Back in the late thirties, a little before I was born, my father had a tenant house built. It was cleverly constructed—a boxcar partitioned into three rooms with windows, and a wash porch added onto one corner. The exterior was painted white, except for the window screens and front door screen, which all had green frames. Spirea bushes were set along the side that faced the road, and a huge mulberry tree was left to stand in the yard, which had been wire-fenced and seeded to blue grass. My father’s burgeoning Hampshire hog enterprise had made it necessary for him to acquire full-time hired help, and the extra room upstairs in the main house was taken up by my mother’s hired girl.
There followed, then, a long line of restless drifters, colorful and earthy, who, for one short time or another, were in my father’s employ. In some instances these men had families too, just as colorful as they were. Within my own memory there was a family of DPs from the Ukraine, and before them an escaped German POW, although my father didn’t know that’s what he was at the time. But one, more than any of the others, has to this day stayed close in my mind because he was, for me, as a young boy, my first exposure to the mysterious agonies of alcoholism.
I don’t know where, originally, Ab came from—he had worked on a spread in Oklahoma before hiring on with my father. He was a short man, probably no more than a slender five-foot-two or three, and balding. He had soft blue eyes and a quick, shy smile and an easy, deferential manner. Although he had served with the Army in the recent war, he was old for that generation of men, possible in his early 40s when he first set foot on my father’s farm.
I was a very big-eyed little boy when it came to anything concerning the war; the effects of that era were still so pervasive. I can remember how intrigued I was at seeing Ab wear his old khaki Army shirts with dark areas on the sleeves where the cloth insignia had been. I’d question him endlessly about the Army, and he’d indulge my childish wonder, although the truth of it was that Ab bitterly hated the Army.
Ab had been married just prior to his conscription. After the war had ended and Ab was awaiting discharge at a post in California, he received word that his wife was to undergo emergency surgery. She’d been stricken with acute appendicitis. Ab requested that he be granted an early release to be with her—his term of service was to expire in a week or two anyway. His superiors, however, denied his request. They hadn’t felt, Ab said, that an appendectomy was all that serious. Nevertheless, Ab’s wife died. And it was as if, for Ab, the Army was somehow responsible. If only he had been permitted to be there, perhaps things might have turned out quite differently. On that score Ab was a very bitter man.
I can see him even yet, trudging up the path from the barn after a hard day’s work. He wore steel-toed work shoes and a thick leather belt and his khaki shirt would be stained with sweat. We’d sit together, he and I, on the steps of the back stoop while my father ran the milk separator and my mother put supper on the table.
The sun, orange and fiery across the western sky, would be sinking behind the pasture hill. Ab would reach into his shirt pocket and take out a bag of Bull Durham and commence rolling a cigarette. I’d watch in admiration each skilled motion of his rough, tanned fingers. His lighter was of the old squeeze variety, an unending source of fascination for me. “Can I squeeze the lighter, Ab?” I’d say. He’d smile and snuffle and hand me the lighter. “Tell me again about the fire in the Army,” I’d say.
Slowly and patiently in a soft voice he’d relate, between puffs on his cigarette, the tale of the big fire in the Pacific Island storage depot. How a native had asked him to fill his lighter with gasoline, which Ab had done from a large storage tank, and how the native immediately flicked the lighter with gas still on the outside and caught his hand on fire. And when he dropped the lighter, it fell into a drip bucket that in turn set fire under the storage tank. The tank caught fire and exploded and set other tanks on fire. “Yes sir,” Ab would always finish the tale. “That was the biggest fire I ever saw. That was sure some fire.”
And then maybe he’d go on to tell about “the big ranch in Texas.” How he’d worked there and lived in the bunkhouse with cowboys for more than two years. “Had over 2,000 acres in milo alone,” Ab would explain. “Kept five men and five tractors busy sunup to sundown. Plowin’ and plantin’. An’ plowin’ the rows.” He’d snuffle again, and spit. “Yes sir,” he’d say. “That was a mighty fine job for a young buck in those days. Best job I ever had.”
Ab hadn’t come to Kansas alone, exactly. He had a married brother named Harley who was living on, and helping farm, the old Sonders place. Harley and Darleen and a whole slew of kids. In fact, it was being near that family, especially the children, that had figured strongly into Ab’s moving to Kansas. Ab’s affection for those children knew no bounds. And, as my parents were to find out in time, that, coupled with a weakness for drink, made Ab a most tragically vulnerable man.
Harley, you see, was lazy and a braggart and a consummate user of people. He was a big man, big-fisted and ruddy-faced, and he had a temper like a bull. I saw that temper explode one night at a school board meeting. His violent shouting and pounding his fist was something I never forgot. My mother came to speculate that Harley might even bait Ab with drink to get him started and then steal his…but that’s getting ahead of the story.
Ab was what is now called a periodic alcoholic. He’d go for weeks without touching a drop. Nothing stronger than coffee or milk. Then perhaps one Saturday afternoon, when he’d gone to town for a haircut or tobacco, he’d stop in the pool hall to say hello to some of the boys. Someone would buy him a beer. Just one. And four or five days later he’d wake up in jail, penniless, with no memory at all of what he’d done or where he’d been since walking through that pool hall door.
The first time it happened, Ab had been working for my father about two months. He’d ridden to town with us in the old International pickup—Ab didn’t have a car of his own—to purchase a straw hat and a new pair of work gloves. When he failed to show up at the prearranged time and place, my father was puzzled and waited a good while before driving on back to the farm. My mother, however, thought it likely that Ab had decided to move on down the road without so much as a farewell—such occurrences weren’t that uncommon among the caliber of help my father had to contend with. But no. Several days later Harley stopped by our place bearing the shocking news, to us, of Ab’s incarceration.
“Guess you folks didn’t know ’bout Ab’s ‘problem,'” Harley explained, his voice assuming a tenor appropriate to a mortician. “He’s a kind man. Damn fine worker, as you know. But I’m afraid…I’m sorry to say, the bottle’s got’m. Old demon rum. Seems like ever’ now and then he’s gotta fly off on a bender. Pitiful thing. Breaks Darleen’s and my hearts ever’ time it happens. But don’t you worry, Mr. Scheel. We’ll get’m dried out. If you could see your way to give’m another chance, Mr. Scheel, we’d all of us be much obliged.”
Ab was back in the tenant house for two whole days before he felt able to come down to work. And even then, he had about as much starch in his bearing as a whipped dog. He looked pale and haggard, exactly as if he were recovering from a serious illness. The saddest thing of all, however, was the way he avoided me. He always seemed to be somewhere else other than where I was. In the evenings he’d wait to come up from the barn until supper was on the table—and then he’d walk by and go straight to the tenant house. It was more than a week before he looked me in the eye and talked to me. And even then, no mention was ever made, by him or me—ever—about what had happened.
With only minor changes, the same scenario would repeat itself every couple of months or so. Ab sometimes would ask my father to hold back most of his pay, in an effort, or in a gesture at least, of self-restraint. More often, though, he’d give his paycheck to his brother Harley to hold. But after a hard drinking bout, like night follows day, most of the money strangely would have disappeared. Although it was true that Ab sometimes lent Harley money to buy the kids school clothes or shoes, that also was money Ab never saw again. He once commented to my father: “A lot better it goes for kids than for whiskey.” Still, the upshot of it all was, quite plainly, that Ab never accumulated anything, money or possessions. Never accumulated anything at all.
It must have been about the time I began sixth grade that Harley and Darleen moved to Allen, a small town eight miles north, to take over running the local cafe. I remember my father commenting how he hoped that might alleviate their influence over Ab. But it didn’t. Often, on his day off, Ab would hitch a ride up to the little town and help out in the cafe. And sometimes, too, inevitably, he’d end up in the tavern next door. So, a few months later, when the cafe deal went sour and Harley and Darleen pulled out for parts unknown, it was no surprise to anyone that Ab left too.
That was by no means, however, the last we were to see or hear of Ab. Several years later word came to my father that Ab had drifted back into the fringe of the community and was working for a farmer just outside of Emporia. Even more interesting, rumor had it that he now had a wife. The full details of his circumstances wouldn’t make themselves known, however, for almost another two years. By that time I was a college freshman, living away from home. And it was through my mother’s letters that I learned in installments what had transpired.
“You’ll never guess who’s back working for your dad,” one of her letters began. She went on to relate how Ab had showed up at the door one day “out of the blue,” looking for a job. He and the farmer he’d been working for had had a set-to about something and Ab had quit. He was owed back wages. But at present he was destitute. And he had come to my father, literally hat in hand, almost begging for work. Although the tenant house hadn’t been occupied in several years, together they had cleaned it up and made some repairs and Ab was living in it once again. When Mother had asked him how it felt living there again, he’d replied: “It feels like I’ve come home.”
Subsequent letters revealed more details. Ab always had confided in my mother. It seems, after trailing Harley and Darleen hither and yon, there had been a permanent breach, and Ab had gone his separate way. Some time later, he’d met up with an Indian woman in a bar in Oklahoma, and, after a particularly intensive drunken spree, he’d decided to remarry. He worked in Oklahoma long enough to purchase a clunker of an old car, and then he packed up his “new bride” and brought her with him back to Kansas.
He found work as a farm hand that included with wages a small trailer house for him and his wife. He laughed when he told my mother how little work his wife did around the trailer. How she’d sleep late in the mornings and sit in the car afternoons reading movie magazines and listening to the radio, only scurrying in to heat some canned soup when he hove into sight. She, too, had a taste for whiskey and that didn’t promote Ab’s own sobriety.
He’d worked at that farm less than a year when they hired on an additional laborer, a young single fellow who rented a room in town. It wasn’t long before he—Bill was his name—was taking an occasional meal with Ab and his wife. And pretty soon he was spending the evenings sitting around with them on orange crates outside the trailer, drinking iced tea and watching the sun go down. The end result, as one might guess, was simply when Ab came in from the field one evening he found the trailer empty. His wife, young Bill and the clunker of an old car had all moved on.
Ab worked for my father then almost two years. The pattern of his day-to-day existence became consistent and predictable. He’d be fine for a few weeks or even a month, cooperative and dependable. Then gradually he’d withdraw a little. Finally, he’d become testy and sullen. My father always knew that that was a prelude to his going on a bender. And sure enough, come the next pay day, that’s invariably what occurred.
It was during this time that a second brother, out of touch with Ab for many years, reestablished contact through the mail. He wanted Ab to come and visit him and his wife in Nebraska, even sent Ab money for bus fare. Ab seemed genuinely excited at that prospect; he told my mother how much he respected and admired that brother—he’d been the “successful” one of the family.
So my father gave Ab a few days off and drove him to the bus depot. Ab was wearing a new set of tan utility slacks and shirt, his best straw hat, and his “town” shoes freshly shined. But the next morning there came a perplexed phone call from Nebraska inquiring as to Ab’s whereabouts. He hadn’t been on the bus when it arrived. And indeed, as a little investigation would reveal, he hadn’t even taken the bus. When he came back off that drinking bout, the only explanation he could admit to was: “The bus didn’t get there soon enough, Mrs. Scheel. It just didn’t come quick enough.” But the real reason, where that brother was concerned, was not that superficial.
My parents and I would have the occasion to meet that brother some time later. He and his wife and adult son stopped by while enroute to visit Ab at another farm where he was then employed. The son had Down’s syndrome, but, fortunately for him, his parents were two of the most loving and compassionate people one could ever hope to meet. That brother would have done anything in his power to have helped Ab. But Ab, in his own way, had too much pride. Too much pride—and shame. It was Ab, we learned, who had always upheld the distance between them.
I remember my mother writing after that bus episode that Ab paused to talk with her one afternoon by the hen house. His eyes were still hollow and his face peaked from the recent drinking binge. He reiterated his admiration for his brother. “He’s lived an honest, decent life, Mrs. Scheel,” he said. “Spent his money wisely. Now he’s got a beautiful home and family and everything. An’ then I look at myself. At my life.” He shrugged his shoulders and suddenly his eyes pooled up with tears. “It’s just an empty road, Mrs. Scheel,” he said. “I look back. Try to see some reason. But it’s all…it always was…just an empty road.”
It wasn’t long thereafter that Ab restlessly quit working for my father and moved on to another hired hand’s job. We heard little more about him for the next several years. Little more, that is, until—coincidentally while I was at home on leave from an assignment with the American Red Cross—Ab’s name appeared in the Gazette‘s hospital admissions section. He’d been injured in an explosion on a ranch north of us, we found out from a neighbor. The oil heating stove in the machine shop, where Ab had his quarters, had blown up. He was badly burned. There was some question whether he’d been drinking and gotten careless. Ab, they said, swore he hadn’t.
I thought it over and decided to visit him in the hospital. Perhaps in some small way it might cheer him up. But when I stepped through the door of his room in Saint Mary’s, I was more than a little taken aback. It wasn’t the bandages or the patches of red flesh or the scabs crusting up his forearms that jolted me. No, I’d expected something like that. Rather, it was simply that I was looking at an old man, a man older than his years, who’d lost all promise in life and who, most probably, would never work again.
“Ab,” I said. “Do you remember me? It’s Mark Scheel. Dale’s boy.”
He squinted at me a moment or two, then a faint smile passed across his lips. “Why yes,” he answered. “Yes. You’re Mark? Well…you’re …you’re all grown up!”
I explained to him about my work in the Red Cross, where I was stationed, and what I did. And, of course, I told him how sorry I was that he’d been injured. He went to some lengths trying to describe what had happened and how it hadn’t been his fault. His gestures were slow, somewhat painful, and his speech was deliberate and halting. He asked, too, about my parents, and I told him they were fine.
I then asked him about Harley’s family, whatever had become of all those nieces and nephews. He didn’t know. Hadn’t heard from any of them in years. And the same pertained to his brother in Nebraska. Ab hadn’t even informed him of the accident.
Finally I asked him: “Ab, do you remember when I was a little boy? And we’d sit out on the back steps before supper—and talk?”
He smiled again, and nodded.
“I never forgot the stories about the Army,” I said. “And about the big ranch you worked on in Texas.”
His smile broadened a little and he chuckled once softly.
“Well,” I said. “I just wanted you to know, all that meant a lot to me. Those memories—they still do.”
The smile faded then, and he cleared his throat. Then he turned his head and looked away out the window. “That was all…” he began, and paused. “That was all…so long ago.” He raised the bandaged hands in a helpless gesture. “And now,” he went on, slowly, “…now it’s just…all gone.”
We were both silent after that for a minute or two, silent in a silence that choked our breath away. Finally, I bade him farewell and wished him luck and said I’d see him again one day. But in my heart I knew most probably I never would.
As I walked out the door and down the corridor I thought of his lament to my mother years before about the empty road. So, Ab had come to the end of that road. His road, anyway. Still, he once had been a kind and gentle man to a little boy who admired him very much. Surely, too, Harley’s children had felt the same thing. That had to count for something, then, against emptiness. Somewhere, that had to carry some weight. But what a weighty thing, too, alcohol was, I could see. Unrelenting and supreme. What an awesome god to have to placate all of one’s days.
Mark’s latest novel, The Potter’s Wheel, was published in 2021 and is available here.
Learn more about Mark on our Contributors’ Page.
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(Photo: Mike Tungate/ flickr.com/ CC BY-ND 2.0)
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