Angelus News | February 23, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 4

DESIRE LINES
HEATHER KING
What is a man?
Allen King Sr. with the author
and her brother Joe, circa 1958. |
COURTESY HEATHER KING
Culturally we’ve been pondering
the question: What is a
woman? Maybe it’s time to ask:
What is a man?
My father — a bricklayer with eight
kids — saw the world as a place of
mystery and beauty, but that things
could go so consistently, abysmally
wrong gnawed at him.
“Doesn’t that get my goat!” he’d
rail in the parking lots of grocery
stores, spotting a cart left by a careless
shopper. “If that thing ever got rolling,
it could pick up momentum, barrel
right into a 3- or 4-year-old kid…” He
shook his head, leaving us to imagine
the twitching limbs, the tiny skull
bleeding onto the asphalt.
What he was really thinking, I knew,
was that the kid would have to be
brought to the doctor — and doctors
cost money.
We had supper together every
night. Around the dining room table
we bonded, and made fun of one
another, and endlessly bickered.
Dad meanwhile totted up imaginary
figures in the air, calculating the cost
of a replacement window for the one
we’d broken playing baseball (again),
new winter jackets for the boys, piano
lessons.
Milk in those days was delivered by
Mr. Gilman of Runnymede Farms,
and came in glass bottles. One night
we were eating supper and, as happened
frequently, drained the gallon.
“I’ll get some more,” my younger
brother Ross offered, and made for the
kitchen. Right away, dad started in.
“Don’t drop the milk. For Crimey’s
sake, don’t drop the milk, it’s up to a
dollar-thirty. Whatever you do, don’t
drop the milk.”
Almost inevitably, just as Ross was
about to reach the table, he dropped
the milk. Glass shattered. Milk
splashed, ran in runnels, and pooled
on the floor.
My father wasn’t violent, but for a
second we stopped breathing and
looked instinctively to the head of
the table. A stricken, defeated look
crossed his face, and then he bent
over double and silently buried his
head in his hands.
Had dad lost it for good? Had we
finally pushed him over the brink?
What if he pushed back his chair,
put on his brown Carhartt jacket that
smelled of White Owl cigars and Old
Spice, climbed into his pickup, and
left? Who would take us out in the
boat to check the banged-up lobster
traps? Who would bake bread on
weekends, fuss over the tomato plants,
and sit out on the breezeway with his
buddies drinking Bud on Saturday
afternoons and listening to the Red
Sox?
Who would go around the house
singing “How Great Thou Art” in
that crackpot fake tenor? Who would
recite Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad”
with what sounded suspiciously like a
catch in his throat?
Mom couldn’t leave us. But what if
daddy, fount of all fun, all jokes, all
30 • ANGELUS • February 23, 2024