The Boat Comes In |
Issue 16
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At the age of 91 my father was shutting down. Having him around for all those decades had made his presence a given in my life. His decline began with driving, and as the insurance companies always said, the accident happened within a few blocks of home.
John Fairbrother didn’t like being pushed. He was on his way to get an oil change, and he’d stopped at a red light to make a left turn. When the light turned green, the driver behind him must have been in a hurry and honked his horn. Annoyed, John stepped on the accelerator and steered into the path of an oncoming car. He explained later, in the Geordie accent his decades in America had never worn away, “Bloke ahint me tooted, and I just turned.” I got the call from my wife when I was in the middle of a meeting at PharmaCom about a new drug that showed promise for treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers weren’t ready to turn me and the rest of the writing unit loose on news releases until test results were more definitive, but they did want us to do some articles hinting at breakthroughs to come. Annie taught anthropology at the university, so she could spend a fair amount of time in her home office, meaning she frequently got stuck with John’s problems while I was at work. “I’m really sorry to break into your day,” she said, “but John just totaled his new Corolla.” “Jesus,” I said. “Is he all right?” My colleagues glanced at me with raised eyebrows, then quickly turned their attention to the reports on the conference table. “He’s okay, miraculously. We’re at Benson Emergency.” “I’ll wind things up here as soon as I can,” I said, “and get over there.” “No rush. Really, he’s fine. How’s it look for the Alzheimer’s drug?” “I forget.” “Bad joke,” Annie said. The irony wasn’t lost on either of us, though my father certainly gave no signs of losing mental acuity. “The cop on the scene wasn’t even going to give John a ticket,” Annie said. “I told him I wished he would. So he did. And John told me he should maybe quit driving.” “Thanks, babe,” I said. “You may have saved some stranger’s life, never mind Dad’s.” * * * *
On the way home from the hospital John said, “I feel fine, you know. Champion. Maybe I can go back to driving once t’car gets fixed.”
“The car’s a write-off, Dad.” I glanced in my rearview mirror long enough to catch Annie’s eye-roll from the back seat. “I’ll be glad to handle the insurance settlement.” Ultimately, the three of us agreed that John’s driving days should come to an end. I helped make the decision less painful for my always-frugal father by getting the insurance company to settle for pretty close to the original price John had paid for the Corolla. “How am I meant to get around?” John asked in a last attempt to forestall the inevitable. I held up a hand. “We’ll drive you wherever you need to go, Dad.” John lived in an apartment complex two or three miles from our downtown condo. He’d been unwilling to move out of the apartment, which was really too big for him, after my mother’s death three years earlier. Not because of any sentimentality about my mother Eloise, I knew, but because John valued control. The complex catered to elderly residents, but John didn’t like being subject to the timetable or the authority of its shuttle service. John’s driving involved not much more than trips to the supermarket, doctor’s appointments, and weekend visits to our place to watch baseball or football, and of course the occasional Newcastle United Magpies game on one of the streaming services he’d never think of paying for. Nonetheless, we knew life was going to get more complicated. But what else could we do? * * * *
Initially, we timed shopping trips for weekends when I was available or weekdays when Annie had no classes or office hours. John would trundle around the market with his own cart and rendezvous with Annie or me at the checkout counter. Annie preferred the days when I could join them and help carry in the groceries. John preferred to shop on Wednesday, Senior Discount Day. After a while, though, John decided to give us a shopping list and stay in his apartment to read or watch television.
“I don’t know why they charge me for all these shows,” he’d say about his bare-bones cable package. “All I watch are the three, what d’ye call ‘em, networks. Never bother with all those strange channels.” Except when you come to visit us, I thought. Aloud, I said, “I wish you’d get out more. Going shopping is good exercise.” “Annie does the needful,” John would respond. End of discussion. So, Annie would dutifully take the penciled lists, written in John’s meticulous old-fashioned cursive, bring back the groceries and carry them in, then show him the receipt so he could write her a check, just as meticulous but in ink. “I get the feeling he’s hoping every time I’ll forget to ask him to pay up.” Annie shook her head ruefully. “Fat chance, after schlepping all the groceries in.” “I’m sorry I can’t help more often,” I said with a frisson of guilt. “Nothing for it,” she said. “You’re tied up all day. And I’m an academic, so I don’t really work for a living.” This last remark was our running joke about Annie’s colleagues, almost all of whom insisted they worked an eighty-hour week. “At least his lists are easy to read,” I said. Annie laughed. “They can be cryptic, though. His list the other day included muffins. ‘What kind?’ I asked. He almost did a double-take, then said, ‘English, of course.’” I laughed, too. “I’d like to see him get into that with one of the employees at the market.” * * * *
I would drive over to the apartment complex on weekends and bring John back to watch sports. On the fifteen-minute trip John would keep up a running analysis of other drivers’ shortcomings.
“Look at that oud wife,” he said on one occasion. “Divena ken enough to signal a change of lane.” I glanced at the other car as it slowed to make a right turn. “Dad,” I said. “That old woman is probably younger than I am.” But I knew John’s self-image was of the ballroom-dancing Lothario he’d been sixty years ago in England and for several decades afterward when he and Eloise had immigrated to the States with their young son: me. Not that I had ever known my father to stray, or even betray much interest in sex, though one day a couple of months before the traffic accident John had alluded to another “oud wife” in the apartment across the hall who kept inviting him in for coffee. John had snorted. “I think she’s just ettlin to get lucky.” On his visits to our condo, he and I would eat snacks, washed down with beer and an occasional shot of single-malt scotch. Though I’d take a scotch with my father now and again, I never drank the beer, which I stocked especially for John. Avoiding the carbs was one of my own concessions to aging, even though John always eyed my diet soft drinks with disapproval. “This is champion beer,” John said one day, and it was, made at a local micro-brewery. “It’s no’ Broon,” he said, referring to his beloved Newcastle Brown Ale, “but it’s no’ bad.” “It’s readily available,” I pointed out. “We get it at the market. You could, too.” John grunted. “If I bought it, I’d just drink it.” The beer he bought for himself was Miller Lite, a step up from ditchwater. But it came cheap, in a case of thirty cans, the extra six tinted orange so they wouldn’t be missed. And his scotch was J & B. No tempting malt whisky for him, except on weekends. “This cheese is good and all,” John said of our favorite Irish cheddar. “We get that at the market, too,” I said. This brought on another ambiguous grunt. Annie would usually head off to Macy’s while John and I watched the Tigers, the Lions, the Red Wings, now and then the Pistons, and whenever possible the Magpies. Then she’d return, often sneaking her purchases into the house so John wouldn’t realize my second wife was such an extravagant woman. “He likes the way we live,” Annie said one day after I had taken John back to his apartment. “And he can afford everything we can. He just can’t summon the will to do it.” “Tell me about it,” I said. “He never spends an extra dime on himself. Or anyone else.” Annie laughed. “He just can’t bring himself to loosen up and enjoy himself unless he’s here.” “I guess it’s not going to happen now,” I said. “Not at his age.” * * * *
“John is so lucky to have Dr. Diefendorfer,” Annie said some months later. “With his congestive heart failure and phlebitis he’d likely never have had the last few years to enjoy if Dr. D hadn’t been so vigilant about tuning him up.”
“I hope Dad’s all right at the moment,” I said. “He was in a big rush to get to the restroom.” We’d just arrived at Food Waltz, a newly trendy restaurant where we were treating Dad to brunch after a visit to the young doctor who’d been our own family physician for ten years, and who—we were happy to note—was enough younger than all of us to make his being around for the foreseeable future a reasonable bet. Dr. D’s latest diagnosis was that John’s pacemaker was working nicely, and that his apparently grapefruit-sized prostate wouldn’t be an issue at his age. “More men his age die with prostate cancer than from it,” Dr. D had told us. Of more concern was John’s general mobility, exacerbated by phlebitis that would be more dangerous to operate on than leave alone, and by his gradually diminishing kidney function. “Ready to order?” A rail-thin young waiter with Kohl-lined eyes smiled down at us, pad and pencil poised. “We’re waiting for our guest,” Annie said. “He should be back shortly.” “No problem. I’ll be back soon, too.” The kid grinned, turned on the heels of his earth-friendly shoes, and walked off. “Nice that we’re not causing a problem,” Annie said. Food Waltz was located conveniently, but was not one of our favorite places. “The only problem around here is pronouncing ‘scone’ properly,” I said and got up. “I’m going to check on Dad.” I made my way past murals of babies nestled under cabbage leaves and fields full of other primary-colored vignettes that celebrated organic farming. No pesky pesticides. Nor pesky pests. When I got into the antiseptic-smelling men’s room, it gave no sign of occupation save for one stall with a closed door. “Dad?” I said. “Edward?” John’s voice sounded oddly tremulous from the closed stall. I approached the door. “It’s me, Dad. Are you okay?” “Edward,” John said again, as if fixing it in his mind. He went on reluctantly. “I’ve messed myself. I’ve peed myself. I couldn’t get in here on time.” My heart quickened. This was the beginning of something, I realized. “How about your trousers?” I asked. “They’re okay. Damp. But my underwear’s soaked.” John spoke each word like the admission of an atrocity. “Push the underwear under the door, Dad.” I got a sheaf of recycled paper towels from a dispenser. “I’ll get rid of it.” “I could wash them,” John said in a firmer tone, his concern for thrift a lurch toward normalcy. “No need to throw away a good pair of briefs. Maybe you can find a plastic bag.” “Not here, Dad.” I wrapped John’s sodden tightie-whities in paper towels and dumped them in a waste container. Adult diapers, I thought. We’d need to add them to the next shopping list. The rest of brunch was somber. Not even the chance to correct the waiter’s pronunciation of “scone” could cheer John. “I’ve told yon fellow before,” he said. “Skahn, not skohne. Then he corrects me. They’re not really scones, anyway. More like shortcake.” Annie and I exchanged looks. I’d tell her later about the toilet crisis, though I knew her always-sensitive nose had registered the faint whiff of urine. * * * *
I recognized how humiliated John must feel as the infirmities of age mounted. On another day he admitted that he’d been unable to lower himself slowly onto the toilet seat in our main bathroom. The impact of his weight had caused the seat to split down the middle.
“Don’t worry about it, Dad.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “You keep track of the Magpies and I’ll drive over to VanEyck’s for a new toilet seat. I’ll have it replaced before Annie gets back from shopping.” “Magpies are like me,” he said, “bound for relegation.” He was right; the United were about to lose their fourth straight match, this time to the upstart Brighton and Hove Albion side that had recently won promotion to the Premier League. As I drove to the hardware store, I resolved to step up my own exercise program by including a few more deep knee bends. I bought the new toilet seat; then, before returning home, I stopped at a medical appliance store and bought a lightweight but sturdy foldable toilet-seat frame John could use at home or during his weekend visits. The frame cost a hundred dollars, but I knew better than to expect reimbursement from my father, and I couldn’t be bothered with helping him to make an insurance claim. Life was developing enough added complications. John had always taken pride in his independence and general fitness, even though I had never known him to take exercise other than an occasional walk—his afternoon constitutional around the apartment complex—or lugging groceries in after a shopping trip. Among the family photographs on our bookshelves were two similar shots of John, trim and handsome, one in his British Army uniform, field service cap at a jaunty angle, the other in stylish pleated slacks and sweater, an Ascot at his neck and his hair Brylcreemed to a leathery sheen worthy of Noel Coward. In each shot he was leaning against a wall, one leg insouciantly crossed before the other. Dandyish images of masculine self-confidence. Thinking of those photographs reminded me of our trip to England the summer after my mother’s death. We’d planned to scatter Eloise’s ashes, and had decided on a visit with our relatives, who lived in the Lake District in Keswick not far from Beatrix Potter’s cottage. We told ourselves the reunion might help distract John from grief, though he had reacted to his wife’s death with his customary stoicism. But he was happy enough to join us. * * * *
We’d landed at Gatwick on an uncharacteristically hot English day. Discovering that our four-door Hyundai with automatic shift wouldn’t be available from the rental office until the following morning, we opted for a night in an air-conditioned room in the airport’s Holiday Inn, where we availed ourselves of the swimming pool and later a bottle of good Champagne. Frugal as always, John took an un-air-conditioned room at the same hotel and decided to visit some old haunts from when he’d been stationed in the area during World War II.
Though he always said his unit had expected an imminent German invasion, John had described many more instances of non-military adventures, always obliquely alluding to various encounters with women, both young and middle-aged. With Eloise safely ensconced in the Lake District and working in a Northern munitions factory, John had apparently found ample wartime opportunity to indulge himself, to use the English idiom, as “a bit of a lad.” This hazy personal history was difficult for me to reconcile with what seemed like my father’s almost fanatically asexual existence over the past couple of decades. “Your parents obviously had a sex-life,” Annie said. “Otherwise, how do we explain your presence?” “You’re obviously right,” I agreed. “But you couldn’t prove it by my experience. I do remember hearing what might have been my mother’s cry of passion one night from my parents’ room in the apartment house they managed in Detroit. But it could just as easily have been her reaction to dropping something heavy on her foot.” “I don’t think you’ve paid enough attention.” Annie shook her head at my obliviousness. “He’s mentioned enough stuff obliquely to me to suggest he has a past, and not just with your mother.” And, indeed, when John returned from his pub crawl around the environs of Gatwick, he regaled us with a story of how he and a couple of his barracks-mates had been detailed to do some work for a well-to-do widow. She had apparently cooked them meals, and something in his tone in describing occasions on which he’d worked at the house alone made Annie raise her eyebrows at me. On the other side of the ledger, his most vivid and pungently-described recollection—triggered by his stop at a hotel that was still in business—involved his having been stiffed on a bar bill nearly sixty years earlier by a mooching lance-corporal. “And to make up for it he’s been stiffing you on bills ever since,” Annie said as we settled in our king-sized bed at the Holiday Inn. We weren’t exactly amazed to see John paying cash for his room the next morning—he couldn’t stand the idea of being “in debt” to a credit card company. But driving north later that day in the rented Hyundai, we were horrified to learn that the cash was coming, not from his redeeming traveler’s checks, but from a money-belt stuffed with around two thousand dollars. He probably wore it to bed. * * * *
Finally in Keswick, we settled in a bed and breakfast place, The Roses, where our stifling room was right next to the street entrance and the late-returning guests seemed mostly drunk. Meanwhile, Dad conducted himself like a visiting dignitary in his sister Ruth’s semi-detached bungalow and treated her ex-miner husband Tom Carricker like an old family retainer. Ruth’s house and our bed and breakfast quarters featured similar décor, heavy on Toby jugs, music boxes, flowered wallpaper, and different-patterned carpet in each room. Fawlty Towers sprang to mind.
Much to my surprise, the Carrickers, unfazed by my father’s inflated bearing, held a family gathering attended by Ruth and Tom’s children and their spouses, as well as their teenaged grandchildren, and the occasion turned out to be a revelation. Strong tea was on offer, of course, but so were Newcastle Brown Ale, whisky, sherry, ginger wine, and soft drinks for the youngsters; the family also provided a variety of sweetmeats including trifle, rhubarb pie, Shrewsbury cake, treacle tarts, and, yes, scones both plain and currant, pronounced accurately, with lots of fresh-churned butter and homemade jam. And as the evening wore on, the crowded living room of the little house rang with unaccompanied song. Ruth Carricker sang in her clear alto, joined in harmony by her husband and her daughter Sheena. “Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly, Blow the wind south o’er the bonny blue sea; Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly, Blow bonny breeze my lover to me. They told me last night there were ships in the offing, And I hurried down to the deep rolling sea; But my eye could not see it, wherever might be it, The barque that is bearing my lover to me.” I saw Annie transfixed by the unexpected beauty of the moment, which brought up a flood of associations from my own recent memory. Before she died, my mother had requested that I sing “Wild Mountain Thyme” at her wake, and I had done so, introducing almost the only sentimental note into the occasion. I’d sung it again before our arrival at Ruth and Tom’s, when we’d stopped to scatter Eloise’s ashes at the Cumbrian stone circle known as Long Meg and Her Sisters. And now I sang it yet again for the family: “Will ye go, lassie, go, And we’ll all go thegither, Tae pull wild mountain thyme All around the bloomin’ heather? Will ye go, lassie, go?” Annie, always easily touched, was dabbing at her eyes by the time I finished singing. And then, without request or remark, John began to sing, in his rumbling bass, a song he might not have sung since my childhood in Detroit. “Dance to your daddy, my little laddie. Dance to your daddy, my little man. You shall have a fish and you shall have a fin; You shall have a codling when the boat comes in. You shall have a haddock boiled in a pan. Dance to your daddy, my little man.” Shocked, I had to excuse myself and make a trip to the tiny bathroom with its miniature bathtub—“Not big enough to drown a mouse,” as a querulous guest at Fawlty Towers observed. I stood at the minute washbasin to rinse the tears from my face before returning to the party. I’d been quite unprepared for my father’s uncharacteristic tenderness. John certainly felt no residual warmth for the memory of his own long-dead father, from whom he’d been estranged for most of his life. I abruptly recalled my four-year-old self standing before a couple of neighborhood boys on a Keswick sidewalk. Dressed like me in short pants and sleeveless Fair Isle sweaters—“jumpers” we’d called them back then—they’d pointed out a dour-looking old man with a nicotine-stained handlebar moustache, wearing a greasy-looking overcoat and a brown cloth cap pulled down over his thick white hair. “That’s your granddad,” one of them said. The old man shuffled along the sidewalk and let himself into a semidetached flat only two doors down the street from where my parents and I lived. How could I not have known—or been told—about the existence of another grandfather in my life? Stomach fluttering, I’d knocked on the door of the flat, just above the brass plate that bore the name Jas. Fairbrother. When the door finally opened, the old man looked down at me without speaking. For a few moments I stood silently, registering his collarless shirt, the broken veins in his weathered cheeks, and the large pores in his nose. “I’m your grandson,” I finally said. “Eddie.” The old man had stared at me for a moment or two, then jerked his head in what might have been a nod, grunted, and closed the door. Later, I asked what had caused the estrangement from my grandfather. John’s mouth drew down at the corners. “My mother died early,” he said. “Cancer. I left school at fifteen and got work on the docks in Newcastle. I turned over my pay to him every week. Then I had a chance for an apprenticeship at an engineering firm. He wouldn’t part with the fifty pounds I needed for my fee. So I left and got a room at a boardinghouse in the city. Never spoke with him again.” And when I was ten, and we were living in a Detroit apartment, my father got a Transatlantic call from Ruth, informing him that James Fairbrother had died. By then I knew adults assumed that children either weren’t paying attention to their serious conversations, or simply couldn’t understand adult matters. But, listening to the one-sided conversation, I realized that Ruth was discussing funeral costs. And my father’s definitive pronouncement, which ended the call, was, “Don’t expect me to spend a penny on him.” We hadn’t been back to England since the trip to scatter Eloise’s ashes, and now I could see that John wasn’t likely to return except in the same way Mum had found the final embrace of Long Meg and Her Sisters. * * * *
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Arnold Johnston’s poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and translations have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies. Arnie’s recent books of poetry are In and Out: Love Poems (Kelsay Books, 2025), The Infernal Now (2022), and Where We’re Going, Where We’ve Been (2020). His two novels are Swept Away (2021) and The Witching Voice, A Novel from the Life of Robert Burns (2009). His plays, and others written in collaboration with his wife Deborah Ann Percy, have won over 300 productions, readings, awards, and publications across the country and internationally. Arnie taught for many years at Western Michigan University, where he co-founded the creative writing program and founded the playwriting program.
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