Strangers Recited My Father at His Memorial
People I'd never met knew his poems better than I did.
The third stranger to hug me at my father's memorial called him by the wrong name, and it turned out she was the only person in the room who actually knew him. "Hal," she said, into my shoulder, a woman in her sixties with a grey braid and a denim jacket. "God, we're going to miss Hal."
My father's name was Frank. Frank Hallis. He ran a hardware store in Dayton for thirty four years and communicated primarily in weather forecasts and the phrase "did you check the breaker." I opened my mouth to tell her, politely, that she had wandered into the wrong funeral...
Then she recited him.
Four lines, from memory, standing between the carnation wreaths and the folding table with the ham sandwiches. Something about a man counting nails into paper bags, and how everything that holds a house together gets sold by the pound and forgotten by name. She said the lines the way you say something you've carried a while. Two more strangers drifted over, a heavyset guy with a notebook sticking out of his jacket and a girl who could not have been twenty five, and they nodded along like it was a hymn everyone knew but me.
"That's from 'Inventory,'" the girl said, helpfully, to the son of the man who wrote it.
My father never read poems. My father, when I was nineteen and announced I wanted to study writing, looked at me across the tailgate of his truck for a long moment and said, "Words don't fill a gas tank, Danny." That was the whole conversation. I enrolled in accounting that fall. I have been very reliably employed and very quietly furious for seventeen years, and both of those facts stood beside me at his memorial while a woman with a grey braid quoted the man who caused them.
Her name was Renee. She ran the Thursday open mic at a bar called the Kettle and Crow, twenty minutes from our house, and for eleven years, since right after my mother died, my father had stood up at that microphone once or twice a month and read poems under the name Hal Francis. His own name, folded over and worn inside out, the way he wore his work shirts on Sundays.
Eleven years.
Every league night that wasn't league night. Every "inventory" that ran late.
"He was shy about it," Renee said, which is the single strangest sentence anyone has ever said to me about Frank Hallis, a man who once argued about washers with a customer for forty five minutes on principle. "First year, he'd only read if it was raining. Said the rain kept the serious poets home."
I laughed... It came out wrong, half a sob, in front of the ham sandwiches.
That was his joke. That was exactly the shape of his jokes, and these strangers had eleven years of them and I had weather forecasts.
The heavyset guy, Marcus, showed me his phone. Someone in their circle had written my father up the year before, in a little series of profiles of writers nobody had heard yet. There was a photograph of him at the mic, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, and a paragraph where my father, quoted, on the record, said the thing I would have crossed traffic to hear when I was nineteen: "You write it down or it eats you. That's the whole craft."
I stood in the funeral home parking lot for a long time that night, doing the math the way accountants grieve. He started reading in public the year Mom died. Meaning he started writing, or admitted to it, at fifty six.
Meaning when he told his nineteen year old kid that words don't fill a gas tank, he was either lying to me or lying to himself, and I spent two decades pricing that lie into my whole life.
I wanted to be angry... I had seventeen years of anger already shelved and labeled. But you cannot be cleanly angry at a man who was afraid of the same thing you were, twenty years earlier, in the same kitchen, with less permission.
The notebooks were in his truck, under the fishing gear that never fished. Nine of them, spiral bound, the kind he sold at the store, three for two dollars. Poems about my mother's hands. Poems about the register drawer, the lake, his father's belt, the war his uncle didn't talk about. Poems that got better as the notebooks went on, ruthless and plain, and I read them all in one night sitting in the truck in the driveway with the dome light on, because it felt wrong to bring them inside a house he never read them in.
And in the seventh notebook, dated four years ago, a poem called "For the Boy With the Notebook."
I know it by heart now, so I can tell you the exact place it breaks: two thirds down, after the tailgate, after the gas tank line, quoted verbatim, his own worst sentence pinned to the page like evidence against himself. And then: "I clipped him quick, the way my old man clipped me, because a bird that never flies never hits a window. I have been forty years learning that it hits the ground instead."
Renee told me later he read that one exactly once, on a rainy Thursday, and had to stop in the middle, and that the room did what open mic rooms do, which is wait. She said he finished it... She said he never read it again but everyone remembered it, and that half the regulars knew the poem was an apology and that the man couldn't send it.
He couldn't say sorry across a kitchen table, so he said it in a bar full of strangers and trusted one of them to deliver it.
It took her eleven years and a funeral, but she delivered it.
I have spent a lot of nights since then reading about forgiveness, trying to work out whether you can grant it retroactively, across a casket, to a man who asked for it in front of everyone except you. I don't have a clean answer... Some days the anger still files itself under anger. But I typed up "Inventory" and "For the Boy With the Notebook" and posted them on a community wall for poets with a note explaining whose they were, because Hal Francis deserved readers and Frank Hallis would have hated that, and both of those men were my father, and I am done choosing between them.
Last month I drove to the Kettle and Crow on a Thursday. It was raining, which kept the serious poets home. Renee put me on the list without asking my name, and when my turn came I stood up and said it anyway.
"My name is Danny Hallis. Hal Francis was my father."
The room made a sound like a held breath let go. I read his poem first. Then, for the first time in seventeen years, I read one of mine, four lines I'd written in the truck with the dome light on, about nails sold by the pound.
Before I started, I had to adjust the microphone stand. Somebody had left it set too high.
He was taller. I read anyway.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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