ABSTRACT ALL OUR FATHERS By Nicholas D. Hoffman All Our Fathers is a collection of eight pieces of creative nonfiction and seven fictional stories. Though separated by genre, the collection has larger themes running throughout: nature as a catalyst for discovery, spiritual and moral upheaval, matters of the body, and the relationship between sons and fathers. Each piece features characters or narrators who struggle with doubt as they attempt to navigate a world filled with moral and spiritual uncertainty, reconcile some peace with death, and plot a course through the disorder of losing, and sometimes regaining, their families. ALL OUR FATHERS A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English by Nicholas D. Hoffman Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2005 Director: Eric Goodman Reader: Morris Young Reader: Brian Roley TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Absence 1 2. Shape 11 3. Boys in Nature 26 4. My Funeral Wish List 42 5. Two Days on Saginaw Lake 52 6. Piano Moving 65 7. Books & Blood 76 8. First Days 88 9. Ice 97 10. Hunting Red Jones 100 11. Dear Fat Magician 113 12. Creatures 117 13. Hitler Hunting 120 14. While Driving 134 15. All Our Fathers 137 ii Acknowledgements As before, thanks to the usual players, who always have and continue to constitute the messy and wonderful core from which the more obvious elements of this work are culled: Kim, Paul, and Kyle. Thanks also to the faculty and staff at Miami for their tireless enthusiasm for the teaching of writing. This includes, but is not limited to: Eric, Brian, Margaret, and Constance. Much gratitude is also due Kim Rayburn for her keen insight and indelible humor. This work would not have been possible with the support, encouragement, and incessant prodding of my future-wife, Krystal Miller. iii Absence In the spring when I am eleven and my brother Marcus is sixteen, the spring when our mother is gone and Marcus earns the eternal wrath of one visiting Slovakian priest, our father is building things. The spare bedroom is getting new paint and a closet; the kitchen a new countertop; the basement linoleum flooring, a drop-ceiling, and wood-patterned particle board walls to create a room separate from the washer and dryer. The effort of my father’s toil is felt throughout the entire house: we are living in a raw fog of sweat and sawdust and body odor; we are irritable and brushing up against each other as different rooms are proclaimed temporarily off-limits to run electricity, or to let paint dry, or to store materials, or for some other reason. The house is not so much a home as it is an expression of the progress of my father’s mind, a constant flux of wood and steel and pipes and wires. My brother and I have to find a way to live in the spaces in between what he envisions. He spends his weekend in the basement, my father, and his nights above in the spare bedroom, which he and my mother elected to paint yellow before she left, because my old room in their first apartment was yellow. This is how they like to remember things. I help my father carry cans of paint upstairs in the evenings, and Marcus takes the station wagon out to Widewater’s for greasy potato skins with his friends, or at least this is where he says he’s going. A year later New York State will up the minimum driving age to eighteen, and Marcus, delighted at my misfortune, will be grandfathered in. The only neglected project is the deck behind the kitchen in the back yard, started two summers earlier and put on hold for lack of funds and motivation. My father sealed the deck before leaving it, so it stands ready for completion, a jagged and grainy invasion into the square patch of green behind our house. “The wood keeps disappearing,” my father says of the deck, but I know better. 1 In late June, the heat ascends into the hundreds, and children are jumping into the Erie Canal, despite the warnings of their mothers. At night, cats fight in the hedge below my window, and the air is hot and still. I stay awake, watching for heat lightning. Marcus is gone at night. When I hear the gravel churning in the driveway at two o’clock, I lean back in my bed. Our father is waiting for Marcus when the latch turns, and their voices lift through the airy grates that carry heat through the house in the winter and let heat pass between rooms in the summer. “Where’ve you been?” “Out.” “Out where?” Marcus’s keys strike bare counter in the kitchen, a heavy rattle that I hear all the way on the second floor. “Down by the canal. Someone was shooting off fireworks.” “You’re home at midnight from now on.” For some reason I imagine my father holding a hammer when he says this. Neither of them say anything then, and their silence is interrupted by a cat-scream that rattles up through my window. I wait for Marcus’ answer, because I know that whatever it is, it will mean something for me. This is how things work between us: what happens or doesn’t happen to Marcus, eventually means that something will or will not happen for me. Years later he will call me the beneficiary of decent parenting due to the years of trial-parenting that he endured. I will say that he cut a rut so deep with our parents that I couldn’t find a way out of the path he made. We are both right. But that night in June, Marcus says nothing, nothing that I can hear through the iron grate. “Go to bed,” my father says. “Church in the morning.” 2 The Erie Canal, begun in 1817 and undergoing construction to this day, runs behind everything in Lockport, New York. It flows behind the Donner Family Funeral Home, St. John’s Catholic Church, McVeigh’s Hardware store (now Ace), and our house on West Vine Street. Middle to late spring, the banks of the canal swell with brown-black sediment and runoff from the hills that cradle it. Children wedge their feet between the rocks and cast their lines for sunfish; houseboats slipping south pass with the gentle current, which in turn is mediated by the seven locks within the city limits. The water rises and falls by both the temperament of nature and the machinations of man. Driftwood, bloated animal corpses, boats, and people float by each spring, passing through, riding the lockswell as they push west. I watch them drift. The canal is the spine that gives my city its name and purpose, and it follows me everywhere I go. In the spring our mother has been gone for almost a month. She is not really gone, my father likes to say—she’s always just a phone call away. It’s true, we’ve spoken with her many times during the absence. At our dinner table two chairs now sit empty where just one did before, and now when the three of us sit down on a Saturday evening for Marcus’ grilled hot dogs, the greasy meat and the construction make the kitchen feel like an infirmary—our family is taking casualties, our numbers are dwindling. My father and I—and Marcus too— exchange the same questions and answers each week. Where has Mom gone? She needs some time to rest and think. How much time? As much as she needs. We don’t speak of it, but it is our fault. Mine and Marcus’s. We are big, too big, both born through cesarean section, ripping and rending the womb that made us, leaving it 3 inhospitable and deadly. Because of us, my father’s blueprint for the ideal family, rounded up to three children from the national average of two point six, is no longer possible. Our mother is discovering and thinking about this in Vermont with her parents, away from her sons and her husband, for as long as she needs. That summer when we are three, even the canal flows differently. In the morning, we are showered and clean. “You boys look good,” my father says to us at the bottom of the stair. “But you need to shave, Marcus.” “Too late, now,” my brother says. He doesn’t look tired at all. The time is eleven thirty-eight. We are ushered into the car by the unyielding precision of my father’s watch. I am never quite sure, but it seems to me when my mother was around she was open to the possibility of arriving to Mass a few minutes late; her eyes would perform a half-roll when my father gave a staccato clap of his hands, indicating that we should be in the car. This is the summer when my father speaks about Mom whenever he is driving, like he could summon her presence by invoking her name. “Those Japanese bugs are back.” He flicks a tiny orange creature at his collar. “Your mom was born in Japan—did you boys know that?” “No.” “No.” This is a detail that surprises and delights me, even though there is no trace of Asia in her, or none that I could remember. “Yep. At the Yokota base in Okinawa.” I wonder why we never knew this before. 4 He tells us on the way to Mass about Michiko, the young Japanese nurse who visited our mother after she was born and how they still exchange letters, or they used to.