Late in October of 1974, I was awakened by a phone call. I was living in Camarillo, California with my wife and two-year-old child. I cannot remember who called me from my hometown of Pittsburgh, Penn., to tell me that my father had died. I gathered up my little family and traveled to Pittsburgh to learn about what had happened and to bury my father.
My father was a brawling man who fought most often when he was drunk, which was also, often. I was not close to him at the time of his death, but I did take my young daughter to meet him when she was about a year old. I remember his pride as he sat Lisa atop the pillow on his bed in the one room he rented near his favorite bars. I don’t remember if I ever spoke to him again before he was killed by my wife’s godfather.
My father was drinking in a bar and got into an argument with a man. That man stabbed him, and my father died in the hospital. It was a shock to read the newspaper’s account of the incident and find that the man who had stabbed my father was my wife’s godfather, a man who had given us a washer for a wedding present. Two of my father’s sisters still lived with my grandfather in the house my grandmother had furnished before she died. My grandmother dictated that the living room furniture retain the plastic coverings that factories used to seal and protect the shipped goods, which made for some hot, sticky seats. My bride remembered that when she recently recounted to me the moment my grandfather assuaged her guilt.
Papa was a burly, cigar-smoking ex-Texan who retained the drawl, even in Pittsburgh, of the Lone Star state. He was retired from the railroad, but my father had regaled me with tales of Papa’s ability to “roll a train wheel around with one hand.” My bride and I were at Papa’s house commiserating with my family when my grandfather, half-chewed stogie poking from between thick brown fingers, settled into his recliner. He then turned to my bride, who had been sitting in stunned silence on the plastic-coated sofa and growled, “Gurl, you ain’t had nothin’ to do with that.”
The Hill District of Pittsburgh was a vibrant and tumbling community, home to jazz musician George Benson and playwright August Wilson, but I never knew that my father and my bride’s godfather ran in the same circles. We learned it from the newspaper that reported the crime but the possibility of my bride feeling some responsibility for my father’s death never occurred to me. My father lived in violence and died from it. And my great gruff grandfather, of whom I’d had no memory of gentleness, and despite his grief at the loss of his eldest son, was able to step outside of himself to comfort my bride.
I had not given much thought to the circumstances of my father’s death, and in the following days, I was busy arranging for my two young brothers — still at home with our mother — to receive Social Security benefits. (I also cleared my father’s blood debt: the hospital charged patients with replacing blood given in transfusions. I had, for years, given blood regularly in a program that credited me with two pints for each one given. I paid my father’s debt.) And my grandfather paid a debt of forgiveness to his granddaughter-in-law, making sure that she knew that he bore her no ill will for that death in the family.