Call If You Need Me (12 page)

But just a few days after graduation, when my mother and I were packed to move to Chester, my dad penciled a letter to say he’d been sick for a while. He didn’t want us to worry, he said, but he’d cut himself on a saw. Maybe he’d got a tiny sliver of steel in his blood. Anyway, something had happened and he’d had to miss work, he said. In the same mail was an unsigned postcard from somebody down there telling my mother that my dad was about to die and that he was drinking “raw whiskey.”

When we arrived in Chester, my dad was living in a trailer that belonged to the company. I didn’t recognize him immediately. I guess for a moment I didn’t want to recognize him. He was skinny and pale and looked bewildered. His pants wouldn’t stay up. He didn’t look like my dad. My mother began to cry. My dad put his arm around her and patted her shoulder vaguely, like he didn’t know what this was all about, either. The three of us took up life together in the trailer, and we looked after him as best we could. But my dad was sick, and he couldn’t get any better. I worked with him in the mill that summer and part of the fall. We’d get up in the mornings and eat eggs and toast while we listened to the radio, and then go out the door with our lunch pails. We’d pass through the gate together at eight in the morning, and I wouldn’t see him again until quitting time. In November I went back to Yakima to be closer to my girlfriend, the girl I’d made up my mind I was going to marry.

He worked at the mill in Chester until the following February,
when he collapsed on the job and was taken to the hospital. My mother asked if I would come down there and help. I caught a bus from Yakima to Chester, intending to drive them back to Yakima. But now, in addition to being physically sick, my dad was in the midst of a nervous breakdown, though none of us knew to call it that at the time. During the entire trip back to Yakima, he didn’t speak, not even when asked a direct question. (“How do you feel, Raymond?” “You okay, Dad?”) He’d communicate, if he communicated at all, by moving his head or by turning his palms up as if to say he didn’t know or care. The only time he said anything on the trip, and for nearly a month afterward, was when I was speeding down a gravel road in Oregon and the car muffler came loose. “You were going too fast,” he said.

Back in Yakima a doctor saw to it that my dad went to a psychiatrist. My mother and dad had to go on relief, as it was called, and the county paid for the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist asked my dad, “Who is the President?” He’d had a question put to him that he could answer. “Ike,” my dad said. Nevertheless, they put him on the fifth floor of Valley Memorial Hospital and began giving him electroshock treatments. I was married by then and about to start my own family. My dad was still locked up when my wife went into this same hospital, just one floor down, to have our first baby. After she had delivered, I went upstairs to give my dad the news. They let me in through a steel door and showed me where I could find him. He was sitting on a couch with a blanket over his lap.
Hey
, I thought.
What in hell is happening to my dad?
I sat down next to him and told him he was a grandfather. He waited a minute and then he said, “I feel like a grandfather.” That’s all he said. He didn’t smile or move. He was in a big room with a lot of other people. Then I hugged him, and he began to cry.

Somehow he got out of there. But now came the years when he couldn’t work and just sat around the house trying to figure what next and what he’d done wrong in his life that he’d wound
up like this. My mother went from job to crummy job. Much later she referred to that time he was in the hospital, and those years just afterward, as “when Raymond was sick.” The word
sick
was never the same for me again.

In 1964, through the help of a friend, he was lucky enough to be hired on at a mill in Klamath, California. He moved down there by himself to see if he could hack it. He lived not far from the mill, in a one-room cabin not much different from the place he and my mother had started out living in when they went west. He scrawled letters to my mother, and if I called she’d read them aloud to me over the phone. In the letters, he said it was touch and go. Every day that he went to work, he felt like it was the most important day of his life. But every day, he told her, made the next day that much easier. He said for her to tell me he said hello. If he couldn’t sleep at night, he said, he thought about me and the good times we used to have. Finally, after a couple of months, he regained some of his confidence. He could do the work and didn’t think he had to worry that he’d let anybody down ever again. When he was sure, he sent for my mother.

He’d been off from work for six years and had lost everything in that time—home, car, furniture, and appliances, including the big freezer that had been my mother’s pride and joy. He’d lost his good name too—Raymond Carver was someone who couldn’t pay his bills—and his self-respect was gone. He’d even lost his virility. My mother told my wife, “All during that time Raymond was sick we slept together in the same bed, but we didn’t have relations. He wanted to a few times, but nothing happened. I didn’t miss it, but I think he wanted to, you know.”

During those years I was trying to raise my own family and earn a living. But, one thing and another, we found ourselves having to move a lot. I couldn’t keep track of what was going down in my dad’s life. But I did have a chance one Christmas to tell him I wanted to be a writer. I might as well have told him I wanted to become a plastic surgeon. “What are you going to
write about?” he wanted to know. Then, as if to help me out, he said, “Write about stuff you know about. Write about some of those fishing trips we took.” I said I would, but I knew I wouldn’t. “Send me what you write,” he said. I said I’d do that, but then I didn’t. I wasn’t writing anything about fishing, and I didn’t think he’d particularly care about, or even necessarily understand, what I was writing in those days. Besides, he wasn’t a reader. Not the sort, anyway, I imagined I was writing for.

Then he died. I was a long way off, in Iowa City, with things still to say to him. I didn’t have the chance to tell him good-bye, or that I thought he was doing great at his new job. That I was proud of him for making a comeback.

My mother said he came in from work that night and ate a big supper. Then he sat at the table by himself and finished what was left of a bottle of whiskey, a bottle she found hidden in the bottom of the garbage under some coffee grounds a day or so later. Then he got up and went to bed, where my mother joined him a little later. But in the night she had to get up and make a bed for herself on the couch. “He was snoring so loud I couldn’t sleep,” she said. The next morning when she looked in on him, he was on his back with his mouth open, his cheeks caved in.
Gray-looking
, she said. She knew he was dead—she didn’t need a doctor to tell her that. But she called one anyway, and then she called my wife.

Among the pictures my mother kept of my dad and herself during those early days in Washington was a photograph of him standing in front of a car, holding a beer and a stringer of fish. In the photograph he is wearing his hat back on his forehead and has this awkward grin on his face. I asked her for it and she gave it to me, along with some others. I put it up on my wall, and each time we moved, I took the picture along and put it up on another wall. I looked at it carefully from time to time, trying to figure out some things about my dad, and maybe myself in the process. But I couldn’t. My dad just kept moving further and further away from me and back into time. Finally, in
the course of another move, I lost the photograph. It was then that I tried to recall it, and at the same time make an attempt to say something about my dad, and how I thought that in some important ways we might be alike. I wrote the poem when I was living in an apartment house in an urban area south of San Francisco, at a time when I found myself, like my dad, having trouble with alcohol. The poem was a way of trying to connect up with him.

The poem is true in its particulars, except that my dad died in June and not October, as the first word of the poem says. I wanted a word with more than one syllable to it to make it linger a little. But more than that, I wanted a month appropriate to
what I felt at the time I wrote the poem—a month of short days and failing light, smoke in the air, things perishing. June was summer nights and days, graduations, my wedding anniversary, the birthday of one of my children. June wasn’t a month your father died in.

After the service at the funeral home, after we had moved outside, a woman I didn’t know came over to me and said, “He’s happier where he is now.” I stared at this woman until she moved away. I still remember the little knob of a hat she was wearing. Then one of my dad’s cousins—I didn’t know the man’s name—reached out and took my hand. “We all miss him,” he said, and I knew he wasn’t saying it just to be polite.

I began to weep for the first time since receiving the news. I hadn’t been able to before. I hadn’t had the time, for one thing. Now, suddenly, I couldn’t stop. I held my wife and wept while she said and did what she could do to comfort me there in the middle of that summer afternoon.

I listened to people say consoling things to my mother, and I was glad that my dad’s family had turned up, had come to where he was. I thought I’d remember everything that was said and done that day and maybe find a way to tell it sometime. But I didn’t. I forgot it all, or nearly. What I do remember is that I heard our name used a lot that afternoon, my dad’s name and mine. But I knew they were talking about my dad.
Raymond
, these people kept saying in their beautiful voices out of my childhood.
Raymond
.

Back in the mid-1960s, I found I was having trouble concentrating my attention on long narrative fiction. For a time I experienced difficulty in trying to read it as well as in attempting to write it. My attention span had gone out on me; I no longer had the patience to try to write novels. It’s an involved story, too tedious to talk about here. But I know it has much to do now with why I write poems and short stories. Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on. It could be that I lost any great ambitions at about the same time, in my late twenties. If I did, I think it was good it happened. Ambition and a little luck are good things for a writer to have going for him. Too much ambition and bad luck, or no luck at all, can be killing. There has to be talent.

Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don’t know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that’s something else.
The World According to Garp
is, of course, the marvelous world according to John Irving. There is another world according to Flannery O’Connor, and others according to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. There are worlds according to Cheever, Updike, Singer, Stanley Elkin, Ann Beattie, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Barthelme, Mary Robison, William Kittredge, Barry Hannah, Ursula K. Le Guin. Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

It’s akin to style, what I’m talking about, but it isn’t style alone. It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one
of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There’s plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. Someday I’ll put that on a three-by-five card and tape it to the wall beside my desk. I have some three-by-five cards on the wall now. “Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing.” Ezra Pound. It is not everything by ANY means, but if a writer has “fundamental accuracy of statement” going for him, he’s at least on the right track.

I have a three-by-five up there with this fragment of a sentence from a story by Chekhov: “… and suddenly everything became clear to him.” I find these words filled with wonder and possibility. I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that’s implied. There is mystery, too. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What’s happened? Most of all—what now? There are consequences as a result of such sudden awakenings. I feel a sharp sense of relief—and anticipation.

I overheard the writer Geoffrey Wolff say “No cheap tricks” to a group of writing students. That should go on a three-by-five card. I’d amend it a little to “No tricks.” Period. I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or a gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily, which may go along with my not having much of an attention span. But extremely clever chichi writing, or just plain tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing—a sunset or an old shoe—in absolute and simple amazement.