Red

 [1]

“Tell me a story about your father,” I say. “A happy one if you can.”

I’m not sure that my father is listening. He is fidgeting in his hospital bed, packing wads of gauze into his abdomen, into a fistula that opens directly to his intestines. There’s no longer a way to fit a colostomy bag over the wound, so a surgical tube is constantly suctioning out anything that passes through the bowel, ferrying it to a clear canister that sits on a shelf in the corner behind him. There is always shit in that clear canister and in that clear tubing and in my father’s bowels that are on display for anyone to see if he weren’t to pack himself up with layer upon layer of gauze every few hours. I always wonder why the hospital hasn’t given him opaque tubing at the very least, but he never seems to complain. He’s even managed to retain a sense of humor about his situation.

“I’ve got this useless asshole following me around,” he’ll sometimes say while changing his dressings, or “I’m getting tired of this shit.” We’ll both laugh, even though none of it is funny.

I probe again about his father. “Do you remember anything?” I pause to gauge how much harder I can press. “Or have you blocked it all out?”

He finishes with the gauze and nods his head. “Yeah, sure. There are a few happy memories.” He continues to nod, looking through me toward the wall. He tells me a story, and as he speaks, his voice takes on the halting cadence of a person on the verge of tears. He must see the concern on my face and tells me that he’s not about to cry or anything, he’s only having some trouble breathing. As if this is supposed to reassure me.

He goes on to describe a typical childhood scene, one so typical, in fact, that I’m not sure I can trust that this is his own memory or one plucked from some archetypal well of Childhood Experiences. In this memory, he and his brothers are playing a cat-and-mouse game with their father, who pops out from behind the living room furniture from time to time to scare them. There are screams of joy. Or of fear. Maybe both.

I’m not surprised that this is the scene that returns to him, one that mirrors the complexity of his relationship with the man, like an image of a father God, who confers both the olive branch and the flood. Creator and destroyer. Loving and vengeful.

This duality is so entrenched in our cultural understanding of fatherhood that even children make friendly monsters of their fathers in their games, as if they are suspicious of them by nature, unsure of what to make of the man who is in every way the antithesis of the mother figure—distant and imposing.

There's nothing much I can say in response to my father's story. I consider a feeble "At least it's something," but instead I say nothing.

We sit in silence for a few moments. It’s a comfortable space, attuned as we are to all things unspoken between us. But it is getting late, and I can see that he is growing weary of my questions, so we say our goodbyes. I fluff his pillows and help him get situated for the night. As I leave, he calls to me.

“Hit the lights, would you?”

I flip the switch by the door, and like his father, whose ghost I have failed to resurrect this evening, I disappear into the dark.

[2]

During our next visit, there was this:

In the early 1960s, while in the thick of divorce proceedings with his wife, John Laubscher took his three young boys out of their Baltimore school and drove them through the night to his family homestead in Vass, North Carolina. The boys were there for three days before their mother came to retrieve them.

They never saw their father again.

[3]

I had never heard this abduction story. I had never heard any stories about my grandfather John, in fact. On the rare occasion anyone mentioned him as I was growing up, he was merely dismissed as an abusive drunk, and I had readily adopted that image as truth, since it could provide some context for his decision to abandon his family, could even make a blessing of his absence. Those boys are better off without him everyone must have said. I likely said it from time to time.

Better off. I bristle at that now, given what I know of the toll his absence would take.

I never thought to question the deadbeat father narrative. Then one day, completely unprompted, my father told me about this frantic trip to North Carolina, as casually as if he were recounting the day’s news.

The story gave me pause. It clearly didn’t square with what I thought I knew of my grandfather, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. In this version of events, he was a man who was desperate for his children, not eager to be rid of them. I had to consider: Had he actually wanted his boys? Had he, in the end, given up hope that he could ever care for them? And if so, why couldn’t he?

Prescription began to worry me about my grandfather’s story, the notion that these roles we play, that the best and worst of our own nature are somehow beyond our control, encoded in our genes as if by divine penance, in a switch that might flip on against our will.

Surely my grandfather was more than a simple villain. Even heroes are rarely pure exemplars of their role. I nursed a small hope for redemption as I set out to find what became of him.

The story I have uncovered about my grandfather is not the real story. It couldn't be. The truth of a story is only as good as a memory. And memories tend to seek their own truth over time. At best, I can assemble the facts of his life and hope they lead me to the truth of it. Time will tell. For now, this is what I know.

~~~

John Rosser Laubscher, known to friends and family simply as “Red,” was born in Vass, North Carolina, a small town located along the Seabord Air Line Railroad at the foot of the Sandhills, a place known for its sweet summer crops of dewberries and the longleaf pine forests that once supplied world shipping interests with prodigious amounts of tar and turpentine until the trees had been nearly bled dry of their resins. In 1926, the year that Red was born, Vass had only one doctor, Dr. R.G. Rosser, whose name was bestowed upon a number of children he helped usher into the world, Red and his son included. Life was quiet there, and the local newspaper reported extensively on the lives of the locals, their comings and goings, providing detailed accounts of the "sumptuous feasts" prepared for various family reunions and birthday parties, down to the color of the table linens.

Red was the second son of Alvin Rheinhardt Laubscher and Margaret Seawell, both of whom were born to families with deep roots in the region, farmers, mainly, who knew and loved the land intimately enough to shed blood for it during the Civil War. Alvin served as Chief of Police and general town servant for most of his adult life and was widely regarded as a decent man of unimpeachable character, a staid Methodist who valued God, family, and community and could be counted on in anyone's time of need. He stood in stark contrast to his wife, a brooding and irascible woman who held and nursed grudges as if they were her own precious children. Though Alvin was a steady presence in his family's life, his quiet temperament only gave space for Margaret's rage.

It was amid these contrasts that Red was raised, in a world that must have seemed transient in some way, a mere stop on the rail line, nestled into forests that were first bled dry and then denuded, overrun by golfers in summer and soldiers from nearby Fort Bragg at all other times of the year, all people whose sense of home was always away. Vass was simply a pleasant distraction, a stop on the way to somewhere else.

Somewhere else is likely where Red wanted to be, if only to escape his implacable mother and the bleakness of remaining in a place that was his only through the accident of birth, not choice. He joined the Navy as soon as he was able, serving in the Pacific during the final years of WWII, and while he returned to the area after his service, he became a long-haul trucker, driving up and down the East Coast, joining the ranks of visitors to Vass whose concept of home was elsewhere.

What he thought about during those long drives alone is anyone's guess. Maybe he sang to himself as he drove, trying to replicate that distinctive break in Hank Williams' voice, a kind of yodel he'd never attempt in the company of anyone else, at least without the aid of a few shots of vodka. This was the freedom life on the road provided: an utter lack of self-consciousness, a certain ease with himself that he could never feel while under the thumb of his mother, or the military, or even his father, gentle and loving as he was.

But this lack, he must have discovered, this freedom from, could be a burden in its own right. Freedom from the clutches of a community and family life is also the absence of the comforts such a life could provide. Surely he had time to consider this as he drove.

Something must have called to him during those lonely drives, perhaps a faint longing for the brotherhood he had known in the military, because in the spring of 1948, Red re-enlisted in the Navy. It's unclear why he did this. The economy was booming, and he was employed as a truck driver at the time of his reenlistment, so economic concerns were not likely at the core of his decision. His Navy service record showed that he had inked a heart-and-dagger tattoo onto his left forearm at some point between his enlistments, so it's possible to imagine him, at 22, joining up in an effort to escape some kind of heartbreak. That, of course, is pure conjecture. But men have done worse things in the aftermath of a breakup.

Whatever his motivation, Red made the journey to San Diego and reported aboard the USS Tarawa in June 1948. Only one month later, for reasons that remain a mystery, he failed to return from a brief authorized leave, opting instead to return to his life as a truck driver in North Carolina. That decision would prove fateful.

In October 1948, Red had been at the wheel of his rig in Elkton, Maryland, when a young man, driving five members of his family home from work, crossed Route 40 right into the path of his oncoming truck. Though Red skid fifty feet in an effort to stop, he was unable to avoid a collision, the force of which obliterated the car, scattering debris and bodies fifty feet along the roadway. The rig continued pushing the remains of the car for 150 feet, smashing through guideposts before coming to a rest in a field, overturned. Red was uninjured, but all of the car's occupants died save for an infant boy, who was miraculously thrown clear from the wreckage.

Red almost certainly did not have time to register much of anything about the scene as he was in it, but as time passed, as endless depositions were given in the court case against his trucking company, I imagine he could recall, in vivid detail, all of the elements of the accident: the sound of crushing metal, the burning smell of his brakes, the wild beating of his heart. Perhaps he could even see the terrified eyes of the boy at the wheel the moment before impact, the last time anyone would see him alive and whole.

At the same time Red was facing manslaughter charges in this tragedy, the Navy caught up with him. His life was quickly unraveling.

Consider the timeline: Red re-enlisted in April 1948, deserted the Navy in July, killed a family of six in a truck accident in October, was apprehended by civil authorities in January and was simultaneously placed on trial for manslaughter in the civilian courts and desertion in the military justice system. Though the manslaughter charge appeared to have been dropped, the military court martial found Red guilty of a lesser charge of unauthorized absence, and he was sentenced to six months confinement and issued a bad conduct discharge.

Red returned to trucking upon his release from prison. Whatever loneliness he might have felt while on the road was eased somewhat by his friend Oliver Schott, who also drove trucks out of North Carolina. Oliver had grown up in rural southwestern Pennsylvania but joined the military at 18 just as Red had, hoping to escape a future in the coal mines, a fate that awaited most young men from the area. Mining was a hard life, and even Oliver's father had tried to escape it, moving his own family to Baltimore to find work in the steel industry. The Schotts still resided in Baltimore when Oliver had settled in North Carolina, and they always welcomed their son and his friend Red during their long trips along the coast.

It was there in the Schott home that Red would meet a teenage Lillian, six years his junior and spirited, restless in a way that he must have found alluring. They were kindreds of sorts. Perhaps, he might have thought, they could be restless together. It was there, with Lil, that he would find an eager audience for his thoughts, that his life would become more real in some way, grounded, not just wheels on pavement.

He was 23 years old. He had already been to war, had spent months away at sea and months in a military prison. Later, free to roam the solid ground, he was still unmoored, spending his days with whatever memories crept up to accompany him on the road, his nights alone with a bottle of vodka, or brawling with the locals wherever he found himself, if only to feel passion of some kind—a fist to the face was at least contact, skin on skin, an expression of need.

In Lillian he might have sensed a woman who could spar with him, who could meet him in that space where his anger met desire. Whether he fell in love with her or she told him to love her, he decided to try out a home life for himself, to see what life would be like coming home to a woman's waiting arms. He decided, for a time, to trade his freedom for an anchor.

A mere six months after his release from prison, on New Year's Eve 1949, he was in Maryland marrying his teenage bride, who likely knew none of this backstory.

[4]

To say that Red and Lillian’s beginnings were inauspicious is understated. Their origin story had all the makings of a tragedy, though neither of them could have known that as they stood before their Protestant minister, on the eve of a decade that would later be defined by its air of hopeful innocence, a golden age that would become the focus of the culture's collective nostalgia. Lillian’s sister and brother-in-law served as the only witnesses to this union, and they all seemed ready to embrace whatever awaited.

By 1951 Red and Lillian were living in Sanford, North Carolina, where the first of their sons was born, followed by another a mere 17 months later, which is as clear an indication as any that they had been getting along quite well for a time. They lived in a little white house on Rose Street, flanked by dirt roads and a large yard for the boys, a picture-perfect version of married life in 1950s small-town America. Upon closer inspection, however, it was clear the facade was already crumbling.

In September 1952, a month after Red and Lillian's second son David was born, Lillian's brother Oliver was involved in a fatal truck accident. A head-on collision with another tractor trailer sent him over an embankment, pinning him in the wreckage and crushing his skull. He was 24 years old. Only months before, he had moved in with his sister and brother-in-law to save some money, to help with the boys. Suddenly, the glue that held the young couple together was gone.

Lillian was still a teenager, raising two young sons largely on her own while Red went about his life on the road. She was isolated from her family and alone in her grief. Whether Red grieved along with her she couldn't know. But as time passed, she found something in her husband, that hint of something dark beneath the surface that at first might have intrigued her, that was burgeoning into something much more menacing.

[5]

Oliver's death likely shook something loose in Red. It had been four years since his own tragic accident had claimed the lives of those six people in Maryland, but the images were sure to have haunted him. Was it the memory of the boy’s face in his final moments that Red tried to drink away each night? No one can know. It would seem that he did not share the burden of these memories with anyone or anything but his bottle of vodka, which always dulled the thoughts into a hazy nonexistence.

But there was no drinking away the pain of Oliver's death. It was infused in everything around him—in his wife's vacant indifference to him, in the dread he felt each time he stepped up into his truck cab. With his friend gone, the thought of driving suddenly paralyzed him, and within a year of Oliver's accident, Red had relinquished the wheel and taken a job as a mechanic with a new freight company. It was a stable job with regular hours. He would be able to see the boys at night, could help see Lil through her grief. He might have believed this change would be enough to see them all through this tragedy.

But now that he was home every night, he and Lillian fought constantly. When she wasn't nagging him about his drinking, she was complaining about his mother or crying about being so far from home. The boys were being infant boys, always crying or squealing or clinging. Whether from joy or from need, they were always squawking. Soon Red found himself drinking not only to block out his memories but to silence all of the noise of this life he had created for himself.

Within a few years, Lillian decided to move home to Baltimore. Red followed, finding work as a gas station attendant, another job that would allow him to be at home with the family. The boys were getting older and still making a commotion, but it was the kind of commotion Red could at least understand, all wrestling and fighting and yelling the perfect insults at the neighbor kids. He found, at times, that he enjoyed their company, enjoyed making them scream with fear and delight as he adopted the various monster roles they assigned him. Whatever troubles he and Lil had, he could set them aside when he was with them.

In 1959 their third son Craig was born, and all the noise of those early days with John and David returned, as did Lillian's listlessness. Red soon realized he couldn't support a wife and three children as a gas station attendant, so he returned to driving, leaving Lillian alone with the boys for long stretches as he had in the early years of their marriage. It hadn't worked then, he knew, and he hadn't hoped for it to work this time around; he only knew that he needed that old familiar space, the comforting sound of tires on asphalt, a steady white noise that could keep his mind perfectly still.

He set up a separate residence back in Sanford, intending to see Lil and the boys on weekends or while in the area on a trip, but as time wore on, he skipped a weekend visit here or there, finding more comfort alone with his drink. It wasn't long before rumors of other men began to reach him, rumors that sent him raging, whether alone in his apartment or face-to-face with Lil, who denied his accusations but still goaded him on until his anger reached a boiling point and spilled out of his fists. He punched holes in the walls, knocked out the windows.

Some husband and father you are, she might have said, coolly, to provoke him.

He knew that he could never be a good husband to Lil. She'd never let him. Since her brother's death, she held everyone at an arm's length. He may have told her as much every time he left, never intending to come back to her. But he kept returning for the boys. He knew he could be a good father, the kind of man his father was, strict but loving. Disciplined. Respected. He also knew he could be none of those things while married to Lil. If he could just get the boys down to North Carolina with him he might have thought, if they could just have their grandpa. If they could all just have some peace. Things would surely be different. I would surely be different.

Hope like this can drive people to madness. One day, in the grip of this thinking, Red went to his sons' school in tears, explaining to the secretary that there had been a family emergency and he would need to take the boys out early. He then drove them through the night to Sanford, and while his sons slept, Red allowed himself to dream that Lillian would let them go, that she'd stop threatening him with the courts. He allowed himself, if only for this night, to dream of how different life might be.

[6]

But things would never be different. Lillian arrived a few days later to claim her sons, in doing so writing them out of Red's story entirely. Did she say No judge will ever let you near these boys now in that same coolly detached voice she had always used to provoke him? Did his mother confirm this in her own cynical way? Courts don't side with the father, Red. Best to go on and let them be. Did he believe any of this?

Whether he believed these claims or not, he must have recognized the futility of fighting, particularly during a time when family courts still followed the Tender Years Doctrine, which believed mothers to be the most appropriate custodians of young children in nearly all cases. Maybe he even recognized that his own problems—the nightly drinking, his swelling rage, the nightmares that woke him in a cold sweat—were more evidence that Lillian was right: No judge would willingly subject children to this.

How long he dwelled on these points is anyone's guess. How much consideration he gave to his father's reputation is also unknown. But while Red had been with Lillian and the boys in Maryland, his older brother Alvin Jr. had been busy raising hell all around his hometown, tarnishing his father's good name in the process. If Red had truly been, at his core, the good man his close associates would later describe, then he might have believed, as his boys would grow up believing, that everyone would be better off without him. Lillian would find a steady man to raise his sons; his father would be spared the humiliation of watching another one of his children fall into the black hole of addiction. Whatever his thinking, he packed up and moved to Florida, and no one in North Carolina would hear from him again for over twenty years.

[Interlude]

This is the point in the story where I am supposed to describe what growing up without a father was like for my own father. At least that is what my notebook tells me: Return to hospital scene with Dad. Talk about life without father. Present tense.

But my father no longer exists in the present tense. In early December of 2017, a few days before my planned visit with him in Pennsylvania, he took a pair of scissors that he had stashed away out of sight of his nurses at the veterans' home, and, working through the abdominal fistula that had kept him bedbound for the last several years, proceeded to eviscerate himself. He succumbed to his injuries a few weeks later.

Now, he is in a box on my dining room table, one I look at periodically but can't yet open, though I need to, if only to retrieve the death certificates required to tend to the business side of dying. I can only think of Pandora when I think of opening it, though I feel embarrassed to make such a prosaic association. Your thinking should be more original than that, I scold myself, though what audience I'm trying to impress with my private thoughts is a mystery. There's a quirk to Pandora's tale, if you'd like to know it, a mistranslation. In the original Greek, she opens a pithos, which is a jar, not a box, one that traditionally held corpses awaiting burial. Unknotting the silken cords from her jar, Pandora's fateful act begins, a part of the story that would sound strange to us before returning to the familiar, she releases death and destruction and evil into the world. Inside a jar, buried inside this box on my table, is evidence enough of her meddling. What more damage could opening it possibly do? Still, I wait.

In another box, one I'm less hesitant to open, I have stored another part of my father's life: twenty-seven years of his letters, letters that outline his struggles and his triumphs, his dreams and his regrets. In many ways, they are an answer to the question I had planned to ask during my next visit, a chronicle of a life lived with an undercurrent of loss. The letters are filled with various if-then statements that have become heart wrenching in the re-reading: If I could just get back on my feet, then I'll get a little place in the country where you can visit me. If I could just lose this weight, then I'll be in less pain. If I could just be happy, then sobriety would be so much easier. If I just weren't broken, then. . .

If only life were written as a simple line of code, then realizing these things would be as easy as listing them.

There's one small comfort in all of this. In every one of his letters, he never fails to express his abiding love for me and his gratitude for my own continued love and support through all the years he suffered from addiction and mental illness, years that he was often absent from my life, save for his letters. My love and support, of course, could never be enough to heal him. His final letter, which was returned to me with his personal effects, was an apology: Munchkin (still, as a grown woman, this name), I just can't take the pain anymore. That's all there is.

It's clear to me, in retrospect, that pain is all there ever was.

Right before Red and Lillian's marriage ended in that standoff with the boys, Red returned to their house in Baltimore to speak to Lillian's mother. What I imagine him saying to her depends on my feelings toward him at any given moment. It's possible to imagine him storming into the house in a rage, screaming You can tell Lil to go straight to hell as he waved divorce papers in his mother-in-law's face. It's equally possible to imagine him walking in calmly, resigned, and leaving the signed papers on the kitchen table.

Tell the boys I'm sorry. I just can't take the pain anymore.

In truth, I haven't yet opened the box of remains because I'm avoiding the pain of it. Opening it will only confirm what I know to be true but can't quite face—that this is the end of my father's story. No matter how much more I write, it will never be in future tense. There will be no miraculous recovery, no reunion with long-lost family, no tearful forgiveness of his father's sins. He has escaped the maze. All anyone can do now is retrace the line.

Sometimes I think about the conversation we might have had in his hospital room, the one I had planned on. I imagine it going something like this: I'd sit in the wheelchair at the foot of his bed and prop my feet up on the mattress. He would offer me a candy bar, which I would take under protest, and I would ask questions that he would avoid answering by making jokes instead. We'd laugh a bit, and it would all be so easy until one of us would make it difficult.

"I know some things you might like to hear," I'd say, trying to bait him. In my head, I'd be playing with a line from an old Amy Hempel story: There's more about your father, I'd think to myself, but it will break your heart.

He'd smile at me and shake his head ever so slightly, as if to say I'd never learn anything.

[7]

When Red left for Florida, he severed ties with everyone—Lil and the boys, his parents, his friends. His sister Wilda Mae noted this in a letter she sent to me when I first set out to find my grandfather in 1997. I have wondered where John R's children were, she wrote, for I never got to see him after he left Sanford, NC. Red's brother-in-law Bill, who still lives a mere seven miles from Sanford where the family once would gather, echoed Wilda Mae's sentiment: "We lost track of Red once he moved to Florida."

What happened there is largely unknown. The records of his time in Florida are sparse, but my search turned up a few documents to fill in some details. I learned that he remarried in 1971, but the marriage lasted less than one year, so it seems fairly likely that Red brought the same troubles to this marriage that he had tried to leave behind in North Carolina. After the divorce record, however, the trail in Florida dead ends.

Since I had noted on the Social Security Death Index that Red eventually died in Sumter, South Carolina, I searched the county's public records hoping to stumble upon something useful. It was there that I found two important leads: a probate document listing a woman named Rounette as Red's wife, and a Power of Attorney appointing his sister-in-law as his agent. The sister-in-law was still listed in the white pages, so I sent her a letter outlining the story of Red's disappearance.

A few days later, I received a call from Rounette's sister.

"We were devastated to get your letter," she said, her syrupy drawl polite but distraught. "We had no idea about any of this."

[8]

I was equally shocked. That Red walked out on his family was something I could come to terms with. Men have, historically, been the outsiders of the family unit, beginning with the question of paternity itself. “Mother’s baby, father’s maybe,” is only one example in a dozen of self-conscious jokes that point to men’s fears of being duped into raising another man’s child. But to never acknowledge the family that was left behind? I found this harder to understand than the abandonment itself. Holding onto animosity toward his ex-wife would be unsurprising. Tucking away the memory of his own children, however, is unthinkable. Was it simple shame that prompted him to remain silent? A jealous new wife?

I spoke with Rounette's nephew Marty soon after his mother received my letter. He had been very fond of Red, and he was eager to convince me that my grandfather had been a good man in his later years.

He told me that Red and Rounette met in Florida, but he knew nothing of their years there, that no one really did. They eventually moved to South Carolina so that Rounette could care for her aging mother; meanwhile, Red drove logging trucks for one of Rounette’s brothers. This would, in keeping with his history, prove tragic for him. While on a job site one day in 1976, he was waiting on a load with his back to a tree that was being cut some distance away. The tree fell in the opposite direction the logger had intended, and the top of it fell on Red, resulting in a traumatic brain injury. Though he eventually regained enough physical function to resume working in some capacity, he was left with severely slurred speech for the rest of his life.

It was clear that Marty was recounting this story to elicit some sympathy from me, but at that time, the best feeling I could muster was simple understanding. Marty went on to describe Red as a good, hardworking man who often picked him up from school to spend time with him.

"If he saw a need to do something, he did it,” he said.

This wasn't to suggest that Red did not have problems. He drank heavily, vodka mainly— but only at night Marty was quick to mention. Rounette was also a heavy drinker, and she avoided conflict with Red by simply leaving when things got heated, which often prompted him to get in the car and drive off.

“One night, Red got shit-faced drunk and drove through the night to their old house in Florida and had no idea how he got there,” Marty said, marveling at the story. I thought about Red's tendency to drive off through the night. Did he abduct the boys in a booze fueled rage as well? Did he remember doing it?

Rounette and Red's relationship was, in the eyes of outsiders, strained from the drinking, but it was Rounette who caused most of the strife in the family. Though she was fun loving when she was sober, she was a bitter drunk who would have everyone walking on eggshells around her.

"Red was too good for her," Marty confided, a point that unexpectedly chafed me.

But it seemed he had found a genuine love with Rounette, and though they never officially married, they remained together for the last twenty years of their lives, recognized as common law partners by the state. After Rounette died from cancer in 1994, Red drank even more than before, and though Rounette's sister would bring him dinner every night, he lost interest in eating, then in living. He died within a year of Rounette's passing, seemingly grieving himself to death.

"He was just a great person," Marty said in a half wistful, half insistent way, as if he were trying to will me into believing it.  

[9]

There were stories I had intended to tell my father about Red, stories I knew he would enjoy, mainly, even if he resisted hearing them. There was one in particular that I was eager to retell, a memory Marty had shared with me about the only time he recalled Red ever getting out of hand while drinking.

"Now let me tell you a story about your father," I would have said. I'd tell him a bit of background that I'd learned, setting up a scene involving Red and Rounette's mother. They had gotten into an argument one night while Red had had a few too many. I'd sit in the wheelchair at the foot of the bed to play the part of the mother.

"You'd better shut up, Red," I'd say in my best—if slightly exaggerated—Southern accent before continuing on with the scene. "Of course, Red kept running his mouth, and the old lady had had enough, so she said 'If you don't shut up, I'm gonna put my foot up the crack of your ass!'"

"Then your dad," I'd say, already cracking up at the story, which would prompt my dad to begin laughing, quietly at first, but building. "Your dad was fuming, so he stormed over to her, bent over in her face and told her to take her best shot!" I'd mime all of this for effect, and my dad would begin this wheezy, high-pitched laugh that used to embarrass me at the movies or in crowds until I realized that I had inherited this same trait. I'd be breathless with laughter at this point, too, but I'd have to finish the story.

"She could barely move, mind you, but she hoisted up her leg to try to kick him." I'd sit down in the wheelchair again and try to play the mother's role, grabbing my leg and struggling with it. "Take that! Hi-ya!" We'd be laughing to the point of tears at this, in such hysterics that the nurses would come to peer in at us to see what the commotion could possibly be about. They'd see me draped over the arm of a wheelchair holding my chest, my father trying to hold his stomach hole closed, the both of us laughing seemingly at nothing.

When we'd begin to catch our breath, I might ask him if shit ever spurts out of his stomach like a geyser, which would start the process all over again, just the two of us, laughing at the absurdity of things. I can picture it all so clearly that I can almost convince myself it happened exactly this way.

Thin is the line between memory and imagination.

[10]

In April 1981, Red drove to North Carolina with Rounette to connect with his family, and if he had expected the prodigal son's welcome, he did not receive it. He returned to his childhood home only to discover that his older brother Alvin had died two months before. His father and sister Anna were also gone. His mother had disowned his sister Mary, discarding any evidence of her existence in the process.

When he asked after his boys, he learned that John had become an ironworker and was married and living in Pennsylvania with his wife and young daughter. David still lived at home with Lil and her husband Dutch and worked for a tree service, where he refused to climb with a harness, the kind of risk taking that had become a pattern of behavior for him. And Craig, the young one he had barely had a chance to know by the time his marriage had dissolved, Craig had killed himself while in a drug induced stupor the month before, leaving behind a young son.

Whatever hopes Red had carried with him on that drive from South Carolina were snuffed out the instant he learned of Craig's suicide and his father's death. At this point he was barely able to speak from his logging accident, but even if the words came easily, what could he say?

It's not clear that Rounette ever knew about the wife and children he left behind before her. If she did, she kept it a carefully guarded secret from the rest of her family. If she knew nothing of this other family, Red's position during this visit home was complicated even further. He would have to risk losing the woman he loved by revealing his past to her, or he would have to bear the weight of his son's death completely alone.

This image, one of a man rendered mute by circumstance, tears at me. It would seem that Red wanted to make amends. It would also seem that, in the end, he chose not to. No matter how justified this decision might have been, it was a decision, with all of the attendant consequences: He would never know what kind of men his sons had grown into, would never lay eyes on his grandchildren. He would never be able to apologize or, perhaps worse, to even feel worthy of forgiveness. Instead, he chose what might have seemed to be the honorable path—to spare his wife the knowledge of his past and his sons the pain of his return. He chose to suffer alone with the memory of his regrets.

[11]

In reviewing the circumstances of my grandfather’s life, it’s almost as though I can pinpoint the exact moment the trajectory of his life was routed toward tragedy: the course was set when he failed to return to the Navy during his second enlistment. The alternate version of events, the one in which Red did not abandon his ship, is one I replay in my mind whenever I’m in the mood to feel heartbroken. Consider again: Toward the middle of October 1948, at about the time Red would seal the fate of six people as well as his own, the USS Tarawa stopped in Pearl Harbor before sailing on to Tsingtao, China. Following their five-week stay in China, Red and his shipmates would have sailed on to Hong Kong and Singapore for liberty in early December. He might have visited prostitutes there. He might have fallen in love. Hell, he might have fallen off of a balcony in a drunken stupor and broken his leg—the point is, he would have been anywhere but where he had been, by ill-fated choice, in Elkton, Maryland, and he almost certainly thought about that over the years, unbidden as the thoughts might have been.

There was no one at the time to call his response to these events post-traumatic stress, no one to offer him therapy or medication to help him cope. So he drank. And he fought. And he abandoned his family when he thought he might do them more harm than good. I can understand all of these things. I think anyone can understand these things, even if acceptance of them is hard to come by.

Men, good men even, sometimes abandon their families with the earnest belief that their absence would be for the best and that the mother would find an acceptable, perhaps even preferable, substitute father for their children. As if men were simply interchangeable parts in the family system. In Red's case, the man who later married my grandmother Lillian was, in every way, a good father figure for the boys; still, that was not enough to stave off what would appear to have been inevitable disaster. Research on the effects of fatherlessness describe my father and his brothers with an almost uncanny precision: the abandoned are given to self-loathing, substance abuse, mental illness. Unemployment, homelessness, divorce. Check the boxes. Red and Lillian's boys suffered them all.

But Red suffered as well. Before I set out to learn anything about him, I had never considered the depths of his pain. In fact, I hadn’t even considered that he might have suffered at all.

Of the few people I've spoken with who knew Red as a younger man, no one seemed to know anything about either the truck accident or his time in a military prison. The confessional age we now find ourselves in was completely foreign in the forties and fifties. Shame was a very real and powerful force, and people, men in particular, were expected to suffer in silence for their transgressions. Red could only have hoped for the grace of God to ease his conscience. And, if God ever showed up, it doesn't appear that Red ever let Him through the door.

[12]

Stashed in a box in my office, I have a photograph of Red sitting on a porch swing with his favorite dog. On the back, Marty had written a note to me: When this dog gave birth, one of the puppies wasn't breathing. Red gave it mouth-to-mouth. FYI.

I wanted, desperately, to tell my father that Red had returned for him, that he wanted to save him just as he had saved that puppy, that he wanted to help him as he had wanted to help everyone he met. Those were the lines Marty had served to me, ones I wanted to spoon feed to my father until his hunger for his own father's love could finally be sated, until his emptiness could be filled. But really, all I have is this story in my head, the one that tries to see the intent behind Red's return, though I can no more know his intent than I can truly know anything else about him. All I have is this hope for a different narrative, one in which love was the impetus for his journey home, and love at the heart of his decision to walk away yet again. All I have is this hope that, in the eternal view of a story, it's never too late to be forgiven.