In this moment, my father, for the first time, seems diminished. Fuzzy. He is standing just inside the police station, dwarfed by the doors, as he and my mother search for where I am sitting. From my perspective, down a long narrow hall, he seems frozen there, at the entrance, and I am glad of this. I don’t want him closer. I am fifteen and, in this moment, I have never seen the ocean or taken a hike or planted a garden. I don’t know what it is like to curl on a beach or hear waves or care about birds or the forest, or visit another country. I do read Aldous Huxley, and I smoke a lot of pot. What I do know, now, is what it is like to have been cutting school and hitchhiking towards an ever-so-brief freedom. Towards Tuscaloosa, Alabama, just fifty miles away. What I do know, now, is before I even hit the state line, crossing from Mississippi, is what it is like to be picked up along the side of the road by the state patrol. Me, from the good professor’s family. I now know what it is like to sit in the back seat of a police car with no door handles on the inside. With wire mesh in front of me. With no hope of escape.

My father, who, up until this time, was always bigger than life, and never in a good way, lets my mother do the dirty work. She walks through the hallway towards me, leaning in over my chair to say, Don’t you ever… And I no longer hear. If we speak, as my father drives us all away from my brief encounter with the law, I don’t remember.

At home, my father lumbers away from me. My mother, again, is closing in on my face. Yelling whatever mothers yell. He walks back in and silently hands me a Whitman’s sampler box of chocolates. What? Who? Like, if I would eat just one, it would get me out of Hell. This day, of all days, I’m not crying. This day I take the box, unopened, and stare him down as he turns, silent, and walks away.

Father as Footnotes:

¹ When I think of my dad, it’s hard not to think of ____________. But you can’t describe a nothing with nothing. You can’t describe all that is untouchable with a big empty O. When I think of my dad I think of a thick neck, trim mustache, long cigarette, slipper-shuffles, silence thick as a volume of A-Z encyclopedias.

² Dad quote: regarding our very first black and white television. Don’t. Let. The. Television. Overheat. Don’t blow it up. I believed, from age six to long past I should have, in his rule, two hours max, despite the clear evidence that my friends’ TVs, turned on like beacons day and night, never exploded.

³ Dad law: Arrive 15 minutes early to everything. We would sit in the parking lot, 7:45 AM sharp until the grade school bell at 8:00 AM signaled it was open. Well into adulthood, I didn’t realize this well-known universal fact: being on time was not the same as being late. Brother George, the competent one, had this problem too.

⁴ My father had a Ph.D, wrote his signature Dr. ________ _______, and I’d think and maybe I’d even say, My dad has a doctorate. My dad has a Ph.D. He wore a suit and tie to each of his freshmen classes. He polished his black shoes with thick shiny wax. Who knew that people didn’t always go to college, finish their masters at least and most probably a Ph.D.?

⁵ Then came middle school and Yvonne who had long thick straight black hair I would die for. Her Air Force mechanic dad a revelation. Friendly, waving hi to me. He beat her mom, though, she told me. Which my dad didn’t do. He just beat the kids. Really, mostly my brother Ronnie. If he hit me, I don’t know.

⁶ My dad was the son of an Alabama Methodist minister, but he never spoke religion. I begged my mother to give us a church to go to like everyone else does. She told me to go talk to my father because she knew I wouldn’t. (Dad law: Never ever talk to Dad.) He made us stay, curtains drawn, inside on Sunday mornings. Not show our faces until we could hear the church bells at noon ringing like a freedom.

⁷ My dad wore slippers at home with no backs and you could hear him shuffling a warning along the hall before you saw him. I would scatter like a gazelle.

⁸ My dad worried about the elephants on our family trip to the Birmingham Zoo. He wouldn’t let us stand too close because the elephants, those complicated creatures, might grab us. Curled in their trunk, they’d fling us down. Then stomp, stomp. We’d all be dead as dead.

⁹ My dad’s superpower was cracking pecans into unblemished halves. When the pecan trees were in their prime, so tall and skinny, we collected boxes upon boxes of unshelled nuts. Sometimes they’d fall high from the trees and slap me ouch right on the head.

¹⁰ We had pear trees, too, and pears often laid uncollected on the ground. Come September, inch-long hornets would swarm on the rotten pears. Once I guess I got in the way, and one flew down my shirt and, trapped, attacked my back in a frenzy. I don’t remember my dad around for that.

¹¹ My dad loved to dust our many not-just-professorial books. He’d pull them individually off the bookcases, vacuum fore edges and spines and pile them up on the floor, spiraled domino towers. To be, days later, un-spiraled and reshelved by someone else.

¹² My dad wore elastic-waist cotton shorts that my mother sewed for him that fell beneath his large belly. He loved slippers and I guess he must have loved the sound of their scrapping along the floor.

¹³ My dad played chess, which is really war, dwarfing the pieces with his thick hands, with Brothers Ronnie and George. Never me.

¹⁴ My cousin, whose own father molested her from age 12 to age 18, liked my dad when she was growing up. She thought him quietly kind.

¹⁵ When I was younger, no, that’s not right, until I was very well grown, I believed my dad held all the knowledge in the world. I believed he was the smartest man on Earth. Which was the most important thing. Speaking Russian, French, and Italian. And chess, as I said before. He was a chess grandmaster.

¹⁶ When I think of my dad in my can-barely-reach-the-counter years, I think of any number of short legs, mine and others, running, a specific belt, a nearest hiding-corner, safety-under-the-bed, bull anger, bear anger, elephant huff and stomp and charge.

¹⁷ In those same years, I don’t remember crying, but my mother, when she was loose mouthed from dementia, told me I did. In the corner. She said she hated it when I cried, which if you take apart that sentence: she hated it when I cried. But, wait, that’s not my dad.

¹⁸ My dad was a very large animal. A large animal you didn’t provoke because large animals, as we all know, are anything but predictable. It helps your chances if you didn’t get too near. And my dad didn’t buy into mock charges. He believed in following through. My dad was a donkey. Who would kick you. If you got too close it was your own damn fault.

¹⁹ My dad’s fingers were less frightening than his hard-pebble eyes or his shuffles. Closely held red pencils for grading, nutcrackers for pecans, cigarettes, dominoes, textbooks, the Sunday New York Times magazine with crossword puzzle. The New York Times, that was our religion.

²⁰ My dad drove Sunday afternoon drives. I liked those drives. I liked looking at his broad back, his hands holding the wheel. I knew he’d drive slow out into the countryside, and I’d breathe and stare out the window at the mysterious-to-me farmlands and scrub pines and wooden shacks. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t drive us all into the river. My dad would often take the route driving by a countryside billboard “Martin Luther King at Communist Training School” that I don’t remember ever acknowledging, yay or nay.

²¹ I didn’t look at my dad’s face. His eyes might break me. Or tie me in knots. Or freeze me in the deep-freeze for literally an ice-age. Those eyes, another super-power.

²² My dad chain-smoked and sometimes took a Budweiser with his cigarettes.

²³ According to my dad, in a letter to my aunt, not spoken to me, when I was one or two years old, I was a mama’s child who made quite a din when I couldn’t find my mother. I know I must have been a strange not-quite-sure-what-to-do-with-me child. A light bulb that flickered but didn’t quite go out, a misaligned toe-stubbing board.

²⁴ If you want to know a man by what he eats, think corn flakes, pop tarts, canned tomatoes with extra salt, vanilla ice milk, Cool Whip on chocolate cake, Hersey’s no almonds milk chocolate, bacon, pork chops, pot roast, okra, peas, white bread strawberry jam. He lost most of his back teeth by the time I was twelve. Even so, I liked his smile, the dark gaps in back. Did I imagine it was me when he bent over to pat, pat, pat the dogs, gently stroke our cats?

²⁵ Out in the world, on the college campus you might say I grew up in, I could walk right by my Dad. It was like I was invisible. He’d never look up, books in his hands, office to class, class to office. It’s almost like I didn’t have a dad. He liked his darkened room, the one dim light on the side. And the kitchen. Sometimes.

²⁶ My friends would ask, “Do you have a dad? Where is he?” I had a dad. I thought. Like a floater in my eye. He was pumped full of concentrated purpose. Like a shark, maybe. Brother Ronnie most often his prey. Ronnie, he was smart but not so smart, would mouth off tantrum mock at scream, and I could almost see the red bubble trail of spit flying from his mouth. Time to run for cover. I knew that shark would take one sniff, Ronnie’s odor-pull stronger than any magnet. I knew he’d get rip-sliced this way and that. There must have been such a big hunger inside my dad. I didn’t, I don’t, know why.

²⁷ My dad liked to bowl. Before his back went bad, his body was such a long graceful S when he threw the ball. When I was itty bitty and could barely lift one ball with both of my tiny hands, his ease would make me think him the strongest person on earth. But I suppose that’s true for most dads.

²⁸ I remember my dad lifting a rowboat by Lake Lowndes and a water moccasin uncoiling underneath. He slammed bam the boat down, went and got a shovel, picked up the boat, and crushed that thing dead. Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was the owner of the boat who pulled off the job, but I wanted it to be my dad who saved us. I do know we didn’t end up on that lake ever again. Who knows what other slithery things were rippling around.

²⁹ My dad had a big brown glass jar of Benadryl on the kitchen counter from which he took a pill or two every day because we had two dogs and three cats though he had asthma and was allergic to practically everything. I didn’t understand and no one explained to me, age 5, 6, 7, asthma attack. From time to time, I’d hear the loudest pressured trying-to-release-the-air-out groans behind the bedroom’s closed doors. Crouched outside, I don’t know if I thought he’s dying or if I was just a child who couldn’t take the noise.

³⁰ My dad was attracted to four-legged things. Dogs, cats, he would pet them soft as silk. He never hit them.

³¹ When I was older, let’s say 12, I remember my dad rushing in the door, wet with sweat, collapsing, full suited from work, onto his bed. We were alone in the house, and he was pale and breathing hard. I got him a washcloth and when my mother came home, she ran into their room and later said to me, Good job. That might have been, I don’t know for sure, his first heart attack.

³² My dad was an injured animal, like he’d had a bullet put in him maybe during WWII that hadn’t killed him, but niggled at him for the rest of his life. That made him even more unpredictable. Or maybe, as my Aunt Martha tells the story, he was just born with problems of temper. She loved to tell the story of his angry four-year-old self running around the house with a kitchen knife, trying to poke big sister in the eye.

³³ Speaking of unreliable, her story also included, fun fact, that our family descends from the highly esteemed medieval Prince Hywel of Wales.

³⁴ My dad had a fatalistic side, one might say. A full-time health neglecter, he lived with bursting-high uncontrolled blood pressure until his own dentist refused to treat him. Skin tags from his diabetes formed all over his skin. But when forced, he learned how to inject insulin without too much complaining.

³⁵ When my mom got don’tsaythatwordcancer for the first time, my dad wept a little into his hands sitting at the kitchen counter next to his bowl of canned tomatoes. My mom didn’t want him at the hospital so I, all of grown-up eighteen years old, drove her and got to see, so tiny on that gurney, her waving to me as she was wheeled away. Don’t worry she’ll be fine. That wasn’t part of any of my trauma. I had other things on my mind at eighteen. Back home that day, my dad dropped a glass on the floor and broke it. I swept up the pieces.

³⁶ You might say my dad failed me. In the way human beings fail each other. Over and over again. You might say, he did the best he could and other people had it worse. I was allowed, such brief relief, at twelve to grade his multiple-choice exams. I loved slashing a big fat red through wrong-lettered answers and adding up the scores. Those rare 100s. I dreamed of that perfection. I sharpened his red pencils into nice shiny points. We watched Green Bay Packer games and it was from him, I learned all the rules. We watched Miss America and would guess the top ten, which always included home state shiny-gowned big-haired oh so very white and oh so very blonde Miss Mississippi. Once we even walked down the street together, awkwardly, without touching, as if we accidently had come upon each other and were required to keep walking along at the same pace. He did tell me then that a gentleman always walks nearest the street, so the horses don’t kick up mud on the ladies.

³⁷ When my dad called in the dogs, he’d pretend that he was at a pig calling contest: “Sooeee, sooeee, come on pig.” I’d try to repeat those phrases. But I think, without him, without his soft Southern twang, I’ll never get it right.

Father as Burial Plot:

Abby Howell lives in Seattle, WA. She has an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College, but is now most interested in the lyric essay form and how one can tell a story, but not in a strict narrative form. Her work is upcoming in Timber, and has been published in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, New Letters, The North American Review, as well as other journals. In other lives, she has been a librarian, as well as a public health researcher.