Knowing Jack

I got to know my wife’s Uncle when I was turning 49 and he was 87.  One of my brothers in law, husband with skills and tools of another of Jack’s nieces, was trying to help him stay in his old farmhouse in Dimmick township.  I became the gopher on the job.


That house had significant problems, plumbing among others. It was Jack’s parents’ house.  He had never married, was long past retirement, and lived as a solitary man. Jack occupied only a few of the rooms that once housed his large family.  The unused rooms were like a museum of a past life.


Jack lived simply.  Realizing calendars could be reused, that there were only so many combinations between days of the week and January 1, and factoring in leap year, he had a complete set of wall calendars from a long closed local bank.  The ones with the big numbers they gave out free.  As the years rolled on, he reused the calendars when January 1 lined up with the right day.  When an old calendar was hung in a new year, he crossed off the previous year it was used and wrote the new year in magic marker.  In the margins were strings of the years of Jack’s life in his own hand.


Jack was a White Sox fan, a democrat, and a Catholic but he was also part of a close community. He talked of his neighbors kindly, as if they were family, and many of them were.  He was grounded in the people and the land around him.  Jack served in Europe in WWII and was a prisoner of war but returned to Dimmick where his heart and his church were.  


Jack’s farmhouse, save for the priest’s residence long since rented out, was the closest residence to Sacred Heart Church.  As the number of families and Catholic church goers in Dimmick dwindled, a reorganization made Sacred Heart part a larger parish in LaSalle.  The church was served primarily by visiting priests. Jack dreaded the possibility of seeing his church close, the place where so many of his family were baptized and married, waked and buried. 


Sacred Heart had no plumbing and was unheated during the week.  During Lent, entrusted with a key, Jack would go to the church alone, do the stations of the cross, and pray the rosary.  Some days, he told me in secret, it was so cold he could see his breath.  Risking blasphemy, Jack would wear his stocking hat on the coldest days while in the pew.  He would wear one glove, alternating hands so he could still feel the rosary beads with his fingers.    


I knocked on his door one day with some food my wife made him.  He was sitting in his chair, the door unlocked.  He yelled for me to come in and as I stepped through the door, he put a clothespin on a rosary bead so he could return to his prayer and not lose his place.  


Jack was he most devout man I ever met.  He spoke about God like he talked about the White Sox, openly and frankly. He taught me how to pray the rosary.  He also taught me that prayer was a conversation with God.


“If you don’t ask him direct questions, I mean really pointed questions, he’s not gonna tell you a thing.  You got to be persistent.  And even then, he might leave you hanging.  He’s had me hanging for quite a while now.”


“What are you trying to find out from him Jack?”


“I’m trying to find out why he’s keeping me around.  It is pretty hard to see the sense of it some days.  I mean, what am I accomplishing?”


“Well, you’re teaching me things Jack.  That might count.”


“Oh yeah but you got plenty of things to do.  You got kids to raise and a wife to support and a job to do.  I have none of that.  I have some fence to make and a few cows to take care of but what does that amount to?  I want to know what God has in store for me in the rest of my life.  I think there must be more, but I don’t know what it is.  And he’s not helping.”


“So, do you pray for God to tell you?”


“In a way.  I mean I don’t expect him to speak to me. But he could show me. Is that asking too much?  I mean, I would catch on if he would just give me a clue.  But he’s left me in the dark.”


Never had I known a man whose life appeared so simple yet was so engaged with the world.  He complained about nothing and felt equal to everyone.  The world both amused and fascinated him.  Sometimes when I visited, I felt as if he had a list of topics waiting to discuss with me.

 
He was interested in county government, farming innovations, changes in education, baseball, national politics, you name it.  He would talk about the past if you asked but he was much more interested in the future. 


The twentieth century was ending, and he was fascinated with how computers were changing the world.  He thought all the “dot.com stuff and emails” were crazy, but at the same time he wanted to know how it was all going to turn out.  He saw the digital world as a means to avoid real conversation.


“I don’t know about that Jack.  Think of an email as a letter in your mailbox on the road there.  You can get a letter from a guy in the morning, send a response back at noon, get another letter from him in the afternoon, and send back another response before you leave work.  I think we communicate more now than ever because of computers.”


“Is that how its working now?”  He paused.  “I have to say I never thought of that. Yeah that could add speed to working out a problem.”


“You want us to hook you up Jack?  I bet we could find you a used computer for not much and get you online pretty easily.”


He laughed and shook his head. “No thanks. I think I’ll pass on this one.” 


Jack worried about his health.  He thought he was declining, as I am told many past 85 years of age do.  In bad weather he would work out by climbing up and down the steep stairs to the cold unused upstairs bedrooms.  He said like old ballplayers, his legs were giving out. 


When days were fair, he would walk up and down the lightly trafficked blacktop road that ran past his house.  Down the road were the houses of his widowed sisters in law, living on patches of ground carved out of his father’s farm and handed down to their husbands.  Jack looked after them as best he could when they let him. 

 
One winter day while walking down the road he thought he saw smoke coming from the house of his sister in law Marguerite.  As he got closer and the smoke cloud grew his heart began pounding and he broke into a run.  As he turned into her lane, he saw flames.


Marguerite was bedridden, recovering from cancer surgery.  He believed she was trapped inside.  He yelled for her and her son and tried to open her door.  Jack was looking for something to break a window with when a fire truck barreled down the lane.  A volunteer fireman, a young man he knew well, told him to stand back.


“But Marguerite and David!” Jack yelled.


“They’re OK Jack.  David woke up to the smoke, put the call in to us, got his Mom in the pickup, and drove her to the hospital.”


The house could not be saved.  Marguerite never moved back.  It was her last day in Dimmick township.


Later when Jack recalled the morning, still emotional in the retelling, he told me this.


“I thought I was there for that purpose.  I thought God kept me alive to save Marguerite and David.  But I guess that wasn’t it.”


He looked pensive, as if he was about to tell me something else.  I waited.


“I’m a little worried, not much to tell the truth, but its a thought.  What if God  tried to get me into that smoke-filled house to bump me off?  But then, that wouldn’t be like him.”


“I wouldn’t worry about God doing that to you Jack.  That doesn’t sound like the God you talk to me about.”


“No, you’re right. It’s not.  But I’m glad the door was locked anyway.”   


Jack may have been frustrated with God, but he never stopped talking to him.


In March of that year Jack and I planted potatoes, Kennebecs and Pontiac Reds, on a patch of his land. Like good Irishmen we tended them well.  After a rain in July we dug for new potatoes.  I brought a spade fork and began turning up the dirt  under the plants exposing the potatoes.


Those Irishmen in Dimmick said the word potatoes fast with no “T” sound.  It was as if it were one syllable; “Budayduz.”  Jack liked his new "budayduz" red, so we dug some of the Pontiacs.  It was a good year. We got rain when we needed it but not too much.


As I turned over the potatoes, Jack gathered them into a bushel basket.


“Let me try that,” he said.  “It’s been a long time since I dug potatoes.”


Jack was a slight man.  He jammed the fork into the ground, put his boot on the top edge and pushed, but it barely moved.  He made another stab at it, then looked up at me.


“Nope. Too old for that anymore I guess.”


Not long after Jack had open heart surgery in Peoria.  He knew the risks given his age, but insisted the surgeon try to repair his failing heart. It was 2001 prior to September 11^th. The surgery had not gone well, and the doctor told the nieces he doubted Jack could recover. 


I visited him in ICU.  He was struggling.  His kidneys were beginning to fail, and he was very swollen.  When I first entered the room, Jack was asleep.  He had an oxygen mask and lots of IV lines.  I went to the gift shop, bought a rosary, returned to his bed and waited for him to wake up. 


“Jack, how about we do the rosary together?”


He nodded.  I put the beads in his hand and said the prayers out loud the way he taught me. Start with the Apostle’s Creed.  Always say a Glory Be before the Our Father, follow it with ten Hail Marys (a decade).  Then repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.  When he couldn’t advance the beads, I pulled them through his fingers.  Praying the rosary takes a while.  Jack stuck with it.  When we were finished, he nodded again and went back to sleep.

Jack died a few days later and we had a funeral service at his church.  Later that year they closed Sacred Heart.  There was a niche in the sanctuary wall where they kept the hosts.  Inside the niche was a flickering red light that was always on.  After the priest said the final mass, he put the container of hosts under his arm, shut the light off, walked up the aisle and out the door.  I’m glad Jack didn’t see that.  For him, the light never went out.