"Legacy" by Nancy Werking Poling
creative non-fiction
Legacy
I have no photographs of my father laughing. The image I carry in my mind is one in which his eyelids droop, his jaw is firm, his lips jut out in a dejected pout.
I grew up believing his sadness was my fault.
I argued with him. I wanted to go to dances. No, dancing was a sin. I wanted to wear shorts. Florida days were hot and all the other girls did. No, displaying my body was a sin. I wanted to wear nail polish. No, that was a sin too.
To my youthful mind, my father spoke for God. Not the God of compassion or the God of retribution, but the God of Ten-plus Commandments. Admonitions from God the Daddy left me confused about my body. If it must be covered, if I was not to draw attention to it, it must be inherently evil.
And the evil my body carried made Daddy sad.
My mother did what she could to ease his gloom. Evenings, after washing dinner dishes and putting them away, she would sit at the piano and play “Precious Lord, Take my Hand,” “I Come to the Garden Alone,” “Nearer My God to Thee.” Seated in his easy chair, Daddy closed his eyes, a look of calm spread across his face.
As an adult I’m able to understand my father in ways my adolescent self could not. He was clinically depressed, but no doctor ever diagnosed his condition. Was he depressed because his widowed mother forced him at age seventeen to farm the land she’d purchased and give up his dream of going to college? Did my mother, in the privacy of their bedroom, make him feel inadequate? Or did he carry a gene of sorrow, one that felt the world’s hurt? Likely, the preacher urged him to pray the sadness away, while Mom and his friends told him that if he’d just try harder, he could jolt himself out of the melancholy.
Daddy left me no memories of fun or laughter. If I allow myself to recall ordinary times, though, I recognize one gift as valuable, perhaps more valuable, than laughter.
Our house was built of concrete block, with a galley kitchen and a miniscule dining room. Our furniture was worn. But we had something I never saw in friends’ homes. We had two sets of encyclopedias: The Encyclopedia Britannica, and World Book, both purchased on monthly payment plans. I spent hours thumbing through World Book, fascinated by pictures and diagrams on subjects ranging from Automobile to Zodiac. What makes a car engine turn the wheels? I asked. Why do fingernails keep growing after I’ve cut them off? Whatever happened to the Seminole Indians? Daddy would get out an encyclopedia. Together we searched for answers. In retrospect I see his reverence for knowledge, his willingness to encourage my curiosity.
Mom must have had her fill of his sadness. She filed for divorce after I graduated from college. Daddy took off for Washington State, as far as he could get from Florida and still be on the mainland United States.
I was inaccessible by phone when he died alone, far from family. My husband, our children, and I had been camping in Vermont. Upon our return home I got a call saying that Daddy had taken his own life. Inside a garage he attached a hose to the tailpipe of his car. By the time I received the message, my brother had arranged for the body to be shipped to Indiana, where our ancestors are buried.
Peering inside the open casket, I saw a familiar expression on my father’s face: the scowl of the deep sadness he carried. “Precious Lord, take my hand,” I imagine him thinking toward the end. “I am tired; I am weak; I am worn.”
I wanted fun and laughter. Daddy bequeathed to me a love of knowledge.
"Legacy" was previously published in Flying South, a literary journal sponsored by Winston Salem Writers.
Nancy Werking Poling is the author of While Earth Still Speaks, an environmental novel; Before It Was Legal: a black-white marriage (1945-1987), non-fiction; and Had Eve Come First and Jonah Been a Woman, a short story collection. After her essay, “Leander’s Lies,” won the 2018 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize, she set about turning the narrative into a novel, scheduled to be published by April Gloaming Press under the same title (Leander’s Lies) in late 2025. She lives in the North Carolina mountains.