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| Theodorus Peck, 1927?, during Good Times |
Over the decades after Theodorus had died, my
father spoke very little about his own father, hardly at all. It was a door he had nailed shut, never
opened unless a sudden flash of a memory appeared.
The photos of him growing up and changing
into a man showed how he and his siblings handled grief by never allowing
themselves to grieve. The three of them
posed for photos, three wooden soldiers with hands to their sides and awkward
half-smiles pasted on faces. The gray
photos never permitted them to touch each other, to hold on to each other. Their
eyes were still, frozen where grief had met them the day their father did.
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| Aunt Helen is the tall girl in the back row. My father is holding the basketball. |
“What happened to your pa? Why’d he die?”
Those questions had been asked throughout my
own growing years and answered only with a few words, usually provided by my
mother. So, it was only when grief had
struck my father’s house twice more that my father allowed tears to fall and
feel the bereavement long denied to him.
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| Robert Peck |
First, death stole in, when my older brother,
Robert, died at age 46 years with a brain tumor. Then two years later, death returned like a
thief and took a second younger brother, Bill, at age 44 years with blood
poisoning.
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| Bill Peck |
My father aged in front of us and finally,
nearly 70 years after Theodorus Peck died, Dad began to talk about his pa.
It
was summer, a hot summer when we sat out on the back yard and listened to the
night crickets start their songs. Still
dusky light slanted over the porch roof and bathed us in silver, black and
white. The porch seemed to take a deep breath as a silence settled over us,
heavy and filled with long held sorrow.
Mom’s hand snaked through Dad’s arm and interlaced his silver fingers
with hers.
“My
pa....” Dad began, and then paused, searching for words that were choked back
before he could speak them. Finally, he
spoke, his voice a stranger’s voice.
“The night he died, my sister and I were upstairs in my Grandma Peck’s
house. The phone rang and I looked at
her and said, “Sis, Pa’s dead. They’re
calling to tell us that he’s dead.”
"She didn’t believe me, but I knew
it as sure as I knew what day it was. I
heard Grandma say that they’d wait to tell us the news in the morning.” Dad raised his head, his strong angular face
lit with moonbeams, and we could see a slow snail trail of tears.
Mom’s
hand squeezed his, as he continued to speak in that stranger’s voice. “I got up as soon as it was light, went out
to the back porch to watch the sun come up.
Pa’s work boots were there, where he had taken them off not two days
ago. I lifted them up, smelling Pa’s
smell on them yet. A piece of mud, dried
in the sole’s instep, fell into my hand.
When he last wore those boots, the mud was soft.” Dad’s head ducked down into the black night
as he continued. “I wrapped that piece
of mud up in a handkerchief and ran home with it. I kept it in my drawer for years....” And the story ended.
Memories
folded up in that handkerchief and drawer slowly crept out over time. Not big memories, but ones speaking about the
loneliness of a ten-year old boy trying to harvest the corn field by
himself. Such loneliness and despair
swallowed up his youth. And when his
sons died, something had to break free.
My father slowly released parts of his grief
over the remaining years of his life, but I know that when he closed his eyes
at night, the images of his pa and two sons were the last to leave when sleep
came.
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| My father in about 1944 |
