Blue

We never met, my brother and I.

Charles Patrick, my dad’s namesake and only son, died nearly twenty years before I was born. As is true of any family who has lost a child, a relentless grief, like a halo of bees, hovers when we say his name. He was a stunning child, as photographs attest, with cornsilk hair, ruddy cheeks, plump lips and blue, mercurial eyes—like our father’s. From an eight-by-ten that hangs in my mom’s living room, Patrick’s gaze haunts me. Brimming, as they seem to be, with ocean water, his eyes are fringed with long, black lashes and framed by brows so dark and angular they make him appear thoughtful, or peevish. But he is only three; the stern slant of his eyebrows is more likely due to pain than to precocity or ill-will.

Only months after the photograph was taken, Patrick died from a stomach tumor. In the Forties, doctors understood little about the insidious, mutational nature of cancer cells. Surgeons at Louisville Children’s Hospital slit his tiny belly open for exploration, only to quickly, with fumbling fingers, stitch it closed. There was nothing they could do, they said; they were sorry. Patrick had weeks, perhaps months, to live. They handed him back to my parents, who returned home to Dunham, Kentucky. Mom and Daddy were mute, spent, yet determined to make their little boy’s final days as comfortable as possible.

In families of dead children, there is also a tendency to rationalize the youngster’s passing, to claw some seed of meaning out of arid ground. In our case, a few have surmised that Patrick’s untimely death protected him from the horrors of war. Had he lived to see adulthood, he would have been an ideal candidate for Vietnam. But I don’t buy it. Since when is a soldier’s suffering more unthinkable than a child’s?

Even more troubling is the presumption that God used Patrick’s death at age three to save Daddy’s soul. After my parents brought him home from the hospital, my brother’s health rapidly deteriorated. Daddy took time off work at the mines to help Mom care for him. Afternoons, he would rock Patrick on the front porch swing and watch the coal train pass. Patrick would lift his head from Daddy’s shoulder long enough to grin and wave at the conductor who, in turn, would remove his denim cap and flap it like a flag. Daddy smiled, too, for Patrick’s sake—but inside he was disconsolate.

Weeks passed and the tumor swelled, draining Patrick’s strength. On his last day, he lay in Daddy’s arms listening for the train. Unable to raise his head, he twitched a finger in the conductor’s direction He did not smile nor speak. Daddy responded to Patrick’s death by challenging God’s supposed goodness and by despising himself for surviving his own child. Grief threatened to swallow him. He drank.

I never witnessed this version of Daddy. By the time I came along, he was fifty and a born-again Christian full of faith, not questions. His heart had been bleached—sterilized—by the power of The Blood. He no longer drank, smoked, chewed, cussed, gambled, danced, lied, fibbed, nor anything else that resembled the remotest notion of worldliness.

However, immediately following Patrick’s death, my unsanctified father sought salvation in jugs of corn liquor and whiskey. Worried by his behavior, Mom begged him to accompany her to a revival meeting at her church, Burdine Freewill Baptist. They sat through the fire-and-brimstone sermon; then, as Daddy told me years later, the Holy Ghost plunged a fist through the church ceiling and yanked him up by the collar. Daddy made his way down the aisle, thinking about hell and how, as the angry evangelist testified, bad people went there. He was bad, he knew, because he was weak and wild and human as Adam. Daddy also thought about Patrick. Above all else, he wanted to see his son again. He knelt at the altar, pleading for deliverance—and the guarantee of Heaven.

“If Patrick hadn’t died,” Daddy declared before his own death in 1990, “I might not have seen what a sinner I was. Jesus used Pat’s death to draw me to Himself.”

For years I tacitly accepted this reasoning. After all, Daddy’s conversion story was rife with drama and good intentions. But my brother was not an image frozen by a photograph, nor a theater prop, nor a recruitment tool used by a soul-saving God. He was no white, unblemished Passover lamb.

I look again. I see the electricity in his eyes. I observe the blue: passion’s hue. My own irises crackle with this heat. I notice, too, the contrasts: fierceness of brow, the pillowy roundness of lip and cheek. Patrick was a little boy who once lived in a family. He loved to sit on his father’s lap. He smiled at the passing train. And he clung to the world—to Daddy’s shirt. I wish I had known him—and the very human father whose fears drove him to the blindness of certitude.