DADDY, TELL ME A STORY

Written by Luz Leigh – August 2007

      The old man sat in his usual place on the front porch of his home. The home where he had resided most of his adult life. The house was built many years ago when he and his first wife were newly weds. 

      He sits in the high-back cane-bottom wooden rocker, enjoying his evening cigar. Most of the time the cigar is not lit….he has let the fire go out, so he just chews on it, much as other men chew a cud of tobacco.

      The young girl sits on the wooden steps that lead from the dirt walkway to the porch. She turns and says, “Daddy, tell me about things that happened a long time ago.” He smiles down at her, welcoming the opportunity to share memories of his past with this child of his. For you see, she is the only thing left of his immediate family. His first wife died years ago; his son from that marriage has long since estranged himself from his father; the young bride he took to be his soul mate a number of years following the first wife’s death is now laying buried in the family cemetery. The young girl is the product of that second marriage and he loves her dearly.

      The old man takes a deep breath and begins to re-live portions of his life. He tells of how his first wife spoiled the only child they had. And how very sad his wife was when the young man announced that he wanted to go away from home to a college several hundred miles away. This was back in the 1920s when transportation was not as available as it is today. But because the boy had always gotten what he wanted, his parents agreed to allow him to go to a junior college in a small East Texas town.

      The wife became ill a few years later with an illness that could not be cured in those days; we know it as cancer today. He watched her as she suffered and then died one April day in 1930. She was buried in the family cemetery; he had a nice marble marker erected. As best he could he moved on with his life.

      A smile crosses his face as he turns to the young girl. “I met your mother a few years after Miss Amy’s death.” Although she was his wife, he always referred to her as “Miss Amy”. “Your mother brought some of the joy and happiness back into my life that had been missing.” This was the part of his life’s story that the girl always loved to hear…..how he courted the young woman who would become his second wife and mother of his only daughter.

      As he talked, a full moon began to rise in the eastern sky, making the evening most enjoyable and providing the only light around them. He told of how on evenings such as this one, with a full moon overhead and crickets chirping, he would walk hand in hand with his sweetheart. They would make plans for their future together. In the summer of 1934, he proposed to her. He chuckles and says, “I guess she was as happy as I was because she hesitated not one second before saying, ‘Oh, yes, I will marry you.’” 

      They were married that September and she moved into the “big house” as her family referred to his home. Her family lived in a sharecropper’s house on a cotton farm; a small crowded unpainted wooden house. His home, painted white with many rooms was in town with many amenities that were lacking in her parents’ home. However, as she told their daughter years later, she would have married him and lived with him in a tepee. It was not the house she was marrying; it was the man whom she loved very much.

      “Three years after I married your mother, the Lord blessed us with a wonderful Christmas gift. The Christmas in 1937 you came to make our family complete,” he tells her. “We were so happy.”

      But their happiness would not last long and as the old man thought of that part of his life, his grey eyes brimmed with tears. Within a few months of the little girl’s birth, it was determined the mother had tuberculosis. In those days there were no wonder drugs with which to fight the disease. Isolation from other people and bed rest seemed to be the appropriate course to take.

      So on an early autumn day, he helped his young wife as she boarded a train that would take her to far west Texas where the climate seemed to be better for those who were suffering with “TB” or “consumption”. She was so very young and had never traveled more than a few miles from the county in which she was born and now resided. She was frightened at the prospect of being so far from home and away from her child and her husband. As the trained pulled away from the station, she waved to him and her baby girl. He kept a stone face so she would not see the tears that were now welling up in his eyes. “As the train was leaving, I held you little hand and helped you wave bye-bye to your mother,” the old man tells the girl.

      Once the train was out of sight, he turned and walked back to their home. The house seemed so empty, too quiet. As he tells the story now, he does not weep as much as he did on that day long ago.

      He tells that after nearly a year of treatment, the young mother returns home to once again live in the “big house” with her loving husband and their young daughter. The little girl must again learn who this beautiful woman with the raven black hair is. “It only took you a few days to know that this person was your mother,” he says to his daughter.

      The girl knows the story all too well now. In less than ten years the disease will return and cause an early death for his beautiful young wife.

      The moon is now high in the sky, the cigar is finished and the old man is ready to retire for the night. As he rises from his chair, the girl stands and hugs him tightly. “Daddy, I love you so much.” He returns the hug and without a word, opens the screen door and disappears into the dark house. She does not need to hear him say that he loves her; his stories of his life and hers tell her all she needs to know.