Harvey and Bud were yin-yang brothers. Bud’s yin pulled him to the pastoral lands of Bill’s forty-two acre farm, to six apple trees and a slate roofed barn, to a Case tractor and feed mill gossip, to an overweight brown and white pony named Babe and four male peacocks from which Bud always gave feathers to the children on Christmas day; and although then traveling to Bill’s farm was only an annual tradition, driving a Model A over dirt roads, the visits were the highlights of Bud’s childhood, they were his secret pilgrimages; and although Harvey horsed around with the pitch forks and loose piled hay, he did not respect the scene, he did not understand the milieu; and thus, with Harvey gravitating toward urban factory life, Bud, looking through prophetic lenses, refused to even wade in those polluted waters, and although Harvey told him he would regret the seven day work week and the small returns, being at the mercy of the weather and the lack of a retirement pension, and although Harvey told him all the reasons for not being a farmer, tried to sell him all the lines that he himself was buying, when my father’s Great Uncle Bill died, Bud took over his small-time operation, and over the years as Harvey gave his youth to the Man, Bud gave his to the earth, and the two drifted apart, each intuitively longing for his other half, but each called in different directions, and although Harvey and Bud never meant to sit across from each other at the holiday table and have nothing to say, that is what they did, and as the years and the drinks flowed, Harvey and Bud’s opportunities slipped away, and their shared history eventually came down to an old photograph of two boys on a sled, Bud sitting in front between Harvey’s legs with his feet on the steering bar, and Harvey, bigger, behind his brother with his arms wrapped around Bud’s waist, and it took the two of them, trading off, to raise my father who was only searching for one solid man and instead received two troubled brothers, and Harvey and Bud would both die as they had lived––fragmentary men.
The only stores Bud ever patronized were pawn shops; thus, for my father’s graduation from high school, his Uncle Bud gave him a pair of gray field glasses he had rummaged from a back-street shop a week earlier. Years later, sitting in the rain at old Municipal Stadium, my father told me that Bud’s real name was Conrad, however, he could not explain the derivative, Bud; but none of this mattered then, in 1956, when his Uncle Bud accepted my father’s hand, outstretched in gratitude, not only for the binoculars, but for the drafty farm house with its hand-pumped water that Bud had opened to my father when Harvey’s drinking turned my father’s father into a maimed and odorous grizzly who struck with ugly black claws; for the ticket to game three of the ‘48 series where Larry Doby’s third inning home run landed just a few rows from their bleacher seats; for the rhubarb pies Aunt Lena, Bud’s second wife, sliced across the middle and split between my father and her husband as they recovered from August afternoons cross-stacking bales of green alfalfa in dusty hay lofts; for the Guernsey cream, skimmed off the top of wide-mouth gallon jugs, in which his Uncle Bud suggested my father drown his pie; for the rope-frame bed and the rag mattress to lay on it that his Uncle Bud salvaged from St. Catherine’s basement after receiving the blessing of Monsignor Kleese; for the grape soda his Uncle Bud had purchased for my father after the deflated crowd, they amongst them, moved away from the black and white television sets in Strauss’ downtown store, still disbelieving that Wertz could hit a ball over four-hundred feet and Mays could catch it; for the lessons learned on those cold morning milkings when ice skims would form over the full buckets before my father could empty them into the tank; for being a man; and for all that remains unspoken, even unthought, but known, known the way the apple knows its seeds and the locust knows its boughs; and so all these stories, this familial history, I learned from my father, not all at once, but in fragments and antidotes told during thirty years of ballpark talk, for nowhere else did my father and I fit together, nowhere else did we stand on even ground. I, with my linguistics classes and rhetorical research, with my two story condominium and bohemian goatee, with my passion for Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, with my amateur sculptures of nude bodies and mad dogs, with my fallen-Catholic agnosticism and forgotten photos of old girlfriends, with my soft-hands and smooth baby-face, with my cerebral leanings and abstract conundrums, with my Miles Davis Kind of Blue and Kerouac beatitudes, with my graduate school moratorium and fears of commitment, with my dead-end psychoanalysis and reflective scrutiny, found little to say to a worker, to a man who washed after work instead of before, to a man who has too many projects to know the beauty of a snowy Saturday afternoon wasted reading Chekov’s stories in an avant-garde coffee shop, to understand the liberation of sitting all day in front of Caillebotte’s Paris: A Rainy Day at The Art Institute of Chicago, to listen to the wind while standing on your head in the Wyoming desert, to waste time; to the man who knows how to fix a broken furnace, a wrecked car, a noisy drier; to the man who lives in antidotes, who disparages complexity, who sees a messy oak tree where I see a primeval archetype; to the man who answers riddles pragmatically. And I too once wanted to do those things, I too want to see that way, I too tried to do what he did, but I could not, and thus, with he embarrassed for me, and I embarrassed at his embarrassment, we have passed awkward holidays and strained birthday parties, and have managed the best we could, and yet, the ballpark is where we talk, the ballpark is the frame of our only real relationship, and it was there, in old Municipal Stadium, that my father told me about those aforementioned binoculars and about that September day, nine years later, before my father would beget me, his only child; before the first season since ‘59 that the Indians would finish ahead of the Yankees, when, after climbing onto the old barn’s slate roof, after loosing his footing and falling thirty feet, his Uncle Bud, lying in a rented hospital bed in the farm house dining room, with wiry chin hairs needle-like below his dentured mouth, shirtless and doughy, attired in threadbare blue pajama bottoms strapped at the waist and matted brown slippers, called my father a son-of-a-bitch bastard and lobbed a feeble fist at his sagging brown eyes.
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