"Daddy" Part IV: Back to the Light

It would be a mistake to conclude from all this that my daddy's personality regularly reflected the darkness I have been writing about. To the contrary, he was usually bright, chipper, and full of laughter. He was a great one to sing. An early riser, he would meet the day with a song, often one whose words he made up as he went along. I was not an early riser and could be quite surly in the mornings when he got me up for school. He loved this; it sharpened his musicality and his versifying. Here are some of his songs I remember:

Get up, Tom!
Get out of bed!
Or I'll pour cold water
All over your head!

or, again,

Little Tommy Tucker
He ain't no good,
He won't haul water
And he won't chop wood.

He was always teasing, always pestering, and (almost) always with good humor. It was the same at work. He would sing, he would nick-name his colleagues, he would shout and laugh. Sometimes he pushed it too far and surly, grown men would grow exasperated and threaten him. He was big and fit and he could be violent, so they were pushed beyond their limits when this happened.

I have often thought of this bright, sunny side of his with wonder. Maybe it was his generation. Maybe it was his genes. Maybe it was just his way to assuage his pain. Whatever it was, it was what it was. Too be sure, if he had enough to drink, he could descend into a maudlin self-pity, but I only witnessed this a few times in all the years I knew him. And he could get into towering rages. These were terrifying in the extreme. But, for the most part, he was his sunny self. This is why so many people never knew him as "the Hurt Man."

After moving back to my grandparent's home, I lived a charmed life. I hunted, trapped, and tramped the woods and fields along the western bank of the Red River where they lived. I lived out-of-doors almost as much as at home. I camped alone in the woods and hunted coons with hounds with a band of friends my age, as well as with older hunters. I learned to play the guitar and began to play with various country bands. I was an above average student and popular with my peers. Life was good.

From time to time Daddy would visit or I would visit him, but gradually we grew apart. My resentments peaked with my adolescent hormones. I nursed my grudges and hurts; those around me sometimes aided this. He knew this and it saddened him. His life was more and more coming apart at the seams. He moved his family back and forth from Texas to California where he worked off-shore on oil wells. These were the darkest days of all and the two daughters from that marriage suffered most. When we were together in his last days, one of them casually remarked, "Was that when Daddy threw the Christmas tree into the front yard?"

Little by little his marriage to the Dragon was wearing out, was wearing him out. They had divorced once and then remarried. I asked him once why he finally left. "Well, son, you don't remember this, but I bought a 1951 Ford roadster in '67-'68 and fixed it up. It was like the one I had when your mother was still alive. Well, she got drunk and went out in it and totaled it. I beat her up so bad that I knew if I stayed with her any longer, I might kill her some day. That's when I left-for good." He was coming apart and he knew it. The darkness was destroying him and he knew it.

I became a Christian in the late summer of 1967 and began almost immediately to "preach." I was full of zeal and aptness to speak, but I was as ignorant as a sack of hammers- ignorant of the Bible and of life. Daddy was not ignorant of either, but I made up my mind to convert him from his evil ways. He was very patient with me, but he was not ready to listen to a child, his child, talk to him from a position of moral superiority. We grew farther apart.

And then, he met my wife-to-be, Kathy. He was dazzled by her. And, I think he was transported by her to his life with my mother twenty years before. (He would sometimes, years later, say of her, "Oh, son, but she is a fine woman, fine like your mother was!") On the day he met her he told me for the first time the story of my mother and him, their happiness and tragedy. Daddy came all the way from Texas to Tulsa for our wedding. We were returning to one another.

I was preaching a revival meeting in Thackerville during the last days of August 1974. Kathy and I were staying with my grandparents. My grandfather's health was failing and he had to be hospitalized late in that same week. I took him to the doctor and then to the hospital. He would never come home again.

On the last day of the revival meeting, a hot Sunday morning, I preached from Genesis 25:8, "And Abraham breathed his last and died in a ripe old age, an old man and satisfied with life" NASB. I don't remember much about the sermon, except that I stressed that the only way to die "satisfied with life" is to die in faith in Abraham's God. The reason I stressed this particular point is that Daddy had come into the service after it began, dressed in his best suit, shirt, and tie and looking like a million bucks. He was not sunny that morning, he was grieving. I knew he was grieving over his dying father, but he was also grieving over his life, our lives.

When the pastor of the church gave he altar call, Daddy already weeping, came forward. The old women of the church were almost shouting and the old men were weeping and muttering loud "Amens." When I met him at the front he said, "I'm coming back, son, I'm coming back!"

As people prayed, we went into a little side room in the back of the church. When I closed the door and turned around Daddy was on his hands and knees, crying out to God and weeping. "O Mighty God..." he kept repeating, "O Mighty God..." And then, as his sobs racked his big frame, he began to cry out in grief and penitence, "I have been angry with you, Lord. I have hated you, Lord! I repent! I am sorry! I ask for your help to start over, to come back!" On and on he went like this for some time. I said nothing, but wept and agreed with everything he said. By the time he finished, there was a pool of tears beneath his bowed head the size of a dinner plate. Then he embraced me, squeezing the breath out of me. We held each other for a long time. "It's going to be alright, son," he kept reassuring me.

I had little doubt that it would.

...to be continued