I ever saw. After he died in 1960, and Mother and I moved into our little two bedroom shitbox out in Avondale, we hung it over our fireplace. That was the same fireplace that would eventually kill Mother, since its mantelpiece had been made with radioactive cement left over from the Manhattan Project, from the atomic bomb project in World War Two.
It is still somewhere in the shitbox, I presume, since Midland City is now being protected against looters by theNational Guard. And its special meaning for me is this: It is proof that sometime back when my father was a young, young man, he must have had a moment or two when he felt that he might have reason to take himself and his life seriously.
I can hear him saying to himself in astonishment, after he had roughed in that promising painting: “My God! I’m a painter after all!”
Which he wasn’t.
• • •
So, during a lunch of chitlins, topped off with coffee and crackers and Liederkranz, Mrs. Roosevelt told us how proud and unselfish and energetic the men and women were over the tank-assembly line at Green Diamond Plow. They were working night and day over there. And even at lunchtime of Mother’s Day, the studio trembled as tanks rumbled by outside. The tanks were on the way to the proving ground which used to be John Fortune’s dairy farm, and which would later become the Marítimo Brother’s jumble of little shitboxes known as Avondale.
Mrs. Roosevelt knew that Felix had just left for the Army, and she prayed that he would be safe. She said that the hardest part of her husband’s job was that there was no way to win a battle without many persons being injured or killed.
Like Father, she assumed, because I was so tall, that I must be about sixteen. Anyway, she guessed it was touch-and-gowhether I myself would be drafted by and by. She certainly hoped not.
For my own part, I hoped that my voice changed before then.
She said that there would be a wonderful new world when the war was won. Everybody who needed food or medicine would get it, and people could say anything they wanted, and could choose any religion that appealed to them. Leaders wouldn’t dare to be unjust anymore, since all the other countries would gang up on them. For this reason, there could never be another Hitler. He would be squashed like a bug before he got very far.
And then Father asked me if I had cleaned the Springfield rifle yet. That was something I got along with the key to the gun room: the duty to clean the guns.
Felix says now that Father made such an honor and fetish out of the key to the gun room because he was too lazy to ever clean a gun.
• • •
Mrs. Roosevelt, I remember, made some polite inquiry about my familiarity with firearms. And it was news to Mother, too, that I had the key to the gun room now.
So Father told them both that Felix and I knew more about small arms than most professional soldiers, and he said most of the things the National Rifle Association still says about how natural and beautiful it is for Americans to have love affairs with guns. He said that he had taught Felix and me about guns when we were so young in order tomake our safety habits second nature. “My boys will never have a shooting accident,” he said, “because their respect for weapons has become a part of their nervous systems.”
I wasn’t about to say so, but I had some doubts at that point about the gun safety habits of Felix, and of his friend Bucky Morissey, too—the son of the chief of police. For the past couple of years, anyway, Felix and Bucky, without Father’s knowledge, had been helping themselves to various weapons in the gun room, and had picked off crows perched on headstones in Calvary Cemetery, and had cut off telephone service to several farms by shooting insulators along the Sheperdstown Turnpike, and had blasted God-only-knows how many mailboxes all over the county, and had actually loosed a couple of rounds at a herd of sheep out
It is still somewhere in the shitbox, I presume, since Midland City is now being protected against looters by theNational Guard. And its special meaning for me is this: It is proof that sometime back when my father was a young, young man, he must have had a moment or two when he felt that he might have reason to take himself and his life seriously.
I can hear him saying to himself in astonishment, after he had roughed in that promising painting: “My God! I’m a painter after all!”
Which he wasn’t.
• • •
So, during a lunch of chitlins, topped off with coffee and crackers and Liederkranz, Mrs. Roosevelt told us how proud and unselfish and energetic the men and women were over the tank-assembly line at Green Diamond Plow. They were working night and day over there. And even at lunchtime of Mother’s Day, the studio trembled as tanks rumbled by outside. The tanks were on the way to the proving ground which used to be John Fortune’s dairy farm, and which would later become the Marítimo Brother’s jumble of little shitboxes known as Avondale.
Mrs. Roosevelt knew that Felix had just left for the Army, and she prayed that he would be safe. She said that the hardest part of her husband’s job was that there was no way to win a battle without many persons being injured or killed.
Like Father, she assumed, because I was so tall, that I must be about sixteen. Anyway, she guessed it was touch-and-gowhether I myself would be drafted by and by. She certainly hoped not.
For my own part, I hoped that my voice changed before then.
She said that there would be a wonderful new world when the war was won. Everybody who needed food or medicine would get it, and people could say anything they wanted, and could choose any religion that appealed to them. Leaders wouldn’t dare to be unjust anymore, since all the other countries would gang up on them. For this reason, there could never be another Hitler. He would be squashed like a bug before he got very far.
And then Father asked me if I had cleaned the Springfield rifle yet. That was something I got along with the key to the gun room: the duty to clean the guns.
Felix says now that Father made such an honor and fetish out of the key to the gun room because he was too lazy to ever clean a gun.
• • •
Mrs. Roosevelt, I remember, made some polite inquiry about my familiarity with firearms. And it was news to Mother, too, that I had the key to the gun room now.
So Father told them both that Felix and I knew more about small arms than most professional soldiers, and he said most of the things the National Rifle Association still says about how natural and beautiful it is for Americans to have love affairs with guns. He said that he had taught Felix and me about guns when we were so young in order tomake our safety habits second nature. “My boys will never have a shooting accident,” he said, “because their respect for weapons has become a part of their nervous systems.”
I wasn’t about to say so, but I had some doubts at that point about the gun safety habits of Felix, and of his friend Bucky Morissey, too—the son of the chief of police. For the past couple of years, anyway, Felix and Bucky, without Father’s knowledge, had been helping themselves to various weapons in the gun room, and had picked off crows perched on headstones in Calvary Cemetery, and had cut off telephone service to several farms by shooting insulators along the Sheperdstown Turnpike, and had blasted God-only-knows how many mailboxes all over the county, and had actually loosed a couple of rounds at a herd of sheep out
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