A Difficult Child

The walls of our living room were atom-blast white the day Aunt Dorothy came to visit us in Grand Haven. She had driven through a winter storm, and the intense light came from the sun reflected off a deep blanket of new snow.

I was ten months old. I had never seen such a thing: So white!

My sisters followed Aunt Dorothy into the kitchen, where mom was stirring something on the stove. She’d propped open the front door, leaving nothing between me and the white.

I wasn’t walking yet, and had reportedly never traveled more than three feet under my own power. This was because my sisters Jan and Denise, who were one and two years older than me, respectively, would sit on my back whenever I tried to crawl. So this was my big opportunity. If I were ever going to get anywhere, the time was now. And there was all that whiteness…

Aunt Dorothy eventually stopped tickling my sisters, turned to mom, and said, Where’s the baby?

Good question; big scramble. Where's the baby?

“Your dad went out the front door,” said mom, who told me the story decades later, “and there was this hole in the snow next to the porch about the size of a football.”

There was a snowdrift out there about three feet deep. And there I was, she said, on my back at the bottom of that hole, looking somewhat astonished and not entirely displeased.


About a year after that, we went to visit my paternal grandparents in Detroit. Shortly before the trip, mom had caught me standing on top of the stove, apparently about to step into a boiling pot of stew. She hadn’t known I could climb appliances, and this knowledge would come to haunt her.

“Whenever you were out of my sight,” she said, “I was on edge. I was always expecting something to fall over and go 'boom'.”

Nevertheless, I had somehow managed to drop off her radar — and grandma's stove looked really, really interesting. Television knobs had taught me a lot about the importance of mechanical controls, but I had no conception of the power wielded by such objects when connected to a gas stove.

So there they all were, said mom, having a nice little chat in the living room, when the house blew up.

This was a minor exaggeration. I had been playing with the stove; I’d valved off some gas, and not in the manner kids are generally known for — and then I’d found the igniter.

“The fireball,” said mom, “filled the downstairs.”

They ran into the kitchen to find me plastered to the far wall, stunned and blackened as if by cartoon dynamite.

“The whole block went without gas for about three days,” she said. “It was the middle of the winter.”

That was my first brush with fame.


I didn't exactly stay out of trouble after that, but I did manage to stay out of the papers for a while.

I had a lot of friends in our neighborhood in Grand Haven, but the boy I played with the most was Tom Harz. Tom was a normal kid, but he had some bad habits, one of which was The Naked Tree Trick. Whenever we would walk into the woods behind his house, Tom would drop his pants, grab a tree limb, and swing from it, laughing. He would always try to get me to do this.

“No,” I would say, “it’s Tuesday [or Monday, or Thursday, or Friday, or Saturday], too close to Sunday.” The implication being, God will be pissed.

“Okay, what about tomorrow?”

“I have to clean my room.”

“Crap,” he’d say, and grab another limb. And he would hang there, swinging, laughing, trying to get me to look at him.

But I didn’t swing that way, so I would just walk down the trail until Tom gave it up and came after me.

I'd known Tom since kindergarten. On my first day of school, I told the class I had pet squirrels. The kids were delighted. That was the plan.

The first time Tom came over to play, he looked the place over, and then looked up at my mom.

“Where are the squirrels?”

There were no squirrels. Tom and mom had a big laugh over this; Tom outed me at school the following Monday; this took a lot of living down.

I had by this time learned to blush, but I never stopped improving upon my life through the agency of fiction. Once in second grade, we were asked what our fathers did for a living.

“He’s a Navy skin diver,” I said. I thought that was as cool a job for one’s father as any I could come up with, and I really didn’t have any idea of what my father did during the day.

And what exactly does a seven-year-old do with “plastics engineer,” anyway? Might as well call him a Navy skin diver.


My friendship with Tom ended in fourth grade. The trouble began shortly after I found an abandoned house.

I was riding my bicycle past the school one day, and saw sunlight flashing off something in the woods.

I set my bike on the kickstand, walked into the woods, and there it was: An old house, paint chips like snow around the crumbling foundation, grapevines enveloping it like a slow-motion movie monster.

I made my way around back, and looked in a window. I knocked and listened, shouted hello!

Nothing. I put my palms on the sash, pushed upward. It opened easily; I crawled in.

I found myself in the basement. The furnace – black, huge, many-armed – reached ponderously for me. I ran for the stairs.

The stairs led to the kitchen. The place was furnished and looked lived-in. There was a plate on the kitchen table containing something brown and shriveled: Somebody's dinner from long ago.

I started roaming the house, marveling at the striped wallpaper in every room and shrinking away from the spidery corners. Upstairs, I found an ancient headset, probably from a telephone switchboard. I put it around my neck and kept looking for souvenirs. I filled my pockets and left after an hour or so.
Back at home, mom asked me where I got it all.

“I found it in the woods.”

“Where?”

I pointed to the dunes behind our house.

“We should call the police,” she said.

I said I wasn’t sure about that.

She called the police anyway. They took my stuff.


It only seemed natural to bring Tom along for the next trip.

“This house is yours?”

“Yeah. We own it and the property, all of this,” I said, with a gesture that took in half of southern Michigan and a portion of Indiana. "It’s been in our family a long time. My great grandparents lived here. But we have to go in the window, because I forgot the keys.”

“You forgot the keys?”

“Yeah. I mean, I don’t know where the keys are, probably with my dad.”

A safe approach, since dad was usually elsewhere.

Tom, too, came out with a fair amount of loot. He was duly impressed. That was the plan.

I was eating breakfast in the kitchen the next morning when the doorbell rang. My mom went to the door.

“Hello?”

“Hi, we were wondering if we could get the keys to the house today.”

By this time I was standing in the living room. There were four kids out there, Tom on the top step.

Mom looked at me. I shrank away from her.

“Keys to what house?”

A bad scene, to be sure: A certain amount of shouting and slapping, followed by a quick trip to the police station.

“I'm scared," I said.

“I hope they keep you,” she said.

They didn't keep me. Too bad.


That's when Tom decided to hate me. I think he had a little help from his friend Bob, a redheaded bully with a beach-ball profile. He terrified my sisters.

“Man, I hate you,” said Bob, and laughed his fat jolly redheaded kid laugh. Tom laughed too.

“Yeah,” said Tom, “we hate you!”

This was at recess. And for the rest of the hour, Tom and Bob kept bumping into me on the playground, pretending not to see me as they threw things in my direction, that sort of thing. I threw something back; Tom acted terribly surprised.

They showed up in my yard Saturday morning.

“I hate you,” said Tom. “I want to fight you! Ready?”

“Okay,” I said, and wrestled him to the ground. I put my weight on his back and held him in a headlock. Tom stopped struggling.

“Okay,” he grunted, I give up!”

“You give up?”

“I give up! Let me up!”

I let him up. He punched me in the stomach.

“That hurt!” I said, starting to cry.

“That hurt!” laughed Tom and Bob. “That hurt!”

And then mom, who had been watching from the kitchen window, offered some encouragement.

“Boy, you’d better fight back,” she shouted, “or I’ll come down there and beat you up myself!”

Tom and Bob loved this. It was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. And mom, who should have been running those kids through the sausage mill, as far as I was concerned, was now on their side. It was all too much.

“I quit,” I said, and ran into the house.

Tom and Bob loved that, too. They left, laughing.

Inside, mom was steaming.

“When I was a girl,” she said, “some girls came to fight me, and I cried, but I fought, and I left ‘em bloody!”

I hung my head.

That night at supper, I was not my normal boisterous self.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked my dad.

“He lost a fight,” said mom, and passed the ham.

He raised his eyebrows.

“He’d better not lose any fights,” he said, scowling theatrically at me as he chewed his dinner.


And then one day, my parents had great news.

“We’re moving to Detroit, to be near your cousins.”

Really?

“Yes,” said mom, big smile. "Your dad has a new job in Detroit. We’ll be moving as soon as school ends.”

The kids at school found out. Mrs. Storey told the class, and then interviewed me on the subject. I didn’t have a lot to say.

“I’m glad you’re moving,” said Bob at recess. “I hate you.”

Tom just laughed and looked uneasy. There wasn’t a lot of coming and going in our little community, so watching someone move away was a little like watching someone die. And that was the treatment I got from the other kids: He’s going away, let’s be nice to him. Even Bob seemed to choke up a little whenever he told me how glad he was that I was going, and how much he hated me.

My parents had a little secret: We were in fact moving to Detroit to be near our cousins, but we weren’t doing it because that would be more fun for all concerned; we were moving there so dad could die.

He had smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for most of his young life. He built ships during the war, he built fiberglass boats for a living, and I doubt if he ever wore a dust mask. If that boy didn’t have cancer, something was seriously wrong with the world.

But not to worry: That boy had cancer. He was 41 when we moved away from Grand Haven. He would last another year.


The summer before we left Grand Haven, we went to visit my Aunt Rae, who lived on the eastern tip of Michigan’s upper peninsula.

Aunt Rae was an important person to me in several ways. One, she let me drive the riding lawn mower around without requiring me to actually mow the lawn. Two, she had a pretty decent mustache. It tickled when she kissed me. And three, she served me coffee, a very grown-up drink. Only the two of us drank it in a house full of people: A special bond.

Near the end of our visit, dad and I loaded up the canoe to float the Big Two-Hearted River. The girls would not be coming; that was just the way my father was raised. The dads did things with the boys, and the moms did things with the girls. It was a bad deal and they knew it. But that was my father’s way.

Dad had made this trip a few months before with some friends, and they had taken some chainsaws along to cut their way through the trees that sometimes blocked the river in the spring. He figured those trees would have stayed cleared.

Mom and the girls dropped us off at the boat launch.

“We’ll meet you at the bridge around 3 or 4 o’clock,” said dad to mom.

“See you there,” said mom, waving.

The Big Two-Hearted is a winding, bewildering river, a snake tied in knots and dressed in barbed wire — beautiful barbed wire, and overhung with trees that have had just enough time to get big before the flooding brings them down.

And it was not long before we came to a tree that had fallen across our path. Dad swore. There was no going under it; we had to pull up on the bank, which was covered in brush, and drag the canoe around the tree. We floated it, got back in, paddled around an oxbow — and there were two trees lying across the river, and nowhere to pull up.

“Okay,” he said. “Get out.”

I got out and stood in the river with my shoes in my hand, as he lifted the canoe — a ‘60s fiberglass job, sixteen feet long, ridiculously heavy — and threaded the canoe through the trees.

We got back in. I put my shoes back on, and we paddled around another bend.

And into another cats-cradle of fallen trees.

This time he didn’t even sigh. I took my shoes off, got out, and watched him thread the canoe through the trees. Back in, a few minutes of clear canoeing, more trees. And again and again, all morning, all afternoon, and into the evening. Dad was clearly tired, but he wouldn’t let me help with the hoisting and threading.

“It’s too heavy,” he said. “I’d rather do it alone.”

I wasn’t wearing a watch, but I could tell it was way after 4 o’clock.

“I think we missed the lamprey weir,” said dad, referring to a landmark that would have told him to take another branch.

“I’ve never been so scared in my life,” I said.

He laughed.

“We’re fine,” he said. “Let’s pull up on that sandbar.”

And so we did.

“Where are your shoes?”

I looked down.

“I don’t know.”

He sighed.

“Damn.”

He was not angry. In fact, he seemed pretty happy. We gathered wood and he built a fire. He reached into the pockets of his jacket, pulled out a pistol and a bottle of rye, and leaned back into a pile of pine boughs. We ate the last of our sandwiches and watched the fire.

I fell asleep; he stayed up and kept the fire going.


Around 2 o'clock, we heard a shout.

“Hello?”

“Over here,” my dad shouted.

It was the posse, come to rescue us.


When we didn’t show up, mom went straight for the sheriff’s office, and told the girls to wait in the car. She walked into the station.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes,” she said, trembling. “My husband and son are lost on the Big Two-Hearted River. My husband has terminal cancer. He’s probably had a heart attack, and he’s probably out there dead somewhere with my ten-year-old son.”

She broke down at this point, and a deputy came around a desk and caught her on her way to the floor.

They sent out several search teams, one of whom saw our fire after eight hours in the brush. They had come overland instead of floating the river, which just made so much sense. But that meant I had to walk out of the woods barefoot, and we were miles from the road.

So we walked. I had no trouble keeping up, and according to the legend, I didn’t even say “ouch.”

We slept in a motel that night. In the morning, we all went down to the dining room for breakfast, and it was the most sumptuous breakfast I can remember: Several styles of sausage and bacon, fried and poached and scrambled eggs that just kept appearing in front of me, pancakes and syrup, coffee and tea, milk and juice.

And just about everyone who came into the room knew the story, and everyone who heard the story came over to look at the kid who walked out of the woods barefoot. Waitresses and old ladies kissed me; grizzled old fishing guides solemnly shook my hand; kids gawked at me as I fed.

And my sisters loved me, and my mother laughed, and my father laughed more than anyone, roaring whenever the story got to “…and then he said, ‘I ain’t never been more scared in my life!’ ”

But he wasn’t making fun of me. And we were all there; and we were all happy; and we were all pleased with one another.

And that was the last time any of that was true.