The Postcard

By Bob Liddil

On my 21^st birthday, my mom told me my dad wasn’t really dead. For as long as I could remember, he had been dead – died in the war in Vietnam, died a hero, my mom had said to me when I was old enough to ask, “Where’s daddy?”

My dad had watched over me from heaven during my childhood. He reached out and stopped the car that knocked me off my bike at the age of 10, kept it from hitting me any harder than it took to skin a knee. At 16 – when I was so drunk I could barely walk, let alone drive, my pops reached out from heaven and stole my car keys. I passed out looking for them. I was hung over and wishing I was dead the next morning when I finally found them. But I lived.

On my 21^st birthday, my mom handed me a postcard and said how sorry she was to have lied to me since the time I first started walking. She handed me a picture postcard with a bunch of buildings printed on it and a return address on the back. It read: Alabama State Correctional Facility, Monroeville, Alabama. My father the war hero had been resurrected from the grave as a chain gang convict in South Alabama.

I never said a word to her. I tucked the postcard into my shirt pocket, grabbed some jeans and T’s from my dresser drawer, climbed into the old pickup truck she’d told me was his and burned rubber out of our driveway. I could see her crying in the rear view and I didn’t care.

5 days later I was there. I stood on the spot where the picture was taken, facing the prison farm from the side of the road across a field of tall green grass. I was so angry that I would have killed anybody who came across me that day, fueled by five days of imagination driving that old pickup down from Vermont. Who was this man, my father? What had he done to be here? How could I have a convict for as father? The questions ate at me like the acid rain had done on the hood of the old Ford.

It took another week to get past the paperwork to get in to see him. I don’t know what I expected. Yes I do, actually. My father had gone off to war at the age of 21, the same age as me. I’d seen pictures of him in his uniform. Handsome man. Mom said I was very much like him. I expected to see the soldier in the photographs, the guardian angel who had stood between me and harm every time mom told me, “Be careful, son. Your father’s watching, but you have to do the work.”

The room in which we were to meet stank of stale cigarettes and piss and sweat. There were babies in dirty diapers being held by proud fathers in striped pants and white T-shirts who were talking softly with worried women. I sat in alone corner with my back to a wall, counting tiles on the ceiling and wishing I were somewhere else.

When he walked through the barred door and into the room, something changed. The other convicts gathered up their folks and with permission of the “boss” on duty, moved outside, until at last, only he and I and the “boss” remained.

He was taller than I am by a good six inches and lean and hard from years of backbreaking labor. That much was evident at first glance. His skin was brown and leathery and wrinkled from the weather. It contrasted dramatically with the clean white T-shirt.

I just stared and I didn’t speak, and when I did, finally, I said, “She told me you were dead.” My voice cracked as I spoke.

“That’s what I told her to tell you, son.” I was thunderstruck at how deep and gentle his voice was, coming from so hard a man.

“But why?” years and years of pain went into those two words.

He sighed, and pulled up a chair and motioned for me to sit back down in the one I now stood in front of.

“Because I killed a police officer,” he said, and the sadness of his statement was unmistakable in his tone. His shoulders drooped a little.

“Better,” he continued, “for you to grow up with a ghost for a father than a convict. I was afraid you’d turn out like me.”

My resentment and anger began to melt away as he told me the story of a young soldier with a new wife and a baby son, Florida bound and stopped in Birmingham, looking for work. He hadn’t found any, but Mom got a job in a nightclub, as a waitress.

“I was really drunk that night, “he told me, “and the guy had been hitting on your momma all evening, even though she told him no and showed him her ring.”

There was a fight.

“I stabbed him with his own knife.” Dad said. “But he turned out to be an off duty cop not much older than me. He died.”

There was a finality and simplicity to his statement. His eyes brimmed with tears as he said it.

“If I could take it back, I would.” He said softly. “I knew they were going to throw the book at me. I sent your momma home to her parents and told her to tell you I had died.”

I hugged him before I left that stark stinking room. I told him I would write him, and I have done so several times. I sent him a postcard from Baghdad just the other day, as a matter of fact.

I’m a soldier now, just like he was, that part was true. I kissed my mom and forgave her deception just before I enlisted. Sitting here now, in this HumVee, writing this in my journal, I’m thinking. I guess I’ve come to terms with it all.

I am my father’s son. My father’s doing time in Alabama. It’s all here on the postcard my mom gave me the day I turned 21. He’s watching, but I have to do the work.