Father Hens

The night after we brought our first child home from the hospital, I held him in the streetlight half-darkness of our living room. Joshua was crying, a little pink bird, his breath ragged, his arms and legs stretching aimlessly. I sang him an old Irish tune and found Mackey – from the Gaelic word for son.

In those first moments of fatherhood, I imagined all the daring acts I would perform in my boy’s defense, all the intruders I would subdue. I laughed, noticing with a shiver the contrast between my dark fantasies and the perfect sweet-soft boy I cradled. As he fell asleep, a smudge of yawn and mew, I thought about my own father and a legacy that has made its way into my heart.

My father was a mother hen. Though it was my mother who raised the seven of us and did the thousand daily chores the brood demanded, it was my father’s job to worry about us. For him, it was an article of faith that life was out to get us kids, that no creatures as fine as his children could be safe in this brutal world.

He came by his concern honestly. He was a doctor, a general practitioner with a thriving practice. He saw the dreadful things that couldn’t possibly happen to children, except that they did. He warned us about lawn mowers, diving boards, lighter fluid, fish hooks, hunks of steak, “projectiles” of all sorts. He warned us about traffic, doors, windows and ice. He told us cautionary tales about broken bones, sledding accidents, a boy killed on a horse. A garrulous, cheerful man, he was also a connoisseur of chaos.

When our son was born, my wife and I began baby-proofing our apartment. We bought caps for outlets, cushions for sharp corners. We locked closets, installed gates, stashed matches, checked the floor for splinters.

And then we waited as Josh blossomed into danger, lifting his head, rolling over, crawling. Finally he stood up and walked, a staggering little drunk with a rabbit on his shirt. Suddenly he was tall enough to bang his head on the dining room table, then nimble enough to scramble over a chair. Each accomplishment brought new peril. I thought we would never be able to protect him. Once when he was six months old I had a dream about him. We were caught in a lightning storm, and I saw myself crouching over Josh, pleading with the sky.

About lightning, my father was a poet of doom. We were not only to come inside at the first drop of rain, but we were also to stay away from windows. According to Dad, no prudent person even took a shower when it was raining. When my brother Kevin and I were teenagers, Dad once drove his car across a golf course to scoop us from the fourteenth green. We thought Mom had died. No so. Dad had heard a weather report that rain was on the way.

Dad was a genius in his caution. Yes, we had to agree, it was not impossible to choke on a croquet mallet, and yes, though we’d never heard of anybody suffocating in a baseball mitt, we supposed that, too, could happen.
About driving, he was a master. Statistics had proved that there were more drunk drivers on the road on Sunday afternoon than any other time of the week. Or perhaps it was during Lent, or when it was hot – he would customise his warnings to fit each situation. As for sleeping over at friends’ houses, he was a stickler. He wanted his kids home.

He did, however, make one exception. When Kevin and I were Boy Scouts, we asked, with little hope, if we could go on a canoe trip. My father replied with all sorts of questions: What adults were going? How long would it last? We answered in reassuring tones, awaiting his inevitable response: more Irish-Catholic boys died in canoe trips than in World War II.

Suddenly he got up and called the Scoutmaster, asking questions, greeting each response with a skeptical grunt. Hanging up, he rubbed his hands in excitement. “Good news, boys,” he chirped. “I’m going with you. The O’Neils hit the Great White North.”

We couldn’t believe it. We wondered if Dad knew that camping meant sleeping outside, the place where it rained. Where bears lived. We arrived at the lake, convinced the sight of water would remind Dad that most people died of drowning. But no. We set out into the setting orange sun, a string of canoes, each loaded with two boys and a man. That night we pitched tents, cooked burgers, put on sweaters against the October chill and fell asleep, canvas-covered and little-boy-bone-tired in the grip of an adventure.

Morning came, cold and wet. Bundled in sweaters and rain gear, we set off across the lake. We were the last canoe in the chain, and the wind made the lake tough going. Before long, as the fog grew thick and the wind beat the waters into a gray-white chop, we lost sight of the rest of the boats. From the stern came, “Let’s catch up, boys,” and I laid my eighty-two pounds heartily into the paddle. Suddenly a wave hit the canoe broadside, overturning it, and dropping us into the frigid lake. We were a few hundred yards from a small island. As I came bobbing up, I thought this was going to be a great adventure. But when I saw my father, his hair soaked crazily to his head, his face a white mask, I knew this was no adventure. That remains the only time I have ever seen him scared. He glanced at me and looked quickly around. “Kev-in!” he barked.

“I’m over here, Dad,” Kevin said from the far side of the overturned canoe. “I’m all right.”

“Hang on to the boat, boys,” Dad said calmly. “I’m going to push it to the island.”

“Why don’t we just swim, Dad?” I asked.

“Hang on to the boat, Hugh!” he shouted like a stranger.

Dad struggled with the clumsy canoe, and it began to move toward the island, saddled with two shivering forms, a submarine now, headed for landfall. Suddenly, my father let out a giant roar. “Help! Help!” It scared me. “Help!” he shouted again.
“They didn’t hear...” Kevin began.

“Quiet!” Dad yelled, and as his voice caromed off the wind, an engine snarled to life, yapping across the water toward us. Finally the shape emerged from the fog, one man standing up in the bow, a second one crouched over an outboard motor – a gray presence coming out of a muted white morning sun. They fished us out of the water.

“Don’t worry, boys. You’re okay.”

When we got to the island, the men started a bonfire.

Dad took off all his clothes, told us to do the same, and we stood next to the blaze, three naked heathens. I remember its heat coming at me in great thumping waves. I remember my father wrapping his arms around us – rubbing our hands, our arms, our feet, our hearts. “Thank you, fellas,” he said to the men across the flames. “You saved my boys.”

When I was sixteen my father’s caution began to drive me crazy. Here I was taxiing for takeoff and he had his arms around my ankles. I used to imagine the romantic lives my friends led – letting the wind whip through their windows, staying out till all hours, taking showers in all kinds of weather.

Now, from my new-parent perspective, Dad’s caution makes sense. In fact, I occasionally wonder whether my father wasn’t a bit cavalier. After all, he let me play Little League baseball, a game in which an oversized twelve-year old throws a rock-hard sphere with as much velocity as possible toward your child.

As parents, we want it both ways. We want our kids to know all the world’s exhilarating stuff. But we want them to learn about it in a padded room down the hall. And this feeling never ends. Not long ago we shared a rented beach house with my brother and his family, and our parents came to visit us. As Kevin and I bounded around the surf, riding the waves on our bellies, I looked up and saw my mother and father walking along the water’s edge, trying to look casual, but gesturing for us to come in, and finally shouting across the wind to their grown sons, “Boys, don’t go out too far!”

Though I talk to my father rarely these days, he is never far away. Recently, my wife and I were planning to escape on our first childless vacation, and I heard myself suggesting that we take separate planes. If we did, although the chance of Josh’s losing one parent was doubled, the chance of his losing both virtually disappeared. After thanking me for a cheerful start to our vacation, Jody recognised my father’s style.

“Did your parents fly separately,” she asked.

“No,” I answered. “They stayed home.”

-Hugh O'Neil-