A love of story was my Dad's gift to me

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — It was my Uncle Jim who told us my Dad was going to die.

He stopped my brother and me in the hallway as we arrived outside Dad’s hospital room, and led us to a set of worn cushion chairs in the lobby at the University of Kansas Medical Center hospital. Uncle Jim lit a cigarette, which I thought was a bit much, lung cancer being the subject at hand. He sucked in the smoke and told us that all medical efforts were useless.

“He’ll be gone by Christmas.”

The date as we sat there was Nov. 5, 1981. Christmas was six weeks away.

Uncle Jim Wenzl was Dad’s brother, and a doctor, and though his specialty was pediatric nephrology he knew the subject at hand, and as usual was pointedly blunt. Doctors in death cases don’t tell you much, he said. They worry that if they speak the truth that the family will get mad, or the patient will give up and die quick, or commit suicide, creating paperwork and tedious committee meetings with lawyers. So doctors dance around, or tell you there is always hope.

He said he’d told Dad the blunt truth last night because he knew Dad wanted it. Dad had said he was glad to know.

Dad’s full name was Gene Roy Wenzl. He was only 50, and had never smoked, so he had some cause, as we all did, to feel cheated. He had five sons; I was the oldest at 26. The youngest, my brother Rich, was still in high school.

What would happen to Rich now, and Mom? Dad was a farmer. Keeping the farm going had required Dad to work seven days a week all year. Would we lose the farm?

“So what do we do now?” I asked. I sat on soft maroon cushions, wanting to do something heroic. Uncle Jim shrugged.

“If you want to cry, cry. If you want to cuss, cuss.”

I wanted none of that.

* * *

Mom was sitting at the foot of the bed, looking sad. Dad lay in pajamas, wearing a half grin as he talked with nurses.

Dad was intensely curious when he met new people. Farmers working alone for seven days a week do not often meet new people, so this was a treat, even one day after he heard his death sentence. He looked embarrassed though, lying there in his pajamas. Stripped of dignity.

Gary held his right hand; I walked around and took his left hand. We never touched like this at home. Every moment felt out of joint.

I told Dad we would let him rest and come back in two hours. He nodded.

“You want anything when we come back?” I asked.

He thought for a moment. The half-grin came back.

“Yeah. Beer. A Miller beer.”

I glanced at Gary; he was surprised, too. The man who never broke speed limits wanted us to sneak beer into a hospital.

“You never drink Miller.”

“I know,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Miller it is, then.”

“Salt,” Dad said.

“What?”

“I got a craving for salt,” Dad said. “Miller tastes more salty.”

* * *

I had a strained relationship with my Dad that he was aware of, and a reverence for him that I had hidden from him. I knew a secret that not even he knew: He had created me, and not only with a biological act.

I was a police and courthouse reporter for the Kansas City Star. I lived in an apartment about 20 minutes from the hospital and had told Mom that my apartment would be the base camp for family as Dad died.

I took Gary home with me now, gave him a sandwich.

On the way home, I stopped at a liquor store and bought three 8-packs of Miller. Miller in those days sold regular 12-ounce six-packs, but also 8-ounce beers in 8-packs. Pony beers, we called them. They fit nicely inside coat pockets.

At the apartment Gary and I sat at my kitchen table for an hour or so. Gary and I had grown up only two years apart and could pass entire days of fellowship without saying a word, but on this day there really was nothing to say.

I opened a closet, and took out two bulky winter coats with deep pockets. I gave one to Gary. I put 12 beers in the pockets of mine.

“You’re way overdoing it,” Gary said.

“No, I’m not.”

Gary put eight beers into his coat. We walked out, bottles clinking. In the hospital, the beers clinked with every step, ka-tink-a-tink-a-tink.

“We tinkle like little glass fairies,” Gary said. No one stopped us.

* * *

Mom was gone; Uncle Jim said our cousins had whisked her off for a rest. Jim grinned when he heard the clinking. Gary closed the door, and we took out beers and lined them in ranks under Dad’s bed. I handed a beer to Dad. He looked irritated.

“I only asked for one.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re going to get us all in trouble.”

“Maybe. You know how those doctors are about their rules.”

“Give me one,” Jim said.

“This doctor has his own rules,” I said. I handed Uncle Jim a beer. He twisted off the cap and took a gulp.

“I wish you’d take it all out of here,” Dad said. “I don’t see the point of making trouble.”

“Have a beer and don’t worry about it,” Jim said.

Dad tried to twist off the cap. He could not do it. He had been the strongest man I’d ever known; milking cows, twisting wrenches, lifting heavy pieces of machinery, tossing 70-pound hay bales into feeder bunks. But he had spent two months coughing before Mom got him to a hospital. He had lost muscle; skin hung off his forearms. His hands had a little shake.

I took his bottle, twisted off the cap and handed it back. He watched beer bubbles float from bottom to top, took a sip.

“You’re right,” he said. “What could they do if they caught us? Kill me?”

“Painfully, if they want to,” Jim said. “But I think not.”

We sat in silence for a few moments.

“Anybody got any good stories?” Jim asked.

Gary stirred where he was sipping beer in the corner. I was a newspaper reporter and Gary was a paramedic, and he and I and Jim always had raunchy jokes and blood-curdling stories from the worlds of cops or paramedics and medicine.

Gary told a failed-suicide story. A man tried to shoot himself in the head and shot off half his jaw instead.

Jim grinned.

Dad looked puzzled, but smiled, and coughed.

“I got one,” I said. “This guy two years ago, not far from here, was stabbed in a fight. The ambulance crew picks him up. He’s gonna make it. They take him to a hospital, a few miles from here. They heaved him off the gurney for the surgeons, and when they lift him, the guy’s semi-automatic slips out of his waistband and hits the floor and goes off, and puts a bullet up through the gurney and through the guy’s heart.

“He died as soon as they plopped him on the operating table. So the doctors just shrugged, and put him back on the gurney and wheeled him to the morgue.”

“Unlucky guy,” Gary said.

“No luck involved,” Jim said. “When God wants you, he wants you.”

Dad stared at us, a bemused look on his face.

“What?” Jim said.

“Nothing,” Dad said. “Keep going.”

“What did God say after he created man?” Jim said.

“What?” Dad said.

“I can do better than this.”

Dad looked at me. “Your mother would like that one.”

“You want religion, I got religion,” Gary said. “Moses comes down from the mountain top, with the stone tablets. ‘People of God,’ he says. ‘I have good news, and I have bad news. The good news is, I’ve talked him down to 10. The bad news: Adultery is still one of them.’ ”

Dad burst out laughing, a real laugh, and then coughed, spasms that doubled him up in bed. Jim put his beer on the floor and got out of his chair.

“Please, please stop,” Dad said. “I can’t breathe.”

“Laughing is good for you,” Jim said.

“You’re going to kill me.”

Jim sat down. Dad sagged back against the pillow. “I haven’t had this much fun in a long time,” he said.

“Two old guys love baseball,” Jim said.

“No, no, no,” Dad said.

“Two old guys love baseball. They grew up listening to games on the radio, and saw every game they could see. They sat on the front porch every night and listened to the announcer call the games. They got very old, and one day made a deal: The first to die would come back from the dead and tell whether there was baseball in heaven.

“One day one of the old guys passed on. Not long after, his friend is on the porch listening to a night game, and sure enough there’s a ghost on the porch.

“ ‘Great!’ the alive guy says. ‘So is there baseball in heaven?’

“ ‘I have good news and bad news,’ the ghost says. ‘The good news is there is baseball in heaven.’

“ ‘What’s the bad news?’ his friend asks.

“ ‘You’re pitching on Friday.’ ”

* * *

We heard someone turn the door handle.

I stuck my beer behind my chair. A nurse came in; her eyes lit up alertly as soon as she sniffed the beery air.

Had she stuck her foot under Dad’s bed at that moment, she would have nudged many empty beer bottles hidden under Dad’s overhanging blanket.

She asked Dad whether he felt comfortable. She told him she worked this floor, and that she’d get him anything he needed. Dad nodded.

She looked at me, then at Dad. She felt his forehead, and stroked back his thick shock of dark hair.

“Your son?” she asked, tilting her head toward me.

“Yes.”

“He’s got your hair. And he looks much like you.”

“That’s an insult to both of us,” Dad said.

She smiled. He did not smile. Neither did I.

The nurse stroked his hair again. She turned, walked to the door, grasped the handle. She turned and looked at me.

“I hope you boys have yourselves one hell of a party.”

She stepped out and shut the door.

“I knew you’d get us caught,” Dad said. “The room smells like a still.”

“She’s not going to say anything to anybody,” Uncle Jim said. “Roy should have offered her a beer. Do we have any left?”

I pulled a beer out.

“Hand it over,” Jim said.

* * *

Dad died six weeks later, the time frame Jim had predicted.

Mom and I cradled Dad’s head in our hands. Jim held his left hand, and my brothers Tom and Rich hung on to his right. Gary and Larry were at the other ends of Kansas, working their jobs. I would call them soon. Rich was sobbing; he was only 17. Uncle Jim was crying, too.

Just before Dad died I leaned down. “We all love you,” I said. He moved his head ever so slightly.

“I love you, too.”

* * *

He had created me, though he did not know this.

He had troubled relations with all five of his sons, especially with me. We were all teenagers or young men, rebelling against authority and dirt and blisters and farm work and him.

He and I had started to get past it, but there were still bruised feelings. He had driven us so hard on the farm, and had not told us why: that the farm’s survival was in jeopardy. We fought with him, too, because we wanted to explore the horizon. We did not know that farm finances were so shaky that all five sons qualified, without ever knowing it, for free and reduced-price lunches at school. When Mom told him about this, Dad told her to pay the full cost. He felt embarrassed.

On the night before he died, he told me he was a failure as a farmer and father.

The stories we tell ourselves are like knives; they can cure or cut us. This was the false story he told himself, and I told him it was false. He just shook his head.

* * *

I was three or four years old when he began to let me go outside with him as he worked.

He always walked fast, and would scoop me up on his back, or I would hold his finger and run beside him as he walked between tasks. Sometimes he hummed songs, sometimes he whistled; he was always cheerful then.

When I grew old enough to understand them, he told stories, and though all he wanted to do was pass the time, the stories he told were to me like those little votive candles that Catholics light up with a match and a prayer after Mass. He lit them in me one by one, hundreds of little flames of stories, and the heat and light from the flames of hundreds of stories coalesced into a big fire about the time I turned 6 and started school. In the classroom was a two-shelf library of books.

He would feed the chickens and the cows with us, and tell how Lincoln saved black Americans from slavery and white Americans from their hypocrisy. It took me years to figure out what he meant by that. He would ride the back of a hay wagon and tell us that the worst thing about Hitler was how gullible everyone was around him.

A secretly devout Catholic, he made relentless fun of Catholics. A secret Republican, he made relentless fun of Republicans. “Their chief policy is to call the other guys Communists.”

He said the best ideas are all paradoxes. When I asked what a paradox is, he said to look it up. Then he said that the bravest patriots were those who questioned the flag when everybody else saluted it.

He would sit on a one-legged milking stool and milk the cow, squirting milk at the flies flying around the back of the cow. Sometimes he’d shoot down a fly with those milk-white tracer bullets, and Gary and I would laugh, and Dad would fill the bucket with milk, and tell about George Washington or Saul from the Bible, or he’d sarcastically analyze the Great Hollywood Hero, General George Armstrong Custer. He said Americans like to skip over the whole stealing-the-continent-from-the-Indians story. Custer, he said, began the battle of Custer’s Last Stand by firing rifle bullets into a tent village full of women and children. It was a glorious military victory, Dad said, until Crazy Horse intervened.

All the while he told these stories, I stood beside him, my little-boy shoes smeared with manure, my soul on fire.

One day, when I was 14, Dad saw me and Gary pretending to sword-fight in the farmhouse kitchen. I sheepishly told him, as I put the fly swatter down, that we were reading Homer’s “Iliad” in my high school English class. All that clashing of swords.

Dad grinned a half-grin. He was dressed in the grease-stained denim jacket he wore to drive the tractor in winter.

“Why is Achilles interesting?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Because he is great?”

Dad frowned, and opened the door to walk outside.

“Achilles is interesting because Achilles is flawed.”

“What flaw?” I asked. “WHAT FLAW?”

“Figure it out,” he said.

I stayed up that night until the wee hours, re-reading the “Iliad,” seeing it with new eyes.

In the years after that, books and conversation and storytelling became for me a magic carpet ride. I have ridden hard every day since.

For better or worse in this life, I became a creature that he created: a believer in the redeeming power of storytelling. Stories were medicine and magic, as Uncle Jim had shown when he led us in mocking death with laughter. Jim has saved the lives of hundreds of children desperately sick with kidney disease; he is a man of science. But in the hospital room, where no science could save my Dad, Jim goaded us to tell stories that mocked death. He got Dad to rise up and take his dignity back, to laugh in the face of death.

It was magic. Stories are magic. Stories gave me a career and a zeal for storytelling that at times borders on blind, mystic foolishness.

Dad had no idea what he did to me. He would have laughed had I told him.

All he did was think out loud. All he wanted to do was tell stories to pass the time in the milking stall.

A couple of years after I read the “Iliad” I signed up for a journalism class in college.

Dad said I was foolish.

“Nobody in that line of work makes a decent living.”

“It’s not about money,” I said.

“Then what is it about?”

I wish I’d told him.