I

SUTTER'S GOLD

My father was good at practically every sport. He had been the captain of his football team. Played tennis, ran track, even loved golf, which was kind of surprising, since he only had one hand. But, as he said, "It's a good one." His high school baseball team beat the varsity team of the University of Southern California. It was a great victory for the little guys to beat the big guys. He was the star pitcher. Even at bat he did pretty well. He said he'd "bunt and then run like hell." After college he played semi-pro ball but he decided not to turn professional because they tried to make a circus freak out of him. "Come and see the One-Hand-Wonder" just didn't do it for him. I guess he put in all those years of practice so that he could be like everyone else.

He encouraged my brother and me to play a lot of sports. Said it brought out the manly side of a man's character. He was a little nervous about the way we loved flowers so much. I think he was worried that we might turn out to be a couple of pansies. But we just ignored it and spent all our hard-earned money we got from selling eggs up and down the street, on more and more glorious rosebushes, hybrid irises, spider chrysanthemums, King Alfred daffodils, tulips and narcissi, unusually gorgeous pelargoniums, and so on.

But it was the roses that we really went for. We tended them with loving care. My mother had said the long, thin strip of sparse soil in which we planted them would never nurture any serious vegetation but we proved otherwise. Whatever we did, we did 'in spades' so we kept up on all the new Rose Contest winners but we only bought the one's we really liked. "Fiesta" was the only tiny, cluster-blossom winner we liked but we gave up a month of movies just to get it.

When "Sutter's Gold," named after the man who owned the mill where gold was first discovered in California, came out, even my father marveled at its vigor and hardiness and at how its blossoms glowed. He said it had a lot of "personality," that every single day, each of its flowers developed a new and different look to it, "from bud to bloom."

My brother became a champion boxer and my football coach said in all his years he never saw anyone with more potential. We really did get into sports and found ourselves completely absorbed in being 'manly' with little time left anymore for the flowers.

My father's voice was plaintive. "Who's going to take care of the roses?" "You do it!", we replied in unison. And indeed he did.

He read-up on them. Experimented with making inch-wide holes in the dirt down deep by their roots with an old, pointed, steel-rod, T-shaped mosquito-net holder, salvaged from inside my discarded pup-tent, and poured his own concoction mixture of bone-meal and blood-meal down into the little holes. He used a special manure on the dirt's surface and got exotic bug sprays to get rid of aphids.

We thought we were good gardeners but my father really got those things to grow.

Mr. Rowe finally had to ask my father if he would trim down the seven-foot "Sutter's Gold" a bit so that he could still watch our backyard boxing matches from his back-porch easy-chair, the way he used to.

No one's ever seen such roses, before or since.

II

"Eight, eighteen, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-eight, fifty-eight..." and onward. The counting was incessant as my father rattled on and on. A look of panic infused itself in my mother's face. Her skin got whiter, her eyes glazed and rolled upwards toward the corner of the room. "He's losing his mind!" she gasped.

I was used to a number system where each unit of ten ended with a zero. My father, in his own original way, had shifted it around so that instead of a 'goose egg,' each group ended with an eight. It seemed a little bizarre to me but I suppose that, if you started with a 'minus two,' it would have the same coherence as the ordinary system.

THE GREEKS HAD A WORD FOR IT

My father used to say that "No matter how arcane or complex the idea, the ancient Greeks always had a word for it." He loved "figures of speech." One of his favorites was "litotes," [ lie-TOTE-tees] the understated presentation of an idea by expressing the negative of its opposite. "She was not ugly" was a phrase he used a lot.

When I was sixteen I complained bitterly to him about our High School teacher demanding that we learn all the three hundred and twelve Figures of Speech in one semester. My father just grinned and said it'd "put more panache" in my "pencil." "Alliteration" was another of his favorites. "Double entendres" didn't bother him either.

Seventeen years passed. When I heard that my father was dying, I thought I'd better go see him before he was too weak to enjoy the week's visit that I figured it would take us to attempt to renew the old, deep ties we once shared with one another. Old Doctor Gilliland, the lady surgeon that both Aunt Harriet and Aunt Olive always trusted so much, had diagnosed lung cancer and emphysema after my father had wound up in the local hospital from a stroke.

When I arrived, the effects of the stroke had subsided and he was sitting up in his small, gently padded living-room chair, wearing a pair of my old pajamas and a very disturbed look on his face.

The front door opened into the living room and I had planned to throw my arms around him as soon as I stepped into the house but after taking a step or two toward him, the detached look of revulsion on his face cautioned me that any gesture of physical affection was definitely not in order. Though he mouthed a polite greeting, he seemed to be elsewhere. I dropped my mind's outstretched arms and meekly said, "Hi, Paw," in a very casual way. I think he appreciated my nonchalance a lot and, after a few strained moments, he seemed a little less freaked-out.

The doctor had told me earlier by phone that he had "three months to three years to live" and right away one look told me that I had my work cut out for me. The idea was that I would use all of my resources, which meant intelligence, experience and love, to help create the best possible climate for him in which to spend his last days. It would be exactly three months.

This was going to be difficult but not insurmountable. I was running a business five hundred miles away that was hard to escape from for more than a week at a time. On top of that was the irony that my mother and I heartily disliked one another, and my father, whom I loved deeply, was in her sole care.

It turned out that the sour look on his face when I arrived had come from a verbally rancorous fight, their first in years, which had transpired just before my arrival. "Your father said, with more bitterness in his mouth than I've ever heard before, that I never loved him! That I was a completely selfish person with no concern for anyone but myself, so of course I screamed at him. What a vicious thing for him to say!"

I silently wondered what on earth had taken him so long to speak the truth, but I had no choice but to ignore the truth if I was to be of help to him. It was my willing job to help create as happy an atmosphere as possible so that he could be free to die in peace.

I spent almost all his waking hours with him. We talked of all the things I knew he loved and cared for. His youth. My youth. His athletic feats. Our long drives to Burbank Airport, me sitting in the rumble seat and my brother and my dad in the front seat of our spiffy Model-T Ford roadster with the horn that went "ooogah." His failed but glorious gold mine. The comical way my father's arms had flung out and the strange combination of startled indignation and surprised delight and on his face when I tricked him into sitting on the 'whoopee cushion' that I had slipped under the little pad of his favorite, living room chair. The Bolsa-Chica Oil Stock which was going to make us 'rich.' How, after that stock plunged down instead of zooming up the way he had enthusiastically told his friends it would, we had 'eaten beans' the next few years so he could pay his friends back all their losses. We gloried in all the sturdy houses that he had built. His magnificent roses. One by one they all became alive again. We sang the Southern songs his mother had heard as a little girl which were made up on the spot by the newly freed slaves. We talked about his pride at my brother's boxing championships, my football and baseball glories and disappointments, our "Strawberry Enterprises," "Elder Egg Farm," and "Elder's Arena." I hesitantly asked him if he'd like a "little rub" even though I knew that he had never let anyone massage him, even when he had sore muscles. I asked him backwards so that he'd be in agreement with not getting a rub but he surprised me by saying "no," that "indeed he would." From then on, each evening, he would say, "Time for my rub." One time I mentioned that I was glad to do it although I had thought he hadn't liked being massaged. He must have forgotten about his old reserve since he replied, in a most earnest tone, "Oh, no! You need it."

Then, after he would go to sleep, usually around eight o'clock, I would do my best to try to heal my mother. I put the intense dislike I had for this woman whom I had come out of, totally aside. And though I felt it weakened me, I acted friendly and understanding. I'd ignore her jibes and attacks or else just sympathize with them, pretending that they weren't triggering the wounded, howling, rage seething within me. And instead of extracting her poisoned comments from my own Achilles' heels, I would try to focus on the positive side of whatever we talked about. I became a kind of human poultice carefully placed on her sour bitterness, hoping to help her to help him feel the love that somehow must have been there for him.

It made me think about what quirk of fate had brought her and my father together in the first place. My beautiful, intelligent, charming, young mother, whose six older brothers were always bragging about their 'conquests,' had resolved that "no man was ever going to treat her like that." She had been the perfect match for my father, noble, staunch, and resolute, born with the fingers missing from his left hand yet despite his handicap, in fact most likely because of it, mastering every challenge that came his way.

I think the fact that everyone who knew my father had so completely loved and admired him helped his cause a lot. My mother, who had an insatiable 'sweet-tooth,' told me she never realized that the elegant two-pound boxes of candy my father would bring her every Sunday had cost him half his salary. Her mother, a very lovely lady whom I've only seen pictures of, had begged her not to marry my father because she thought his handicap might be hereditary, but my mother, a modern woman who knew her own mind, had believed in my father's hopes of riches with the concomitant, intellectual stimulation and cultural and social perquisites which adorned his dreams of wealth.

She told me that I was a 'love child' in the truest sense, and only came about thanks to the inefficiency of the rhythm method of birth control, that I wasn't planned for, but how secretly pleased she was when I began to brew. She talked about many things in her childhood, how her feisty, younger sister had always protected her, about her father's dignity, her mother's sweet skepticism ("Never let your husband know how much you love him!"), her yearning to be immersed in a life of adventure and creativity and how she had somehow confused these things with monetary wealth. One night when I had awakened her for a late night phone call, I gently called out, "Mom...., Mom...., wake up....." Though her voice was now raspy and harsh, not like it was when I was little, she responded in the sweetest, purest tone imaginable, a single word; "Wha-a-a-t?" I couldn't believe my ears. Then, when more awake, she told me in her normal voice that it was quite remarkable, that she had been dreaming that she was a young child and her mother was waking her, that somehow she was both the mother and the child. I felt so sad that child was lost to me.

On the second day my dad and I got telepathic. Nothing directly triggered it but I thought about the time when I was thirteen and rather hesitant about learning to dance, and how he told me all about the unforgettably joyous time he had from dancing at a Tennessee barn dance, when he had been thirteen: There was a beautiful, lovely, blonde, young widow at the dance who had still been grieving from her recent loss. She was one of the most spirited and lively persons that he had ever known. She had translucent, emerald eyes. Her name was Rebel Burge. My father had hesitantly asked her if she might dance with him. Though she was "a week of years" his senior, she took his hands in hers and danced with him in circles and those circles moved them both around the farthest edges of the barn and all the while her lovely eyes would smile at him, would smile into him, down to his very soul.

He had added that "some folks didn't cotton to the fact that she was seeing other men before the usual, six month 'mourning period' had been up" but, he asserted, with his usual, quietly authoritative tone, that "she was so pure and good that, I knew that if Rebel Burge did it, it was O....Kay."

Though we hadn't talked of her for more than twenty years, she had been etched into my thirteen-year-old memory, this glowing, young woman who could put aside her own grief and find herself open to new joy again by making the dazzled heart of a sweet, small, one-handed boy beat harder and faster than it ever had before.

We were just finishing a lengthy discussion about his favorite rose, the Sutter's Gold. A long pause in our tender conversation had allowed my thoughts to wander. I wondered if he knew them. So, as he lay dying and barely able to talk, I, ever so soft and slow, said, "Do you know what's on my mind right now, Paw?" And he responded, without missing a beat, " Rebel Burge..... She was the loveliest woman I had ever seen. I was a young boy of thirteen, she was barely twenty-one and already a widow....., she danced with me......, round and round we went."

On the third day, I open the hallway door to the living room and there's my dad with a very determined look on his face, out of his chair, walking, with his head bent, around the perimeter of the room, his elbows slowly swinging up and down, like the piston rods on an old train when it's just beginning to leave the station, and every so often kicking up his heel. "What're ya doin' Paw?" say I. "I'm doin' mah exercises!" says he, grinning.

A few hours later, I phone my old friend, Hesh. "I need a respite, do you and Meredith feel like getting a visit?" "We'll be waiting," says Hesh.

It's nearly an hour's drive to get there. As soon as I arrive and the embraces are over, I sink into a big, overstuffed chair in the middle of the room. The walls are mainly windows and I begin to admire how the sun and gentle breeze have joined forces to create the shimmer on the fluttering cascade of leaves on the gracefully dangling branches of the large Weeping Willow tree outside the house. Meredith goes into the kitchen to get ice cubes for my drink. When she returns, her eyes practically pop out of her head, "My God, look at you!" she exclaims. "Hesh, just look at him!"

This has never happened to me before. Every square inch of my skin has become puffed and swollen and glowing with a frightening, reddish color. I open my shirt. It's the same way. I'm shocked but not surprised. "It's all the poison coming out," I say, "It'll go down after a while." And sure enough, two hours later it's all gone. Hesh said he figured it must have been "psychosomatic," the Greek word for the body expressing the emotions of the soul, that I'd probably been "holding something in."

III

LITOTES ONE DAY, ALLITERATION THE NEXT

Your father's condition has gotten worse. He's asking for you. Do you think you could fly down here for a couple of days?" My mother went on to say that he couldn't get out of bed without help, that he was using the oxygen mask a lot more than before and that it didn't look like he was going to last a great deal longer.

When I arrived there, he was in worse condition then I anticipated. Lung cancer and emphysema really turn you into a ghastly wreck. His body looked about the same as the dead bodies in photographs I had seen of Nazi concentration camps. Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Treblinka all over again, but this time, courtesy of the American Tobacco Company.

When a child turns seven, they say he has reached the "age of reason." When I was seven, my father had encouraged me to smoke. I remember the incident quite clearly. It was a Saturday morning. We were all sitting at the breakfast table in the kitchen. Breakfast was over and my father began to read the morning Times. He seemed to be taking particular pleasure in the cigarette he had just lighted up. "Light up' with Lucky Strike," was a radio jingle that all the kids in the neighborhood were fond of parroting in a puffed up, mock self-important manner. Looking back on it, it reminds me of the jingoistic slogans of the Nazi Youth Movement. Jingo jingles.

My father looked up from his paper, noticed I was staring at his cigarette and casually asked me if I wanted one "Sure," I replied, trying not to show my amazement at his offer nor my eagerness to become an adult, "Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco."

"Here, let me 'light you up." He reached into his shirt pocket, took out his cigarette pack, coughed up another 'coffin nail' with a little jerking motion, carefully squeezing the pack to keep the lone, extended cigarette in place. His eyes sparkled with a gesture of subtly amused challenge as he thrust his Lucky Strikes toward my hesitant hand. I took the cigarette from the pack, leaned over toward him into the metallic, ringing "click" of his lighter, and took a deep drag. The coughing, sputtering, awful, squeaky, rasping noises coming from my convulsing throat made a primitive, curious counter-point to my father's laughter. It was one of the greatest gifts he ever gave me.

Sadly, he didn't give himself the same gift and now he lay dying, fifteen or twenty years ahead of his time, a shriveled mass of bone and skin. But his spirit was still there, which was what I wanted to tell you about:

He could hardly talk. When he did, his slow, stretched-out words were so low in volume that you had the feeling you were listening to his quiet thoughts rather than his voice. When I entered his bedroom he was lying on his back, hands folded, his arms across his chest, his nose pointing to the ceiling. I tried to be cheery. "Well, Paw, you didn't look so 'hot' yesterday but today you're lookin' pretty damn good! How're ya feelin'?" I had to listen hard to hear his slow, drawn out response; "Well.......,I...........wouldn't...........say...........I'm..........feelin'..........exactly.............exuberant!

The chuckle that followed was even softer. "Litotes," 'til his dying day..The next day, when I entered the room he was lying on his left side, facing the wall by the door through which I entered. I thought I might be able to cheer him up with some of his beloved "alliteration." "Well, Paw, you were lookin' mighty youthful yesterday and pretty peachy the day before but today's the best by far; You're lookin' downright delicious!" His soft, mock-plaintive, sideways response, distinct, but barely audible, started before I had hardly finished my sentence. "You.... thinkin' .....of ....taking ....a ....bite out'a me?"

On the third day, we wheeled the television set into the bedroom so that he could watch the Kentucky Derby. He loved horse racing and this was "The King of the Racing Events."

Before my brother moved to South America, he and my father were always going to the races. Occasionally I would go with them but I wasn't nearly as thrilled about horse racing as they were. In those days, my brother had subscribed to both The Daily Racing Form and a magazine called Thoroughbred of California. He made elaborate charts to keep track of all the winners, noting down all the details of each race such as the exact length of time it took the horse to reach the finish line, the condition of the track, who the horses' sires and dams were, and so on. And on and on. Even when John was still a starving student putting himself through college by selling eggs door to door like the milkmen of old, he would use up all his earnings at the racetrack. One time I heard him say, "Boy, I sure hope I 'break even' today, I really need the money!" In retrospect, I think his passion had even more to do with John's love for my father than for the sport itself. He did the same elaborate kind of record keeping with all the Major League baseball players and even some of the Minors. When we were very little, I still remember how he would drum all those players' names and positions into my somewhat distracted head. He would say something like "Whitesox....,...Rogers" and I would have to say " Hornsby, Chicago, second base." Or perhaps it was first base and another team. I don't remember for sure but I would have tried to memorize the entire telephone directory if I thought it might have helped to garner some serious respect from my highly critical, older brother.

When I called him in South America, I had said "If you want one last visit with your father, you'd better get up here right away." He arrived the next day, somewhat sour from the long plane ride, said "Hello" to our father, and took a long bath.

Afterwards, I encouraged him to spend a lot of time with Paw but he said he couldn't do it, that the time for pleasant visiting was over. He wouldn't listen when I said, "Just talk slowly and he'll understand. He'll respond slowly too, just be patient, there's still a lot of life left in him that you can visit with!" His reply, "As far as I'm concerned, he's already dead!" made me curse him.

He looked away, saying that it would be a long time before we talked again. Before we had these words, he had told me that when he was in the bathtub, his tears had nearly made the water in the tub spill over. I was having too much fun exchanging banter with my father at the time, for tears to come, and whoever heard of a weeping guardian angel? It took another year for them to flow.

We all watched the Derby. Even my mother feigned a little interest until she saw my father thumbing through a large, pale-bluish-grey, non-existent stack of printed cards, calling out to himself in a most methodical but determined manner, "Eight, eighteen, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-eight, fifty-eight" and onward. At that point, a look of panic infused itself in her face, her skin got whiter, her eyes glazed and rolled upwards toward the corner of the room. "He's losing his mind," she gasped. Fortunately her breathless voice was low, perhaps from the lack of oxygen caused by her fright, perhaps out of respect for my father's condition. "Perhaps the one, perhaps the other...., oh, I see, ' it's probably a combination of the two' " was the phrase my father was to frequently use when contemplating the reasons for many things he would puzzle over, over his last, short, remaining days.

There is no room for hysteria here and curiosity is rampant. I carefully place my right hand on the small of my mother's back, my left hand under her left elbow, gently maneuver her around each corner at the back of the wide bed, steer her toward the door, open it, usher her through and quietly close it after her. By this time, he's up to "one-eighteen, one twenty-eight, one thirty-eight...." In an amused, somewhat quizzical, soft voice I ask,"Watcha doin' Paw?" His matter-of-fact response has a tone of surprised delight at his new project. "I'm countin' all these winning tickets. Every one endin' in an eight is a winner!........" More counting. Then, "Not sure how we're gonna handle this. Got so many winners here that we might hafta' take it to a 'Court a' Law' to prove they're ours." And on goes the counting.

I try to get some semblance of reality into his delightfully charming, little hallucination by asking, "How much did these winning tickets cost?" "Two dollars each." "How much does each ticket pay?" "A thousand dollars!" His reply is definite, seeping with certitude. "Did you say a thousand dollars for each two dollar winning ticket?" "Yes, sir.!" "That's fantastic odds! Five hundred to one! How many horses were there in the race to give such incredible odds?" "Five hunnert." "What? Did you say five hundred?" "Yes, sir!" "Paw, are you sure there were five hundred horses in that race?" At this point he must be sensing that he's pushing it a bit, since he replies, "I said one hunnert!" "Paw," says I, trying to get his marvelous mirage into some kind of feasible context, "What kind of 'starting-gate' do they use for a hundred horses?" It doesn't even slow him down. "Oh, they don't use a starting-gate," he says matter-of-factly; "They hold up a big rope, and when the gun goes off they just yank it away!"

I try to hold on to some sense of practicality; "Paw, isn't it rather cluttered to have a hundred horses on one racetrack?" "Oh no;" he says, continuing his cool nonchalance. And then an almost imperceptible smile hovers near the corners of his mouth, "Until they reach the first turn, then it gets a bit hectic." He was always fond of using the word "hectic," I think it means feverish in Greek.

He continues his counting for a while and then I have another 'go' at it. "Paw," I say, trying to sum things up, "did you say that there were a hundred horses on that track?" He stops counting and looks up. His reply, emphatic, as always, lets me know he's still in charge; "I didn't say there were a hundred horses! I said there could'a been!"

A perfect, three-point landing, and we're home again. That was quite a trip.

My father slept naked all his life. Or at least all his married life. Even when he was dying, he refused to wear pajamas. It got so that he lacked the strength to get out of bed, even to go to the toilet. When I wasn't around, they used a bed pan for him but he detested it so much that when I was around, he preferred my picking him up, plunking him down on the toilet and holding him steady until he had "done his duty." He held on to this position until his dying day and I was always glad to oblige him.

His older sister, Aunt Olive, wasn't sure if it was good for him to be "moved around like that," but she acquiesced to his wishes and my hearty willingness to oblige. When I'd pick him up I would drape the bed sheet over his pathetic, limp, naked body, more to keep him warm than out of any sense of modesty or propriety. One day, shortly before he died, he said it was "time to go." At first Aunt Olive gasped a little until she realized that he wasn't quite yet talking about 'leaving the planet', that it was merely 'nature calling'. I draped the sheet over him, lifted his delicate, wobbly body in my arms and steadfastly moved down the hallway toward the bathroom while all the while Aunt Olive was 'clucking away' and hovering in little arcs around us to make certain that I didn't bump his fragile feet on the hallway doorknobs. Halfway down the hall the sheet slipped off part of his midriff exposing his penis to all the world. More clucking came from Aunt Olive as she quickly and proprietously replaced the fallen sheet over his drooping, little, private part. With a remarkable display of energy, he twisted his head around to see what all the fuss had been about, and then, with a sigh of relief, casually remarked, "That's the least of my worries!"

The Elder wit continued on, beyond the body. In another two days he would be dead.

© 2005___Muldoon Elder