About Nick A. Yengich
An Old Miner
By Nick Yengich
The words Rushed together without punctuation, without the intended assurance; "We don't want to scare you and it's not too serious but we knew we had to call." Words by long distance about the Old Man's heart attack.
The mind sifts out odd memories when fearing the death of your father, curious scenes shared with the person who, more than anyone, molded you. Guilt surfaces too, if the awkward barrier between father and son is unbroken.
He was bald before my birth, was short, inhaled his Luckies, always seemed to have a beer gut. he had a temper, yet when he laughed the smile climbed to the corners of his brown eyes.
The biceps were large, the forearms oversized, the wrists and fingers broken too many times. Still, his gnarled hands could grasp a saw and hammer and finish off a roughed-out room, build a bookcase or create a cabinet -- craftsman's carpentry, not the mundane toil of a punch press operator, and insurance actuary.
He wasn't home on Monday nights, was always at union meetings. He worked in a copper mine, drank like a miner, fought the company like a union man. When the FBI agent came looking for communists -- I remember because suits weren't worn in our mountain community except on Easter and Christmas, for funerals and weddings -- he found only a union man in our house.
The company sued him for $1 million during one strike. He said he wasn't afraid: $10,000 would have frightened him, but if you don't have much what's $1 million?
Unions and drinking and strikes were his life, fueled much of the strife between Ma and the Old Man. In time, they settled up. Iit was easier after he quit his "union business."
Did he have a temper? In spades. Was he stern? To a fault. Was he mean? Unfair, say my sisters: demanding say I. Not mean-spirited.
Once I faced an inevitable 20-foot fall from a mine chute to a jagged hill. After someone chased me to safety, the Old Man grabbed me: "I'm not going to give you a a lickin' because I promised I wouldn't. But if you climb up there again, I'll...
The Depression and the war stopped his schooling at high school so he told his kids they would go further. A's were demanded; B's grudgingly accepted. On the dreaded report card day he preached: "Why didn't you do better: you can, you will do better." We mimicked him, but only if A's far out numbered B's.
I could usually talk with the man I affectionately called Nick or Old Man, but my brothers and sisters couldn't. It was their loss. Is it because I am the first son? Did old-fashioned fears make him stricter with my sisters? Maybe we're both, as the family says, mazgars, mule-headed in bastardized Croatian.
But even if father and son can sip beer, golf, argue and confide, they can't always breach the love barrier that stifles love.
In time I moved away, talked to him only by phone. He shook his bald head when I bought a rundown house, said I was crazy. Then he and Ma traveled to Baltimore with his tool box and spent weeks in the humidity shoring it up one year, tacking on finishing touches another.
As he approached 60, after 40 years in the copper mine, he yearned for retirement. The heart attacks -- one while he labored deep in a stuffy hole -- hastened the decision. He feared surgery, but too many hospital tests were tethered in his chest, jammed up his nostrils, taped to his now-withered forearms, my brother cried on the shoulder of our weeping mother. Perhaps he wondered about his own barrier.
It's been 13 months since the operation. The Old Man is healthy, his temper is short, he can still tread unfairly. He is my Old Man. On Sunday we'll share Father's Day for the first time in years. I'll hug him and needle him and, in my way, will try to say what I'm saying here.
Nick Yengich is a reporter for The Evening Sun.
