Fishing with Wussy

Until I was six I thought of my father the way I thought of 'my
heavenly father', whose existence was a matter of record,
but who was, practically speaking, absent and therefore
irrelevant. My mother never did end up getting her divorce. When
my father heard what she was up to, he went to see her lawyer. He
didn't exactly have an appointment, but then he didn't need one out
in the parking lot where he strolled back and forth, his fists thrust
deep into his pockets, waiting until F. William Peterson, Attorney-
At-Law, closed up. It was one of the bleak, dead days between
Christmas and New Year. I don't think my mother specifically
warned F. William there would be serious opposition to her design
and that the opposition might conceivably be extra-legal in nature.
F. William Peterson had been selected by my mother precisely
because he was not a Mohawk native. He had moved there just a
few months before to join as a junior partner a firm which employed
his law school room-mate. F. William Peterson was a soft man of
some bulk, well-dressed in a knee-length overcoat with a fur collar,
when he finally appeared in the deserted parking lot at quarter to
six. Never an athletic man, he was engaged in pulling on a fine new
pair of gloves, a Christmas gift from Mrs Peterson, while trying at
the same time not to lose his footing on the ice. My father never
wore gloves. For warmth, he blew into his cupped hands, steam
escaping from between his fingers, as he came toward F. William
Peterson, who, intent on his footing and his new gloves, hadn't what
a fair-minded man would call much of a chance.

Finding himself suddenly seated on the ice, warm blood salty
on his lower lip, the attorney's first conclusion must have been that
somehow, despite his care, he had managed to lose his balance. Just
as surprisingly, there was somebody standing over him who seemed
to be making a point of not offering him a hand up. It wasn't even a
hand that dangled in F. William's peripheral vision, but a fist. A
clenched fist. And it struck the lawyer in the face a second time
before he could account for its being there.

F. William Peterson was not a fighting man. Indeed, he had not
been in the war, and had never offered physical violence to any
human. He loathed physical violence in general, and this physical
violence in particular. Every time he looked up to see where the fist
was, it struck him again in the face, and after this happened several
times, he considered it might be better to stop looking up. The snow
and ice were pink beneath him, and so were his new gloves. He
thought about what his wife would say when she saw them and
concluded right then and there, as if it were his most pressing
problem, that he would purchase an identical pair on the way home.

Had he been able to see his own face, he'd have known that the
gloves were not his most pressing problem.

'You do not represent Jenny Hall,' said the man standing in the
big work-boots with the metal eyelets and leather laces.

He did represent my mother though, and if my father thought
that by beating F. William Peterson up and leaving him in a snow-
bank, that would be the end of the matter he had an imperfect
understanding of F. William Peterson and, perhaps, the greater
part of the legal profession. My father was arrested half an hour
later in the Mohawk Grill in the middle of a hamburger steak. F.
William Peterson identified the workboots with the metal eyelets
and leather laces, and my father's right hand was showing the
swollen effects of battering F. William Peterson's skull. None of
which was the sort of identification that was sure to hold up in court,
and the lawyer knew it, but getting my father tossed in jail, however
briefly, seemed like a good idea. When he was released, pending
trial, my father was informed that a peace bond had been sworn
against him and that if he, Sam Hall, were discovered in the
immediate proximity of F. William Peterson, he would be fined a
thousand dollars and incarcerated. The cop who told him all this was
one of my father's buddies and was very apologetic when my father
wanted to know what the hell kind of free country he'd spent thirty-
five months fighting for would allow such a law. It stank, the cop
admitted, but if my father wanted F. William Peterson thrashed
again, he'd have to get somebody else to do it. That was no major
impediment, of course, but my father couldn't be talked out of the
premise that in a truly free country he'd be allowed to do it himself.

So, instead of going to see F. William Peterson, he went to see
my mother. She hadn't sworn out any peace bond against him that
he knew of. Probably she couldn't, being his wife. It might not be
perfect, but it was at least some kind of free country they were living
in. Here again, however, F. William Peterson was a step ahead of
him, having called my mother from his hospital room so she'd be on
the look-out. When my father pulled up in front of the house, she
called the cops without waiting for pleasantries, of which there
turned out to be none anyway. They shouted at each other through
the front door she wouldn't unlock.

My mother started right out with the main point. 'I don't love
you!' she screamed.

'So what?' my father countered. 'I don't love you either.'

Surprised or not, she did not miss a beat. 'I want a divorce.'

'Then you can't have one,' my father said.

'I don't need your permission.'

'Like hell you don't,' he said. 'And you'll need more than
lawyers and a cheap lock to keep me out of my own house.' By way
of punctuation, he put his shoulder into the door, which buckled but
did not give.

'This is my father's house, Sam Hall. You never had anything
and you never will.'

'That's how come I married you,' he said. 'If you aren't going
to open that door, you'd better stand back out of the way.'

My mother did as she was told, but just then a police cruiser
pulled up and my father vaulted the porch railing and headed off
through the deep snow in back of the house. One of the cops gave
chase while the other circled the block in the car, cutting off my
father's escape routes. It must have been quite a spectacle, the one
cop chasing, until he was tuckered out, yelling, 'We know who you
are!' and my father shouting over his shoulder, 'So what?' He knew
nobody was going to shoot him for what he'd done (what had he
done, now that he thought about it?). A man certainly had the right
to enter his own house and shout at his own wife, which was exactly
what she'd keep being until he decided to divorce her. It must have
looked like a game of tag. All the neighbours came out on their back
porches and watched, cheering my father, who dodged and veered
expertly beyond the outstretched arms of the pursuing cops, for
within minutes the backyards of our block were lousy with
uniformed men who finally succeeded in forming a wide ring and
then shrinking it, the neighbours' boos at this unfair tactic ringing in
their ears. My mother watched from the back porch as the tough,
wet, angry cops closed in on my father. She pretty much decided
right there against the divorce idea.

It dawned on her much later that the best way of ensuring my
father's absence was to demand he shoulder his share of the burden
of raising his son. Until then, life was rich in our neighbourhood.
When he got out of jail, my father would make a bee-line for my
mother's house (she'd had his things put in storage and changed the
locks, which to her mind pretty much settled the matter of
ownership), where he'd be arrested again for disturbing the peace.
His visits to the Mohawk County jail got progressively longer, and
so each time he got out he was madder than before. Finally, one of
his buddies in the force took him aside and told him to stay the hell
away from Third Avenue, because the judge was all through fooling
around. Next time he was run in, he'd be in the slam a good long
while. Since that was the way things stood, my father promised he'd
be a good boy and go home, wherever that might be. Since one place
was as good as another, he rented a room across from the police
station so they'd know right where to find him. He borrowed some
money and got a couple things out of storage and set them in the
middle of the rented room. Then he went out again.