Bornfamous

He wasn’t as bad as that makes him sound. I’m sure he was actually a good person but I only have my mother’s stories to go on and unfortunately, her version of things is suspect. She divorced him, after all. But the fact is, my father killed my dog.

I didn’t know it at the time. I was just four years old and had spent a couple of weeks with Gramma and Grampa. Looking back, I realize that my parents must have sent me away so they could work out their marital problems, which apparently worked temporarily because my mother had arrived to bring me home.

Then she told me that Chief, a big black and white mutt with a strong protective streak, had run away. Looking for Chief, talking about him and dreaming of him, became an obsession of my young life. I must have driven my parents crazy.

Years later, long after their divorce and my father’s death, after I’d married and had my own child, my mother told me what really happened.

Mom and Aunt Babe, my father’s sister, were visiting us in our new apartment. I must have been reminiscing to my husband about my wonderful dog Chief who ran away, when my mother cleared her throat.

“Well,” she said. “That’s not exactly what happened.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

My mother hesitated and then blurted it out. “Your father killed Chief.”

“What?!”

“He didn’t mean to,” she said quickly. “He was fixing the car and got mad and threw his wrench. He always had such a temper. The wrench hit Chief in the head and killed him instantly.”

I looked at Aunt Babe, shocked.

“Is this true?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s true.”

“You were too young to tell you the truth,” my mother said, “so we told you that Chief away.”

“What happened to him?” I asked. “Did you bury him?”

“No,” she said, hesitating again. “Your father threw him off a bridge.”

“What?!”

What bridge? Why didn’t I ask her? Did my father wrap Chief in a blanket or just throw his poor, limp body into the Mississippi? Did it float away or did it sink? Was he sorry?

But I didn’t ask.

It was one of the biggest shocks of my young adult life, right up there with the time Mom told me, on my eighteenth birthday, that she had given up a baby girl for adoption ten years before I was born. Definitely another “What?!” moment.

It made me think differently about my father. Even though Mom said it was an accident, I recognized the impulsive throw of the wrench in anger. How many times had I myself exploded in frustration over some minor difficulty, and thrown something or cursed so vehemently that I actually scared my family? [Hell, I just blew up a couple of days ago when a flat of cherry tomatoes spilled all over the floor. Robby came running out of his room to see if I was all right, and I had to apologize for my rage. I don't throw things any more but that loss of control can be very embarrassing.]

This new story about my father added to his growing, negative legend in my mind. As a child, I had begun to think of him as dangerous and unstable, and of myself the same way. After all, wasn’t my mother always telling me I was just like him?

So it should come as no surprise that when she told me after he died that my father had brought it on himself by not taking his insulin shot to gain sympathy, I came to the conclusion that he had committed “accidental suicide”–and that therefore, I would have the same fate.

Screwy how our minds work.