The whisper in our blood | Steve Barnes

It made sense to go to Center Ridge on Sunday, to the few acres halfway between Morrilton and Clinton. It made sense to me and to the two generations beside me, a couple of guys.

Some kids are frightened of cemeteries. Me, I was a little antsy among the dead when I was younger, much younger – the fact that they were underfoot and not stumbling up from the dark and across the sod and around the marble and granite toward me was but a bit of comfort. Graveyards, after all, were a reminder, unbidden and unwelcome, of that thing my elders said was the only certainty other than taxes.

From his toddler days, my grandson has never evinced any reluctance to visit the last resting place of so many of his ancestors, men and women he will encounter only in the next life, should he come to believe in one. His ease among the deceased may in fact result from his being brought here when he was quite ambulatory yet still swathed in absorbency. With no thought of nor certainly any intent to disrespect, he scampered among the stones with gleeful abandon and his father’s indulgence, taking in the sweet scent of the newly mowed grass and the sprawling canopies of the huge oaks and elms that govern the grounds, an escarpment surrounded by meadows where cattle and horses ignore one another, mostly, and mammals with two legs, always. Just over the rise, only yards from where tomatoes and cantaloupes and okra sprout from the summer loam are the silver-colored pipes and valves that bring natural gas from the shale deep beneath.

“That’s your dad,” the youngest reminded me as we three visitors stood at his great-grandfather’s marker. “How long has he been dead?” The artless curiosity of youth, less offensive than endearing, more deserving of a chuckle than a reprimand.

“Almost 20 years.” Come August.

“Was he old?”

“Yes. Almost 92.”

“Was he sick?”

“Oh, not really. Just ... old.”

He was really sick once. His ferocious work ethic had compelled him in middle age to ignore, or try to ignore, the terrible abdominal pains. Eventually he tossed the towel and just in time. It was in my first year of (legal) driving, so long ago.

“At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father,” wrote Salman Rushdie. “You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood.”

The great-grandson, satisfied, sauntered away, searching for whatever he may find. His father’s hand touched my shoulder and he wordlessly retreated, granting me the solitude he assumed I desired – the freedom to speak aloud to the old man, and though I could not think of anything not already said, I said it again, sotto voce.

And then came to mind the elegiac for his father penned by novelist Mark Slouka, he at one level as guileless as my grandson: “I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were misplaced. As if he could just turn up, like a sock or a set of keys.”

There are worse analogies, for those still looking.

All about us were the graves of men and women, some succumbing in mid-life or the winter years; and too many children – infants and adolescents and teens. But on a certain Christian Sabbath the site becomes a field of fathers, every one of them somehow unique, sui generis. Adored or abhorred, respected or reviled – the inscriptions do not say, are judgment-free. The day and the scene merge, and the alloy they produce is not a lament for the fathers of yore but an appreciation of the task of parenthood today, the duty of fatherhood now, its challenges and rewards.

The late Christopher Hitchens: “Nothing can make one so happily exhilarated or so frightened. It's a solid lesson in the limitations of self to realize that your heart is running around inside someone else's body. It also makes me quite astonishingly calm at the thought of death. I know whom I would die to protect and I also understand that nobody but a lugubrious serf can possibly wish for a father who never goes away.”

It's a hard swallow, that last line. But it’s made easier for some of us, perhaps most of us, because we do not ever “lose” our fathers. We hear their whispers in our blood.

Steve Barnes is the host of "Arkansas Week" on Arkansas PBS.