Sometimes my father would sing

When my father sang, which was not often, I was always surprised by how good his voice was. He had a lovely tenor. One of his favorite songs was Waltzing Matilda. He knew all the verses, and there are quite a few. When he sang his face would light up, a look of joy filling the usually tense, dark corners. I liked seeing him that way. 

He once told me that when he served during World War II the American soldiers didn’t sing the way the Brits and the Aussies did, with verve and heart. Having grown up as an American expatriate, and having been educated in Britain as a young boy, he must have felt a kinship with those soldiers. The camaraderie in those moments, when their voices were joined in song, must have given them all a reprieve from the horrors of war. I imagine as he was singing my father felt that he belonged somewhere, if only to the singing.

But as I was growing up, my father did not seem to want to belong—he was a bit of a loner. He continued the expatriate life, moving our family for the jobs he held in different countries. He often spent Sunday afternoons alone on projects, such as researching local history. He’d go out on excursions by himself and report back to us about the things he’d discovered. 

Occasionally, he’d want company. My mother for some reason never wanted to go. I think these excursions involved more “roughing it” than she would have enjoyed. My older sister was often involved in some kind of activity. She liked church groups and camp, which I wasn’t interested in. So that left just me to go along for the ride.

When we were on home leave to the US during summers, I went with my father into the woods and mountains. When we lived in Brazil we went down the Amazon, in Hong Kong to a snake-eating restaurant where you had to pick out your snake from a pit. Sure, these were adventures, but more importantly, my father seemed different to me on these outings, a change from his usually tense self. He relaxed, and he was more fun, and that’s when he’d sing. 

One such road trip—I must have been about 10 years old—was to Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina. En route we took a slight detour to visit his old friend Oliver, a country man, older than my father. Oliver had been a kind of mentor to my father when he had worked as a 17-year old boy as a rifle instructor at a summer camp near Brevard, North Carolina. My father later said that Oliver, though uneducated, had made sure that all of his children received an education, and one son later became the mayor of Brevard. 

What I remember about Oliver is that he wore overalls, he was missing a tooth, and his wife chewed tobacco, and I swear she could hit a spittoon halfway across the room, which was very impressive to a ten-year-old girl. More importantly, I remember this as one of the first times I caught a glimpse of a man I rarely saw: my father was relaxed, laughing easily, as he talked with Oliver. 

This side of my father was at odds with the side he usually presented: blustery and full of pontifications. His friendship with someone like Oliver later came to puzzle me because he wasn’t the type of person my father often instructed me was of value. Yes he’d given his children an education and my father knew that, and that part was clear. But what confused me was this: when we went out as a family to restaurants, my father would make disparaging comments, rather loudly, about other patrons who appeared to be without class or education, and he would complain about the failures of an egalitarian society. I feel certain that had my father not known Oliver, and he walked into one of the restaurants we were sitting in, my father would have made rude comments about him, too. 

On that day, however, after we left Oliver’s, I could feel my father's happiness. He was humming, lost in thought. Maybe because we were going to a place he loved—but more likely because we had just visited someone with whom he felt a real connection—my father started to sing a song I love to this day. These are the lyrics as I remember them:

I heard the crash on the highway
I knew what it was from the start,
when whiskey and blood run together,
the picture was stamped on my heart.

I heard the screams of the dying.
I saw the dead where they lay,
when whiskey and blood run together,
I didn't hear nobody pray.

The song is “Wreck On The Highway,” a tune from 1937 written and performed by Dorsey Dixon, a South Carolinian mill worker. My father sang the verses in his soft tenor and he did justice to that plaintive tune. As we drove down the highway, he taught me the lyrics, and we sang all the verses several times. My father was temporarily released from the dark tension that usually overwhelmed him, his happiness spread to me and made me feel happy, too. 

How odd that my father would choose this ballad to share with me, but I guess he had “old-time" music on his mind because we had just visited with Oliver, and because we were in the mountains. But on a deeper level, the irony of this sad tune bringing joy somehow makes sense.

My father was an enigma that I doubt I will ever unravel. Often during my childhood and adolescence, he berated me for my lack of understanding about class, and he almost never let me off the hook for the “mistakes” he claimed I made. He insisted I needed to better discern who was of note and of value and who was not. If I went out on a date with a boy, he would ask me exactly what the boy’s father did for work, as if I would know or care. My father was a harsh taskmaster and hard to please, and I rarely pleased him. And yet, his rules were full of contradictions and exceptions, contradictions I’m not sure he was aware of. 

And so on that summer day, instead of being under the scrutiny of his perfection, attempting to live up to some impossible standard to which he held himself and others, I am sitting in the passenger seat next to my father who is driving us through the mountains of North Carolina. The afternoon sun is shining golden. All the windows in the Chevy wagon are open and the mountain air flows sweet and cool. My father doesn’t seem weighed down, least of all by who is of value and who is not. We're headed to Sliding Rock where he’s taking me to swim. I’m holding a bottle of cold soda pop in my hand, and my dad and I are singing “Wreck on the Highway,” his sweet tenor rising and my small voice joining in, and for the moment, we belong to that singing.