My father, Buck, was a quick-tempered, mean son of a bitch who, at age 53, shot and killed a man in a bar back home in West Virginia.
Allegedly the victim had publicly insulted Buck about his masculinity. So Buck, after an afternoon of drinking with a buddy who goaded him on about not letting the guy get away with it, decided to initiate a confrontation. But this, killing someone? Neither I nor anyone in the small, rural community of Greenbottom believed Buck would intentionally commit such a violent act. But, then, unlike me, most had never witnessed the frightening rage and fury he was capable of, especially when drinking. His life of temper tantrums, intimidation, and brawling had finally caught up to him.
It was a cold January night in 1986. I was living in northwestern Pennsylvania where I was close to earning tenure as a state university professor. I had just finished helping my young son with his homework, and we were watching The Cosby Show when the phone rang.
The caller was my slightly older cousin, Kenny, the family member always charged with giving me bad news from back home. Usually reports of deaths and illness updates. Otherwise we never spoke by phone. I jokingly called him the Grim Reaper.
“Hey, Ken, what’s going on?”
“Some bad news. Buck shot a guy this evening at the Glenwood Inn. Killed him.”
I was stunned. Wordless. Had I heard him right? I had to gather myself.
Finally, I asked, “What happened?”
“He fucked up.”
Buck and my mother, Patty, were high school sweethearts and they married shortly after my mother graduated from high school. Buck had quit school when he was sixteen and went to work in a local chair factory. By all accounts from my family and their friends, they were in love and devoted to each other. I was born a year after they got married. Then the day before my third birthday, my mother died suddenly from a poorly treated infection that reached her brain.
Buck’s best friend and running-around buddy at that time—who later became a Baptist preacher and pillar of the community—once told me about hanging out in beer joints with Buck after my mother’s death. Buck would feed the juke box with nickels and play the Johnny Cash song, “Guess Things Happen That Way,” over and over.
Well you ask me if I’ll forget my baby.
I guess I will, someday.
I don’t like it but I guess things happen that way.
You ask me if I’ll get along.
I guess I will, someway.
I don’t like it but I guess things happen that way.
(Clement, J., 1958, Stanza 1)
I was familiar with that song but unaware of its significance to Buck. I now realize how, at age 23, Buck was wild in his grief over the loss of my mother.
Buck and I were never close. After my mother died, I first went to live with my paternal grandmother, and later, with my great-aunt Frankie and great-uncle Wilmer on the family homestead up a holler called Turkey Creek. I rarely saw Buck, although he lived only a few miles away.
When I reached my teens, Buck would make an occasional drive-by appearance to the home place where we would have very strained conversations. I recall sitting with Buck out in the yard on spring-back metal chairs where he would awkwardly try to connect with me by offering his notion of fatherly advice: always use a rubber, always hit the other guy first, never change your oil without also changing the filter, a little nip in the morning after a night of drinking will help sober you up, and, my favorite, if a man has a piece of ground, he can make it. Not bad advice, I suppose, but at age 14, it didn’t yet matter much to me.
Growing up I was scared to death of Buck, with his volatile temper and steely brown eyes that pierced right through me. He was proud of being a six-footer, a rarity among the men in our Irish ancestral family and maintained a neatly trimmed, full head of thick, wavy, auburn hair. Always clean shaven, he kept a steady wiry weight of 175 pounds that belied solid core tensile strength. While never an athlete, he could move with startling quickness, especially his hands. His personal neatness carried over to his possessions, which he maintained with precise orderliness. He always wiped his wrenches down with kerosene after using them and cleaned his shovels of dirt before storage by plunging them into a bucket of sand that was infused with used motor oil. He carried a bone-handled Case pocket knife that was always honed to a razor sharp finish, a particular point of pride among many Appalachian men of his generation. He would be ashamed to carry a dull knife.
Without warning, Buck could go from calm to rage within seconds over seemingly incidental actions. Add some alcohol and he was even more unpredictable and capricious. I was always on guard around him, careful not to say or do something that would set him off. It didn’t happen often, and never after I reached the age of 11, but there were occasions when he would whip off his belt with one hand, snatch me up with the other, and wail on me until I cried. I once heard him and a loafing buddy brag that they wouldn’t stop a whipping until they saw tears. If I refused to cry, the thrashing became even more relentless until tears finally came. Mine were tears of rage, not of pain.
Our interaction remained sporadic throughout my college years at Marshall University in the nearby city of Huntington. Then one hot summer night when I was in graduate school, he stopped by my apartment. He had been out drinking and wanted me to join in. He asked me where the roughest joint in town was. He kept saying, “We’re as tough as they are. Let’s get a beer.”
The meanest place in town was the Golden Goose, a biker bar that ran hookers out of the second floor. Feeling coerced, I climbed into his truck like a dumbass and rode the few blocks to the bar. It was a quiet week night with only a handful of what appeared to be regulars. In places like these, fights usually don’t begin with words, but with glares and scowls. Mean-mugging, as it’s called today.
At the Golden Goose, I knew Buck was looking to brawl. I grabbed a table away from the bar where everyone else was drinking and ordered a pitcher of beer. I began asking him questions about a vintage Farmall C tractor that he was restoring. He was passionate about old farm equipment, especially Farmalls. I wasn’t interested in his tractor as much as I was hoping to distract him from nosing around for trouble. I wanted to keep the conversation light and easy, hoping to avoid any windows for confrontation with those drinking around us. As he talked, I kept thinking that his idea of a nice father/son outing wasn’t a fishing trip or a round of golf or attending a sporting event. He wanted to be able to say that he and his son got into a brawl together at a biker bar. The outcome didn’t matter. It was the willingness to engage and not back down that he was looking to revel in. He wanted to see me fulfill the reflection of his own brawler self-image.
After we drained our pitcher, Buck slammed his empty mug on the table and yelled, “What do you have to do to get a drink around here?”
The bar grew quiet, and everyone turned our way. The bartender, a thickset, tattooed guy with a shaved scalp, braided black beard, and a Harley chain for a belt, very calmly said, “Just ask, asshole. But ask nice.”
Buck and the bartender locked eyes and I thought, “Here we go.”
After a long pause, Buck said, “Bring us another pitcher of Falls City. Make sure it’s full this time.”
In ominous silence, the bartender delivered our pitcher with his left hand, while his right hand gripped a small blackjack down by his leg. He and Buck began a stare-down like two dogs looking to establish dominance. The longer the stare, the greater the risk of escalated conflict. Looking away signaled submissiveness. Neither one blinked. I reached across the table and handed the bartender a five dollar bill for the $1.25 round and told him to keep the change. He looked over at me, took the money and politely said, “Thanks.”
The bartender returned behind the bar and the room started humming again. We finished our beer and I suggested that we move on to a nearby bootlegging joint that offered a blackjack table. Buck liked that idea and told me that he hadn’t done any gambling in quite some time. We walked across the room to the door with Buck and the bartender wordlessly exchanging one last round of hard eyes, then stepped out into the hot, muggy night without incident.
Outside, we headed down the street toward his truck without talking. Then I suddenly stopped walking and faced him square and full. I told him I was done for the night. I was going to head back home. Buck wanted no part of it and began badgering me to stay out with him. I could see his agitation quickly rising as he lit me up that old familiar intimidating glare.
“You can’t go home now. We just got started. I’ve been wanting for us to hang out together. Don’t puss out on me.”
I slowly shook my head and replied, “Maybe next time.”
We stood there on the sidewalk, face-to-face, each feeling sorry for the other for different reasons. I turned around and left him there standing in silence. He never came by my place again. We never went out drinking again. We never spoke of that night on those rare occasions that brought us together.
After the shooting, Buck remained out on bail for nine months until his week-long trial began in October. I chose to not attend the trial. I was angry at him. I was embarrassed to be his son. I had reached my tipping point. I had had enough of him. The trial was covered extensively by local newspapers and while I have kept the articles, I have not looked at them again since they were published. Although charged with first degree murder, the jury believed Buck’s account that the shooting was an accident. He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, typically defined as an unintentional killing that results from criminal negligence, not premeditation. He spent less than a year in the Mason County jail.
Immediately after the shooting occurred, I went back home to West Virginia, met with Buck, and asked him what happened. I expressed my disbelief that he would simply walk up and shoot someone. He stood up and physically showed me what had happened. Buck walked into the beer joint to confront the guy about what he had been saying. Buck had heard that the victim carried a pistol. So Buck approached him holding an old JC Higgins .22 caliber pistol in one hand while searching the victim’s belt line with the other to disarm him.
Buck told me, “I said to him, ‘where is it?’ Then my gun went off. I didn’t mean to pull the trigger.” I believed him. So did the jury.
I visited him just once while he was in jail and, then, only after much urging from my wife and a couple of family members. It was a hot Sunday afternoon in May when I stopped by the jail unannounced. He had been housed there for 4 or 5 months and was a trustee, hanging out with the sheriff deputies, drinking coffee, and smoking cigarettes. Apparently they were all members of the same nearby Moose Lodge. A young deputy led us to a small room reserved for attorneys. He didn’t ask to frisk me, leaving me intact with my pocket knife—a Case, of course. Buck was surprised and pleased that I had come. As usual, he did most of the talking. The only thing I clearly recall was him sitting there, looking away, and saying that he wished he could go back and do a few things differently. What those things were, he didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. I just nodded in agreement. After 20 minutes or so, I wished him well and rang myself the hell out of there.
After serving less than a year of his sentence, Buck and my step-mother retired to Florida where they bought a nice little house and resumed their lives together. They returned home to West Virginia each year at Christmas, staying with relatives. It was during the last of those trips that he was stricken with a brain aneurism. My wife and I were also back visiting, staying at Cousin Kenny’s place, which was only a few houses away from where Buck was staying.
On the last afternoon Buck was alive, I had just gotten into my truck with my Gordon Setter, Willie, to go ruffed grouse hunting. As I looked into the rearview mirror to back out of the driveway, I saw Buck’s van driving up the lane. I immediately felt a suffocating sensation of dread. He stopped the van behind me, waiting to see if I was going to get out and say hello. I didn’t move, only nodded through the mirror. I sat there hoping he would back up and move on. He did.
Later that night, New Year’s Eve, 1992, I went to a party at the home of some old friends. I returned to Kenny’s house around 2:30 a.m. and had just climbed into bed when the phone rang. It was my step-mother. She asked me to come right away, that Buck had just collapsed in the bathroom and appeared to be having a stroke. I ran to where they were staying and found him conscious but incoherent. He was looking up at me but I had no idea what was registering. I cradled him and kept talking to him until the emergency medical workers arrived. I rode in the ambulance with him to the hospital in nearby Huntington. He never regained consciousness and, two days later, my step-mother removed him from life support.
In his novel, Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry writes, “When I was a young man, I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to know.”
For years I buried a lot of resentment and anger towards Buck. It has slowly receded. I thought I would feel guilt for not getting out of my truck to talk to him on our final encounter. I haven’t.
I haven’t felt sadness about his passing as I have relief from not having to deal with him.
I haven’t forgiven him as much as I have simply let it all slip away.
In the words of Johnny Cash all those years ago:
You ask me if I’ll get along.
I guess I will, someway.
I don’t like it but I guess things happen that way.
