from Invisible Bride by Tony Tost

My father traveled a lot, railroading as a Pullman porter and working at sea. My father traveled in circles. My father traveled the Pacific Ocean establishing radio stations that would be of great use during the war. He traveled north for months at a time. Increasingly, my father traveled in solitude.

When I was a child my bed was large and I, like a compass, turned in the night so I could face whatever direction I believed my father was headed. When I was fifteen I traveled with him for a week, and my mother stayed home and slept in my clothes.

When my father came home from another country he called me the word for “doll” in that country’s language. At night, according to my mother, he could travel into the heart of disaster. My father traveled thousands of kilometers by train through the endless landscapes of Russia, Mongolia and China. He documented this voyage with dozens of tiny cuts across the back of a small doll.

In one letter, he wrote “every child is a Negro hung in chains on a tree.”

It has been said that to be a father is to be traveling at all times, through areas of holiness, and by so doing, acquiring holiness: when my father talked of God he pointed not at the sky but at his feet.

My father traveled to Kansas to find the Negro’s gravesite but was unable to locate it. He traveled long distances by horse, riding by night and sometimes herding animals. “My argument,” my father wrote, “is not with the dark, but with those who stumble in it.”

One year he sent home small machines from all over the country, and my mother and I would drag each to the river. There was snow all over the ground. More than once I burst into tears at his accounts of traveling the country in railway cars and playing the devil at hoedowns in order to stay alive.

When my father finally returned, I slept in my boots.