That's My Nose

I'd like it back

My father died twenty-seven years into a sixty-year discussion about what would become of my life. The first two years we got along fairly peaceably, save for the occasional argument about why he would take my nose when I was clearly using it. After that, we started to have disagreements about more substantial things.

In this case, a discussion is an argument waged between people who love each other. Battles like this are fought with words, sighs, looks, touches, presence, absence, and many hopes, and uncomfortable silence. For a man accustomed to bending the world to his will, bending me to it proved an often insurmountable challenge.

A parent wants for a child success, safety, and happiness. Often, these goals work against each other, and happiness is far more elusive than anyone admits. I can’t promise you that he was ever happy himself. He would say he was, but then, so would I. Happiness might not be possible in a world where creativity, entropy, and inertia spend every moment trying to undo each other, at least not the kind of happiness we’re led to expect as a child. Even when I was small, I could see when he was still, when he was quiet, how the world stacked things on his shoulders, including his worries about me.

What would Boyd become? He doesn’t do well in school. He goes for days without speaking to anyone. Some nights, he sits on the side of his bed, listening to the night but not sleeping. He plays football but hates it. In his sock drawer are syringes and medicine bottles he buys from a black man who works for the police. His doctor says boys who play for Ole Miss do the same, and it doesn’t seem to be dangerous. That doctor saying boys at Ole Miss also took dynabol was probably the only thing that kept me out of Chamberlain-Hunt Academy and school for troubled boys.

A parent doesn’t decide what gifts God gives a child. That bothered my father quite a bit. He believed that if I tried hard enough, I would have his gifts, not the ones I was given, which he didn’t trust or understand. He was a big believer in the idea that you can do anything if you try hard enough. I tell people the same thing all the time, even though I know for certain that it’s not true. Maybe it’s wrong when I tell troubled people that it is, but it seems to make them feel better, even if it’s just for a moment.

God gave my father’s first child the same creative gifts he gave me, but he also provided an avenue for my father’s namesake to be lost—lost in my father’s lifetime and in his own when the voices in his head took him away. My father never said that he didn’t want the same thing to happen to me, but it’d be natural if he thought it. I thought it myself. There were times when I would wonder if I would hear voices one day, too. Sometimes, sitting on the side of my bed in the dark, when the world was asleep, I would listen for the voices, but they never came.

Melvin Cooper was the warehouse foreman in our operation in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a place of infinite heat and dust but remarkably good food. An actual giant, Melvin never touched a barbell in his life, but he constantly wanted to test his physical strength against mine. So did I. Youth and strength and anabolic steroids struggled to compete against farm boy genetics.

Without a day’s education and the color of a good gumbo roux, Melvin was an actual genius. One afternoon, I ate boiled peanuts on the deck with Daddy and his cousin Robert Wingate, throwing the shells into my momma’s garden. Daddy assured her they were good for the azaleas. Daddy said that if he was flying in a seven-forty-seven airplane, and the stewardess came on and said the pilot was dead and they needed somebody who could land the plane, he would get Melvin to do it. In that situation, that’s probably not a bad idea. You’d have some chance of living with Melvin flying.

Six feet, four inches tall, and handsome as a draft horse, the ladies liked Melvin very much, and he liked them in return, as many of them as he could find. One night, a very sad fellow decided that Melvin was having more luck with his woman than he was himself and shot them both dead. Louisiana law is funny. The lawyer said they couldn’t convict this man of murder because they never found the gun, so he was sentenced to just six years for assault.

Bringing Melvin’s body back to Jackson, his preacher asked Daddy to say a few words at the funeral. I’d been to black funerals before. My childhood nurse had a son who died in the army and a daughter who got married. Neither of those events had the same size audience as Melvin Cooper’s funeral. It was an event. By this time, Daddy had delivered a few thousand speeches, including a few eulogies, but none like this. I was curious to see what he might come out with.

“God needs work in heaven!” He said. “God needs work in heaven, and he called Melvin home to help him because Melvin was the best, most reliable, and most capable worker I have ever known.”

Daddy admired Melvin for the fruits of his labor. He often held that up as an example to me. Arguments that I just wasn’t any good at what he wanted me to do, or at least not good enough by my own standards, were met with the advice that I should lean my shoulder harder into the wheel. Melvin did.

“You’re so smart, Buddy. So smart! God only knows what you could do if you put your back into it.” He told me. Putting my back into moving pieces or iron around a gym I understood. I even had some level of success, but putting my back into trying to live like my father just wasn’t working regardless of the effort I put into it.

He put his back into life. I never knew my daddy without two or three full-time jobs. He considered them his obligation, and I think these jobs most likely aligned with his gifts as well, although I always wondered what might have happened if he’d stuck with the Air Force like he wanted.

He left in the middle of our discussion and never came back—pretty rude if you ask me. He died sitting at at his desk while I watched men try to start his heart again. I spent the rest of my life replaying in my head the things he told me when he was alive and trying to win an argument with someone who couldn’t answer me any longer. I never heard voices in my head like my brother's, but I heard my father’s voice throughout my whole life. Maybe that’s my punishment for not being more patient with what happened with my brother.

I kept my life’s work a secret for almost sixty years. I’m showing it to the world now, but not really to the world. I’m showing it to my father. The words I write are my response to an argument put on pause thirty years ago. My father never read a word I wrote that wasn’t a school paper or advertising copy. That’s my fault. I could have shown him. I could have shown everyone, but I didn’t. How could I? He had my nose.