FIRST LOVE

(Excerpted from Chapter Five of Wild like a wolf: my holy life)

The first memory I have of my father is of him sitting up in a bed in a hospital ward with many other sick men. I am a toddler.  He asks me to do a dance for the patients.  Someone starts clapping and I am jumping around happily thinking that I am dancing.  Suddenly a patient starts to call out for help.  He is obviously in pain.  Then he screams.  Nurses run in and pull the curtains around his bed.  All the clapping is finished.  My dance is cut short.

My mother takes my hand and we leave to ride the train back home.  There are no good-byes. We pass along the Connecticut River and I look out at the bleak winter sky.  Sitting in my mother’s lap, I don’t feel the same way I did before seeing my father. At home my dancing was never cut short.  But something hidden, something to fear was there in that hospital ward, in the moans and screams of the patient, in the urgency of the nurses, something that curtains had to be pulled around so that no one could see it, something that had the power to cut short the dance.

In the second memory of him I am on tip toes straining to see over the top of the parlor window sill.  I must have heard that he was coming home from the convalescent patients’ part of the hospital because I was waiting at the window that looked out on the road in front of our house. I waited there for a long time before the tan, four-door Chevrolet sedan stopped and parked out front.  I could not see the driver, but I heard someone honk the horn.   Once.  Twice.  Twice again.

Suddenly I saw my mother running towards the car.  Her long, golden brown hair was swinging on her green V-neck sweater.  She opened the back door of the Chevrolet and stretched the top of her body forward.  After a bit of rummaging inside the car, she was standing upright again and nearly carrying what looked like a big boy.  She was supporting him as if she was a big crutch and he was leaning into her. The boy was wrapped in a white bed sheet.  His hair was very black and shiny with waves in it. I recognized the handsome face I had seen in the hospital. The man who had said, “Let me see you do a nice little dance for us.” 

As my mother helped him towards the house I could see that for the first time since I’d known her she was wearing red lipstick.   And she was crying.

Daddy was just 24 years old when I met him.  He didn’t ever read to me from books, but he told me many stories.  I loved listening to his words.  He told me that we, he and I, were Portuguese; that my mother and grandmother were Polish and that’s why we spoke Polish in the house.  He said that when he had met my mother on the steps of the Crayco Hotel in Bellows Falls, Vermont and they fell in love he was Jackie Reis, a welter-weight boxing champion who had never lost a fight.

For a few years they lived happily-ever-after. But as soon as I was born things began to change.  When I was two something horrible happened to him and he and the Angel of Death did 15 rounds together.  Nobody won. But Daddy woke up in the Bellows Falls hospital and heard the doctor whispering to the nurse, both of them standing at the foot of Daddy’s bed, “He’ll be gone before morning.” 

So, when the coast was clear, Daddy, bleeding from the rectum, as much blood as a slaughtered pig, he said, walked home, more than a mile, through the winter snow and below-freezing gusts of wind and collapsed onto the front porch.  Babcha and Blanche were at home and they both heard the thud.  It was Grace of God, Daddy said, who took him up to Hanover, New Hampshire, to Mary Hitchcock Hospital and delivered him to Emergency.  The sun was just coming up over the horizon; the icicles on the roofs hanging like crystal scalpels. 

When the anaesthesiologist put the mask over Daddy’s handsome face, he didn’t go right off to sleep.  Daddy remembered his body when it was a gleaming temple.  He said his whole life played out like a Technicolor movie in front of him. He saw my mother, her large breasts and her tiny waist. He saw his baptismal name in lights, Joaquim Charles Reis, and bits and pieces of his rubbish childhood, the fourth baby born of Theresa Almeida and Frank Reis, immigrants from San Miguel—a Portuguese island in the Azores. 

Daddy’s first job was not easy.  He had to take the punches of grown men and not fall down.  He was 11 when he learned this job from his enterprising older brothers who didn’t exactly invent it, but had been punching bags themselves for a couple of seasons. To keep from tipping over when the mill men punched him, one by one on pay-day Fridays, Daddy learned to stand with his legs wide apart, locking his ankles and his knees, then tensing his calves and thighs, and, most of all, freezing his spine. 

These rubbish kinds of childhoods were common in Fall River, Massachusetts he said where immigrants had come to work in the woollen mills, and where Frank, who looked like an exotic native Hawaiian surfer in his wedding photo, was actually a porter on a ferry boat until he died of TB or as they used to call it, “Consumption.”  After that, Theresa, became a washer woman, with seven living children, no insurance and monthly rent to pay.

So, Daddy dropped out of sixth grade and took the punches.  He became a sort of legend.  The family always had enough to eat.  This is what poor kids did.  It’s what they still do.

Daddy’s two older brothers, Scottie 13 and Joey 12, became his trainers and later his fight-career managers. They collected big money from those heavy-drinking, child-punching mill workers on pay-day Friday nights.   The Reis Boys said if anyone could punch their little brother Jackie in the stomach and make him fall over with a single whack, they would win the jackpot.  They stood outside the mills, week after week, selling their wares. One punch cost five dollars.  If no one made Daddy crumple, then the Reis Boys got to take the money home.

Daddy never crumpled then.  And he never crumpled afterwards.  He stayed hard as tombstone granite, graduating from mill-yard punches to below-the-belt punches in the New England boxing rings.  He was a welter-weight wonder, all charged up by the sound of the ringing bell and the victory taste of his mouthpiece until he met my mother and fell in love with her—until I was born.

And then, all of a sudden, his intestines exploded like bicycle tires that God-ordained night at Mary Hitchcock Hospital.  His colon and part of his ileum had to be removed.  They were like dazzling garden snakes that just went rotten and full of holes because of salt tears and sugar karma and huge, blood-curdling screams that never got let out.

Boxing boys don’t whine.  They just keep on dancing.  Or, they die.

After his intestines got thrown into the hospital trash, Daddy had to wear a bowel bag for the rest of his life on Planet Earth.  At the hospital, and later at the convalescent home where he was sent to live for centuries, Daddy learned how to change his bowel bags and how to make new ones out of clear plastic sheets, cut into handkerchief-like squares.  Each plastic sheet was clutched together with a black rubber ring about the circumference of a silver-dollar piece.

Daddy placed this apparatus over the constant wound of the artificial opening on his left side, out of which his excrement now dripped, and he strapped it securely into place with a leather belt.  He stuffed cello-cotton between the leather belt and the bowel bag, to soak up any excrement or blood that might accidentally leak outside the black rubber ring.

He didn’t go to therapy because in the nightmare time before cable TV, there was no such thing as therapists for hospital patients, at least not up in our neck of the woods, or so he said.

Nowadays the bowel bags are ready-made and very efficient. And there are psychological counselors to help the gouged-out patients to accept the madness that accompanies their losses.   But the horror, just like Daddy’s horror, is still the same.

Mostly everybody who heard Daddy’s story said how lucky he was to be alive, that he almost haemorrhaged to death and that the resident doctor at Mary Hitchcock who performed the emergency surgery that blood-soaked-white-moon night was a hero. 

Doctor Milne was just about my father’s age when the two of them entered the last-fight arena together.  It was the two of them against the marauding hordes from the Death Lands.  After 33 years of caring for my father, carving up his body, moving the artificial opening from one side to the next to preserve the tissue around it,  performing various other related surgeries, it was hard for Doctor Milne to know where his patient’s  body left off and  his own began.  You could say he shared a psychic connection between his soul and my father’s.  When they were together, they could read each other’s minds. 

When my father died at 56 and hundreds of people came to the Fenton and Hennessy Funeral Home, I remember how hard Doctor Milne cried—so unashamed, right in front of everybody. He was on the kneeler beside my father’s open casket and he was clutching Daddy’s waxy-looking hands. I could tell by the way Doctor Milne was shaking that his grief went all the way into his bones. It was obvious to me that he had lost the Jackie Reis, welter-weight champion part of himself. 

All the cockiness, all the sure-footedness, all the razzmatazz drained right out of him.  After awhile, his sobbing stopped and he got up off the kneeler and reeled out of the funeral home.  It almost looked as if he were drunk.  Whether he ever realized it or not, my father’s ghost, in silver satin boxing trunks, and maroon leather boxing gloves strutted out beside him that poison-ivy night.  Left.  Right.  Left.  The punches whopped the shadows. And the shadows jabbed back.  

After the burial, when I asked my mother why she never cried at the hospital on that last day of Daddy’s life, and why she never cried at the funeral, she said, “For me, your father died a long time ago.”

But from the very beginning moment that my daddy danced into my life and long after he danced out, I was One with him.  When he cried, I cried.  When he laughed, I laughed.   And when he beat me up with his boxer’s fists and sometimes knocked me unconscious, I didn’t hate him. In a mystery way I might have deserved it—or maybe I was redeeming our whole family, you know, like Jesus. 

To be continued….