Daddy

On the first of April, 1914, my father was born at his grandfather's house in Sturgis, Kentucky. The grandfather, Eddie Jones, had a physician attend the birth of his daughter Dukie's third child, who was named Edward Lindle for the grandfather and the doctor.

Just why Grandfather Jones was not on speaking terms with the baby's father, Charley Benedict, is not clear. The family has various versions of the men's first meetings in April. Either Charley and his sister appeared at the door in a horse-drawn carriage or met Eddie Jones's carriage on the road. At any rate, the birth was announced; the aunt was invited to see the baby, but the father was told he was not welcome.

Great-aunt Eulah replied that "If Charley is not invited, I'll not come either."

Our family's oral history edits out sad things, preserving heroic deeds, evidence of merit, and the overcoming of hardship, so I know that at some point Dukie, on her own, shot sparrows to feed her children, and that she made ice cream for Daddy's birthday by hand-swishing a bucket of cream inside a bucket of ice. How and why she killed herself is not so clear. Grandfather Benedict may have been a soldier by then, in World War I.

The orphan children were parceled out to relatives. Some of them treated Daddy harshly (he was gored by a cow while doing farm chores) and he ran away from home at least once. The last time he ran away from home, he was fifteen, living with his grandfather again. He rode his bicycle from Sturgis, Kentucky, to Evansville, Indiana, and got a job delivering prescriptions. Charley somehow found Daddy sleeping in an alley and took him to his own home, where he was looked after by Charley's new young wife.

I never knew Eva, who died giving birth to her sixth child, known only as "Little Babe". I have only the vaguest memory of Charley, whom we called Poppa. His first family, Mildred, Lillian and Daddy, was grown and he was looking after his and Eva's four girls, Audrey, Elsie Janis, Rosemary and Jo Anne, by himself. He played the violin for the children and paid close attention to their diet. He invented an immersion heater which is still used in household appliances. He built a radio. He sold the patents for a good price. He gave me a Blue Willow tea set.

Daddy was known as Benny at college, Tennessee Polytechnic Institute (now Tennessee Technological University). He studied physics, played tenor guitar in a band, painted in tempera and water color, and solved a supposedly insoluble math problem having to do with divisions of an angle. He dated the two older Ensor girls and married the youngest, my mother, when she was 17 and he was 21. She was his only sweetheart, and they were married util he died in the fiftieth year of their marriage.

Daddy often fell asleep in class, and when the professors would call on him, he would awake with a start and ask "Who? Me?" A French professor once shouted "Benedict! Translate 'Qui? Moi?" Daddy, jolted conscious, said "Who? Me?" and the French teacher said "Correct!" Daddy found French comical for some reason and would inform us that "Le diner est servi" and that we were having choux or chou-fleur or petits choux, if that was the case.

My father had a series of teaching jobs after college, but we moved every June because teachers were not paid in the summer. He would repair radios and do handyman jobs to keep us going until school started again in September. When my brother Lindle was born, the baby slept in a dresser drawer for a while because we had no crib. One summer we had to go live with Aunt Annie, who objected to Daddy's Big Band records. I locked her in the outhouse and informed Daddy that now he could play his records all he wanted to.

When I was in second grade, Daddy and I would have lunch together, since he taught Shop in my school. One day I missed him at lunch, and when I came home, he was lying on the couch with his arm over his eyes. He had cut off the tip of his index finger on a power saw at school. They said he didn't yell or swear but just whistled when he saw the blood. I never heard him swear except when he was singing a song from H.M.S. Pinafore which contained the line "Why, damme, it's too bad."

Our favorite thing, after I got too sophisticated to go fishing, was to sing that Gilbert and Sullivan operetta together. Daddy had played Captain Corcoran, a baritone, in a college production, but at home he would also sing  the parts of Ralph Rackstraw, tenor, Sir Joseph Porter, and the evil Dick Deadeye: "They are right. It was the cat." I sang Buttercup, the sisters and cousins and aunts, and I squeaked my way through Josephine's soprano aria, "Sorry Her Lot Who Loves Too Well."

After my little brother died, we moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Daddy worked on what he learned much later was the Manhattan Project. He was on the Town Council, joined the Lions Club and directed the Methodist Choir. One of his last jobs at the plant before he retired involved teaching matrix algebra. He had always loved teaching, and he was so happy at getting to teach again that he gave me copies of his textbooks and three handwritten pages of personalized lesson plans. He thought I could do anything and did not believe that as a grown woman I still counted on my fingers.  "The fun part begins after Lesson Five," he wrote.

Daddy was delighted by the elegance of mathematics, by the truth of physics, by a bon mot, by anything his children did, by a low note ("Rocked in the cradle of the deep"), the Poet and Peasant Overture, a big band, an afternoon on the lake, any new technology, a circuit board, angel food cake.

He died October 30, 1984, on the one night the nurses persuaded my mother to go home from the hospital and get some sleep. At the funeral, I played Wagner's "To the Evening Star" from Tannhauser and the minister read Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar".

"Sunset and evening star

And one clear all for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar

When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home."

There was a double rainbow over the lake when we went back to the house. My mother said "I guess everything is going to be all right."

Daddy had cast his absentee ballot before he died, probably voting for all non-incumbents, which he always threatened to do. So after the funeral, we all went back to our respective homes, miles away, to follow his example and vote.