Robert Butler - The Deep Green Sea

It was the summer of 1965 and he’d got me a job at the mill the year before, right after I graduated from high school with not much in my head to do with my life. My mother wanted me to go to college real bad. She taught me to like books and I did, but she had come to love them, and it took something like love to want to actually study them and I think I loved my father and he loved the mill and he loved working there, so I did what he wanted of me. He was a foreman at the North Plant by then and he got me on at the blast furnace operation doing what he did for a large part of his life, working the labor gang.

It was sometime in July that year when we met one afternoon before we were due on our night shifts at four. It was at a bar just down the road from the blast furnace and the Cards were on the radio, playing the Cubs in Wrigley Field and Bob Gibson was pitching. I remember that because it made the silence between my father and me comfortable, baseball did. I was only nineteen but if you had steel toes on and goggles around your neck and you smelled like the mill already even though you were still sweating clean, before a shift, they didn’t ask any questions at the Half Moon Bar, so my father and I were nursing a couple of Buds, neither of us being real drinkers, and Harry Caray was pissed on the radio about some sloppy Cardinal play in the field and that morning’s Globe Democrat was lying faceup on the bar with a headline about the Marines in Da Nang, and it turned out this was what my father was thinking about in his silence.

Finally he said, “You think you ought to go?”

“Where?”

“To Vietnam. To the war.”

“I wasn’t thinking about it,” I said.

“I missed out.”

“I know.” I knew that whole story already, had known it for some time.

“If this thing gets bigger, they’ll need men,” he said.

I nodded at this and I turned the bottle in my hands a few times and the label was going soggy and I started peeling it away and what was going on in me was the way he said “men” and a feeling I’d had for as long as I could remember was starting up again, a feeling that had put me in that bar at that moment with steel-toed shoes on and goggles around my neck, and that was the feeling that my father thought of me as a man and he knew I could do the tough things, no question about it, and I stripped the label off the bottle and wadded it up to a dense little ball and put it down gently. It was already decided, I realized. I was going to end up in that war. I was going to do this thing for the reason I’d done about everything else up to that moment. For him. All but reading a bunch of books and trying to figure out how to control my words in certain circumstances, and that I’d done for my mother.

“I could handle that,” I said.

“I know you could,” he said, and his voice surprised me in how soft it had gone. We neither of us had looked at each other since we sat down there, shoulder to shoulder at the bar. I wanted to look at him now, but I didn’t.

He said, “Sometimes I make it sound like all I got is regrets about not fighting the war. But it was okay. If I’d gone I might not’ve come back so I could have a son.”

He said that to me. This man didn’t have a lot of words, usually. And maybe after him suggesting I should go to war and put my life on the line in a way he’d missed, maybe then he had to try to tell me it wasn’t because he didn’t value that life of mine. How could this man who was my father say such a thing? Maybe that was the way. I stood before Tien’s shrine and I turned my face away from this thing that wouldn’t even let a man die and be done with it. I didn’t want my eyes to be full of fucking tears when she came in wearing her silks and still damp from her washing.

But the memory wouldn’t let go of me. That was the time he told me about when they tried to kill him at the mill. My father had a long life before I came along. He was at the mill in the Depression, and the summer before Roosevelt won for the first time, there was a lot of bad stuff going down. My father hated the guy who owned the mill and what he was doing to the workers. So he got mixed up with the radicals. He didn’t know anything about communism. He just wanted things to be better for the men who worked the furnaces with him.

When my father said he was glad he had a son, I did turn to him. He was watching his beer. I waited for him to look my way, though it was enough he’d spoken the words. He’d been planning this for a while, I think. He had to do it the way he’d figured it out. He kept his eyes on his beer, or maybe on his hands, his great, thick hands lying there on the bar before him.

And then he told me a story about himself. He said, “In ’32, things were bad in this town. The men who work this place had enemies they couldn’t even figure out. But I was trying to. The biggest of the enemies was the owner of Wabash Steel. John J. Hagemeyer. I never made a secret of my feelings. So he sent one of his goons into the B-furnace stove with me. In those days we’d have two-men teams that went into the stove for short times to poke out the clogs of flue dust in the brickwork. We couldn’t be in there for long. It was the toughest work on the labor gang. Nothing like it. We’d go up the furnace and then into a trap at the top with nothing but a teapot lamp and a steel rod and we’d go down into the stove and it was like climbing down into the fire. But once, Hagemeyer sent one of his boys in with me and there was a place in there on one side that was an open shaft straight down to the combustion chamber. I was working near there and the goon jumped me, tried to throw me down. But I fought him a short, hard fight and it was him who went down the shaft and died. Just the thirty seconds or so of fight almost killed me in that place too. There was no way to breathe. But I dragged myself back out of there and your mama and I eventually got away to the west for a time. Till the war came and all my enemies at Wabash Steel were either gone or dead. Even Hagemeyer. By 1941 he was just a street name. So we come back.”

It was the longest he’d ever spoken to me, I think. I was breathless from hearing his voice for all of these words, wondering when they would stop, grateful for them no matter what it was he was saying. He almost died. Fourteen years before I was born. Fighting a man. Killing a man. These were things a father might tell a son someday, but why on this day? It wasn’t until later that I wondered why, and of course I never asked him. Maybe it was because he had just told his only child that he should go to war. Maybe he wanted me to know that he had faced death himself in what he saw as another kind of war. Without that, he felt he had no right to ask me. Maybe it came up because of it being another chance for me never to have been born. He was glad I was born and he was determined to tell me and that could have been the connection in his head. And maybe all of it, all of it, including why I should go to Vietnam, had something to do with deciding what it is you’re ready to die for.

Whatever the reasons, he just said the things he wanted to say and he didn’t say any more and I didn’t ask. I turned my face to my own beer and I laid my hands on the bar and there was a blur of baseball words around us and the whoosh of a semi rushing past outside and I drag my wrist across my forehead, wiping away the sweat here in Tien’s apartment, and there is no longer a threat of tears. The past is no longer a matter of tears and smoke. It’s simple now. I went away. I came back. He died. My mother died.

And this memory that came to me before Tien was about to emerge from her bath, I see now that the talk with my father was the first marker on a long road that would one day bring me to her bed. And the switchback that would have prevented it was there, too. If it had been my father who had gone down that shaft. But in those thirty seconds in the stove at B-furnace more than sixty years ago and half a world away, my father killed a man, and as a result, Tien came out of her bathroom with her hair and throat and hands still damp and she found me there, and now I have put my hand in that soft and secret place on her body and she speaks my name and I am afraid I have gone too fast but she says it’s okay and I move my hand once more to that place and touch her.