Walk Two Moons - Quia



18

THE GOOD MAN

I SHOULD MENTION MY FATHER.

When I was telling Phoebe's story to Gram and Gramps, I did not say much about my father. He was their son, and not only did they know him better than I, but as Gram often said; he was the light of their lives. They had three other sons at one time, but one son died when a tractor flipped over on him, one was killed when he skied into a tree, and the third died when he jumped into the freezing cold Ohio River to save his best friend (the best friend survived but my uncle did not).

My father was the only son left, but even if their other sons were still alive, my father might still be their light because he is also a kind, honest, simple, and good man. I do not mean simple as in simple-minded-I mean he likes plain and simple things. His favorite clothes are the flannel shirts and blue jeans that he has had for twenty years. It nearly killed him to buy white shirts and a suit for his new job in Euclid.

He loved the farm because he could be out in the real air, and he wouldn't wear work gloves because he liked to touch the earth and the wood and the animals. It was painful for him to go to work in an office when we moved. He did not like being sealed up inside with nothing real to touch.

We'd had the same car, a blue Chevy, for fifteen years. He couldn't bear to part with it because he had touched-and repaired-every inch of it. I also think he couldn't bear the thought that if he sold it, someone might take it to the junkyard. My father hated the whole idea of putting cars out to pasture. He often prowled through junkyards touching old cars and buying old alternators and carburetors just for the joy of cleaning them up and making them work again. My grandfather had never quite gotten the hang of car mechanics, and so he thought my father was a genius.

My mother was right when she said my father was good. He was always thinking of little things to cheer up someone else. This nearly drove my mother crazy because I think she wanted to keep up with him, but it was not her natural gift like it was with my father. He would be out in the field and see a flowering bush that my grandmother might like, and he would dig the whole thing up and take it straight over to Gram's garden and replant it. If it snowed, he would be up at dawn to trek over to his parents' house and shovel out their driveway.

If he went into, town to buy supplies - for the farm, he would come back with, something for my mother and something for me. They were small things-a cotton scarf, a book, a glass paperweight - but whatever he brought, it was exactly what you would have picked out for yourself.

I had never seen him angry. "Sometimes I don't think you're human," my mother told him. It was the sort of thing she said just before she left, and it bothered me, because it seemed as if she wanted him to be meaner, less good.

Two days before she left, when I first heard her raise the subject of leaving, she said, "I feel so rotten in comparison."

"Sugar, you're not rotten," he said.

"See?" she said. "See? Why couldn't you at least believe I am rotten?"

"Because you're not," he said.

She said she had to leave in order to clear her head, and to clear her heart of all the bad things. She needed to learn about what she was.

"You can do that here, Sugar," he said. .

"I need to do it on my own," she said. "I can't think. All I see here is what I am not. I am not brave. I am not good. And I wish someone would call me by my real name. My name isn't Sugar. It's Chanhassen. "

She had not been well. She had had some terrible shocks, it is true, but I did not understand why she could not get better with us. I begged her to take me with her, but she said I could not miss school and my father needed me and besides, she had to go alone. She had to.

I thought she might change her mind, or at least tell me when she was leaving. But she did neither of those things. She left me a letter which explained that if she said good-bye, it would be too terribly painful and it would sound too permanent.

She wanted me to know that she would think of me every minute and that she would be back before the tulips bloomed.

But, of course, she was not back before the tulips bloomed.

It nearly killed my father after she left, I know it, but he continued on doing everything just as before, whistling and humming and finding little gifts for people. He kept bringing home gifts for my mother and stacking them in a pile in their bedroom.

On the day after he found out she wasn't returning, he flew to Lewiston, Idaho, and when he came back, he spent three days chipping away at the fireplace hidden behind the plaster wall. Some of ' the cement grouting between the bricks had to be replaced, and he wrote her name in the new cement. He wrote Chanhassen, not Sugar.

Three weeks later he put the farm up for sale. By this time he was receiving letters from Mrs. Cadaver, and I knew that he was answering her letters. Then he drove up to see Mrs. Cadaver while I stayed with Gram and Gramps. When he came back, he said we were moving to Euclid. Mrs. Cadaver had helped him find a job.

I didn't even wonder how he had met Mrs. Cadaver or how long he had known her. I ignored her whole existence. Besides, I was too busy throwing the most colossal temper tantrums. I refused to move. I would not leave our farm, our maple tree, our swimming hole, our pigs, our chickens, our hayloft. I would not leave the place that belonged to me. I would not leave the place to which, I was convinced, my mother might return.

At first my father did not argue with me. He let me behave like a wild boar. At last, he took down the For Sale sign and put up a For Rent sign. He said he would rent out the farm, hire someone to care for the animals and the crops, and rent a house for us in Euclid. The farm would still belong to us and one day we could return to it. "But for now," he said, "we have to leave because your mother is haunting me day and night. She's in the fields, the air, the barn, the walls, the trees." He said we were making this move to learn about bravery and courage. That sounded awfully familiar.

In the end, I think I merely ran out of steam. I stopped throwing tantrums. I didn't help pack, but when the time came, I climbed in the car and joined my father for our move to Euclid. I did not feel brave, and I did not feel courageous.

When I told my story of Phoebe to Gram and Gramps, I mentioned none of this. They knew it already. They knew my father was a good man, they knew I did not want to leave the farm, they knew my father felt we had to leave. They also knew that my father had tried, many times, to explain to me about Margaret, but that I wouldn't hear it.

On that long day that my father and I left the farm behind and drove to Euclid, I wished that my father was not such a good man, so there would be someone to blame for my mother's leaving. I didn't want to blame her. She was my mother, and she was part of me.

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