Lee Martin is the author of the novels The Bright Forever (a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction), River of Heaven, and Quakertown. He has also published two memoirs (From Our House and Turning Bones), and a short story collection, The Least You Need To Know. He teaches in the MFA program at Ohio State University. All Those Fathers That Night Lee Martin                                                       1.        The barber works with wood. In a room behind his shop, he cuts and planes, sands and stains, fits tenon to mortise. He knows words like “bevel,” “dado,” “rabbet.” He uses a router jig, a dovetail jig, a biscuit joiner. He powers up his saws: miter, scroll, table, trim. On slow days like this one in this itty-bitty town—it’s the mid-sixties and the kids are starting to wear their hair long, sometimes going a month or more without coming in for a trim—he makes dining tables, end tables, coffee tables, rocking chairs, chests, dressers, armoires. The room smells of the raw wood, freshly cut: the oak and maple and cedar and pine. It smells of stain and varnish. Sawdust coats his eyebrows, the toes of his cowboy boots. He passes the time between giving haircuts and shaves, making furniture for his four daughters, who will one day marry and set up housekeeping of their own. With each cut, each joint, he assembles their futures.                                                       2.        I’m ten years old that day, a country kid, so I won’t know anything about the drunk man until later. His story will come to me the way these stories do. Something out of the ordinary happens in a small town and gets told again and again as the years go on until you feel like you were there—right there—when it took place.        Maybe it starts when the drunk man marries, and he and his wife have two daughters and a son. Then, miracle of miracles, his wife delivers triplets, three boys. Just like that, the drunk man doubles his brood.        I wonder how long he basked in his fame—the father of triplets! He must have taken some ribbing, the kind that could lift up a man like him, a man throwing his money at liquor and scraping by on odd jobs and public assistance. Jokes about the lead in his pencil, the pop in his pistol, the twang in his twanger. I wonder how long he got a kick out of that before he started to feel the burden of all those extra mouths to feed.                                                       3.        The state trooper has three beautiful girls. I’ll make the youngest my girlfriend one day.                                                       4.        My father only has me, and I was never meant to come along. My parents married late. My father was thirty-eight, my mother forty-one. When he found out she was pregnant, he asked the doctor, “Can you get rid of it?”                                                       5.        Today is my birthday. I sleep late to the sound of rain beating against the windows. The autumn has been cool and damp. My fifty-fourth birthday. I run on the treadmill. I eat a light breakfast. This evening my wife and I will go out for dinner with our next-door neighbors. We have no family of our own. My wife’s choice, not mine.                                                       6.        In my dream, my father is telling me that there was a time when he nearly left my mother for another woman he swore he loved.                                                       7.        The state trooper, Arky Cessna, comes into the barber shop, mid-afternoon. He’s looking for the drunk man, but he doesn’t say why.        “Haven’t seen him,” the barber says.        The barber will always remind me of the television star, Andy Griffith. Thick head of wavy hair, disarming grin, good-natured, dependable, upright.        Whenever the barber cuts the state trooper’s hair, he jokes with him. “Ark, you better get busy on the fourth if you want to keep up with me,” the barber says. “Or maybe these days, you’re just shooting blanks?”        Ark just nods his head, an agreeable man who doesn’t mind a little joke at his expense. By the time I become his youngest daughter’s boyfriend, he’ll be gone, dead from a heart attack.        I have to admit that I don’t even know if he was the state trooper who came looking for the drunk man that afternoon. I just know that it was a trooper, and whenever I go over the story in my head, as I’m prone to do—it won’t let loose of me—I always imagine Ark in that role. I never knew him, never knew the drunk man. They’re mysterious figures to me, characters who are just barely out of my reach, disappearing, as they did, right before I came upon the scene. Two men I can’t get out of my head, and for that reason alone, I set their paths together on this summer day. Ark and the drunk man, one of them looking for the other for some reason I’ve never known.        So in my imagination, it’s Ark Cessna who steps into the barber shop that afternoon, and before he leaves, he says to the barber, “Sure is hot.”        “I guess it shouldn’t surprise us any,” the barber says.        Ark laughs and steps out into the afternoon heat.                                                       8.        Summertime. More traffic come evening when folks are off work at the oil refinery, the grain elevator, the gravel pit. Outside, the air smells of hot asphalt, cut grass, the fried foods at the cafe down the street. Inside the barber shop, the ceiling fan turns its broad blades in a slow circle, stirring the muggy air. A radio on the counter behind the barber chair plays faint music, the volume turned down so the barber can make small talk with the man in his chair, a man named Red who works for Marathon Oil. It’s after supper, and he has two boys at home, and he’s eager to get the haircut done so he can go back to his house and spend some time with his sons.        “Red,” the barber says. He hasn’t had a soul to tell this to, and he’s not even sure he should, but he’s been turning it over and over in his head while he worked in the back room cutting lap joints for the drawers of a jewelry chest, and now something makes it a thing he has to say. “Ark Cessna came in this afternoon.”        The song the disc jockey on WAKO is playing is Roger Miller’s “Chug-a-Lug,” a toe-tapper about the liquor that makes you wanna holler hi-dee-ho. Red’s eyeglasses are folded and tucked inside his shirt pocket. He squints to see who’s outside on the sidewalk, a man passing under the candy cane barber pole screwed into the side of the building. “Who broke the law?”        Someone taps on the glass. The drunk man. He’s drinking a Pepsi. He raises the bottle, as if to say, look here what I’m drinkin’, and the barber waves at him to come inside. The drunk man just smiles—a goofy, what-the-fuck grin. Then he moves on down the sidewalk toward the post office.        “Who was that?” Red says, and the barber tells him the rest of the story.                                                       9.        My father likes to loaf. He likes to sit in the pool hall, the grain elevator, the barber shop, and shoot the breeze. It could have easily been him in the shop that evening instead of Red because it was summer and we were living on our farm ten miles outside of town as we did each summer, the school year spent in Oak Forest, Illinois, a southern suburb of Chicago, where my mother taught school for six years until she retired and we moved back downstate to this small town for my high school years.        When I’m a small boy, I have to go with my father to the barber shop to get my hair cut. I can never get comfortable with the way he gets loud in the company of the other men, all of them jazzed up and talking big. They’re away from their homes—out of earshot from their wives, and they’ve got the world on a string. They say things I’m certain they’d never say anywhere but this barber shop, which is a place where they puff out their chests, crack jokes, get rowdy. Sometimes the phone rings and it’s someone’s wife looking for them, and, oh what a howl that sets off, the other men ragging the caller’s husband because mama needs him at home.        I’m a timid boy, more my mother’s son, and all the give and take between the men in that shop makes me uncomfortable. I try to keep quiet and make myself small. I’m afraid that one of the men might say something to me, might even ask me a question, and then everyone will look at me while I fumble for an answer.        A row of fold-down seats stretches along the wall, and that’s where the barber’s customers wait, or the loafers who’ve come just to shoot the breeze. They smoke cigarettes and flick their ashes into the silver trays of smoking stands. They drink Pepsis and RC’s and 7-Ups from the pop cooler along the front window. They leaf through worn copies of Police Gazette. Farmers, mechanics, oil field roughnecks. They roll their short-sleeve shirts tight on their biceps. They keep a cigarette behind an ear, or roll a pack in the sleeve of a tee shirt. They handle a Zippo with ease, a casual one-handed operation: a flick of a thumb to open the hinged top; a spin of the thumbwheel against the flint; the flame from the wick touched to the end of a Chesterfield, a Winston, a Marlboro, a Kool; a twist of the wrist to let the hinged top snap shut.        The men tell dirty jokes. They cuss. They argue. They goad each other in a game of one-upmanship. They look for the soft spots, the sores, the sensitive places they know will hurt. They tell each other they’re pantywaists, they’re pussy-whipped, they’re pissing up a rope. From time to time, one of them gets another in a headlock and gives him a Dutch rub. They come close to fisticuffs. I know this is the world my father would have me join—a world of cocksure men, a world on the brink of eruption—and even as a boy, though I can’t articulate as much, I must know it’s not a world where I’ll ever feel at home. I don’t even know how to be alone with my father. I always feel uneasy with his gruffness, his quick temper. I never know what might set him off, so I do my best to be quiet even though I eventually figure out that my silence disappoints him. I’m sure he’d prefer a more spirited boy.        It could have been him instead of Red in the barber’s chair that afternoon. I could have been waiting my turn.                                                       10.        On our way to the restaurant, we drop off our neighbors’ thirteen-year-old daughter at her mother’s house. Our neighbors, K. and B., married after each of their first marriages ended in divorce. The thirteen-year-old and another daughter, age twelve, are K.’s. My wife says they’re our girls, too, because we spend so much time looking after them when K. and B. need us to. It’s true. They feel like family. I have no siblings, and my wife only has a brother from whom she’s estranged. These girls delight me, and at the same time, they make me sad because they remind me of all I never had the chance to experience. They’re the ghosts of the children I’ll never have.        In the van, the conversation is about birthdays. The thirteen-year-old has one coming up in less than a month. “I’ll be fourteen,” she says, “and then I can date.”        She’s becoming, B. has told us, boy-crazy.        “Not a chance, missy,” B says. “You’re not dating until you’re sixteen.”        I’m sitting up front with K. He says to me in a low voice, “Well, I guess I’ve got another couple of years to keep her away from Roman Polanski.”        It’s a joke about the film director who’s been brought back to the United States to face charges of having sex with a thirteen year-old girl in 1977. I know K. is making light as a way of avoiding the uncomfortable truth: His daughter is becoming a young woman, and all sorts of possible dangers await her.        At her mother’s, she gets out of the van and stands outside the passenger side door, waving at me. “Happy birthday,” she mouths in an exaggerated way. I can’t hear the words inside the van. “Happy birthday,” she says, and then she runs up the drive to her mother’s house.                                                       11.        My father always told me to marry late in life like he did. “Forty,” he said. “That’s the best time to settle down.”        I married when I was nineteen. My wife was a week away from her eighteenth birthday. We’d only known each other four months. Love-drunk kids. No sense at all of what lay ahead. Did we talk about having children? Guess not. Guess I assumed too much. Stupid me.                                                       12.        Inside the shop, Red and the barber hear glass breaking against the outside wall. “Kids in the alley making a mess, most likely,” the barber says. “I’ll jerk a knot in their tails. Be right back.”                                                       13.        The triplets are fourteen the evening their father steps into the alley between the post office and barber shop. Does he know Ark Cessna has been looking for him? Does he carry something inside him that makes him crazy-scared on this summer night? By this time, his three older children are grown and gone from home. Just a handful of years and the triplets will be, too. They’ll marry good women, have families, hold down jobs, be upright and honorable men. Flawed as he is, and as often as he’s disappointed his family, the drunk man still has this ahead of him: the satisfaction of seeing his darling boys become good men. It’s right there, just a few years out ahead of him, the chance to see his own youth reflected back to him, only the way it should have been all along without the liquor—a decent life, nothing to give him shame, and maybe that’s what’s too much for him to stand, the unavoidable comparison, the accusation, the reminder he gets each time he looks at those boys that time and time again he fell short of being the father his children deserved.                                                       14.        My father never intended to have a child in his middle age, but, as we all know, our nevers sometimes turn into exactly what we swore was impossible.        Once upon a time, maybe ten years back, my wife decided she wanted to have a baby. I would have taken that miracle, a child in the middle of my life. I like to tell myself it wouldn’t have thrown me for a loop. Then, she said, she came to her senses, and that maternal feeling, much to her relief, went away.                                                       15.        Fifty-four. My life more than half done.                                                       16.        The barber finds the drunk man in the alley, the jagged end of the Pepsi bottle near where his body thrashes about on the ground.        He’s slashed his throat, cut his jugular, and now blood spurts from the wound, more blood than the barber knows how to stop with his hands, those hands that work with wood.        Inside the shop, Red hears the shouts for help. He runs out of the shop, the cloth, white with thin blue stripes like pillow ticking, still snapped around his throat. The long cloth fills with air and billows around him as he runs.        His older son is ten, and at that moment he’s in the back yard, tossing one of those toy parachute men up into the sky. At the zenith, the handkerchief-sized parachute unwinds, and the plastic parachute man drifts gracefully to earth.        Just four years from this night, my family will move into a small frame house in this town, and Red’s son will be one of my friends. I’ll hear the story of the drunk man. I’ll go to high school for one year with his triplets before they graduate. Three blond-haired, blue-eyed, rugged looking boys with charming smiles. Darlings in this town.        I have my father’s 1930 yearbook, The Pyramid, and in the grade school photos, there’s a picture of the drunk man, who is, I’d say, about ten years old at the time. He looks older, more world-wise than his peers. He has a jaunty cock to his head, a weary look in his eyes. Maybe he’s starting to think, even then, the hell with it all.                                                       17.        The barber calls Charlie Sivert at the funeral home. Who else do you call in a town where there’s no doctor, no hospital, no ambulance service? You call the man who presides over the dead.        And that’s what the drunk man is by the time Charlie arrives. Dead in the alley. Dead despite anything Red or the barber can do to save him. Dead by his own hand. Dead with six children left behind. Dead with those triplets yet to grow into men        Later, Red’s son tosses his parachute man into the sky again, and while he watches its descent, one of those three boys—it’s so hard to know which one—runs beneath it, cutting across the yard to his uncle’s house. And like that the news of what happened in that alley begins to be known.                                                       18.        “If ifs and buts were wishes and nuts,” my father always said, “we’d all have a merry Christmas.”                                                       19.        The barber has to go home. Red has to go home. They have families waiting. The barber’s four girls; Red’s son.        The girls wait for their father and the familiar scents he carries with him: Lucky Tiger hair tonic, Butch Wax, Mennen talcum powder—that and the sweet smells of cut wood and varnish. How long will it be before he’ll be able to power up a saw, watch the blade slice through wood, without thinking of how he found the drunk man in the alley and how he tried to staunch the blood with his hands?        Red’s son holds his parachute man and wonders why that boy has just run across the yard.        I imagine everyone moving now as evening turns to dusk: Charlie Sivert and the barber and Red loading the drunk man’s body onto the gurney and into the hearse; the barber and Red washing blood from their hands, the best they can, in the barber’s sink. What do they say to each other? How do they step back into their regular lives? When they come into their homes that evening, do they try to tell the story to their wives outside their children’s hearing, not wanting them to know the way a misery can fester until a man can give someone a silly grin and a wave and then step into an alley and cut his throat?        The drunk man’s brother gets the news and doesn’t know what to do with it. Ark Cessna hears the news and doesn’t know what to do with it. The drunk man’s wife, his children, those triplets. They don’t know what to do with it.        Neither do I. I don’t know why the law was looking for the drunk man. I don’t know whether that was the reason he cut his throat. I could ask questions. The barber is still alive. The triplets still live in that town. I could be forward. I could say, “Was your dad in trouble with the law?”        But it’s everything I don’t know that keeps me telling the story. As long as I don’t know why the drunk man did what he did, I can fit the story to my own—the story of an only child, who has no children, an only child born to a father, who may have come to love me, but at first was willing to let me go.        The story of the drunk man comes to me year after year, and attached to it is the story of Ark Cessna and the daughters he left to mourn him once he was gone. Neither story is mine to tell, outside of the fact that each is a story of fathers and their children.        So here I am, on my fifty-fourth birthday, past any chance I ever had of being a father. I think of how my father asked the doctor if he could “get rid of it.” I think of Ark Cessna’s beautiful girls, and the barber’s, too. I think of Red and his son, who’s still my friend and willing to ask his mother, for my benefit, everything she remembers about the night the drunk man smashed that Pepsi bottle and worked the jagged end into his throat.        All those fathers that night. They must have been afraid, scared to death, for once the drunk man killed himself and those triplets became the town’s to see to, the world, and everything they thought they knew about it, surely seemed flimsy, about to come apart with the slightest breath or step.        And yet there were all those children, and someone had to look over them. Someone had to keep telling them, Love, love, love—until, finally, they believed they were safe.        I can’t let the story go because there are times like this, another year older, when I wish my father back to me—when I imagine the children I never had, the grandchildren he never had.        All of us come together. All of us with all our lives to live—lives of plenty, with nothing to long for and nothing to regret.