"I saw all too clearly that my father-not a mythic hero, not a superman, but just a good man-was a solitary traveler in the wilderness of anguish."
-Robert McCammon, Boy's Life

For Christmas, my son Tom gave me a book of poetry by Lionel Santiago Vega, a poet from Puerto Rico. The book's dedication struck me: "To my mother, who taught me how to cry when it's necessary, and to my father, who taught me how to be a man when crying isn't enough."

My first book, The Saints of Lost Things, is dedicated to my parents: "For my daddy, the boy who grew to be the man who saw that the emperor had no clothes and could not keep silent about it, and for my mama, the woman who loved him."

Most of my characters are not really based on anyone in particular, but I will tell you this, the character of Simon Carrick, Pete Carrick's daddy in Living Among the Dead, has a whole lot of my daddy in him. Simon Carrick is a naysayer, a malcontent, a tree-shaker, a hive-swatter, something that this country used to have a lot of. Now, however, most of us jump on a party's bandwagon and ride around in it, posing and posturing to each other and to those on the side of the road. Nobody really weighs an issue anymore and takes an unpopular stand. We go far left or far right to our camps and we stay there, cowering with people who think like us. We are becoming less a nation of fearless eagles and more a nation of blind geese. But that's not what this blog post is about, really. It's about my daddy.

I've seen a picture of a park bench posted on social media with the question, "If you could sit on this bench for five minutes and talk to someone, who would it be?"

No question, it would be my daddy. But it could only be five minutes, because by six minutes, we would be arguing. But so it is sometimes for fathers and sons. [Somewhere, I think my daddy just chuckled.]

I would sit there on that park bench and enjoy my daddy's sense of humor. My daddy, who sent Catherine and me some money before we got married and in the note that accompanied it, jokingly said that there was still time for me to escape to Mexico. My daddy, who, whenever we had a cold snap, used to say, "better bring in that brass monkey." My daddy, who, when asked what religion he was, would always say he was a frisbeeterian. We frisbeeterians believe that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof, and nobody can get it down, he would say.

My daddy was a union electrician, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local #194. Only recently did I learn from my uncle, his brother, that in the 1960's when a union meeting in Shreveport was taking on a tone of racial ugliness, my daddy stood up and proclaimed, "I cannot believe that you all would treat our black brothers this way." He was never voted most popular, nor did he yearn to be.

When I bought my first car, a 1974 Plymouth Duster, I proudly showed it to him, and he was proud of me for buying it with my own money. Until he saw the front bumper with the Confederate flag license plate placed there by the previous owner.

"Take that thing off, son," he said. "A war's never been fought for a sorrier cause." Words spoken by my daddy, the great-grandson of Confederate veteran A. J. Lawler, who had lost two brothers in the War.

And that friends, a war's never been fought for a sorrier cause, is a quote that has found it's way into Living Among the Dead, a sentiment held by Pete Carrick's daddy, Simon Carrick. Another exchange that has the markings of my daddy is this one in which Pete Carrick's Aunt Cora comes to visit each Sunday, only to find Pete and his daddy working:

“Working on the Sabbath again?” Aunt Cora would ask my father as she alighted from the carriage she had driven up the five miles from her house.
“Why not?” Daddy would say. “Got to eat on the Sabbath, too, don’t a man?”
She always let it go. She had argued the point before but had gotten nowhere, since in the end, Daddy had refused to recognize the authority of the Bible, Aunt Cora’s trump card. (“Written by men who didn’t wear drawers,” he would say.)

And this, when Pete decides to go off to war with the Confederate Army:

When war broke out, Daddy couldn’t understand how I would want to join up and leave what he considered a twisted little patch of paradise out in the woods, a colony of lucrative rancidness where a man could pause from his work, produce himself out of his trousers and urinate without ever having to so much as step behind a tree, a free and easy lifestyle. Perhaps he didn’t think there was anything better out there in the world. More likely, I understand, now that I’m a father, he knew I would never come back.

“Mark my words, son,” he said as he straightened up from his work, putting one hand on his hip while the other pulled the stub of a cigar from his teeth, “At the end of this thing, if there ever is an end, it won’t be one side or t’other that wins. It’ll be the man what sells the guns to ‘em both. He’ll be the winner.”

He stood there with a scudder in his hand, holding it limply at his side. I stood there with a sack drawn up on a stick over my shoulder. Neither of us said anything. Neither of us looked at the other. To have told him that I was proud of him would have been a lie. To have told him that I loved him would have been closer to the truth but just plain odd and not in keeping with how we conversed.

So I just said goodbye, turning from him and the smell of his cigar and the yellow-brown stench of the tanning yard, turning to the rocky red earth and the orange cinders of the Mt. Lebanon-Athens Road as it ascended a little rise of a hill. When I got to the top of it, I turned around. He was a small figure on the edge of the road in front of our place, looking back at me with his hands on his hips. I waited for him to acknowledge me, a wave, perhaps, but he hastily put his cigar to his mouth and turned back to his work. I wonder now if he felt I had betrayed him.

When you are a malcontent, your life is heavier than most other people's, and sometimes you find that you just can't carry it anymore. It's the loneliness that makes it so heavy. And so you have to set your life down and walk away from it. And that's what my daddy did. The world was too imperfect for him. He finally found it to be unlivable.

My daddy, my beloved infidel.

So I hope Daddy's soul is at rest in heaven or the cosmos or recycled into another soul. Or maybe up on a roof somewhere, basking in the sun while a gentle breeze tickles the leaves and they shimmy in the bright sunlight.

To say I understand him better now would be right on the money.

To see a picture of my daddy and pictures that reflect the characters and places in my novels, visit my Facebook page:https://www.facebook.com/chlawlerstor...