Telling My Father’s Stories

Sarah Bank

Growing up, my father entertained my siblings and I with stories of his Michigan childhood. He grew up with three sisters in a small town in the northern peninsula. He told us about digging caves and tunnels in the snow, about spitting and hearing the crack as it froze in midair. He told us stories of watching old men standing around the closed-up mill, who would press one nostril and exhale with force out the other to blow their noses. My dad endured days with snot frozen to his upper lip until he mastered the skill. I admit to attempting it a few times myself, unsuccessfully.

My father told us stories. 

My sister, older than me by four years, and I shared a room with a tall bed in a heavy wooden frame. We made a fort beneath the bed where we lay at night, long past our bedtime, reading and telling each other stories. We delighted in repeating the best of my father’s, seeing each scene clearly in our minds.

On cold nights my dad would build a ‘rip-roaring’ fire in the fireplace and tell us stories. He told us a story about how he handled the town bully. The bully lived in a house on a hill, and my dad crept up one night and loosened all the nuts and bolts on the kid’s bicycle. The next day, my father taunted the kid until he jumped on his bike to chase him down the hill. The bicycle fell apart as the kid pedaled furiously and he went tumbling, breaking who knows how many bones on the way. My father says he never bullied him again.

He told us stories about his .22 rifle, how he credits it with saving his life on more than one occasion. He used the rifle to hunt the family supper, and one time he fell through a hole in the ice. My father pushed the .22 up through the hole and placed it across the opening to haul himself out. Once he emerged, soaked in frigid water, he knew he had to keep moving or he’d freeze. He went to the closest place he could think, his Uncle Ernie’s, and he says that by the time he arrived he was walking like Frankenstein as his clothes began to stiffen and freeze to his body.

My father told us stories about the nuns at the Catholic school he attended. He says they were always yelling at him, saying how his sisters were so much better behaved. He had to carve his own wooden paddle in shop class that was used to administer his beating. He says it’s because he checked out a book about dinosaurs from the public library, a direct contradiction to their creationist teachings. One night, he and a few friends broke into the school. They placed tacks on all the teachers’ seats. The school desks were the kind that opened for students to store their textbooks inside. My dad and his friends spent all night moving the books from desk to desk, classroom to classroom, even moving the teachers’ master books. Then they stole cookies from the lunchroom before escaping out the coal chute. The next day, lessons were postponed due to the chaos of trying to return all the books to their proper desks. My dad and his friends played along, acting as confused as everyone else, but they were disappointed that the habits the nuns wore were too thick for the tacks to penetrate. 

My father’s favorite story to tell was about the town dentist’s car. He bought a brand-new car, so new there was still plastic covering the seats. It was the talk of the town. One day, my dad and his friends decided to play hooky. One of the boys was the son of the dentist, and they stole his car to go joy riding. Of course, they inevitably crashed into a snowbank. In a spark of genius no one understood at the time, they decided to have the boy with the smallest feet walk backward away from the car. Then each boy would follow in his tracks, walking backward with the largest-footed boy last. When the police arrived on scene they were baffled, seeing only a single set of footprints in the snow leading up to the crashed vehicle. That night, my father was sitting at the family dinner table, everyone listening to the radio, when the news about the vehicle theft aired. His father was furious on behalf of the dentist, cursing the hoodlum behind the crime. My dad choked down his mashed potatoes and said nothing.

My brother, younger than me by almost five years, loved hearing our dad’s stories, valuing that little time he spent with us. In high school my brother said, “You and me should write a book one day about all of dad’s stories.”

When we were older, my dad told us stories about his years in the Navy. He was fond of telling us that when the commanders wanted a job done right, they always went to the little guy because bigger men would just make a mess of it. My father’s height never exceeded 5’8”, and even that is generous. “The little guy always gets the job done,” he said.

He told us stories about unwittingly eating dog meat in China, about buying Elvis records with the covers written in Mandarin. He got his first and only tattoo one chilly night in Tokyo. It’s the Navy logo, and he wanted it on his bicep, but it was too cold to take off his shirt, so he pushed his sleeve up and had it done on his forearm. One night, when his ship was docked in Japan, he got drunk on sake. He passed out and two locals carried him back to his ship, recognizing the ship’s name from his uniform, saving him from what would have been an AWOL charge.

My father told us stories. In our youth, my sister and brother and I had plans to share his stories. I don’t think we will tell his stories now. My siblings are too busy for stories. They are caught in the cycle of stress and frustration that afflicts so many people, always working to make more money to buy more things that they don’t have time to enjoy because they’re busy working. When I talk to my sister and brother, I don’t recognize in them the children they once were. I don’t see the sister who shared the fort beneath our bed and read with me. I don’t see the brother who was my constant movie companion. Two or three times a year, I have a superficial conversation with my sister. When I talk to my brother, he’s often full of an anger reminiscent of our father.

My father still tells his old stories, but now they’re interspersed with the latest conspiracy theory being pushed forth on Fox News. He sits in his garage, swirling the whiskey in his glass, bent over from age and bitterness. It’s hard to say what has aged him faster: life or the constant sense of regret.

We won’t tell his stories together, but I will try to tell them. I like to tell stories. I am a child again, feet propped up near the fire, roasting marshmallows with my siblings sitting close when my father says, “Let me tell you a story.”