Passing A Tragedy

Twice daily, I pass the scene of a tragedy.

Not far from where I live, a man in his sixties is raising his grandchildren. The man looks like a slightly older version of myself: gray, tired, Celtic.

His grandchildren are mulattoes, and their regular presence in his front yard is as jarring as a pile of dog dung in a pristine snowbank.

In the warmer months, the grandchildren are always outside, playing in the above-ground pool or cavorting on the trampoline. These two expensive circular toys seem to signify something about the violence done to this old man’s bloodline: they are the sorts of things an adult purchases in order to distract children who are either reared with indifference or despised in the secret chambers of the heart.

The man waves to me when I pass by. He’s usually working in his yard while the mulatto children do whatever they do on a given day. I’ve heard the stories from others in town – the local churches hold the man up as a model of selfless paternal service. The local realists (quiet as white mice) look at him with the deepest pity a son of Adam can know. The man’s wife is dead now, gone down to the silent grave and spared the daily sight of the unnatural hatred the girl shows to her parents and all her ancestors.

Every once in a while, I see the man’s daughter. She is what we used to call “a hard number.” Scraggly, over-permed hair frames a cigarette-etched, bitter face. Her attire is a curious rural slattern’s getup, and she constantly yaps into the cellphone she keeps pressed against the side of her face. When I look at her, I see the cosmic betrayal of Eve in cut-off shorts. I see a remorseless slut who cares not a whit for the torture to which she has consigned the man she calls “Daddy.”

Last week, on Thanksgiving Day, I drove past the tragic house. There were a half-dozen cars in the yard, and the grandfather was tending a charcoal grill off to one side. In the wide driveway, a basketball hoop had been erected, and several black males were scrambling after the ball. All of the niggers were between 20 and 30 years of age, and their antics were being watched with sharp interest by the white man’s daughter as she sat on the porch and spoke into the cellphone.

How can he do it? I wondered. How can he allow this mockery and this great sin to strut into his house and eat his food and leer at his treacherous daughter? This, then, is what hurts me the most about this tragedy. Not the fact that this man’s daughter did what she has done, but rather the lies I imagine he tells himself in order to cope, to survive, to sleep. I look at him and know for an iron fact that this man never in his life sprawled in his recliner and thought to himself, “I truly hope my girl someday brings home a six foot-tall talking gorilla and tells me that she is expecting a damned mamzer child.” I look at this man and thank Christ that I was never called upon to see such a thing happen in my family, never put in the position of making the sort of decisions such a daughter can force on a man.

Perhaps the man has been successful in convincing himself that his grandchildren are little Christs. Perhaps he’s had some help from his church in this ruse. Perhaps he’s known as a devout Christian…him and his daughter with him. Perhaps he no longer thought what he once surely thought: “What the flip?”

What the flip, indeed. We live in a world of lies and tragedy, and the greatest tragedy is that such messes are all our fault. We have no one to blame but our own stiffnecked selves.

~ Wheeler MacPherson