Fathers And Sons, Part Two Poem by Dennis Ryan

Monday morning, June 20,2022

"He had died in a trap that he had helped only a little to set, and they had all betrayed him in their various ways before he died."
--the character Nick Adams speaking about his father in Ernest Hemingway's short story "Fathers and Sons"

I'm driving through familiar country—my son asleep
beside me—thinking about my father, his bad luck.
Certain untold truths, family secrets need telling
that my uncles, aunts and cousins would feign tell,
are willfully forgetting. When the trouble started,
everyone in the family turned their backs on him,
us, pretended not to know what was happening.
They lied to his face in the process of betraying him,
then enforced various separations to exclude him.
They had to keep up public appearances; that meant
more than his life, those of his wife and children.
Sure, they had their own lives to live, no doubt;
you can make that argument. Still, he was their brother,
and they showed no shame. He should have known better,
but he couldn't see them clearly—he was a sentimentalist.
That was his fatal flaw. All sentimental people are betrayed
in one way or another. There's nothing to do about it now;
I have thought it through too many times. No happy ending.
It's troubling—these pretenders, my blood. Their pretenses.
There's no good remembering now—even my earliest memories
are tainted. He seemed happiest when we lived abroad,
in France, where I went to school, and it carried over here,
up in Michigan, where I got along better with the Ojibwe
than I did with the whites who are only out for themselves.
We live in another part of the country now, so I don't have
to deal with these people anymore. I do miss my friends.