True North

Aside from the Lord, my father received his directions from a Marble’s compass, one of those brass pin-on ones with a black face that he wore everywhere, even to church, despite my mother’s indignation. She never understood that the Lord and the compass meant the same thing to Dad, who believed that both would guide a man through the thickets of life, moral or otherwise. It was no surprise, then, that my confirmation gifts were a Bible from Mom and a compass from Dad. The way he reckoned, I would never have an excuse for losing my way again—a tall order for a 12-year-old boy on the cusp of puberty. Truth be told, my father’s homely virtues embarrassed me.
    “Do you understand the meaning behind these gifts, son?” In his old brown wool church suit worn thin in the elbows, shirt gaping at the neck, he looked like he belonged in a Depression-era cartoon depicting someone who had fallen on hard times. Wearing a dollar haircut that exposed his big ears, skinny as a snipe, all he needed was a tin cup full of nickel pencils.
    “Yes,” I nodded impatiently in the freezing cold, sure of nothing except the chatter of my teeth and the chagrin to come.
    “Tell me.”
    “It means I’ll know the right direction to go?” Seeing the congregation pour from the foyer, the only direction I wanted to go was home.
    “That’s one way of putting it, I guess.” When he motioned to my mother to follow us into the churchyard, I groaned inwardly when I saw some of the other boys snickering. Looking at my father through their eyes, I flushed with humiliation. With his cheap haircut, cracked leather shoes and compass pinned to his secondhand coat, he was a caricature of what a father should be, I thought, and I vowed never to be like him.
    The ceremony was red-faced formal. Standing beneath the flag, snapping sharp as a snare drum against a brilliant-blue winter sky, I shivered in the brisk wind while Mom fiddled with the camera. Clutching the gift Bible two-handed to my chest for warmth, I stood still long enough for Dad to pin the compass to my new church clothes like a medal of valor. Shaking and coughing in the cold, he took forever, it seemed. Then he saluted and stood beside me, stretching his bony arm across my shoulders and grinning with pride. I still have the picture. On the back he wrote, “Don’t lose your Marble’s.” Watching my school friends point and laugh as they headed for the parking lot, I covered the compass with my hand when my father walked ahead of me, hunched against the wind.
    Mingling catechism with compass training, Dad drilled me all winter in the understanding of both and harped ad nauseam about one being the equivalent of the other. I suffered his lessons stoically, knowing they were a price I had to pay if I wanted a gun for the coming hunting season.
    “Trust your compass and trust your God, and you’ll never get lost, son.”
    Banned from the sin of saying “right” and “left” when giving directions, I had to practice using cardinal and intercardinal points even when I was leaving for school. Sometimes my contempt surfaced.
    “Say you wanted to go to the neighbor’s pole barn as the crow flies. Which intercardinal direction . . . . ”
    “Northeast,” I interrupted.
    Given his beliefs, my father’s disposition brooked no nuance, making him oblivious to any shortness or sarcasm in another’s voice. “Alright then, give me the directions to Uncle Bob’s deer blind if you were leaving the back door at dawn and following the pasture fences.”
    “Walk south to the shed, turn east toward sunrise and walk until you hear the river rushing over the rocks, telling you you’ve reached the fence. Turn that way, south, I mean, and split your flashlight between the fence and the ground to keep from ripping your pants on barbed wire and covering your boots with cow flop. Turn west at the next fence and follow it until you come to the gate. Turn south, walk the log over the river, and straight ahead is the blind. You’ll know it’s Uncle Bob’s when you get inside and hear the candy wrappers crunching under your feet from all the crap he eats before falling asleep.”
Even Mom shot me a glance from the kitchen for mocking an adult, but Dad overlooked it, pleased instead by the accuracy of my answer. Clearly the compass training was taking hold.
    “Excellent.” Then he smiled and shook his head. “Uncle Bob needs to take a reading on those wrappers. Candy, you say? No wonder he hasn’t shot a buck in over a decade.”
    In the coming months I learned that one end of the needle always points to the north, the same as the Bible always points to the truth (unless I let my belt buckle or the devil get in the way). I learned that the degrees for each direction are North: 0°, East: 90°, South: 180° and West: 270°, and I learned how to take and keep my bearings. I learned to distinguish between true north and compass north by understanding magnetic declination, something Dad said was no different than applying the Gospel to distinguish between God and false idols. I also learned that my father was becoming more and more short of breath, often resting between sentences to gather himself.
    “A man with a Marble’s on the outside and a moral compass on the inside can’t get lost, son,” he said. “If you pin one to your coat and the other to your heart, you’ll never end up in the devil’s lost-and-found bin.”
    To a 12-year-old boy in 1971, it was mostly hooey.
    Tests were many, beginning with treasure hunts on the back property and leading to excursions in the woods replete with ethical questions pertaining to hunting, gunning and the taking of game. Each more difficult than the last, the tests culminated that spring, when I was driven a mile from the house and walked blindfolded into an unfamiliar forest. I was provided food, water, matches, a compass and a Bible. My task was to survive a day and night in the wild and return the next morning with a thorough understanding of the parable of the lost son. When I arrived home safely—bleeding, bug-bitten and reciting Luke 15:11-32—my mother burst into tears and scolded my father for a week of Sundays.
    For his part, Dad beamed with pride at the return of his only son. “Well, well, aren’t you the voice of amazing grace,” he said, breathing hard, clueless to my disdain. I knew then I’d won the gun.
    As expected, that summer on my birthday he presented me with a shotgun. I tore the box apart, hoping for a Browning A-5, better yet a Sweet Sixteen, but was crestfallen when I unveiled a used 20-gauge Winchester Model 37 identical to Dad’s 12-gauge. I hid my disappointment lest he take it back and smiled weakly, furious with myself when I should have known better. This was my father, after all, who never took more than one shot, believing that more than one was pure greed, the devil’s work and a deadly sin. Given his proud grin and my mother’s warning glare, I thanked him tersely and went to my room to sulk.
    “Don’t you want to shoot it?” he called after me.
    “Maybe later. I don’t feel very good right now.” Disgusted with the lowly single-barrel and already anticipating the mockery of my friends who owned pumps and semi-autos, I stuck the gun in the back of the closet. It was barely better than no gun.
My father trained me to use the Winchester much like he did the Marble’s. By fall I was a safe gun handler and a decent shot, able to lead an apple whipped down the drive past the barn and splatter it before it hit the ground. I knew how to walk abreast in the field and correctly cross a fence, unloading the single shell before handing Dad the empty gun. I carried it correctly and never aimed the barrel at anything I didn’t intend to shoot.
    Opening day of hunting season I reluctantly took my place afield next to my father, who peppered me like birdshot with his Jiminy Cricket homilies.
    “The two letters of difference in ‘quality’ and ‘quantity’ are the difference between a hunter and a killer and a saint and a sinner.”
    “Restraint is the trait of a true hunter.”
    “Take less than you need, not what you can.”
    “A good hunter rejoices more in the bird that eludes him than the one he takes, just as a father rejoices more in finding his lost son than in knowing his other son is safe at home.”
    “Let your conscience be your compass.”
    Our early hunts together were a painful choreography designed by my father to savor the experience. Slowly and deliberately we walked in a line 20 yards apart, our compasses worn at his insistence supposedly to serve as a symbol for some higher code. Often he stopped to catch his breath, and on better days he hummed hymns and stole glances at me across the ripe grass of our small fields on those colorful October mornings. Amazed by autumn’s magic and the company of his only son, he seemed awed, his face suffused with wonder and reverence—a man grateful for what God had given him. With a boy, a Bible and a compass, he had dead reckoned himself to happiness.
    When Indian summer donned its war bonnet, he used to strip down to his undershirt, making me cringe at the sight of his gangly ever-thin frame, and whistle Sousa marches. He looked like an emaciated Abraham Lincoln striding through the fields, oblivious to the John Wilkes Booth anger in my heart for his earnest humility. God may have been in his details, but they weren’t in mine.
    Like most young hunters, I trembled with bloodlust and hungered for the kill and count, each trigger pull a quick fix between opportunities. Without a dog, we flushed few birds, but when we did my father always deferred to my haste, allowing me to shoot first and never firing his gun unless I crippled one. There were times when I wanted to grab the gun out of his hands to shoot again at a bird I’d missed or, better, to take a double.
    During the second season when a rare pair of roosters erupted from a fencerow where my father had stopped to rest, I nailed the first with a quick shot, rushed to reload, and fired off-balance, dropping a foot on the second bird. At the farthest edge of range, my father folded the bird with a perfect shot and reproached me for my behavior, a recklessness that violated the sanctity of the hunt. It was the only time I saw ire flash in his eyes.
    “You know better than to shoot like that,” he scolded. “Nobody needs to take more than one pheasant at a time, and especially not a boy with a single-shot.”
    Stung by his reprimand, I flushed with anger, threw my gun down and cursed him. “It’s not against the law, damn you! I’m sick of doing it your way!”
    He was obviously taken aback, and he looked at me like I was a stranger as he struggled to corral the emotions galloping across his gaunt face. “Just because the law allows it doesn’t mean it’s right, son. What’s right is respecting the game and not hurting God’s creatures wantonly. That’s part of the reason I gave you that compass. To keep you on the straight and narrow.”
    I tuned out his compass cockamamie, stalked over to the quivering rooster I’d shot and wrung its neck hard, twisting the head from the body. Determined to dry my bloody hands on the dying embers of his control over me, I wiped them on my pants, tore the compass from my shirt and handed it to him.
    “Here, you keep it. I don’t want it.”
    My father slipped the compass into his pants pocket and, without comment, picked up the bird lovingly before placing it in his vest. He then turned away from me, and he never took me hunting again. Watching him cross the field, I retrieved the other pheasant and my gun from the weeds and walked a different path home.
    In the weeks that followed my father’s health failed faster than expected, and by mid-November he was no longer able to hunt. I watched him clean his gun soberly, neither of us knowing then that he would never take it afield again. We hardly spoke to each other, and in some ways I took stubborn pleasure in breaking his heart, my defiance of his country-bumpkin morality fueling my self-importance.
    By December his breathing had deteriorated to wheezing and he could barely talk without coughing. Pneumonia took his life days short of spring. At his funeral my mother saw to it that he wore his compass—“to find his way through the next    world,” as she put it. Pinned to the lapel of his old brown suit, the compass needle pointed right at me.
    With school, chores and work to help my mother make ends meet, I had little time for much else. In the summer I worked the farm, and in the winter I bagged groceries at the local supermarket after school. With the advent of college, hunting became an afterthought, and by the time I’d graduated and started a career, it had been all but forgotten.

With the passing of my mother, I returned home on a cold evening in December. Already the solemn grays of winter had painted an austere landscape, except for the deep green of snow-laden conifers and the rusty leaves from a row of oaks ticking in the fine snow. As I walked toward the dark house where I’d grown up, I suddenly realized that I was no one’s son any longer and an unexpected lump filled my throat. Softened by time, the child who had despised his father had grown into a man who did not—a man who yearned to make peace with his past. When I opened the door, my childhood took me by the hand and walked me from room to room, telling me stories that filled my heart with remorse.
    I found the picture in their bedroom: Dad grinning happily with his arm draped across my shoulders. Taking my father’s 12-gauge from its case, I threw on his battered hunting coat and ran outside through the snow into the pasture. This time I wanted to shoot the gun. I fumbled a shell from the coat pocket, loaded it, pointed the gun at the sky and pulled the trigger.   Fire roared from the barrel like lightning—a one-gun twilight salute shot across a thousand yesterdays toward a country churchyard where a man in a worn suit once saluted his son. One round only, to illuminate my sorrow and to honor my father.
I listened to the night quiet around me as I removed the spent shell and slipped it into my coat pocket. As soon as my hand   touched metal, I knew what it was.
    “I found my Marble’s, Dad,” I whispered before turning north on the path toward home.

T.C. Jennings is a retired principal and now freelance writer who lives in Michigan with an undisciplined chocolate Lab and an equally recalcitrant German shorthaired pointer. He has won the Hopwood Award for creative writing from the University of Michigan and has written for a variety of sporting publications.