"Daddy" Part III: Darkness Visible

The years to come would be years of darkness.

A great part of this is because my daddy had no real foundation under his life. While my mother had been building a personal character that dated back to her young years, daddy had been playing at life. My mother had become his foundation, but he had only just begun to build a personal, moral character. And remember, too, how young he was: only twenty-four at my mother's death.

Moreover, my daddy had embraced a Christian faith that coincided with the happiest brief years of his young life. It would be impossible for anyone not to erect the argument that he did. "I have lived a sinful life. I turned from that life to a life of faith in God and obedience toward God. That changed coincided with my marriage, my child, my family, the respect of others, bright hopes for the future, etc. Ergo, a life of faith and obedience produces happiness-in this life and in the life to come." I know from countless conversations with him that my daddy reasoned in this way, and that he struggled his whole life not to reason this way, even when he had come to know better.

To put in succinctly (and daddy would not have put it quite this way) my daddy's darkness was exacerbated by a theological conundrum, a theological conundrum at least as old as the story of Job.

Once in the 1980s we were walking together in the dark on the Young Place near Thackerville where we were both brought up. The sky was wondrous that night and, despite the glow of Dallas-Fort Worth seventy miles to the South, the Milky Way was luminous, overpowering. It was a numinous, mystic moment and we were both breathless beneath the immensity and splendor of it all. In the quiet daddy said, "I have tried to be happy in all the wrong ways...you know this. Women...drink...money. But, all I ever really wanted was to have a family...which I did for a while. And, then...then...God took it all away from me? Can you tell me why? You're the preacher, son, tell me why!" It was a unique, uncharacteristic outburst on his part.

And there was little I could say. There are, ultimately, no rationalistic answers to questions like these- at least, there are none that will finally rest the restless mind. The answer of faith, that can give rest to the mind, at least for periods of time, is that God has his purposes in all things, and that these purposes have a good and gracious end. Or, as one has said, "When we cannot trace God's hand, we can trust his heart." This will never satisfy those without faith, but it does bring peace to believers.

So the dark years that my daddy lived from 1952 to about 1972 were aggravated in part because of his own personal warfare with God, the God who had betrayed his trust, the God who "took it all away."

He waged this war by throwing away almost every moral principle he had embraced under my mother's influence. There were the girl friends, and the drink, and the language, all of which she would have found repellent. There were the marriages (four? five? six?) and the child out of wedlock that he would not claim as his own until she was twelve. There were the two other children that, finally, he left in despair with their wreck of a mother. And, there was the worst of the marriages to a woman who was the dark, abused addict, the depraved moral opposite of Velda.

And there was "Tommy."

After a year of traveling the country with Tommy in the front seat of a 1951 Ford roadster, daddy finally took me to his parents to care for me. There I would live until he entered the marriage with the one I would come to think of as "the Dragon." I would live with her and my daddy for the next eight years, years marked by her slappings and kickings, by her savage verbal abuse, by her drunken binges and countless infidelities, by her crude manners and exposures of herself, by their violent fights that sent me running home from school on Fridays to hide the shotgun shells and knives before the week-end drinking began. And on, and on...

But, enough.

It all became so bad in the end that my grandparents pleaded with daddy to let me return to them. And in time, I did. I have no doubt that I teetered on the edge of sanity in those days. My salvation was found in books, in weekends at my grandparent's, and by my personal space that I kept with the meticulous tidiness of a child whose other life is out of control.

All of which ate away at him. "Take care of my baby, Jim. Take care of Tommy!" It was daddy who later told me of this exchange. He had failed utterly and he could not forgive himself. Yet he could not help himself. Such guilt in such an over-heated conscience leads some men to suicide. In daddy's case, he just plunged deeper into the darkness.

But, it was during these days that we spent the time together that I spoke of earlier. He was always there. And he was always doing things for me, buying things for me. He bought me a Remington .22 rifle on my twelfth birthday that cost him the better part of a week's wages. He was his whole life the master of the grand gesture.

When he was dying and we were talking about some of these dark days, he began to sob and said, "I should have left you with Mama and Papa, but I wanted a little bit of you, too!" That moved me deeply, but the fact is, like many parents in broken marriages, he wanted it both ways. He wanted the child, but he also wanted a life detrimental to the child. I speak without bitterness, even if I speak bluntly.

Not that there wasn't bitterness aplenty during those dark years. He was a god to me, but a fallen god. There is no bitterness like a violated child's. The is no spring of bitterness like disappointment in a fallen god. Daddy knew this. I know this.

So I went back to Thackerville. It was heaven on earth to me. It was salvation.

And daddy plunged deeper and deeper into the dark. Even the light that I was to him was gone.

...to be continued