The Power of Testimony

DIKKON EBERHART
And I can’t look at hobbles and I can’t stand fences [slice]
Don’t fence me in [sweep everything into the pot]
I understood Mom’s delight at the idea that her husband, when
he was a boy, might have ridden his cayuse all the way to the
mythical spot where the West commences. Mom loved Dad’s
frontier boyhood, just as she did his deeply expressed love of
the history of his family.
Family lineage, the dignity of earliest ancestry—​these were
very important to my father. He thrived on the meaning of
being an Eberhart. Dad’s mythmaking imagination delighted
in who we are. Westward drive was one of the meanings of the
American Eberharts.
But Dad had reversed the westward-​pushing trend of our
ancestors. While Uncle Dry settled in Wilmette, near Chicago,
and Aunt Bunny (Dad’s sister, Elizabeth) married a Texas oilman
and settled in Albuquerque, Dad turned back to the east—​
first for his college education, then even farther to England for
his graduate work. Upon returning to the States, Dad cemented
our family’s geography by making his living teaching at eastern
universities and summering in Maine.
Why this reversal, undermining as it did a major Eberhart
meaning? Because everything changed for my father when he
was seventeen.
It was the fall of 1921. That was the time of the knockout
punch. Dad’s family was smacked down onto the mat, and
when Dad looked up and shook his head to clear his buzzing
brain, he perceived that everything had changed. Everything he
had known and trusted had changed to a wilderness of doubt
and fear.
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