Bret Lott - Fathers, Sons, & Brothers: The Men in My Family

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

This book is for

who else?

the mothers, daughters, and sisters involved:

Barbara, Leslie, and Melanie

The author would like to thank the editors of the following magazines, in which these essays first appeared:

sound in Puerto del Sol

brothers in The Antioch Review

royal crown: i and royal crown: ii (originally as royal crown) in Creative Nonfiction

zebulun in New Letters

atonement and mornings in The Chicago Tribune

first names in The Seattle Times

LEARNING SEX in The Notre Dame Review

JACOB in The Gettysburg Review

HUGO in The Bellingham Review

ALLEGIANCE in The Iowa Review

All the rivers flow into the sea, Yet the sea is not full. To the place where the rivers flow, There they flow again.

Ecclesiastes 1:7

.

This is the last room: the garage.

We've been in the new house more than a month already, each day thus far filled with putting away all we own, each day filled with trying to find order in chaos. This is our dream house, after all, the one for which we bought the lot, the one we helped design, the one we plan to see filled with our lives and our children's lives here in South Carolina, so putting things in their just and proper places once and for all seems only right.

WeMelanie, my wife, and our two boys, Zeb, age ten, and Jacob, age sevenlive a five-minute walk from the tidal marsh along the Wando River, where these spring evenings we can stand and watch the sun set behind Daniel Island, the sky above us reflected on the river to form a wide and shimmering band of blue and red and magenta, and where we can watch slender stalks of yellowgrass and saw grass and salt-marsh hay sway with the movement of the tide. A ten-minute bike ride takes us to the clubhouse, perched on the edge of the Wando.

and the swimming pool there, and the marina, where on a quiet morning you can hear the breeze off Charleston Harbor gently rattle the halyards on the sailboats, the rhythmic metal tap on the masts like some impatient dream of open seas, full sails billowing.

Already there are three forts in the surrounding woods to which the boys can retreat; already there is talk of signing them up for the club's swim team. At breakfast we've seen out the bay window everything from pileated woodpeckers to Carolina wrens; yesterday morning, when I took the dog out to get the paper, there stood a doe in the empty lot next door, only to dart, at the sight of our Lab, for the woods at the end of the street.

We're home.

But the garage. No matter how crisp and ordered the inside of the house, no matter how many empty and flattened boxes piled up outside the kitchen door, a house is not a home, at least in my mind, until the garage has been put together. It's only a rudderless ship set for sail, a freshly waxed and gleaming car up on blocks, a perfectly detailed map with no true North. That's what I think, anyway, though I know that if I were to tell this to my wife, she'd only shake her head, let out an exasperated sigh.

"Men," she'd say.

1 sit on the bottom step of the stairs down into the garage and survey it all, this endless mass of material goods we've accrued: a two-car garage piled haphazardly with boxes, yard tools, Zeb and Jake's outside toys and sports equipment; and the camping equipment, recycling bins, bicycles, lawn mower, more boxes. A thousand items, all ready and waiting for me, and though I

2 FATHERS, SONS, AND BROTHERS

have no clue as to where to start, still my heart shines at the prospect of the job before me, as though by putting it all away I will become a better husband, a better father, a better man.

My father, I know, would have thrown as much of it out as he could. His garage was always a lean, pristine place, and it seems now, on this Friday I've cleared for the express mission of setting up the garage, that throwing things out is the way to begin. Separating the wheat from the chaff, as it were.

I stand, go to the mounds of our belongings on the left side of the garage, and pick up the first victim: an old and holey garden hose I've been meaning to repair for the last year or two. But now the truth rises in me, ugly and incriminating: I'd rather just buy a new one than seek out the pinhole leaks and replace the hardware at either end, and so I toss the hose out the side door, the one that leads off into the backyard. So begins, if in a heartless way, my association with my garage.

My father was a man of few words, and even fewer tools. What I remember of the first garage I ever knew was that it was a dark and windowless place: tar paper and bare studs, open rafters above. This was back in Buena Park, California, in a tiny stucco tract house where we lived from the time I was two until I was nine, and I can remember, too, the small Peg-Board above the workbench at the back of the garage. On it hung one hammer, one hand saw, and two screwdrivers, a Phillips-head and a flat-head. That was it.

Sure, there must have been other stuff somewhere in there, but back then garage paraphernalia wasn't important to me. What was important was that after Saturday yard work, we three

boys finally done pulling weeds along the fence in the backyard, my dad would hose out the entire garage, giving the concrete floor a slick sheen, a temptation too great for us. Brad, Tim, and I had no choice but to take turns running as fast as we could along the asphalt driveway, then jumping flat-footed onto that cement, blasting from pure California Saturday morning sunlight into the black garage to slide barefooted as far as we could, arms out like surfers' for balance.

And of course my mother forbade our doing this, hollering from the front porch each Saturday about broken arms and concussions. But my father only shook his head at us, gave what we supposed was a smile, then set about sweeping out the water, his garage once more pristine, every item in its place, we boys sliding and laughing and falling and laughing again.

But when I was nine, my father was transferred, and we moved from Buena Park to Phoenix, a place so strange and alien it might have been another planet: saguaro cactus as decorative landscaping, snakes sunning themselves on warm driveways at daybreak, coyotes rooting through the garbage cans.

And nobody had garages.

Instead, we all had carports, open-air structures under which you simply parked your car. Gone overnight was the sense of mystery about the garage, the dark and cool of it, the bare studs and tar paper replaced with eight painted wooden posts holding up a roof.