Empty Silo

I have a scar that starts at the top of my lip and runs vertically for about a half-inch through the cleft below my nose. I’m so used to it that most of the time I don’t even see it unless I’ve gotten a lot of sun. Scars have a way of just reappearing after a lot of sun.

I used to have a scar on the inside of my left forearm from getting spiked by a guy trying to steal second base during a game at Valparaiso University in my junior year of college. Actually, there were two scars. Two of his cleats caught my arm, tearing through my favorite long-sleeve undershirt and drawing a fair amount of blood. But the guy was out. I remember two other things about that game: it snowed that day; and I got the game winning RBI. I don’t really know when, but those scars faded away.

The scar on my lip, however, is still here. I think I was four years old. It was in the summer, and my dad was driving all of us somewhere in the old station wagon. We were out on one of the old country roads just outside of town. My brother Danny was in the front seat beside Dad, and Pat and I were in the back. Maybe I was three. If I could remember when Dad lost his leg, it might help. But then again, he drove without it too, so maybe not.

I know it was summer because it was hot. It was hot, and in the late ‘60s air conditioning in cars was unheard of (at least where I came from). Once we were on a trip up north to Iron Mountain and my brother Mark (the second oldest—he was probably about seventeen at the time) told us all to roll up our windows and pretend that we had air conditioning as we drove along the highway, smiling and waving at the cars we passed. My mom got a big kick out of it too, but pointed out that the people in the other cars probably could tell by all of the sweat running down our faces that we didn’t actually have air conditioning. So we rolled the windows back down, and someone cracked open some sodas from the cooler in the back of the wagon and we drank and had a good laugh. But that was a few years after I got the scar on my lip. My father wasn’t with us for that trip.

So it was summer and my dad was taking the three of us somewhere and it was hotter than blazes. The windows were rolled down in the front of the car so I was getting a good breeze in the back but the air wasn’t really flowing up front. Dad yelled back above the whir of the wind rushing in the front windows, telling Pat and me to roll down our windows. I reached over and pulled on the window crank and suddenly I was falling.

I fell quickly. So quickly that I didn’t even realize that I was no longer in the car. Didn’t realize that I had grabbed the door handle instead. Didn’t realize until I looked up through the dust of the chip and seal road to see the back of the station wagon heading off in the distance.

And there was no pain at all. There was just fear. For an instant, I was afraid that they might not stop. Afraid that they might not even realize I was missing. And then brake lights. And then back up lights. And then the car flying backward toward me at a speed twice as fast as it had moved away. And then I started to cry.

Later that day I sat on my mother’s lap in the big chair in the living room while she held a damp washcloth with ice in it over my lip. She comforted me as we sat in the big chair that Santa used when he came by our house on Christmas Eve to ask whether we had been good.

The chair with the matching ottoman. The ottoman I sat on that night the following spring—St. Patrick’s Day. Sat with my face buried in my hands, hiding my laughter. My laughter at my older brother Mark whom I’d never seen cry before. My brother Mark who was crying as our father lay dying behind the closed doors of the den not ten feet away.

Or perhaps it was the St. Patrick’s Day two springs after I split my lip. I don’t really remember. I only know that this scar above my lip is one of the few lasting memories of my father.

My father, c. 1942

My father put too much pepper on everything he cooked. Way too much pepper. “That’s how they taught me in the Army” he would say, as if during World War II the Army had sent him to culinary school instead of North Africa, instead of Ardennes to participate in the Battle of the Bulge where he received two Bronze Stars. As if he needed to provide his four-year-old son with a résumé in order to get him to eat the plate full of chipped beef on toast that sat in front of him. Perhaps if my father hadn’t called it “shit on a shingle,” I would not have been so skeptical of his culinary expertise.

But my father did know how to cook, and how to bake, which is probably more than most fathers in the 1960s. He knew how to make a piecrust. He used that skill to make pasties—a meat and potato pie that is a delicacy of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and not something readily available in Evansville, Wisconsin. When the neighbors would ask my father when he was planning to make pasties again, my father knew how to take a hint, and would set aside an entire Sunday afternoon to put together the pies, and then share a meal with the neighbors that evening.

For breakfast my father’s specialty was “Army Eggs.” The recipe is simple. Fry about half a pound of bacon in a skillet until it is so crisp that you can no longer stab it with a fork. Remove the cooked bacon from the skillet and place it on a paper towel until it cools enough so that you can handle it. While the bacon is cooling, mix up a half-dozen eggs with a little bit of milk, and then pour that into the skillet. Be sure not to drain the bacon grease from the skillet beforehand. That is what gives the eggs their flavor. That, and about four tablespoons of pepper. As the eggs first begin to firm (after there is a good base, but while they are still mostly runny), crumble the bacon into the egg mixture, and then slosh the pan around so that the hot bacon grease spill over the top of the eggs to help cook them from the top. You know that Army Eggs are done when there is no liquid of any kind left in the pan. Then you use the spatula to cut off a piece and serve it with toast and butter. Dry toast in which the butter just sits on top, like they served in the Army.

On Sunday afternoons during the summer, my father would grill steaks. Steaks with lots of pepper on them. He would also slice up potatoes and onions and put them into tinfoil, with slits of butter, and you guessed it, lots of salt and pepper.

It has been more than forty years since I have eaten Army Eggs. Not quite as long as that for chipped beef on toast because my mother continued to make that for us after my father’s death (although she backed off on the pepper). But to this day, I still make those potatoes on the grill, with slits of butter and as much salt and pepper as my wife will allow (and even a little bit more sometimes).