled his children was robbing them, for a spoiled child would never be capable of the higher emotions: love, patriotism, self-sacrifice, honor, duty. Though he wept when the father made the son shoot the pet deer in
The Yearling
, he felt that the father did the right thing. We got into a heated argument about this one night about a year before he died. “It had to be done!” my father had insisted, and his voice rose, almost cracking with emotion. “That’s how it was back then, damn
My father acted as if they weren’t there, though his face became stiff and his eyes fixed harshly on some point in the distance. He just kept plodding forward, as if he couldn’t hear them. That was the look, I thought, that he had at the funeral.
The times in my childhood that I remember seeing him cry, they were always because of music. He was frequently brought to tears by some old, unbearably sentimental song. I remember this one called “Scarlet Ribbons,” and another that went:
O my Papa!
To me he was so wonderful!
O my Papa!
To me he was so good!
This song, in particular, used to drive me crazy, and when he would play it I would leave the room, if possible. It wasn’t only because of the maudlin tremor in the singer’s voice, or because of my father’s solemn canonizing of my grandfather, a man who had once burned my father’s arm with a red-hot fork, leaving a scar which still remained. (“It taught me a lesson,” my father said. He was being punished for having cruelly burned his younger sister with a match.)
It wasn’t the hypocrisy that repelled me. It was simply that I understood the implications of the line: “To me, he was so wonderful.” By which the singer meant, “No matter what, my father seemed wonderful to me.” And I knew that my father wasn’t weeping because he was extending this grace to his ownfather. No: He was weeping because he was wishing it for himself. He hoped that I would someday sing “O My Papa!” He cried for himself, and each tear said, “Someday you will love me unconditionally. Someday you will forgive me. Someday you will be sorry.”
Which was something I didn’t want to hear at the time.
I’ve suffered a little. Along with his sentimental side came a nasty temper. I got my share of what my father called “lickings,” a term which, even in the extremity of my punishment, would cause me to smirk into my hand. I was beaten with a wire brush, a belt, a length of hose. And I was the victim of verbal and emotional abuse. I don’t know whether I mentioned this or not, but once my father hit my mother. I stood by watching.
Nowadays, I meet a lot of people who were never beaten when they were children. They never witnessed any sort of violence in the home and the idea of striking a child is so aberrant to them that I enjoy shocking them with tales of my abuse—most of which are quite true.
My father would have been just as outraged to hear of a parent who
didn’t
use corporal punishment. You couldn’t really reason with a child, he would have said, but you had to make sure they obeyed. They had to learn to respect before they learned to think. The idea of a world filled with unspanked children would have made him frown grimly. For what would become of society, once these children grew up? The children would be spoiled, and the world would be filled with rude, disrespectful, dishonest, shiftless adults.
He worried about me being spoiled. By “spoiled,” he didn’tmean what my mother means when she says that she can hardly wait to see her grandchildren at Christmastime. “I’ll spoil them rotten,” she says devilishly, and I say, “Oh, they’re already so spoiled it’s not funny.” And we laugh.
To my father, the word still retained a large part of its older, more serious connotations: “Spoiled” meant “ruined,” and the act of
spoiling
had flickers of its archaic meaning—to pillage, to plunder. In my father’s estimation, a man who spoiled his children was robbing them, for a spoiled child would never be capable of the higher emotions: love, patriotism, self-sacrifice, honor, duty. Though he wept when the father made the son shoot the pet deer in
The Yearling
, he felt that the father did the right thing. We got into a heated argument about this one night about a year before he died. “It had to be done!” my father had insisted, and his voice rose, almost cracking with emotion. “That’s how it was back then, damn
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