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My Father Like a River
    F ifty
years, half a century, have passed since the November afternoon my father
watched from a sandbar as my brother surfaced and then disappeared in a river
that, like my father’s life, was moving in the wrong direction. This was the
autumn of 1962. He was thirty-five years old, a man with a wife, four children,
and, suddenly, no job.
    â€œI can’t believe he fired me,” my father had said a
month earlier when he sat down at the dinner table. He sounded puzzled—no
bitterness or fear in his voice, not yet. My mother and I, even my nine-year-old
younger brother, let our roast beef and mashed potatoes lay untouched. Only the
twins in their high chairs continued to eat.
    â€œMaybe he will reconsider, realize the mistake he’s
making,” my mother said.
    â€œNo,” my father answered. “He’s been setting this
up for weeks. I just refused to see it coming. He wants to show he’s in charge,
not his daddy-in-law’s ghost, and he’s using me to make that clear. He didn’t
even offer me my old job back.”
    My father shoved his chair back from the table, his
plate untouched.
    â€œI wish Mr. Hamrick had left me in the weave room,”
he said and walked out the front door.
    Through the dining room window we could see him in
the yard, the flare of his lighter as he lit a cigarette. He stood at the edge
of the cul-de-sac, looking across the street at houses as new as our own, as
heavily mortgaged. Brick houses, unlike the wooden house we’d lived in before, a
house on the same mill village street where my father had grown up. There’s
nothing more solid than brick, my father had said the day we moved.
    â€œYou all need to eat,” my mother told my brother
and me.
    â€œIt’s cold,” my brother said.
    â€œEat it anyway,” my mother said sharply.
    â€œA man doesn’t have to have a college degree to
wear a tie,” Mr. Hamrick had said at the mill’s Christmas party, then announced
the third and final promotion that had taken my father from weaver to shift
supervisor to management. “Hard work and experience are more important than some
rolled-up piece of paper.”
    Mr. Hamrick had waved us up to the podium to join
our father. He had kissed my mother on the cheek and shaken hands with my
brother and me.
    â€œYou boys should be proud of your daddy,” Mr.
Hamrick had said.
    But Mr. Hamrick’s philosophy was not shared by his
son-in-law, and two years later when Mr. Hamrick died of a heart attack, my
father’s rise became a free fall.
    He started looking for work the morning after he
was fired. By afternoon he’d found a job. Clyde Harmon, a contractor my father
had known since they’d been in first grade together, added him to a crew
repainting the junior high. The job would last a month at most Clyde told him.
After that my father would need to find something else.
    And so my father returned to a school he had
attended two decades earlier. Instead of a white shirt and tie, he worked in
white coveralls crusty with dried paint. His coworkers were two brothers, one
twenty and one eighteen. Each Friday when Clyde Harmon took his thick roll of
ten-dollar bills from his pocket, my father placed two fewer in his wallet than
his coworkers. He had never painted before, so he learned from men half his age
the art of staring at walls day after day.
    For that month my father was a looming presence in
my life—in hallways when I changed classes, up on his ladder as adolescents
moiled under him, or peering into my classrooms as he painted window frames.
That I pretended to ignore him was only natural for a fourteen-year-old, for at
that age a parent’s mere presence is a source of embarrassment, but I’m sure my
father believed my downcast eyes were caused as much by shame. He was as
uncomfortable as I when we saw each other during the school day, our
acknowledgment a quick turning away