Terence Knox: Stories: LETTERS TO MY HIGH SCHOOL NEWSPAPER: Cats and Dogs

LETTERS TO MY HIGH SCHOOL NEWSPAPER

Cats and Dogs

I am my mother's son. I loved my father too; make no mistake about that.

But it was a different kind of love. My father was a tough country boy from rural Mississippi, who grew up hunting through the woods with hounds as companions and helpers, never as pets.

My mother was raised in a house with mowed lawns on the outskirts of Tupelo with a cat in her lap. Sometimes two cats. And she could not kill. So I was raised in the often uneasy intersection of those two very different life views.

I learned early to fight with my fists, but was a disappointment to my father because I had no stomach for the hunting and killing of small game in what was then the wilderness of West Richland. As a kid he'd make me acompany him on those bumpy roads out there along the Yakima River, and then follow along behind him as he carried his shotgun down some dirt trail hunting pheasant.

But I would deliberately make so much noise that the birds were mostly scared off before he got there, and he'd get so frustrated with me that he'd tell me to go wait in the car.

And I would.

And at some point during that passage of time growing up, he simply stopped taking me along with him. Maybe it qualifies as what they call a bitter understanding between Father and son. I'm not sure.

I know he was proud of me about a lot of things, because I was a good athlete, and he could show some of the fellows at work my name in the paper once in awhile. But he couldn't take me on the fishing trips with his fishing buddies because I was a bedwetter clear up until I was 12, which embarrassed him greatly on those trips, and I knew it did, even though he never said that. And I could never get myself to bait a hook with one of those desperately squirming worms from out of that green coffee can, when even the younger boys along on the trip could do it easy.

On the last trip I ever went on, a two-day trip up to the Palouse River fishing for channel cat, they had the day's catch tied in the water along the bank to keep them from going bad, and that night I sneaked down to the riverside and let them go, all of them, still strung together like that and certainly doomed to a more prolonged dying than they would have suffered in our frying pan. And I knew that when I did it. But I did it anyway. I did it, I let them go, and I stood there shivering in the mud that night watching them float off downstream, and I knew I was going to catch hell for it, and I knew it was a stupid thing to do, but I did it anyway. And I didn't even cover up my tracks. Couldn't have. And they knew immediately the next morning what I had done. Everybody knew. But nobody said anything. But I know my dad was ashamed of me.

The other men didn't really even know what to say. But none of them would look at me when they were packing up and loading the cars in the morning. The other kids didn't even have anything to much to do with me, either.

It seems like a hundred years ago now. Well, it was almost exactly 70, so that's close enough. But I still remember every moment of that morning from the time I got out of the sleeping bag and stood listening to the conversations of the men down by the River Bank, and them looking up towards me standing there with my hands stuffed in my pockets.

But you see, the way I looked at things back then, I was more or less within my rights.

They'd all been pretty drunk the night before, and all day the day before that. Loud and crude and drunk. And I couldn't stand them, any of them. And their kids shied away from me because I wet the bed. But they couldn't say anything because I could fight, and would fight.

So they just loaded up the cars and headed on back to the Tri-Cities, about seven or eight people all together, counting the kids. It was a long drive back home, and my father didn't say a word to me.

But he'd been very drunk that night before, and I had seen him. But even though he knew I wouldn't tell on him, there was enough shame to go around.

Still, we both understood that was our last trip together.

For some reason, I feel it's important to tell you that my father never laid a hand on me in anger. Not ever. It just wasn't his way.

Oh, but my mother would, and did, without hesitation. She was a slapper, my mother was.

Even as an old woman in her assisted living residence and I was a middle-aged visitor, she once slapped me smartly across my cheek over a comment I made about some memory or other.

And we both just froze, staring at each other. Then I sputtered into a kind of giggle. I couldn't help it.

I was my mother's son.

Terry Davis Knox "65"