My Father: a Brief Reflective

My father, Herschel Dean Raney, the namesake senior to my junior, died of complications from Covid 19 on January 21^st, 2021. He was alone at the time, as far as direct family contact goes, in this epidemic cruelty that worsens everything about this viral past year. Though he told me his nurses were kind. He was able to talk on the phone during the week before with difficulty and by facetime on small phone screens with my mother and my brothers. He was 89 years and 4 months old exactly: September 21^st 1931 to January 21^st 2021. And I’ve learned since that Thursday that after your father dies, really, you just want to sit somewhere quiet for awhile.

Dad was a policeman most of the early part of his life, for the military and for the VA security force afterward. And in the weeks before he died, I had been thinking about all the things he had survived in order to reach January of this year 2021. I guess you survive some things just being a policeman for so long. There is a risk there. And there are also likely long spells of boredom and routine. We must survive that too, those times. Routine can certainly be comforting. But if he ever had to kick down doors under gunfire or rescue a dog or a child from some flames or from an angry drunk, he never told me about it. He likely would have been humble. He often was about such things.

The first very dangerous thing in his life he survived was likely that squirrel hunt with his brother when he was 14 or 15 years of age. Though he did swear to me that the time he shot of the skullcap of his mother Verda’s prize rooster was the most risky even before that. He shot the rooster's crown clean off with a bottle cap and his ‘wrist rocket sling shot.’ Said he had to hide out for two days afterward with his mom on the hot, angry hunt variously with a hickory switch, a 2-by-4 or a shotgun depending on the telling. “Dammit, boy, where are you.” Chickens were a life and death item back then, “and that damn rooster was her favorite.” Dad couldn’t recall the bird’s name. Dad’s brother though was named Carl. And on the morning of that squirrel hunt they flipped a coin for who would get the 20 gauge and who would get the 12 gauge. Dad got the 20 gauge possibly making the coin flip life saving. And it is unclear whether they were headed out or headed back from the taking of squirrels. But as dad was going over a neighboring fence, he dropped the shotgun butt-first on the far side. Carl must have been close behind because he described it as ‘dad flew into the air with all his arms and legs flailing.’ Like a flung starfish or a dropped tomcat, I suppose. It put an image in my head of dad being blown far higher than is gravitationally possible. I’m not sure Carl even saw the actual event. But he was soon there over his bleeding neck-shot brother laid out in the dirt. How anyone got dad to the doctor or where in the hell the nearest doctor was at the time is unclear. I think that was all hazy for dad. And it is still a small miracle that the gun went slightly left, did not hit him in the face or eyes or brain. He also swore the doctors did not do anything other than marvel he wasn’t dead. “Go and sin no more.” Left all the pellets where they were, wedged inside all those cartilages and crevices. No carotid wound or jugular bleeding. He lived on.

Then he was a soldier. And it was only after he was more than fifty years of age that he ever really told me about any of those times. Sure, some generic mentions of how cold it was. There was something about a bayonet and a grenade. And there was the reiterated fact of how fearful he was many times. “Believe me, I was scared over and over.” He was a member of one of the machine gunnery teams. Apparently not that enviable of a slog through war. Five or six guys were required for the very heavy and various weapon parts involved. Dad mostly was tasked with the tripod which was solid metal and weighed more than all his other gear combined. Another carried the barrel assembly, another the ammo, I guess another the extra water for the water-cooling system. I talked to other war veterans from Korea in my own job and they all raised their eyebrows, ‘oh, those guys, jeesh.’

“We had to cross a bridge”, he said, just suddenly one time while we were sitting and talking. He may have had a whiskey. But I hadn’t asked. War was not the preceding subject. His whole squad, however many men that entailed, needed to get across a river on some small bridge that was the only way across. The hill above the bridge held a sniper or multiple shooters, who knew. They had clear sights to anyone on the bridge. Jam a hat on a stick and raise it: gunfire. It was also evident from the first few who had ventured out. “We had to go one at a time. As fast as we could. I think we were supposed to zig-zag but I may have forgotten.” When it came to his turn, he remembered his heart beating so fast and then boom it was go-time. He said he didn’t remember too much about the sounds or sights while on his way across. Brain maybe sacrificing blood and air for the legs and lungs. He is not sure he zagged or just comet-tailed across. But he made it and he flopped into the safety of the hollow where everyone else had assembled or fell. He never slowed. But sitting there, heart speed coming down from 4^th to 3^rd gear, he felt the growing warmth and some distant fire in his knee. Someone verified he was shot.

It was not until he was well past eighty that he told me about an August long ago, also in Korea. It was August at the time he spoke and he just suddenly said, “August is when I had the worst week of my life.” I did not presume at first it was during the war since he so rarely talked about Korea. And I gave him the ‘what happened then?’ Go ahead. His whole squad had been raided in a sudden attack. I am not sure it was in darkness. I got the feeling it was a broad daylight kind of thing. Everyone was killed except him and one other soldier. Dad had not been in camp. He returned to find the dead squad. And he was alone. He was not aware, I believe, of the other escapee until later. They certainly had taken off in different directions, pursued. I never asked whether he saw the ‘other’ again. I do not think dad had any weapons on him other than a knife perhaps. He was certainly no single-man counterattacking force. So, he fled into the countryside. He was hunted. They knew he had escaped. For seven days he stayed low. Crawling in rice fields frequently, where he drank his only water out of the paddies and ditches. Whole days that he did not rise off his knees or his belly. Entire nights on his back watching stars track across from one side of the sky to the other. Mosquitoes at night were terrific, all-encompassing, a shifting haze over the moon. The heat, in August, was oppressive. One’s uniform, soaked in rice water and muck, probably was not that helpful. It was a week of sustained fear. Eventually, he stumbled into some American troops who wanted a password. He could only shout his name, rank and squad. They were amazed to find him alive. He lived on.

And it seems likely that this night and day, night and day of terror for a week is what gave him his infectious encephalitis. I presume if was Japanese Encephalitis. With a known fatality rate once the brain was involved of 30%. Injected by a Culex mosquito which certainly would have been part of the buzzing clouds that followed him. Fever and delirium: this removed him from the war for good. The fever grace of a mosquito bite rescuing him from all further human conflict. At least in Korea. He remembered some very kind nurses from this time of fog, faces both hazy and beautiful. He seemed to remember some curtains and window light, stone walls. Eventually he came back from the cerebral shadow world and returned home.

Both parents survived the long journey to Alaska, later. A car trip from Little Rock, Arkansas to Anchorage, Alaska. In the back bench seat: boys aged nine, seven and three by my estimate. Two to three weeks of roadway in the space capsule of the car with that restless boy trio. Many peanut butter sandwiches. Mile Zero of the highway didn’t even start until you reached somewhere in Montana. Mom attempting order with her long left arm, reaching to grab whatever calf or thigh she could pinch in the back, perpetrator or not. The pain would teach everyone by osmosis. Dad’s eyes in the rearview mirror behind the green aviator sunglasses. He would lapse into military policeman mode, watching. If dad stopped for any reason other than lunch or gas or the night’s accommodations, it was dire. Grizzly bears in the road. ‘Come on boys, they’re bears, one of you has to go. Draw straws. We don’t have all day.’ We did see our first bears and wolves and the first wild, bearded Canadians on that trip. (The latter being somewhat friendlier than the Grizzly but still only approachable with caution by young children.) The wolves were just after we crossed into actual Alaska, two thousand miles behind us, family still intact.

Once settled in Alaska, however, the true hunter and fisherman in my father emerged and ran wild. I was too young to accompany him at that age. I had ice skating and sledding and explorations of my own to attend to. But dad would bring home the varied bounties after a weekend or longer absences. Sinks full of duck or geese to be plucked. Puzzle piece sections of moose or caribou, Ptarmigan and grouse. King Salmon longer than either the sink or the stove. King Crab. And there are very few meals I remember before age ten, but those salmon slabs roasted in the oven and the long, golden white chords of crab meat I do remember. And I have never had such since. Dad did hunt bear, though I don’t think he ever got one. Whenever you went out in Alaska, which was barely a state then, you were required to carry a weapon capable of diverting a Grizzly. Dad had a long barrel .357 magnum. I do remember him saying on one hunt that his camp of men had walked all day, many miles without anyone killing a Black Bear and then that night, in camp just after dusk, a large Black Bear ran into and through camp while dad fell over trying to get his rifle up. He ended up just pointing it into the darkness where the bear lived on. And he laughed.

One particular night in Alaska, that both my brother Scott and I remember clearly out of all those nights we spent there, my father and some friends had been drinking in the house together. Probably playing cards, I don’t recall. Dad played many a game of hearts in his lifetime. But we were still up, the boys. And it was dark, high arctic dark, when dad announced he wanted to go sledding. The other adults may have looked at him like my brother and I did, with unguarded alarm, but dad jumped up and we all went out into the snow. We all walked across the road and down about half a block beyond all streetlights to the climb up the hill into real darkness where many sled paths descended. This was the sledding hill that all local children on the base used. My brother and I had been down the zagging, crisscrossing paths so many times, that maybe we could have gone down in the dark. But we both doubted it. There were paths you did not want to take down that hill. But dad hauled that sled up the long hill. I don’t remember if any other adult was carrying through with the plan. But dad marched ahead. Scott and I ran partially up the hill and watched. We definitely tried to talk him out of it. And it was with some horror that we heard him launch and watched the dark mass approaching from the peak. He took no relegated path. I think he could barely steer. At some point I think his hands lost all grip on the steering boards, and he was just a flail rider helter-skelter atop the flying sled. He went over some death-bumps that we had never attempted. He rose up out of all contact with snow or earth. He made great ‘oooffs’ each time he returned to the ground just to fishtail and fly again over the next camel hump into sheer air. And we ran to him after he came to a jarring stop at the bottom, gravity finished with him. It crossed our minds that he was dead. And we stood over him, as he lay splayed out like he had just decided to make a snow angel suddenly there in the starlight and decorate it with blood. For blood ran from at least his nose and his upper lip. We could not rule out a head wound. When he smiled though, we thought we could see all his teeth. No new dark gaps, just blood. And he laughed like it was all worth it.

Back in Arkansas, with all the rest of our lives to live, we moved to Sherwood where the woods and creek stretched out to the north and east back then empty of homes. Suburbia with a sudden edge. Dad was a champion skeet shooter in the Army and ping-pong player and pistol marksman. He kept all these things going while he took on his second life as a VA Policeman. He kept a ping-pong table in the garage at the Sherwood house for the longest time. It would fold up and push off to the side of the garage. But mostly it was just out and ready. And my younger brother Scott and I would take him on. We would take him on over and over. ‘Let’s go dad. Right now.’ And honestly, it was years before my brother or I ever won a game. While dad won literally thousands of games. We were zip for 2000 or nearly that. Many scores of 21 to 2 or 11 to 0. He was never cruel or overly proud or loud about it. He just whipped our young asses again and again. And then the day finally came. And it was not me. It was Scott, I am sad to report that beat him. The tension up to the end of that game was high. And we were not subtle about the win. Scott and I ran around the yard, the street, the whole damn neighborhood like Olympic victors with our arms above our heads, bouncing and shouting. No one beat him again for months after that. Dad just shook his head, watching the jubilation.

After real retirement dad would go to deer camp in south Arkansas. Where he kept many friendships. A separate world with tree stands and campfire conversations. I think the actual shooting of deer was a very small part of camp life. Though necessary. Mostly this was a late summer clean up and fall hunting event. I went with him for a few years after I convinced him and his brother Carl to try and hunt turkeys. These two lifelong hunters had never considered it. Turkeys had been another animal to watch from the tree stand along with bobcats, hawks and wild hogs. So, I mastered the mouth membrane turkey call and got dad a box call that we strapped to his shotgun. Camp in spring is far less populated than in fall but still there was the core group who did come just to enjoy the woods or stalk turkeys. I got to sit in on the night campfire conversations: bellies full of deer chili and grilled wild hog, circles of exaggeration and laughter. The sipping of whiskey and the telling of inflated, sometimes preposterous hunting experiences. After I had scouted and stomped over the camp landscape with dad and his brother, I took dad out on one of those mornings to a rocky opening with a good tree mix and the ‘right look.’ I set him up on his stump near a tree and he was adorned in the camouflage of hunters. He tested out his box call. And I drove away, expecting dad to have a few hours watching the world go by, the wind in the pines, the quiet of sitting with oneself. Those things he had come to expect from the hunting days. But before I even got two curves away to find my own spot to sit, I heard a shot boom out from that direction. I turned around and drove back, walked back in to find dad standing over a turkey, smiling the big dad smile. “Why, there ain’t nothing to this turkey hunting son.”

Dad lived through prostate cancer and its large attendant surgery. He lived through two separate cardiac bypass surgeries. After the first one, with its heart-shaped, squeeze pillow and the post-op cough with its weeks of lancinating pains, the breathing cage wired back with twisted wires, dad said he would never, ever do that again. And the heart, after the readjustments of new plumbing, needs care and frequent attention, more even than the normal heart. He took care of it. But still the second need arose. And when it came down to it, deciding to face the bone saw and the wire cutters and the tiny vascular needles or not, when it was time to choose ‘stop’ or ‘go ahead,’ like so many of us, he said ‘go ahead. Bring me the damn heart pillow again.’ And on we went.

Later in the long life he retreated mostly to his back yard and house. They had a patio and a wood stove out there. Armed with binoculars and the bird book I bought him; he took on some birdlife. He noted the complex territories of his skinks. He loved to see his Speckled Kingsnakes make an appearance. His yard still backed up to the tall trees near the creek. And he kept feeders and bluebird houses. He never tired of bluebirds. Or titmice or chickadees. The Mississippi Kites nested back in those tall trees and stayed all summer. Who does not love the stoop and sheer of the silver and gunmetal kites? Superb fliers, dad had a deep joy in watching them. He would report the activities to me when we talked on the phone. And one year I found a Cooper’s Hawk nest one half block away in a neighbor’s yard and we focused on this. He kept me informed. And two young hawks fledged. Fortunately, they loved dad’s bushy yard border and trees and birdlife. He watched those youngsters as they attempted many times to catch his squirrels in the yard. The birds losing over and over but not giving up. He laughed at them and cheered them on. Shaking his head, telling me about it.

In his last two weeks dad was admitted to the hospital twice. On one of the interim days he texted me a picture of one of his chest x-rays. An astounding event as dad rarely texted anyone. And adding an attachment? I looked at the pictures showing a shadowy heart grown larger with time, lung spaces not bad for age 89 and the world we had lived in. But up top, above the breathing fields, on the left side of his neck, I could still count at least fourteen dark lead pellet shadows like some inverse constellation from childhood. I stared at them a long time. On the day before he died, I called him twice, no one still being allowed into the hospital. In the morning, he said “I’m getting a new roommate.” And I asked if he had spoken with him. “Yeah, we’ve traded some stories. He seems nice.” Later in the day, he was too breathless to talk for long. He kept his replies short. I did not want to burden him. At the end of the shortened conversation he said, “I’ll talk to you later, son.”

And then there has been one memory trying to return this past few weeks more than all the other dad memories. The mind grows disordered at times like these. But this memory was attempting to coalesce from fifty years ago. Like it had found its way out of some cerebral cocoon after a distinctive triggering. And it is not one of danger or threat, well, unless you consider me with a shotgun at age 12 or 13 dangerous. Which, now that I do consider it, we should. But it was back when people hunted quail, when quail existed to hunt in most of our Arkansas fields and wild open places. And dad had bird dogs. And we would arise well before dawn. Or dad would and he would go push, kick and prod me to arise with him. Then into the car and northward or southward to the fields where dad had some relationships and connections that allowed us to hunt the birds freely without worry of trespass. People didn’t much care if you hunted their quail back then. As long as you asked. And we had a series of bird dogs: Blanco, Princess, Lady. They did most of the work. And they were the true beauty of most of these trips: the working of the dog. They lived for the waft of quail. The complex signs and motions that they made for their lumbering humans to understand were also lovely. The language of tail and head and ear: ‘Hurry up. Over here. Right there. What are you waiting for?’ I loved watching them. Dad always proud.

Blanco was Dad’s first pointer that I know of. Mom and dad had always had pets. Including a descented skunk named Fragrance that preceded me. Blanco became somewhat wild when we had to leave him with Grandma Dungan while we scooted off to live in Alaska for all those years. Alaska not being a place for a short haired dog. Blanco learned to chase deer during his time with Grandma’s dog Scooter. And when we took him out to relearn the world of quail, well, deer were still on his mind most of the time. He was an artful and elegant dog, master of canting in the right wind direction. Dad loved him. But the deer chasing habit made dad put a length of chain on him, supposedly to slow him down. It wasn’t attached to anything and he still got to work the birds. It did provide dad with repeated extra entertainment because when things were getting tense and close, and Blanco was moving here and there to approach a cluster of quail, the chain would suddenly move in the grass right next to me and I would leap into the air, thinking ‘snake’ or who knows what. ‘Something-in-the-grass-right-next-to-me’ that I can’t identify. Dad always laughed out loud. “Something bout to getchoo boy?”

Whatever dog we were with things always built to that final tension of the dog frozen: nose down and out, tail up, front left leg lifted. Us knowing the birds were somewhere waiting right there off the nose of the dog. The dog so enlivened it shook and shivered with the nasal knowledge of the thing, the coming eruption. I usually shook a bit myself as we crept up. It was like knowing someone was about to leap out and scare you with a bang or a shout. I was never prepared. Dad skootched up without fear, safety off, trying to position us both. Saying ‘easy, easy’ to both the dog and me, I think. And then the blast of lifting birds, the covey break. High speed things winging in all directions. I honestly try and think back if I ever killed a quail. Possibly, I fired wildly up into the air a few times to make dad think there was any chance I was composed enough to actually aim at a rocket-bird. Dad would wheel and spin and take down two or three birds on every rise. Everything silent after the blasts of shotgun and birds blowing into the sky. Dad’s gun smoking, he would look around for me and ask ‘did you get one?’

Anyway, the memory is not of the hunts. But after the hunts. Many of the fields and landscapes were west or north or east of Conway and Mayflower, such as they were back then: a vaster silence, less populous. And as we would wend our way home dad would choose a path that led by the old cemetery in Mayflower, that road paved now. I don’t know about back then. But we would pull off in the late morning fog or rain or sun in the pull-out next to the cemetery. Dad would leave the heater blowing and the car running. Dog up front with me. Dog often wet and mud-caked, cockle-burred, briar-torn. The dogs still got to sit up front. Exhausted from all the walking and work of bird searching, the thing they lived for, ears now lifting in the heated air. Dad would leave us and walk away. And he would be gone sometimes in the cold for ten or fifteen minutes. I could wipe the condensed mist off the side window and see him standing away over the far headstones of his mother and father’s graves. I could not tell if he was talking or just standing in silence. But after some time, he would come back and pull open the driver’s door and plop back down with us. He would look us over quietly for a bit. And usually pat the dog across his or her happy scalp.

“You ready?”

I would nod.

“Then let’s go home.”

On the day my father was buried the red-shouldered hawks were making back and forth tracks across my yard, out the back windows, reworking the nest, adding sticks and forming the bowl just right for the eggs that will come in a month. I will watch them again this spring, thinking, I know, of dad, repeatedly.

At the cemetery, the white headstones lined around us in the fields in great numbers. Large patches of barren winter trees broke up the arrays. Clearly, someone had tried to keep some trees as overwatchers there. The place will green up and fill with birds soon enough. But for now, six impressive soldiers carried my father to a draped stand before us. When Taps played behind us, I broke. I was broken. Like when Morris Smith said earlier of my father, “I loved him like a brother. I never told him that. I should have.” My mother’s shoulders shook next to my brother as a soldier handed mom a tightly folded flag.

Too much, I think, too much.

I will miss him.

        HR (for HR)

Thanks to Morris, Mike, Joe and Wayne for speaking about their friend and my friend, my father.

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To the Parting Year

So you are leaving everything

the way it is

taking only your day with you

already you are out of reach

you do not know us or hear us

you scarcely remember us

already we cannot imagine

where you are

what we remember of love is starlight

M. S. Merwin

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Tenth Elegy

How dear you will be to me then, you nights

of anguish. Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you,

inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself

in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.

How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration

to see if they have an end. Though they are really

seasons of us, our winter-

enduring foliage, ponds, meadows, our inborn landscape,

where birds and reed-dwelling creatures are at home.

R. M. Rilke (S. Mitchell translation)

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Psalm 39

Unnamable, unthinkable God,

Lord of the dead and the living,

teach us how transient we are

and how fragile is everything we love.

For all of us flash into being,

as insubstantial as a breath.

Our lives are a fleeting shadow;

then we vanish into the night.

And now, Lord, what do I wait for?

My only trust is in you.

Help me to give up my desires

and to let go of who I am.

You have granted me this brief existence,

which is almost nothing in your sight;

May I receive it gratefully

and gratefully give it back.

Turn toward me; touch my spirit;

stay beside me, until

The moment when I must step out

into your final darkness.

(Translation, Stephen Mitchell)

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