The Deletion of a Son by David Gobel

Chapter One ...

The Red Wagon on the Hill

My father did not talk about the hills of Kentucky with nostalgia. For him, they weren't a scenic backdrop; they were a prison of gray wood and newspaper insulation. In the mid-1940s, while the rest of the country was looking toward a victorious future, the hills were stuck in a brutal, timeless past.

He only told me the story once. It was a rare, profound crack in the emotional armor he had worn since before I was born.

In 1949, my father was fifteen years old. He was the "man of the house" by default because his own father, my grandfather, had fled the crushing poverty of the hills for the promise of war-effort jobs in the Baltimore building airplanes. Left behind in a drafty house with no running water, insulated only by tacked-up newspaper, my father was the protector of his mother and his siblings. He was the one who chopped the wood so they didn't freeze; he was the one who hunted so they didn't go hungry. His hands, though still a boy’s, were permanently roughened by adult responsibility.

Then came the sickness.

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His eight-year-old brother—a boy who should have had a lifetime of chasing hounds through the brush—contracted diphtheria. In those isolated hills, a diagnosis like that was often a death sentence. As the boy’s throat closed and his breath became a shallow, terrifying rattle, my father did the only thing a "man" could do. He picked up his dying brother and began to run toward the nearest town, miles away.

He carried that small, light frame in his arms, every step a frantic, desperate prayer. To keep the boy, awake, to keep him fighting, my father made the only grand promise a poor hill boy could offer: "If you just hold on, I’ll get you that red wagon. The bright one you want. I’ll buy it for you, I promise."

But the hills are indifferent to promises. Somewhere on that long, dusty road, the rattling breath stopped. My father arrived in town with a weight in his arms that was no longer a living brother, but a ghost.

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He kept his promise, though. He bought that red wagon. He walked it out to the cemetery and placed it in the tall grass beside the fresh mound of dirt. It was a splash of bright, mocking red against the dull brown of the Kentucky earth—a promise of joy delivered to silence.

The cruelty of the hills wasn't finished. Because the family had been exposed to the disease, they were immediately placed under a strict quarantine. When the day came to lay his brother to rest, my father, his mother, and his siblings weren't allowed to stand by the grave. They had to stand on a distant ridge, silhouettes against the sky, watching from afar as my grandfather—who had traveled from Baltimore—stood alone by the small casket.

My father watched his brother go into the ground through the distortion of distance and the hazy veil of a quarantine he couldn't break.

That was the man who raised me. A man who learned at fifteen that survival meant carrying a burden until it died in your arms. A man who learned that the world can isolate you even when you are grieving, forcing you to watch the final rites from a hill. When he eventually moved to Baltimore, he brought that ridge in Kentucky with him. He was always standing on top of it, watching the rest of us from a distance, terrified of the day the breath might stop again, and therefore, incapable of allowing genuine closeness.

I spent my life trying to fill the empty Red Wagon—the one promise of joy that died on the road. I wasn't trying to make my father happy; I was trying to acquire the structure and safety that would finally fill that wagon for myself. My lifelong journey began with a single, driving purpose: to acquire the unconditional love and unwavering stability that would finally replace the ghost of that little boy's toy.

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