Almost a Family Read online

  By far the most dramatic memento of all turned up in December 1975, only weeks before I was to leave for Africa on my first foreign assignment. I was in the midst of preparing for my departure, running around trying to secure visas, complete my inoculations, and read up on wars and insurrections from Rhodesia to Angola. One afternoon, as I passed by the bank of mailboxes on the edge of the city room, I saw a package wrapped in brown paper stuffed into my box. Something about it struck me instantly as momentous. I took it to my desk and opened it. A note under the letterhead of the Chicago Tribune appeared. It was written by one Harold E. Hutchings, an archivist at the newspaper. He said he had been cleaning house and come across an item at the bottom of an old filing cabinet. He was sending it on to Abe Rosenthal, the Times’ managing editor. “We have acquired this sad memento of the war in the Pacific,” he wrote, “which the Times may wish to keep, or pass on to the appropriate recipient.” A secretary in Abe’s office had passed it on to me, unaware of its significance.

  My hands began to tremble as I carefully unwrapped the parcel. Inside was a notebook with a thick cover, on which was written “N.G. 1942, Buna.” Above that, my father’s name was neatly printed. There was a date: “Oct. 17, 1942.” It was his last notebook, the one he carried with him on his final day. Slowly, I turned the pages. There was his handwriting, broad strokes in pencil. I scarcely breathed as I read it. He wrote about the trip aboard the DC-3 from Port Moresby and the soldier next to him saying, “I still don’t see how these things can fly.” He wrote about the plane flying over “very thick jungle—many white birds,” then landing in Wanigela on a strip that was “just grass cut down” and about the women carrying bunches of bananas and pawpaws. He saw the King John and wrote that it looked like a pirate ship. Then, the next morning, collecting color for his story, he jotted down impressions of the trip along the coast. He noted at 6:00 a.m. that it was “just turning light.” He saw that “the high indigo mountains have emerged” from the night. He wrote that the men caught fish for stew and that grenades were distributed to the troops. Then, at 8:00, he made that fateful entry: “Plane across course. Jap or our?” The plane returned and his writing was hastily scrawled now and came in fragments: “bombed by 2 eng. plane—500 yd. miss.” And the final note: “Fahn shot 50 cal.” The next page was torn out. I realized that must have happened at the moment the shrapnel struck, or perhaps as the notebook slipped from his grasp as he fell to the deck inside the wheelhouse.

  For a long time, sitting there in the city room, I couldn’t speak. I don’t remember much of what I did do, but I recall the numbing sensation that comes with a flood of contradictory emotions. I felt chilled and warmed at the same time, both scared and comforted. Why had the notebook turned up now, after thirty-three years? Why had it come just as I was about to embark on my own journey, off to cover conflicts in a vast continent? Was it so far-fetched to imagine that it was some kind of message? If so, what message? A warning? A laying on of hands?

  I took the notebook in to Abe, who was seated behind his desk in the center of his managing editor’s office. In his excitement at the discovery, he ordered up a news story about it. It turned out that the notebook had been taken from my father’s body by E. R. Noderer, the Chicago Tribune’s correspondent in the Pacific. He’d brought it home, intending to give it to my mother, but instead left it in the cabinet. He had retired and moved to Florida two years before. “A reporter’s notebook,” the Times story said, “is perhaps his most professional possession, for in it are his observations and his perceptions, the brick and mortar of his job.” A week after the story appeared, another letter came to me. This one was from Sheridan Fahnestock, the son of the man who was killed along with my father, who had read it. He had become a reporter, too, working on the Bulletin published in Bend, Oregon. “I don’t know about you,” he wrote, “but in our family the Darnton name was always special because our fathers died together.” Immediately I wrote him back; the same was certainly true in our family. We corresponded for a while, until distance and time separated us again.

  Over the years, as my wife, Nina, and I raised a family of our own—two daughters, Kyra and Liza, and a son, Jamie—I mused about these tokens and mementos and recollections. I came to think of them as visitations from my father. They were like notes washing ashore in bottles, messages from Shakespeare’s “undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” I suppose that this kind of irrational thinking was a continuation, in lesser form, of the superstitions that had ruled so much of my childhood. But sometimes I almost wonder, Is it even remotely conceivable that perished souls live on in some kind of parallel world and decide from time to time to reach in and tweak our own?

  If this is true, then what happened in June 2005 is proof that my father’s ghost has an extravagant sense of humor. In that month my brother and I heard that there exists on a remote Scottish island called Sanda a tavern called the Byron Darnton. At first, I was disbelieving. But I went to a Web site, and there was Sanda, a mere stub of a place thirteen miles off the southern tip of the Kintyre Peninsula in the North Channel—that is to say, in the middle of nowhere. It was home to thousands of sheep and a smattering of stone buildings and—here was the odd part—a year-round population of exactly one person, an enterprising fellow who single-handedly had constructed a pub, proclaiming it to be the most remote in the entire United Kingdom. And he had named it the Byron Darnton! This was too much. What was a tavern named after my father doing on some godforsaken island in Scotland?

  The mystery was quickly solved. The Web site said the tavern had gotten its name from an old shipwreck, some kind of vessel that had smashed against the island’s rocky western shore long ago. Of course! The SS Byron Darnton! In a single phone call, my brother and I came to a quick decision. We’d travel to Scotland and go to Sanda. Our wives would go with us. Then we’d raise a glass—or several, or perhaps many—to the memory of our father. If Barney has indeed been trying to get my attention, I thought, he has certainly succeeded.

  Some weeks later, Nina and I took the overnight flight from JFK, changed at Heathrow for a plane to Glasgow, then rented a car for the long drive in the Highlands, which would take us past Loch Lomond and the pine forests of the west coast. We spent the night in an elegant castle overlooking Loch Fyne, sleeping in a canopied bed in a vast chamber, the walls coated all in white, guarded by suits of armor and broadswords mounted over the stone fireplace. The next day we ended up in Campbeltown, an old-world sea town with thick wooden piers, salt spray in the air, and seagulls resting on rooftops.

  There we were met by the driver of a RIB, or rigid inflatable boat, built around a solid hull with inflatable tubes at the gunwales. We were handed rain slickers and we climbed down a ladder to board and sat side by side on motorcycle saddle seats with raised handgrips. Minutes later, we were out of the harbor in the Mull of Kintyre, bouncing off the waves and doused by spray. When we hit the churlish waters where the Irish Sea converges with the Firth of Clyde, the waves practically washed over us. We tightened our hold on the handgrips as the boat bucked and bounced. After some forty minutes, the driver pointed to the horizon and yelled in a thick burr, “Thar she is.” In the distance, rising starkly out of the dark water, was an imposing island, shaped like a gigantic upside-down spoon. As we drew nearer, I could make out rolling green hills and, closer still, the white dots of sheep and dark lines of stone walls. We entered a quiet bay. A row of gray stone buildings was set behind a fifteen-foot seawall. They looked as if they had been there for centuries.

  We pulled up to a jetty. A man rushed over, fastened the boat, and thrust out a calloused hand in welcome. Dick Gannon was a slight man in his mid-fifties with a white beard, thick-lens glasses, and the unkempt look of a person living alone. He had been preparing for our arrival—we had explained the purpose of our visit in an e-mail—and he was eager to show us around. He grabbed our bags and walked ahead, but I stopped dead. A sign perched on a wooden stand at the end of the
jetty read BYRON DARNTON TAVERN. It was strange to see that name suspended in midair in a place that was at the ends of the earth.

  We dropped the bags off inside a stone cottage and headed for the pub. In front a dozen people sat at picnic tables and in lawn chairs, sipping drinks and gazing over a half-moon bay of stones washed by gentle waves. The scene was a study in holiday serenity. The tavern presented itself as an eighty-foot-long, sleek stone building under a slate roof. It bore a large hand-painted sign that depicted the island set between raging white surf and billowing white clouds. Once again there was that improbable name: B-Y-R-O-N D-A-R-N-T-O-N. We crossed an open-air courtyard and entered. Inside, the room was vast and cheery. The walls were stone with pine cladding, and wooden tables were spread around. The obligatory dartboard hung in a corner. Suspended from the walls were T-shirts and white life preservers with BYRON DARNTON painted in bold red letters. At the far end was a handsome three-penny bar made of sandstone and topped with thick mahogany. I grabbed a stool next to a large jar of home-pickled eggs and contemplated the selection: five ales and beers on tap and upward of thirty whiskies. My father would have approved.

  I chose a lager and settled in while Dick sketched the history of Sanda and told us about his tribulations in getting the pub built and up and running. When it came time to name it, he thought of the most dramatic event of recent times—the night the Byron Darnton struck the rocks just below a lighthouse on the treacherous western coast. For fourteen hours, the ship foundered. Lifeboat crews from Campbeltown tried to reach her and convince the captain to abandon ship. Finally, only minutes after all fifty-four passengers and crew and a husky dog were taken off, the ship broke in two. Over the years, divers stripped her of everything worth taking. “We had no idea where the name of the ship came from,” Dick said. “Or that there was any history behind it, or a living family. We simply liked the sound of it—struck us as poetic.”

  Nina and I spent part of the afternoon with a group of men outside. Most of them had come over on yachts from Red Bay in Northern Ireland. I bought a round of drinks, which seemed to open the door to a lifelong friendship. Six of the men, our own age, were particularly friendly, and when we told them the object of our visit, one exclaimed, “I read about you on the pub’s Web site! You’re famous!” He bought us a round. Curiously, for all their boozy camaraderie—they invited us to sail back to Northern Ireland with them—they turned evasive whenever we asked questions about them. We found out why three hours after they had gone. Dick remarked, “Do you happen to know who you were drinking with all afternoon?” He anticipated our surprise with a smile. “Pink Floyd.”

  The next morning, Bob, his wife, Susan, and their daughter, Margaret, arrived in a motorboat. They dropped their bags off at their cottage and we all went to the tavern. Bob and I posed next to the sign. Moments later, we were inside, and I watched Bob take it all in with the same incredulity that I had felt twenty-four hours earlier. Dick disappeared behind the bar and we heard the pop of a champagne cork. Flutes were filled and passed around. I looked at my brother and he looked at me. He proposed a toast. “Here’s to the memory of Byron Darnton,” he said, sounding oddly formal. He raised his glass and I raised mine. “Here’s to the old man,” I countered. We refilled the glasses several times.

  Afterward, Bob and I walked across the waist of the island to visit the remnants of the wreck. Black-faced ewes scattered at our approach along a path though the bracken and wildflowers. The path dipped through a valley and reached the windswept western coast, where seals sunned themselves on the rocks and colonies of razorbills and puffins nested. It ended at the foot of a tall white lighthouse, built in three stages on the top of a towering crag. A giant outcropping, nicknamed Elephant Rock, was connected to it by a thin eroded strand, much like an elephant’s trunk. We had timed our walk to arrive at low tide and we had been told where to look.

  And then we saw it, on the rocks, about thirty yards offshore, a heap of metal rising up about eight feet into the air. It was covered in yellow lichen and green moss. With effort, we could just about make out what was—or had been—the bottom of the hull. Resting next to it was something that looked like a propeller and, twenty feet away, another mound of dark metal. They looked strange and out of place in the mudflats, like pieces of sculpture.

  We tried to approach it. I stepped down onto the moss-covered rocks at the water’s edge. I wanted to see if I could climb over and touch the battered hull. I even wondered if this might be the section on which Bob had written his name. He circled around the other side and stared at the hunk of metal. I yelled something to him, but he appeared not to hear me. The rocks were too slippery, so I could not get close. I didn’t feel like trying to wade through the cold brine. I gave up.

  After a few minutes standing there and looking around, we decided to return to the other side of the island. As I walked beside Bob, I told him, joking, that I hadn’t been able to see his name. By way of reply, he smiled weakly. We were mostly silent. Something about the sight, that vast hull that once had seemed to rise up like a mountain, reduced to this, a pile of metal covered with moss and barnacles, was saddening.

  What was I feeling? It was hard to tell. On one level, I was glad that we had seen the Byron Darnton, or what was left of her, after all these years. I imagined how excited our mother would have been and how dramatic she would have made our little encounter in telling it to her friends. But I also felt something else, a disappointment, almost a disillusionment. The experience wasn’t what I had thought it would be. It wasn’t satisfying or revelatory. I wondered, Who was Barney really? What was he like? Why did he go off to war, leaving behind a wife and two small children? Questions that had lain dormant for over sixty years, or that I had never dared to ask, began to surface, seemingly out of nowhere, and demand answers.

  Why, if he was such a dominant figure in my mental universe, had I resisted learning about him as a living human being—all this time? I didn’t know. Something had stood in my way. I remembered a story I had heard about a Native American tribe in northeastern California (called the Ajumawi, I later learned). They venerate a mountain (called Simloki) and especially the mountain’s shadow. At sunset the shadow glides over the bowl of a wide valley and takes an hour and a half to reach a mountain range some twelve miles away. On the evenings of solstices and equinoxes, Ajumawi men race to get there first—a feat that is physically daunting and just barely possible. They know the shadow is sacred and to be revered. A running man may measure his progress and the shadow’s movement by looking at the trees, but he must not look back at Simloki until he reaches the end. If he does, he will be struck down.

  Standing there on the shore of Sanda, having reached the age of sixty-five and having just retired after working nearly forty years at my father’s paper, with a long, happy marriage to sustain me and three fine children now in adulthood, I was finally ready to look back.

  CHAPTER 3

  Not long after I returned from Sanda, Jamie gave me an extraordinary present for Father’s Day. I had guessed that it was something special from various hints and the fact that he had shut himself in his room for hours on end, working to the blast of hard rock with a supply of scissors, glue, and other paraphernalia. He finally emerged, carting a large black scrapbook, which he placed before me.

  Using a new data-retrieval program in his college’s computer system, he had assembled the complete run of my father’s stories in the Times. They were not printouts, but exact reproductions, complete with grainy photos and the jagged lines of print produced by the long-gone Linotype machines. He had arranged them chronologically, with chapter headings, such as: “Barney Arrives in the Pacific.” I was moved by his gift and especially by that touch—by his using a nickname for his grandfather, who to him was only a shadow of a shadow, as remote as the doughboys of World War I or the soup kitchens of the Great Depression. He had no doubt picked it up from me, but when had I ever used it?

  I flipped through the stories. There
were fewer of them than I had thought. I was struck by the realization that my father’s time at the paper had been one-fifth of my own. My bylined clippings, recently mailed to me in creamy white folders from the morgue that was being dismantled, would tower over his, even accounting for the fact that in his day bylines were much harder to come by. That was not the way I had imagined things. I had somehow thought my work was at best a footnote to his.

  I began to read. Some of the stories were familiar to me—I had read them long ago. This time I took a hard look at his style. It was unadorned and elegant and without artifice. It reminded me of Hemingway and Steinbeck, the way he used strong Anglo-Saxon nouns and active verbs and held back on flowery adjectives. If he used a word like village or brook or tree and the sentence called for it to be used again, he didn’t search around for synonyms; he used the word again. This set up a pleasing, at times almost poetic cadence. His leads were straightforward—he just leapt right into the subject. He didn’t tie himself in knots to concoct an opening paragraph with clever subordinate clauses and all sort of bells and whistles to make it sound like the Second Coming. His writing was the real thing.

  At times he referred to American soldiers as “our boys.” This was no doubt a prerogative of his middle age, but it also reflected the mood of the country. In World War II, we were engaged, all of us, in a fight to the finish. The enemy was evil incarnate and dedicated to destroying our whole way of life. There was no middle ground; no one stood on the sidelines, and that included the American war correspondents. As if to emphasize the point, the reporters and photographers were actually in the U.S. Army—they wore uniforms, were subject to military command and discipline, and held a noncombatant status equivalent to that of captain.