Man in the Moon: Essays on Fathers and Fatherhood

The Mechanics of Being

212 a decade after dropping out of high school I’d managed to arrive, like some survivor of a tragedy at sea, on the shores of a community college. My parents were thrilled when I phoned to say I was pursuing my childhood dream of being an architect. They were just as happy when I decided to be a sociologist instead. And after that a political scientist. Finally, a writer. “I’m going to write a novel based on my life,” I said to my father one day. I was in an mfa program by then, starting my second year. I’d recently found some statistics that said there’d been a 60 percent chance I’d end up in jail; I had stories to prove just how close I’d come. But after writing the first draft, my tale of black teenaged delinquency seemed too cliché to me, told too often before. I decided to write about my father instead. He, like my mother, was blind. My father lost his sight when he was twelve. Climbing the stairs to his Chicago brownstone, he somehow fell backward, hitting his head hard against the pavement and filling his cranium with blood. It would have been better had some of this blood seeped out, alerting him to seek medical attention, but when the area of impact did no more than swell a little and throb, he tended himself by applying two cubes of ice and eating six peanut butter cookies. He did not tell anyone about the injury. He also did not mention the two weeks of headaches that followed, the month of dizzy spells, or that the world was growing increasingly, terrifyingly dim. the mechanics of being Jerald Walker 213 the mechanics of being His mother had died of cancer four years earlier. His alcoholic father was rarely around. So at home my father only had to conceal his condition from his grandmother, Mama Alice, who herself could barely see past her cataracts, and his three older brothers and sister, who had historically paid him little attention. His grades at school suffered, but his teachers believed him when he said his discovery of girls was the cause. He spent less and less time with his friends, gave up baseball altogether, and took to walking with the aid of a tree branch. In this way his weakening vision remained undetected for three months until, one morning at breakfast, things fell apart. Mama Alice greeted him as he sat at the table. She was by the stove, he knew, from the location of her voice. As he listened to her approach, he averted his face. She put a plate in front of him and another to his right, where she always sat. She pulled a chair beneath her. He reached for his fork, accidentally knocking it off the table. When several seconds had passed and he’d made no move, Mama Alice reminded him that forks couldn’t fly. He took a deep breath and reached down to his left, knowing that to find the utensil would be a stroke of good fortune, since he couldn’t even see the floor. After a few seconds of sweeping his fingers against the cool hardwood, he sat back up. There was fear in Mama Alice’s voice when she asked him what was wrong. There was fear in his when he confessed he couldn’t see. He confessed everything then, eager, like a serial killer at last confronted with evidence of his crime, to have the details of his awful secret revealed. And when pressed about why he hadn’t said anything sooner, he mentioned his master plan: he would make his sight get better by ignoring, as much as possible, the fact that it was getting worse. For gutting out his fading vision in silence, Mama Alice called him brave. His father called him a fool. His teachers called him a liar. His astonished friends and siblings called him Merlin. The doctors called him lucky. The damage was reversible, they said, because the clots that had formed on and now pressed against his occipital lobes could be removed. But they were wrong; those calcified pools of 214 Jerald Walker blood were in precarious locations and could not be excised without risking immediate paralysis or worse. The surgeons inserted a metal plate (my father never knew why) and later told Mama Alice that...