FATHERS AND SONS

a tale by Eugene Marckx

Some nights Dale would find the banker's top hat hanging on his mother's bedroom door, or the senator's homburg, or the hat of the general, festooned with gold braids. Dale slept on a cot in the pantry off the kitchen. This way his mother was available for men.

But Dale kept having the same dream recurring every few nights.He was on the bridge that entered town yet, unlike the real bridge, in his dream it wasn't complete. It had a gap. He looked down at the dark swift river. He wanted to get across into town. There were men on the other side standing near stacks of planks. Dale waved to them. The banker in his topcoat and white gloves pointed below to the iron girders. The senator was holding forth and shaking hands all around. The general tapped with his riding crop where the railing was left hanging. None of them saw Dale. He was invisible.

Dale spent most days along the riverbank exploring the rocks and mud. Often Robbie joined him. He showed Robbie a swarm of tadpoles in the reeds, or a duck's nest, or the shadows of bottom fish behind the bridge peers. Robbie was in school, where Dale got nothing but scowls. Yet Robbie taught him with sticks how to add and subtract and how to read the shop signs. Robbie's father owned the biggest store in town.

One afternoon Dale asked his mother, "Who is my father?"

She sipped her coffee and looked away.

"Is he the banker?"

"No."

"The senator? The general?"

His mother told him nothing. Suddenly she grabbed him by the arm. "You want to get us run out of town? Don't ask questions."

But Dale couldn't stop his night dreams. Then on a bright afternoon a traveling clown came along into the Market Square. Dale remembered him from last year. Sunlight glanced off his chin when children screamed in laughter. That man wasn't only grease paint and a red nose. But the next day he was gone down the road.

Sometime later Dale's mother caught him in her bedroom standing in front of her big mirror. "What are you doing in here? What are you looking at?"

His fingers ran along the slight cleft in his chin. "I know who my father is."

"Who then?"

But he wouldn't tell. He ran down to the river, and soon Robbie rode along on his bicycle, taking a wide detour on his way home from school. He left it on the roadside, but its wheels and gears fascinated Dale. Robbie joined his friend on the riverbank.

"Look, Daddy says I've got to keep in school. It's my job to learn all I can."

Dale's mouth twisted up.

Then Dale smiled, and he did learn a lot from Robbie, who sometimes even let him ride his bicycl But a year later the clown came along again. Dale stood next to his juggling pins as he walked on his hands or played his penny whistle and danced with crazy legs, causing peels of laughter. After he pulled off his red nose and wiped away his big smile Dale followed him to the bakery where he bought a big round loaf.

He looked back. "Do you want to share some bread?"

Dale had been smiling all day, but now he jumped high in the street as they went along and up to the hayloft above the horse stables. It smelled of droppings and was busy with flies, but so what? Yet after the bread was eaten the clown said he should go home.

"I am home. I'm with you."

"You are, are you?" The clown looked him up and down. "Then you'd better learn how to make merry" So they traveled together. The clown showed him the way to paint on a wide grin, and Dale learned to walk on his hands. He practiced leaping high, his hands in the tight grasp of the clown, who stood him stiff-armed upside-down overhead. Blood pounded in his ears, but he loved that wild applause.

And they learned to sing together and play the penny whistle on winter evenings in the alehouses. They always had enough to eat, but their coats and shoes were wearing out. Then Dale had an idea. When they came back to his old town after a year he saw Robbie down by the riverbank.

"Daddy is going to send me away to boarding school in the city."

"What's that?"

Robbie tried to explain, but he had only been to the city once. "Let's go look for some bull frogs." And they crept into the reeds. "Gosh, I sure missed you, Dale."

"Well, I had to go." Dale didn't say that the clown was his father. Later he went around to his mother's, but she was busy. After performing he ate with the clown, and then late at night he went to the big house where Robbie lived. He knew where the bicycle stood, inside the wall of the horse barn near the big field. The horses nickered, that was all. Dale rode away. On the back road the clown took over, and Dale sat on the handlebars. The moon went down, but the clown made his way through the dark.

After many miles they stopped and worked out some new tricks. Dale learned to stand on his head over the handlebars as the clown pedaled in a wide circle. Then the clown let go of the bars and pedaled on. Soon Dale could spring onto his father's shoulders as he pedaled. At the finale they stood on the coasting bicycle, the clown with one foot on the seat and the other kicking out behind while Dale leaned forward, his feet steering the handlebars, one hand clasping his father's, the other waving to the crowd.

With these tricks they had money enough for new shoes and coats, but as they were paying the store clerk a policeman came inside the doorway.

"Is that your bicycle?"

The smile on the clown faded. "What's it to you?"

The policeman pointed to a serial number on the frame that matched a missing bicycle from the other end of the county. "I'll have to take you in for questioning."

Dale wanted to go too, but the clown said, "Go home, go back home!"

Yet he stayed for two days until he felt brave enough to visit the clown in jail.

"Haven't you gone home?"

Dale couldn't speak. He broke down in tears.

The clown waited for him to get calm. "They'll send me off to the chain gang. I know what to expect, but don't you stick around, or some character will beat you senseless for those shoes you're wearing. Go find a safe place, back with your mom."

Dale had a feeling of hot coals in his belly. "I'm sorry." It was all he could say.

"I know," said the clown. "But it'll be okay with me if you can find a safe place."

Dale went back to the hayloft, but now he grew fearful. Instead of sleeping in last night's corner he squeezed behind the tall haystacks. Later a man climbed the ladder and crept toward that corner. Dale shinnied down the ladder and got out of town.

Back in his own town he went to his mother's, but she wasn't living there. Two little girls were playing patty-cake in the mud of the yard. He wandered down by the river where he saw men building a high fence along its banks. He went across the bridge and up the streets, all the way to the big house where Robbie lived. He knew Robbie was away at boarding school, but he went to the back door and asked for him, hoping the servants might give him food. The black woman who cooked let him sit by the stove. Then Robbie's little sister ran in from the hall and stopped. She wasn't so little anymore. Her curly dark hair fell across her shoulders.

"Did you know that Robbie drowned?"

Dale gasped.

"Come with me. I'll take you to his grave." The graveyard was next to the church. They looked at a tall stone that had Robbie's name and dates. Dale could barely take in this tall cold wall. Then behind them came the storeowner, the girl's father.

"Who is this?" the man said.

"Daddy, don't you remember Dale? He's back home, but he's got no place to live since the town drove off his mom."

The storeowner looked him up and down. "If you can clean the stalls and feed the horses, we'll give you food and a place to stay."

"And an allowance!"

"Well, all right, Amanda, an allowance."

So Dale found a safe place of sorts. Amanda showed him books in her father's library, but he had little time to read. Besides caring for the horses he must do many other jobs. He had to meet the standards of the storeowner, or the man would beat him with his riding crop, stinging him with shame. Dale learned from the black servants how to do what was expected.

What he loved was to plow the fields for planting, and then harvest the grain. Year after year he learned all he could from the black hands.

"Now I'm one of you."

They laughed and told him that might be true, but they knew better how to keep from a beating. Amanda said to him, "Daddy's just taking it out on you because you're alive and Robbie's not." Then she kissed him, kissed him long.

After she ran away he felt a new fire, but it brought on the old coals he carried in his belly from the clown. He saw all too clearly with every smile from Amanda that he couldn't stay. Her father would find some excuse to kill him.

Then news came of gold discovered in the streams the other side of the Black Mountains. Dale put together his belongings.

Amanda came to him. "I can't let you go just by yourself."

He kept his face like stone. Only tears could cool the coals in his belly, and he would not cry. She kissed his cheeks, and they set off together in dark of night. But when they crossed the Black Mountains all of the paying claims had been staked. Men searched every stream, higher and higher. In his life before, the jobs always ended at sundown, but now the search for gold never ceased. Months disappeared. For days at a time he left Amanda in a tiny cabin. She cut wood, foraged and kept soup on the stove.

He followed a rumor that gold veins lay open in the quartz of high cliffs near the snowline. Caught on those cliffs after dark he couldn't move. Winds kept him from sleep and tested his stamina. Flashes of old dreams came back—the senator in a patriotic speech, the banker forcing people out, the general draining his whiskey after a bloody battle. Then he remembered as a boy going dizzy upside-down over the clown's head. And so he climbed down off those cliffs and went back to his cabin.

When he opened the door a neighbor woman was in a chair next to the bed. She stood up and smiled at him. "You have a son." Then she left.

Dale looked at Amanda in the bed. "You were pregnant? You never told me."

"You had all that gold on your mind."

He bent over and kissed her, then saw the boy's dark skin. "He's a darkie!"

"That he is."

"How could he be my son? What have you been doing while I was up there?"

"Surviving! But maybe you won't believe a word I say."

He felt coals in his belly and peeked again at the boy, at the bit of a cleft in his tiny chin. Then he saw for once how black were Amanda's curls. He sat down.

She looked at him. "After Robbie's mother died my daddy took up with one of his servants, my mom. She told me that her grandfather was a chieftain in Africa. I take pride in that. My baby is yours if you want him, but I'm naming him Robb."

"I'm not leaving you again, and I can't find gold. I've got no luck up there."

Amanda smiled. "Do you remember how you loved to handle a plow back home? I hear there's land out west. Maybe we can make a start out there."

Before spring they bought a patch of wild land in the western hills. Dale cleared what he could, plowed and planted what he could, and found some luck. Years went by. Amanda bore children all shades under the sun, but none as dark as Robb.

Then a man with a limp and a bent back showed up—the clown, out of prison at last. Dale took him in his arms and wept. "My father!" And the coals died away.

Amanda fed the old man, and he regained some strength, yet he could only gather eggs and bring in firewood. But when he told stories about the chain gang he made jokes of the guards. The children laughed and loved to hear what fools those men were. Dale gave him some money for the alehouse in town, but often the clown would pull coins one after another from behind the ears of the children. They thought they were rich.

Some few years later he was found dead, gone in his sleep. After they buried him and Dale had time to let out his pent-up grief, it was Robb who asked his mother.

"Is Dad my real father?"

She looked at him. "Feel your chin."

"But Dad's not dark, and his father was plain white."

"Your dark skin comes from me, from a long line of chieftains in Africa. They once lived, and now in you they live again."

She told him this. What she didn't say was that the clown had told her a secret.

"I am not Dale's father," he had said. "True, I had a passion for his mother, like a lot of men but I never had that kind of money. But when Dale stole the bicycle and we rode together, then I became a father to him. I was glad to go to prison to protect him."

She held that secret to the end, knowing what makes a father, what makes a son.