The Best Mark of a Man

That morning, I started vomiting on the school bus, so Mr. Ring turned around and dropped me off back at the house. By afternoon, I had a fever.

“William,” Mom called downstairs that evening, “it’s a 103.”

She held the thermometer in the light. Everything I heard had a high pitch and an echo.

“Well, let’s take him on in,” he said, appearing at the top of the stairs. He leaned over me and, for the first time, his eyes did not glare with meanness.

Mom was looking at him, her face tight with fear. He wrapped me in a blanket, picked me up, and carried me down the stairs in his arms. At first, I was frightened by the way he carried me like a child. The only other time I saw him carrying something this way was when he hit a fawn and carried it off the road and put it into his trunk.

Through heavy-lidded eyes, I saw Jerry and Robbie gawking at me as I bounced in his arms with his each downward step. The moment was dreamlike, the house spinning around me, Mom rushing around, getting her coat, getting Dad’s, telling Jerry and Robbie that she and their father were taking me to the hospital, reminding Jerry that he could call Granddaddy Roy from the train station if it got late and we still weren’t back, and that she would call granddaddy from the hospital.

Dad was quiet as he carried me outside. It was still raining. For a moment, in the wet night air, it was just him and me. He held me strongly against his body. There was no violence in him, just steady strength.

I should have been a girl. He had said that once. I was close to my mother, like a girl. I didn’t like working on cars, like a girl. I preferred being inside, running around in my sock feet, like a girl. He would have been nice to me this way all these years if I had been a girl.

Uncle Dave had a girl, and he didn’t beat her, or make her work in the cold woods until late. I was jealous of my cousin Judy for that reason, jealous that she was born a girl. She could grow up without having to spend so much time outdoors, working on cars, chopping wood. But boys had to be disciplined, as if we started life with something wild and wrong in us. I could be as well-behaved as Judy, if Dad didn’t hit me and make me stay outside in the cold like a stray dog. That was why I always ran to Mom, and that was why they always fought.

Everything seemed darker outside in the rain and darker still inside the car because of the rain. Mom said the rivers would be up again. I sat bundled up in the back seat of the car, leaning against the bag of mule feed and gazing at the dim orange dash lights.

As we rode to Charles Town, I heard the murmur of my parents’ voices up front, the soft, gentle sound of their worry for me. Usually they were bickering about something.

At the hospital, with Mom and Dad following, a fast-walking nurse led me down a long corridor to a room where, inside, sat a stainless steel bathtub. It was huge like a coffin and made of this bare metal. A simple metal faucet, like the one in biology class, was already filling it up. Clear water wavered over its shiny bottom. Another nurse was already there, emptying bags of ice into the rising water. The chucks turned white like icebergs.

Both nurses moved quickly, one undressing me, the other adding more ice, and though they weren't frantic like Mom, I knew by their movements, I was in danger. Time was critical, the first nurse told my father. My temperature had to be brought down.

I was wearing only my underwear as she and the other nurse helped me down into the water. The sensation of cold was beyond anything I had ever felt before. I jumped and gasped until I saw my father move closer to me—I was more afraid of what he might do to make me sit still.

I found a steady hold on myself and stared down at the harsh, bare-metal tub around me, at the deep, clear water and blocks of ice floating over my pale legs.

“This should bring his temperature down,” the nurse was saying.

Dad, meanwhile, was trying to distract Mom by joking that he would like to have a tub like this one on the property, for cleaning car parts.

I saw the nurse smile. I wanted to smile, too. Dad had the kind of humor that made people shake their heads.

He ran his fingers along the rim of the bathtub. “Sure wish I had one of these,” he went on.

My father admired stainless steel that same way he admired snakes. Spoke of the metal as a kind of miracle, a surface that would never rust. In West Virginia, rust was a plague. Everything rusted because everything was either old or lying in a damp place. Our house was built against a hillside that was always damp from runoff. Our tool shed was wedged between the house and the hillside, so everything in it either rusted or rotted.

So, for Dad, the look of stainless steel became a quest. Sometimes he had us walk around the house with wire brushes the way Grandma Jennings walked around with a flyswatter. If he spotted rust, he’d say to whichever one of us who was closest, “Take your brush to that.” We all had our own wire brushes: Jerry’s the newest, with shiny, stiff bristles, Robbie’s with the long handle and forked edge for pulling out nails, too, and mine the oldest, with short, frayed bristles.

“Get all of it,” he’d say, looking over our shoulders as we brushed. It was fascinating to see rust come off something old, for it to sparkle like new. It was as if we were turning our junk into gold.

Every now and then, during one his during junk hauls to the mountain, something stainless steel came along. His prize was a pair of side pipes off a ’78 Corvette.

But this hospital room was a treasure trove of stainless steel, and Dad had the eyes of a scavenger as he looked around—faucets, doorknobs, tabletops, handles on cabinets, the cabinets themselves. He looked back down at the tub.

“Wonder where I can get one of these?” he asked himself.

“Mr. Connors,” the nurse said, with just a ripple of impatience, “why don’t you stand close to your son.”

I was shivering hard and must have looked scared.

My father, for lack of anything truthful and appropriate to say about me at that moment, said I was tough and could take the cold water. It was the first time I heard him lie for the sake of his own ease. He did move closer, though, and as I shivered in the ice bath, he did try to be affectionate toward me, since I was his sick son in this situation. But the problem for him had always been, he really didn’t admire anything about me. I didn’t have a strong back like Robbie, didn't have endurance like Jerry, didn’t like man’s work at all. I was timid with guns to boot. All I did was give him backtalk, then run to Mom. As far as sons went—and he had three to choose from—he really didn't have a liking for me.

I almost felt sorry for him standing there, trying to look fond of me when he really wasn’t. He had a ridiculous, soft expression that just didn’t go well with his face. I was not surprised when he resorted to joking again.

“Josh, don’t you dirty up this damn tub,” he said, pretending to be firm with me. “I might want to give my mule a bath in it next.”

The nurse, as rigid as she tried to be, again liked his humor. Most women did. My father was a strapping man who surprised those who didn’t know him with his knack for joking. He had a sudden absurdity to him, as if what he thought, he turned it on its side when he said it, if not upside down, always to get a reaction. It was as if he needed these reactions, the surprised looks, the way the rest of us needed kindness.

Unlike him, Mom was the same with everybody—polite, kind, pleasant. She found virtue in that. But Dad was in need of something. Something different, like this stainless steel bathtub. It caught attention. Any piece of metal could rust, but stainless steel was special. When my father got a laugh, it seemed he was special, too.

“He’s tough. He can take the cold water,” he said again.

I could see in the nurse’s face that she didn’t believe it either.