Wesley Alexander White
My father often said, almost proudly, that he was descended from a long line of “drunkards and horse-thieves.” Like most New England farmers, in his case dating back to the 18th century, my father cobbled together a living, doing a little of this, a little of that: some carpentry, raising a little tobacco and corn, pigs and chickens, all of it hardly adding up to much of anything. And like most old Yankees, my father wasn’t opposed to bartering his labor for something he wanted—perhaps a piece of land, a used car, a dog or an prize stud bull, occasionally some object that merely struck his fancy, sometimes even to pay off a lost bet or a bar tab.
No matter how or why he came into possession of it, he had this predilection for bringing home all manner of things. At heart, I guess, he was a hoarder, though not the sort that kept stuff just to pacify some emotional need. Rather, a pragmatist, a product of WWI and the Depression, he was more a flea market collector, one who speculated on the possible need of an object in some unpredictable point in an unpredictable future. You never knew, for instance, when a six cylinder, flat-head Studebaker Champion Six motor might come in handy (despite not owning a Studebaker at the moment) or you might suddenly be in need of a saddle (though we never owned or rode a horse) or a tent (though we never went camping). The important thing was having it, just in case. He always knew “some guy” who wanted to barter or unload something cheap, and getting something cheap struck some fundamental chord in my father. He was always fixing things, sharpening, welding, rebuilding, rewiring, getting them ready. It wasn’t junk to him. It was a good deal, one that just needed a moment of necessity to prove its worth.
The one thing he was constantly bringing home were scraps of wood from his worksite, wood that we burned in our cellar furnace or in one of several potbelly stoves that heated our barns or outbuildings. It was free, and he brought home wood when he thought he might be short of cash to buy a ton of coal down at the coal company. I was usually responsible, as I was for shoveling the coal, of unloading the wood into our cellar coal bin. One time, on a frigid Christmas morning when I was about ten, I recall waking to a pair of rough hands shaking me. “Get up, Mike, we got to get some wood.” Still half asleep, I slowly realized what day it was and reminded him of it. “You can still freeze your ass off on Christmas. Now let’s get a move on.”
My father was forever driving or towing home an old car or truck or tractor, the more the merrier, as well as various parts—engines and transmissions, carburetors and starters, generators and intake manifolds. They were stacked in the barn on shelves, waiting like a back-up catcher for their chance to prove themselves. One time I was riding with him, and from the bed of a commercial truck in front of us something suddenly flew off and landed along the side of the road. My father stopped and pulled over to inspect his find. It turned out to be a brand-new right front fender for a 1964 Dodge Polaris. Presumably the fender was on its way to some autobody shop, to replace a damaged one. Without so much as a second thought, my father picked up the fender and tossed it into the bed of our truck. When I reminded him we didn’t own a Dodge, he replied that you can never tell when we might.
Though he never once hunted or even shot a gun to my knowledge, he frequently brought home guns: shotguns and rifles and pistols of all varieties. He never bought them from a gunshop. He always traded something for them, labor or bartered an old transmission for a gun from some guy sitting next to him at the bar (bars, he felt, were a good place to make a deal). One time it was a .45 Colt. Another time a .38 police special. His guns weren’t stored in a cabinet under lock and key, but rather were strewn haphazardly about our house and barns, where any one of his four sons could pick them up and play make-believe gunslinger. One time he brought home a rare Civil War octagonal-barreled sharpshooter’s rifle, a cumbersome thing that weighed more than 30 pounds. (Many years later I looked up a similar gun and found that it was worth in the thousands of dollars!) My father though didn’t keep it in a display case but simply propped it in the barn next to our hoes and shovels and picks. We kids used it in our martial games, cocking and firing the thing at each other as if it were just another toy gun. It’s a miracle we boys didn’t kill each other.
And there was no better deal, to his mind, than to get something for nothing. There was clearly an element of the klepto in my father’s psyche, that self-styled ancestral horse-thief blood flowed through his veins. Sometimes when he was working on someone’s barn or attic, he’d take a shine to something, say a lighter in the shape of the Eiffel Tower or an old baseball he happened upon that was signed by Dizzy Dean. And when the owner wasn’t around he simply slid it into his pocket or tossed into the bed of his truck. “Look what I got you, Mike,” he might say, giving me a signed baseball or a Babe Ruth-era glove that looked like the fossilized foot of a mastodon. One time when I was with him, he bought a new chain saw from a hardware store, something that was unusual for him because he normally fixed up old things rather than buying new. But on his way out, he casually grabbed a second saw from a display and placed them both in the truck. When we were pulling away I asked him how come he didn’t have to pay for the second. He glanced over at me and grinned. “It was a two-for-one sale.”
He also brought home bags of second-hand clothing intended for us boys: two-tone saddle shoes, baggy wool pants you might see on your grandfather, and wide ties out of the Gatsby era, stuff that had sat in someone’s attic for ages. They always smelled funny, of camphor and old men. He’d bring home frayed ice skates so big you had to wear five pairs of socks for them to fit. “You’ll grow into them,” was his motto. When we boys complained in the summer that the cramped, unfinished attic the four of us slept in was too hot, the normal response would have been to buy a cheap fan. Not my father. He went out to the barn, removed a metal fan from some idle engine, welded it onto an electric motor he’d rewired, and stuck it in the attic window. The unprotected metal blade appeared hungry for fingers, and unbalanced as it was, the Rube Goldberg contraption rattled and clanked, keeping us awake all night. `
Some of the things he brought home were for immediate use, like wood or an engine or a sink; others, however, like the many cars would lie dormant in one of our barns or scattered about our property as if it were a junkyard. In fact, the kids on the school bus passing along our rural stretch of road called our house the “White junkyard.” It was something for which I felt both shame as well as an odd sort of pride. What other family could go out and simply cannibalize some car for a part that others had to spend good money on. For example, a year before he died, my father removed the engine from a 1955 Ford that had patiently waited years in our yard for its chance, and, as if it were some delicate heart transplant, fitted it into his Ford truck—a vehicle that had kept running for years after his own heart had stopped.
One time my father brought home a large tree limb. Not in the bed of his truck but sticking right out of the middle of the windshield. From the kitchen window we all watched, curious and amused, as he nonchalantly pulled the truck into the barn. He never confessed to crashing into a tree. He’d previously brought home any number of scraped fenders, dented doors, crumpled bumpers, smashed side-view mirrors, not counting the many DUI tickets.
But what he carried home most nights were things not quite so tangible. These were the manifold frustrations, the quiet disappointments, the numerous small and large failures of a lifetime. That’s why he carried a full pint of whiskey with him to work each morning, and brought home each night an empty bottle, hoping, I suppose, to hide from his defeats. When I was a boy–like Lyman in my novel Skunktown–I’d often accompany him to work. During our time together I would hear him vent about his many grievances: how his younger brothers had gone off to war to become heroes while he had to stay home and manage the farm or how he’d not been able to go to college because of the Depression or how he was the black sheep and how his father used to beat him with a razor strop. The many things missing in his life. I think the things he brought home was his small attempt at filling that cavernous void in his life.
(Lyman’s father in my upcoming novel Skunktown was based closely on my own father.)
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