So, after my humiliation at East Norton High, I spent most of my evenings doing nothing— walking through the woods or watching TV or looking at dirty magazines I kept in a shoebox under my bed. My buddies would still come around from time to time but always on the sly because their parents forbade them from hanging out with a "Commie." Pap put me to work on the farm to keep me out of trouble, which in hindsight was a good idea. I remember one day I was stretching barbed wire, and I looked up to see Pap walking across the pasture toward me. I couldn't tell by his expression what kind of mood he was in, but when he got to me, he put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Son, I want you to know I support you in what you said. You did like I taught you: Stand up and say your piece with no apologies to any man nor woman neither. On t'other hand, I don't think showing your ass in the gymnasium was a particularly good idea, but, well, these things happen." He gave me a "what-the-hell-can-we-do-about-it-now?" smile and shook my hand. After that, I never thought Pap was ignorant or old-timey or anything other than my hero. When we went into town, Pap wasn't embarrassed to be seen with me. And when folks gave me a sidelong look, he would say, "C'mon, Otis, you and me have work to do." That may not sound like "I love you" to you, but it sure did to me. That's why when I left home in May of '67, I wasn't rebelling against Pap or Ma. Yes, I was young and angry and didn't know who I was, but I wasn't angry at them. None of my soul-searching was their fault. And besides, what I really wanted was sex with pretty girls. The magazines in the shoebox and Dean Martin's Golddiggers and a delayed entrance into puberty churned up my natural desire into an all-engulfing obsession, though damn near every boy goes crazy for nookie.
Anyhow, this is another story about Pap. Well, it's not really a story. It's more of a picture, like a washed out Polaroid snapshot you find in the back of a drawer. One July when I was a lad of ten or so, Pap took me on a float trip on the Buffalo River. Mr. Lawson, who owned the Stella filling station, and his boy, Rory, came with us, and so did Tommy Jackson. Tommy's dad was supposed to come, too, but at the last minute, he had to drive to Kansas City. Mr. Jackson peddled soap and candles, both of which smelled like Pine-Sol, and he carried a line of feminine hygiene products that were utterly mysterious to me then and somewhat uncertain to me even today.
A boy on an Ozarks river is a study in ecstasy: Catching turtles in the gold-green glory of the morning and splashing about in the blue water; eating hotdogs and potato chips and drinking an Orange Crush on a gravel bar; then lulled to lethargy in the dull afternoon by the cadence of katydids and suddenly startled awake by the arc of a bamboo pole flexing up and down because a smallmouth bass is thrashing on the line—such are the bricks and mortar of evanescing joy. Then evening follows with pan-fried fish and potatoes and onions roasted in a foil pouch and brown beans heated in the can and another Orange Crush—two soda pops in one day are a grace beyond all merit. After supper, Pap and Mr. Lawson sat on camp stools and picked their teeth and drank beer and told ghost stories by the fire, until we boys were sleepy and terrified. I hurried to the tent and burrowed down in the sleeping bag and peeked up at the night sky under a mesh of mosquito netting that left me nearly naked to the wilderness. But I heard Pap laughing by the fire, and the moon was drenching the night sky with milk, so I dozed off in spite of the ghosts. Later that night, the yipping of a coyote woke up me up. The moon was gone, and the fire had burned down to soot and ashes. I heard a critter snuffling around the dead campfire, but I knew I was okay because Pap was snoring, and Pap wasn't afraid of anything.
These moments plant a feeling in a boy's heart, and the feeling is very much like that ancient glory of sunshine and sparkling water—a sepia boyhood glow that almost fades away but then re-emerges as a melancholy ache that calls a man back to a time he never should have forgotten but nearly did. And the man knows, he just knows, that someday when the cancer metastasizes or the dementia deepens or his heart begins to falter, and the soot and ashes of that other world begin floating down around him, he knows the last thing he sees will be that golden summer glory fading into twilight. We will be redeemed by glimmers of light or not at all.