My Father Before Me by Chris Forhan Page A

cedar, five. A five-foot box. As Seamus Heaney says in a poem: a foot for every year.

14
    Not long after Skippy’s death, Bernadine and her two remaining boys moved again, this time to an apartment on the north side of the lake, in the Fremont neighborhood. The gasworks were only a few blocks south, and Nat’s oldest brother, Jim, lived only a block away. If Bernadine and her young sons had strolled a few blocks toward the lake and turned left, they soon would have passed the business Jim had recently started: Forhan’s Tavern, serving sandwiches and fish and chips and Schlitz and Olympia beer. It was a nondescript one-story building near the water, close enough to the shipyard to do a bustling business. Did Jim’s brothers frequent the place, plunking themselves on stools at the long bar, sipping free Schlitz? I imagine four of them lined up, fists gripping glasses, complaining about some new boss or old wife, suppressing some sorrow with a long swallow or a wisecrack. Maybe Fred Grant, up from California, wandered in now and then. And what about Bernadine? Did she ever slip through the door of the tavern, let her eyes adjust to the darkness until she saw the face of a Forhan, and ask, “Where is Nat? Where is my husband?”
    Maybe she didn’t care to know where he was.
    By the fall of 1939, Bernadine had moved with her sons out of Fremont to the northern edge of downtown. A new boyfriend was the cause, a divorced Scottish truck driver. In the spring, when thecensus taker came around, Bernadine lied that she, too, was divorced. It must have been the easiest thing to say. She could not have been very healthy by then, after years of dealing with her diabetes. In the meantime, Eddie and Jim had changed schools, as they must have several times already. Perhaps they had gotten used to not getting used to anything.
    Across the street from their new home stood a bronze statue: a tall, robed Chief Seattle, that noble, resourceful man who watched his ­people’s ways—the hunting, canoeing, berry-gathering—­supplanted by the customs of Christian missionaries, fur traders, and hard-­drinking lumbermen; Seattle, who gave up his land and removed himself and his tribe to a reservation; Seattle, who in his youth took on the power of the Thunderbird through a vision quest and who, in his older age, was baptized Catholic; Seattle, whose entire life was given over to transformation and accommodation. Grave-faced, the chief raised his right arm to the Forhan boys in welcome.
    Then their mother was gone: fallen into another diabetic coma, then gone for good. At thirty-one, Bernadine was dead.
    My father was eleven. His little brother, Skippy, was four years in the grave. His father was nowhere. Now, too, was his mother.
    He still had twelve-year-old Jim. The family had shrunk to the two of them. On a sunny September morning, they stood on the sidewalk outside of Sacred Heart Church, two blocks from where they had lived with their mother and her truck-driver boyfriend. They had just attended Bernadine’s funeral. Now what? Mourners shuffled past them to their cars and drove off. At last, their grandparents, the Careys, appeared in the church doorway and approached them. Eddie looked up. “Where am I going to live now?” he said. “Who’s going to take care of me?”
    â€œWhy, Bud,” his grandmother answered, “you’re coming with us. Didn’t you know that?”
    No, he did not know that. Nobody had told him.
    Bernadine was buried in the Catholic cemetery where Skippy lay. Would my father have doubted that the two of them were together in heaven now? Probably not. He was a good boy and did what he was told—he may very well have believed what he was told, too. He was soon to become an altar boy, solemnly pledging, as his official certificate proclaimed, “to live and die befitting one who has dedicated himself to the service of our Lord, Jesus