Death at the Antipodes
There is no greater bond than that which exists between a father and son. Even before the son is born, he lives inside the father, and from the day of birth the father begins to grow in the son. Hardened to something akin to steel, and tempered by tears and time, the bond connects them forever, and the son must learn to live with that man inside him, or go mad. I understand now, that my father never wanted to hit me or my brother. He always gave us ample warning before his patience wore thin as the thin plaster walls of our tiny two-bedroom house, before he stormed into our room and drew his belt from his pants. Even as the last moment approached, we couldn’t stop our giggling, at least we never did, until we heard the unmistakable sound of the belt coming out, and by then it was too late.
You could say that dad was a patient man, but his patience had limits. You could say he was a just man, but lucky for us, he never measured out the punishments we deserved. Dad wasn’t the kind of man who meted out justice and counted the strokes. Nor did he ever feel the need to explain himself afterwards or fashion it into some sort of a life-lesson to rationalize his behavior. He’d just storm out of the room, as angry as he had arrived. He was working two jobs and just wanted us to be quiet so he could sleep. In short, what you needed, was what you got, with him. Because Eddie was the oldest, he would wale on him several times until his anger had nearly subsided and then, he would give me my two or three licks with the strap too. I was always small and thin. Eddie, on the other hand, was thick and heavy-set. His body absorbed the beatings better than mine did, and he was always first with the wise-crack after Dad had left the room.
I feared my father for most of my youth, and detested the harsh way he treated my brother, and I carried that mixture of hate and fear for a long time. But, in truth, the beatings were few and far between, and the benefits of having a strong and unambiguous parent far outweighed the bad. One day I woke up to the realization, that despite everything I had grown to love him over the years, and that most of what I had tried to accomplish in life was for him. But I also discovered how little I knew of him.
I met my father, Edward Dubiak, for the first time in the spring before my fourth birthday. He had left us nearly two years before to travel to California to find work. The post-war years were very hard on everybody in Scranton, but especially hard on my mother and father. The two major sources of employment, the coal mines and the railroad, had both closed down, and many men and women found themselves without work. Competition for the remaining jobs was stiff, and while other men were returning from the war with medals on their chest and honorable discharges in hand, my father waited for the War Department to process his case.
He was released from the Army in July of 1945, and at the time of his discharge he had to surrender all of his uniforms and unit insignias. Finally in 1950, more than five years after the end of the war, he received a copy of his discharge form signed by the Adjutant General of the Army; he had not received the honorable discharge he had hoped for, but other than honorable.
I found this document many years later and the picture it paints is not inconsistent with the story I was told of his time in the service. I can’t remember who told me exactly, or how it was divulged, but I grew up believing that my father enlisted in the Navy immediately after Pearl Harbor, and that he had struck an officer. He was a young man, with only an 8th grade education, burning to get into the war. He was court-martialed and discharged from the Navy, but later was accepted into the Army. In the Army he wore many hats, serving for a time as a mess-cook, and an Engineer, and finally volunteered for training as a paratrooper. He was injured, however, in a training jump from a high tower, and, when he never made it into combat, he started going AWOL and sat out the rest of the war in the brig.
Thats the story I grew up with, the story my father wanted his family to believe. While other boys spoke openly and proudly about their dads in the war, I kept silent. But it wasn’t the story that he carried in his heart or his wallet, where pressed tightly between a piece of boot-leather and a cloth pouch with a silver-dollar sized St. Christopher medal, was a faded photograph of a proud, disciplined young soldier with Corporal stripes on his sleeves and silver Airborne wings on his chest.
It was in the winter of 1972 that I first got an inkling of the pain his silence hid, and I was home on leave from the Navy for the first time in over a year. We sat at the kitchen table, and he listened quietly with his big brown belly protruding from beneath the unbuttoned flannel shirt, as I told and retold the story of how our ship had been attacked by a MIG in the Tonkin Gulf, and how one of our escorts had shot it down.
“Are you a shell-back?” he asked. I knew that was important to him somehow.
“Yes,” I replied, and proceeded to tell him how we had crossed the equator on my very first cruise down to Singapore.
“My brother was a shell-back too,” he said. Which brother, I wondered.
That night when I got home, Dad was still sitting there at the kitchen table, poring over his collection of silver coins and other trinkets he had accumulated over the years.
“You’re still up,” I said. I could tell that he had been drinking some. He wasn’t supposed to do that anymore, but we all suspected that he had a bottle or two of Kessler’s whiskey stashed around the house.
“I couldnt sleep.” he said, “I was thinking…” and his voice trailed off, helpless.
“When you go out,” he asked, after a moment, “do you go out with the other guys or by yourself?”
I knew that he meant my comrades in the Navy, and not the old high school friends that I had been with that night. “Sometimes,” I said, “but I usually end up by myself.”
“Me too,” he said, gently stroking the blue letters of the word Ski tattooed on the web of his right hand, between the thumb and forefinger. “I was a loner too.”
He never got to tell me what he tried to tell me that night. I went back to Vietnam, and he was hurt on the job in March of the following year, when he became trapped between two train-cars. One of the heavy laden cars hit his big belly and left a large bruise. At home that night he woke suddenly and rose up out of bed to go to the toilet, and my mom saw that he had been bleeding. She dialed 911 and that night they took him to the hospital, where he died several hours later.
My ship was in Yokosuka, Japan at the time, preparing to go back to sea. That afternoon the ship’s Chaplain called me to his office in the library and said that the ship had received a radio transmission from a ham radio operator near San Francisco, who informed them that my father had been injured on the job and might not survive. I was immediately granted an emergency leave and hustled out to the airbase at Yokota to board the first flight back to the States. I sat by myself on one side of the transport plane, staring at the wooden casket containing an officer’s dead dependent son, and everything else was just a blur. Death and I, it seemed were racing home to my father.
It was a long flight to Travis Air Force Base, and would have been the worst flight I had ever been on, had I actually digested any of it. The plane rose up and dipped and bounced continually as if it were a roller-coaster, and the compartment was very cold. A young Airman, one of the members of the flight-crew, stood outside the cockpit door, quietly listening through a head-set that he had plugged into a jack by the door, and occasionally he would repeat aloud what he heard spoken on the intercom.
“Were flying at 50,000 feet.”
“Anchorage is snowed in, so we cant land.”
When I arrived home, Dad was already gone. Death had beaten me. And it wasnt until several days later at his funeral that I actually got to see him, to say good-bye for the last time. I wasn’t prepared for that day, perhaps nobody ever is prepared for the death of a parent. I stood there by his casket staring at the life-less form before me, and all I could think was, it wasnt the man I knew. The body that lay there was cold and grey, and nothing like the wistful, brooding man I had talked to less than a year before. I said good-bye, as if to a noble stranger. I watched as the body was laid to rest, and the first shovelful of dirt shoveled in on top of it, but somehow I sensed that his spirit, once broken, perhaps shamed, perhaps bound to secrecy by some sacred duty or oath, was now free and alive somewhere in the world, and that it still had work to do and one day it would seek me out.
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