The Way He Walked

If I should meet my father in heaven would I know him? It's a good question. I was only two years and ten days when he died within a few weeks of being diagnosed with kidney disease. No one in the family knew how to explain his death to me. They could hardly comprehend it themselves. Lindbergh had just flown the Atlantic alone and the United States was awash with joy.

I suppose that I thought my father was late coming home from work. He often was at the pharmacy until closing time at 9 p.m. It was only two blocks from our home, 3 Brent Street, Wadesboro, N.C.; and it was his custom to walk to work in the morning, to walk home for lunch and back for the afternoon before walking home for dinner and sometimes back for another stint at the pharmacy. The climate is temperate in that part of North Carolina, and I can imagine that it was an agreeable walk. Perhaps I stood at the front door and watched him head off back uptown walking with his hands behind his hack.

It's too bad that I couldn't keep a journal. I would know what they did with me when the funeral was held. I would know if my brothers went or not. They were five and six, old enough to be told about death and relied upon not to demand unseemly attention. A child barely two years old might cry and cause further distress to the grieving widow. Perhaps our grandfather held my brothers' hands. What a blow it must have been for him to lose his son-in-law Will. Grandfather did not care much for the company of women. He complained that they "talked at random." Papa we called him. Daddy we called our father. Was I talking when he died? I think so. There is no reason to suppose not. Apparently I had formed a strong attachment to my Daddy. For a long time after he died, I was told many years later, his close resemblance to his brother McKay was disturbing to me. "You would get upset when Mac came to visit," my mother said. "He had to stay away until you were older." The voice would have been different, but they were near in age and there was a striking physical resemblance. The feeling of loss would be further intensified by Uncle Mac's visit. Perhaps my mother experienced something similar.

Apparently I had not given up hope that Daddy would reappear. Weeks after he had been buried and my mother was taking me for a stroll in the neighborhood, we found ourselves behind Mr. William Marshall who, like my father, had a habit of walking with his hands clasped behind his back. I never see men walk this way anymore, but perhaps men do not customarily walk as a method of transportation as they did in 1927. If they walk nowadays it is more often for exercise. They swing their arms or hold them up in a pumping motion. Apparently Mr. Marshall's walk with his hands clasped behind him, probably wearing the same type of white linen suit that was so usual in the southern summertime, appeared to me to be that of missing father. "There's my Daddy," I cried out, breaking my Mother's heart all over.

She knew, of course that time would drown my feelings for my father. I would forget how he smelled, the soft plumpness of his body as he carried me to the backyard to look at the chickens. I know that this was a ritual he had established with me from a letter to my mother from the hospital when he still had hope for a recovery. "Tell Virginia," he wrote, "to see after the chickens."

He was a respected pharmacist, accorded the title Dr. McKinnon, fastidiously clean, something of a dandy from the photograph taken when he and my mother were "courting." Looking at this picture once together, my mother told me that it was taken by Hugh Hammond Bennett, a native of Anson County who became chief of the U. S. Soil Conservation Service. "He was out taking pictures on a Sunday afternoon," she said and added hastily, "Oh, I don't mean that he was working on Sunday." My father sits with one hand propped on his thigh and a pleased-as-punch expression on his face while Emily Toy Huntley smiles demurely with both hands in her fur muff. She looks down as she has been told to do by the professional photographer who took the senior pictures for her college yearbook, "The Oak Leaves," Meredith College, class of 1911. Unlike the other seniors, Emily's picture is a profile. She said the photographer was dissatisfied with the first proof and asked her to try a different pose. Her neck is beautifully bent as she follows his instructions to incline her head slightly. She wears a "rat" of extra human hair in her piled-up coiffure. She looks every inch a gentlewoman. How could she have known what happiness and sorrow lay in store for her?

[Undated recollection by Virginia McKinnon Mann.]