Severed Ties: Mike goes to college

Severed Ties Notes:  Just before Mike leaves for College                              10-7-2017

By John W. Vander Velden

Michael took a breath and leaned his head back.  Too tall for the plane seat’s head restraints his head hung for an instant in an uncomfortable angle as with eyes closed his mind returned to when he was eighteen.  Perhaps it was then he finally began to understand Henry.

A hot September night he couldn’t sleep.  Everything was packed and ready.  All the arrangements had been made.  Though he had not seen it a room in Harrison Hall, West Lafayette, a space he would share with another would be waiting for his arrival.  The long road of preparation complete, yet Michael did not feel ready for Purdue University.

He stared at the ceiling of the small room he had used since his arrival.  Lost and alone he had felt then.  In some ways he yet felt the same.  But the eight years had built a rhythm, a rhythm he knew and understood.  And in those years he had formed friendships as well, particularly Jimmy and Timmy.   Though they were his first friends others followed, and among those was Debbie.  He would not say that Debbie had become a girlfriend.  They hadn’t officially dated, but in her he had found a confidant, and she helped make the awkward years of High School endurable.

It was there in the dark as his eyes moved about the familiar room where the faint light, the dimness that oozed in the only window, that he realized that it was the people that bound a person to a place.  That the friends he had here, by and large, defined this place he had not so softly settled into years before.  It was then that he understood that those left behind, his boyhood friends, Joey and Chuck, and his father were the anchor that had held him to Debuque.  Those living in his childhood neighborhood and the memories of his mother, they made up his mental image of life then and there.  Mike knew that he would never get over the loss of his mother.

With swirling thoughts Mike understood that sleep would be impossible.  Tossing aside the sheet he grabbed his britches and silently made his way down the stairs.  He had no intention of waking others just because he couldn’t sleep.  As he eased himself out the back door he saw the silhouette of a man sitting on the steps looking up at the stars.  The glow of Henry’s cigarette, enough for recognition.

Henry didn’t even look his way.  “Couldn’t sleep either, huh?”

Mike nodded without considering that the other would not see him.

Mike heard him draw a deep breath.  “I done you wrong, Mike.”  The words carried none of the strength his grandfather’s voice always had.

Henry looked over his shoulder, his face dim in the light of the cigarette and the stars above.  He shook his head slightly, snuffed out the smoke and flicked the butt into the yard.  “I was harder on you than any of my own.” 

Mike watched his grandfather as the man turned his head looking down to the dark grass before them.

Henry rose from the step, turning he looked up at Mike yet in the doorway and three steps above him.  “Your ma would have been proud of you…of what you have become.  I’d like ta think I had a bit in that, but I ‘spect that you’ve become the man you are in spite of me.”  Henry looked down shaking his head once again.

Mike didn’t answer his mind filled with all times Henry had voiced his disappointments.

The older man looked toward the west.  “They say it ain’t right to love one of you kids more than the others.”  Mike watched as Henry’s chest rose and fell with a deep breath.  “Probably true, but it don’t change things none.  I loved Annie more than Joe, Les, or Mark.  Maybe because she was our only girl.  Maybe because she looks so much like your grandma years ago.  Hard ta imagine ain’t it.  But your grandmother was a beauty, yes she was.  Still is as far as I’m concerned.”  He turned to face Mike once again.  “I was too easy on her.  ‘Spect I spoiled her something awful.”

The man tilted his head back and even in the dimness Mike saw he closed his eyes a moment.  “I loved her so much…and she broke my heart, and I blamed everybody.  I blamed Annie, your pa, I guess I blamed Emma too.  But when you came I blamed you.”

Mike wanted to shout, How could you blame me for things that happened before I was even born, but he stood there watching and waiting.

“Emma will tell ya that I changed when your ma left with your pa…that I became a hard cuss.  It’s true, I was just mad all the time, and heaven help anybody that came close.”  Henry turned and faced Mike again.  “You come almost outa the blue, so near to when we heard about Annie’s….”  The man swayed as he looked down.  Mike heard him draw a deep breath.  “I should’a understood, should’a seen just how much your pa loved Annie.  It never were a contest.  It weren’t right that I thought her loving Patrick meant she didn’t love us.  It weren’t right that I demanded she choose.  How stupid this old fool was…still is for that matter.”  Henry looked up into Mikes eyes.  “Instead of pushing you away, like I done all these years, I should have seen that God give me another chance.  A chance to make things right.”  Again he closed his eyes and shook his head as lowered his face.  “You’ve had a hard road Mike, and I did my best ta make it harder.”  Henry did not look up as he went on.  “I got no right and I know the answer you’ll give, but I got ta ask.  Mike can you forgive this old fool?”

Mike’s mind was filled with all harsh word that had been directed his way.  It would have been so easy to toss all the pain back into the face of his grandfather.  But there in the dark, in the small hours of the day he would leave the farm, he came to understand the man.  And in understanding his grandfather he understood himself a bit better as well.

Mike drew in a deep breath went down the steps and stood face to face with the man, he held out his hand and said.  “Yes, grandfather I can forgive you.”  The words were true but even so Mike knew how hard a task keeping them would be.

Henry just stood there in the dark staring at Mike’s outstretched hand.  It was then something happened that no one would have expected.  For as Mike watched he saw the big man begin to quake, as he sobbed.  Mike moved the last steps and wrapped his arms around the man, held him, as his grandfather, the man that seemed to know no other emotion but anger, wept, perhaps for the first time in his life.

Yes, that moment in the early hours of the day he was to leave for college he began to understand the man.  It was then that he knew that Henry Faustich was indeed human.  His grandfather was certainly flawed, but a man, and they shared more than some genes.  They shared a deep love for the same person, Ann Coulter, a daughter and a mother and were both crushed by her passing.  They were damaged men trying to get on, each day to the next.

Mike opened his eyes, the roar of the aircraft filling his ears.  Things changed after that time in the dark.  Looking back now he understood that things had begun to change years before, only he had been too blind to notice.  Life had always been tight on the Faustich farm.  Each month Emma had to find a way to pay the bills and feed those that shared the farmhouse.  When Mark joined the Army, Henry was shorthanded.  He demanded that Mike carry his share, a share that Mike felt was unfairly large and grew with each passing month.  But looking back he saw just how hard Henry had worked.  That he placed the hardest demands upon himself.  How would a boy of thirteen begin to recognize realities of the demanding life farming was then.

Here on the plane, Mike knew that his grandfather considered himself a failure.  Soft voices and words he was not to hear of his grandparent’s dream, a place of their own, should have revealed another part of Henry’s broken heart.  But Mike had been just a boy.  He did not understand that a tenant farmer just didn’t get ahead…couldn’t get ahead.

But somehow Henry and Emma had squeezed pennies until they bled.  And in that blood found the funds needed to send Mike to the University.  Yes, Mike had worked, worked those years for his grandfather, worked when he had gone to college.  Mike knew how to work.  His grandfather had taught him.  Perhaps it was the greatest lesson the older man had imparted.