The Hour Before Dark by Douglas Clegg Page B

lost two fingers on his left hand for reasons of which he never spoke, had been decorated a hero, and had returned to the plow as it were—or in his case, returned to his own father’s farm, married, and started a family.
    My mother retrieved the articles for me. She substituted them for the comic books I loved to look at. She would show me the old home movies. Daddy getting a medal. Daddy standing beside a helicopter. Daddy meeting some news anchorman. Daddy standing in line with others to meet the president. Daddy and Mommy on their wedding day, with swords and guns and soldiers standing in a halo around them. The glow of heroism surrounded him in all these photographs. I felt better about my father. I loved him even more for being not just a hero to me, but to the world.
    Sometimes, an old-timer from town would see me at the playground in the park and call me over and tell me that I looked just like my father did when he was my age. “Your grandfather wasn’t much good, but he made himself a good man in your daddy,” someone might say; once I heard the librarian, Mrs. Pollock, tell me that my father had been the most famous man to ever come out of Burnley, and that no one had expected he’d come back to run Hawthorn again or even try and get along when the money ran out.
    “He could’ve been president or at least a senator, once upon a time,” she told me. “That’s how famous he was after the war. Not famous like movie stars or rock and roll people. Not that vulgar thing. And not rich. I mean to say famous in the ways that count. And just like you, he got in trouble as a boy sometimes. So don’t think that it’s the end of the world for you. You can be a hero, just like your father.”
    Or I’d hear the story of how my father had managed to save seven men from certain death, or how my father had piloted a helicopter “without knowing nothin’ about helicopters but that they spin. And he bombed the hell out of them. He just dropped it all back down on them. And he got his men out.”
    My father would rarely speak of the past that existed before meeting my mother, other than to hide the medals of valor in places where my brother and I could not find them. He’d scoff at the idea that he had ever been a hero at all. After my mother ran off, he lived under a terrible burden. He expressed little that wasn’t dour or dutiful after that. He gave lessons or lectured; he rarely spoke to me and even more rarely listened. I suppose my mother’s abandonment affected all of us, and may have been part of the fog that kept me confused about life and my place in it as I grew into an adult.
    I grew up under the burden of his heroism, and I became less than a model son because I knew I was no hero. My impulses were never heroic ones. I began smoking by the time I was twelve, and when I was seventeen, I’d done all the things teenagers do that they will regret in merely a few years, scarred by such foolishness and disregard for any rule in life. I was the embarrassment of the family when I left it.
    Yet, I could look back on the love and affection of the household; on the way my father would tell me—even at my worst—that he’d done just such a thing when he’d been my age, and it was wrong, but it was not wicked, merely childish.
    His words had the effect of arms around me—it was his way of embracing.
    I took his wise words to heart and knew that despite my missteps in life, my father had gone through many more difficulties than I could dream up, and still, he had done good.
    My mother had been a slightly different story.

     
    5
     
    After she left, my father told us that she sometimes called, late at night.
    No matter how much he begged, she would not come back to us. He told us that she wanted to see us. He promised that one day she would come for us, would collect us, but that “now” wasn’t the time.
    She sent letters and postcards, as well, but none of them mentioned our names. Notes like: “I want to