The Bricklayer's Son

by Dale Scherfling

The neighborhood gang hung together, played together, stayed together. In the parks and playgrounds, to the Saturday matinée at the Dreamland, along sidewalks where we knew every crack, every hole in the concrete where weeds poked through, and every alley shortcut on the way to Broadway. We shot each other with pointed fingers and died agonizing deaths, like the ones in the main feature, all the way home again.

We had imagination to spare, and plans to match—fireman, cop, cowboy, Marine, baseball player—all the adventures ahead for the rest of our lives. We talked about them the way other people talk about the weather, constantly and with great conviction, as though the future were already a place we'd visited and liked.

All except Bruce.

We were eight, nine, maybe ten, and Bruce was a six-year-old punk we kept around because he ran errands for us until sundown, or because we needed a right fielder to fill out our unofficial roster in non-existent leagues. If he'd had a tail, it would have wagged. He was small enough that we could lose him in a crowd and not feel guilty about it, and loyal enough that he'd find his way back.

Bruce had no imagination whatsoever. When asked what he was going to be when he grew up, he said he was going to be a bricklayer, like his dad. Every time. We'd laugh, not meanly exactly, but the way boys laugh when something bores them—quick and dismissive—and go back to arguing about whether a cowboy could beat a Marine in a fair fight.

The neighborhood was its own kind of world back then, bounded by the things we knew and the things we hadn't yet needed to know. The fathers on our block worked with their hands or their backs, came home smelling of labor, and sat in their chairs like men who had earned the right to be still. Bruce's father was one of those. We'd see him sometimes, a compact, deliberate man with calloused hands and mortar dust in the creases of his neck, laying brick for a new building going up on the avenue. He worked with an economy of motion that we were too young to recognize as mastery.

We all lived through childhood—unlike Millard Todd, a first-grade classmate from another block who hit his head on a curb during kick-the-can and died the next day, which cast a shadow over the whole summer and made our mothers call us in earlier than usual—and more or less settled into adulthood. Patrick became a fireman, Scott a cop, Jimmie a shortstop for a couple of years in the Detroit organization before his knees decided otherwise.

We turned into what we'd said we'd become, or something close enough that we could tell ourselves the story. Life arranged itself around us the way we'd expected it to, more or less, with the ordinary adjustments and the occasional grief.

But Bruce, the bricklayer's son, went into the Air Force. He learned to fly, then learned to fly faster, then faster still, until he was threading an F-86 Sabre jet through the sky at speeds that would have been science fiction to the boy who shagged our flies in right field. He flew fighter jets. He married a general's daughter with laughing blue eyes and a way of making a room feel like somewhere worth being. He grew into a six-foot-three colossus, the kind of man who makes you recalculate your memory of him, because that boy with the wagging tail couldn't possibly have become this.

He died teaching a West German cadet to land an F-86 Sabre jet.

His father died in bed.

The bricklayer outlived the pilot, which is the kind of thing you can turn over in your mind for a long time without finding the bottom of it. The man who built solid things out of clay and fire, who kept his feet on the ground by profession and by temperament, who had probably never once imagined his son above the clouds—he got the long life, the quiet ending, the ordinary span of years. And the boy who had no imagination, who couldn't dream past his father's trade, somehow dreamed further than any of us.

We thought we were the ones with the futures. Turns out we were just the ones with the plans.

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