Another father’s day is here, my eighth without a living
father, since he died on mother’s day in 2006. It would be cliché to say I love
him as much today as I did when he was alive, but it would not be all that
inaccurate; only I must admit to having forgotten a lot of the details. How did
his voice sound? I can conjure it up, but it is not automatic. How did his face
look, that is a little easier and does not take much effort.
What is easiest to remember are the things he would say,
such as Yello for hello; or Yaman, for Amen; or I heard you when you drove up,
for I know what you are talking about; and so on. He had a million sayings he
had either made up or had picked up from others across the years.
He liked to say: it’s better to burn out for the lord than
to rust out for the devil; and I feel so good I could climb five trees
backwards – I think he made that one up. Get thee behind me Satan. This is a
day that the lord has made, I will rejoice and be exceedingly glad. I am going
to fight the devil until I die, I’m going to kick him, hit him, scratch him,
claw him, bite him and when I lose my teeth, I’m gonna gum him. Or, he would
say: as long as Jesus has my hand I would walk on a rotten corn stalk across
hell.
Dad did not spend much time thinking on material or earthly
things. He thought mostly of the next life, of God the Father, Son and Holy
Ghost. He had read the Bible completely through, over 100 times. For years he
prayed at least three hours a day. He had callouses on his knees that made them
look more like pine knots. That was another thing he would say: “I’m tougher
than a pine knot.”
Many of the things he would say are so deep within me, I
find myself saying them at least under my breath at random times. They seem to
be in the ancient, early-evolved rear of my brain and require conscious
inhibition by the front of my brain. Sometimes, though, there is no stopping
them, they just flow out.
Most of the conversations he and I had after I left home and
would return for a weekend or a holiday, took place with him holding his index
finger on the passage he was currently reading in the scripture. If we arrived
with him praying, we may have to wait a while for him to get done or he would
leave us on our own and go in the other room and pray for a long time, no doubt
praying for us.
He worked for twenty-one and a half years in a cotton mill,
until he was around 38 years old, but then he stopped working altogether and
became a “home missionary” to eastern Kentucky from South Carolina. His job for
the last forty years or so of his life was: soul winner.
His right hand, withered –pieced back together, actually-
from where his brother Richard had cut it in two with an axe when he was three
years old; was not usually the one he would extend to shake. If a person did offer
the right hand though, he would put his withered hand in theirs and I honestly
believe that bothered him right into his old age. He never got over being
ashamed of his right hand.
We still have a bunch of cassette tapes of him preaching at
his church on the Lee/Owsley county line in Kentucky, Pine Grove Baptist –
which was actually not in Pine Grove but retained the name after a location
switch. I listened to a little of the tapes right after he died, but I no
longer have a cassette player and I am not sure I would want to hear them now
anyway. Which makes me wonder how long anyone will be interested in the things
I leave behind, once I am gone. I think for the first time, I realized, after
my father’s death; that when you die, you are genuinely gone. The grip you had
over people, the place you held in their thoughts and conversation, it really
is gone. The most they will do is conjure memories of you ever so often, maybe
on father’s day.
I still love him, it’s just that I also love life and it
does not slow down. When people die, others are born to replace them, as much
as what happened yesterday is supplanted by what is happening now; and of
course, what is going on now will give way to tomorrow.
My father was enormously important in who I became, no doubt
more than any other person; but even that influence gets folded into all the
other influences and pretty soon it is not simple to figure exactly whom to
credit or to blame. At first I think I tried to be like him but at the end of
my teens, sort of like Elvis did for a lot of people before he died, dad became
uncool for me and stayed that way for many years, during which time I tried to be
as little like him as possible, but of course, as many people have pointed out;
I wound up being a lot like him, just in my own way. I do not hold many of his
religious or political views, but the views I have, I hold with the same level
of conviction as he did his views.
In the end, I think what is most clear is that there is a
basic part of us on which the less basic parts are built. The most basic part
of me, I owe to Paul Asters McCullough, Pastor of Pine Grove Baptist Church,
but mostly – father to me and my two wonderful sisters and one brother.
