Father of Lies

Winner, J.F. Powers Prize for Short Fiction, 2021

In the first years after she ran off with a hardware salesman from northern Idaho, Kasimir Lahti dreamed that his wife had not left him, she was lying beside him, and they had a child. He would wake and remember she wasn’t his wife anymore, really she was up in Kellogg selling door hinges. Then after more years, he no longer dreamed of Katja. But still he dreamed of the child.

The child looked like the blue-eyed, yellow-haired boy he saw in pictures in his edition of Andersen’s Fairy Tales. He had bought it when he and Katja were newly married and he was sure there would be a child. Sometimes he was sure there still would be a child, though he didn’t know how it would ever come about, short of some miracle of the kind the priest, Father McNenny, was always talking about.

Kasimir would consider it and think: But probably they don’t hand them out to atheists.

He met Emma Simmons at the end of 1935 in the WPA office where he applied for jobs as a supervisor. There was not the faintest possibility that they would consider him for a supervisor’s post, an ex-Communist who had once recruited Finnish-Americans like himself to emigrate to the Soviet Union. But he needed money for alcohol and tobacco and books and stamp collecting, his vices.

Quiet Emma with the hurt smile always offered him coffee when he put in a new application. Once she asked, “How are you at reading blueprints, Mr. Lahti? We’ve got some new buildings going up.”

But Erland A. Makinen in that office, who was some sort of a supervisor and even had a brassy nameplate with that jaunty little initial in the middle, said, “Emma, give the man coffee but no encouragement. Mr. Lahti’s credentials as a construction supervisor are a bit absent.”

“Oh—construction,” Kasimir said. “The fact is my father loved architecture, so I learned a lot about construction and blueprints. He made drawings of Antti Hakola’s wooden churches there in Finland and he let me help with the shading—for sunlight and shadows, you know. He’d tell me: Leave a little more light in the chancel, but make it darker in the nave and transept. My God, what a lot of time he spent in churches! Not a believer, and I am with him there, but he was fascinated by design. He was planning to write a book: Antti Hakola’s Masterpieces: A Few Churches of Finland. And he would be delighted to learn I’m reading blueprints and overseeing construction.” 

Erland said, “Good Lord, Kasimir! Do you make this stuff up as you go? Like listening to a damn fire hydrant. We don’t need cathedral builders. The project is to finish up the north end of the Bergstadius City Auditorium. You can haul concrete, if you want. That’s all I’ve got for you.”

“Ah, concrete—a Roman invention,” Kasimir Lahti said. “And my father said that’s why the Romans were great builders and architects while the Greeks were only great sculptors—with their tired old buildings like the Parthenon. Of course I’ll take the job.”

He would wink at Emma on his way out and say: “All work is honorable. It’s very close to what I had in mind.”

Emma was in her early 20s. She was slender and had straight brown hair and brown eyes. Her face in that cold WPA office was as welcome as the pale sun over winter fields. Then in summer 1936, Kasimir noticed that Emma wasn’t in the office anymore. 

“Got herself in a family way,” an older woman in the office named Margaret told him.

“Ha—I didn’t even know she was married,” Kasimir said.

“She skipped that part, our little sweetheart. Went straight to the good stuff with one of the boys from the CCC camp. Isn’t that the way it was, Erland?”

“Ah, Margaret, who knows,” Erland said. “I don’t know why you need to go on about it.”

“Because the man asked, that’s why,” Margaret said. She said to Kasimir: “And her aunt’s a nun, too. They say the fellow might have been that curly-headed kid from Philadelphia. What was his name again?”

“Bernard—skinny Bernard. Only we called him Bernie,” Kasimir said.

“Bernard, that sounds about right. And we all thought he was only laying bricks,” Margaret said. “Quite a bit younger than our Emma. But old in the ways of the world, eh? Looked like an angel, behaved like a devil.”

“Margaret, you don’t know that. How would you know anything about that kid?” Erland said.

“Well, because I heard it from you,” Margaret said. “Aren’t you the one who told me who was the bad actor in this little drama?”

Erland shrugged, turning back toward his office, “Sometimes I should just keep my mouth shut.”

“And now they say that kid joined the Army,” Margaret said. Told somebody he wanted to leave this place behind and never look back. I guess we know why.”

Kasimir heard from Margaret that the child had been born just before Christmas of that year. He went out and bought the cheapest Christmas paper he could find, two kinds. He stopped at the WPA office to ask for the address of that girl, Emma Simmons.

Margaret said, “I’ll have to ask Erland if I can give it to you.”

She went and asked. Erland A. Makinen came out of his office with a toothpick in his mouth. He looked at Kasimir and said, “You planning to start something with Emma? A man your age?”

“Now, Erland, you know me better,” Kasimir said. “Once down that road is enough. But I’m told there will be a Christmas present for the child. Sent by the father, I mean, Mr. Bad-News-from-Philadelphia, who is away soldiering up north somewhere. He asked me to find Emma’s address.”

Erland looked astonished. “Kasimir, I don’t know what the guy’s trying to pull, but I wouldn’t get mixed up in it, personally. But suit yourself. Margaret, help the man.”

He went back into his office.

Margaret wrote the address on a slip of paper. She said, “You heard from the father, huh? I didn’t know you two were that close.”

Kasimir held up two fingers tight together like a scout’s pledge and said: “Margaret, we are like that.”

And that was not exactly false. Kasimir had played chess with Bernie several times at the picnic table in front of the WPA office where men waited for work. Bernie, that cheapskate, still owed him $1.25 for a game they’d had money on.

Kasimir wrapped presents thinking: But a kid should get gifts from his dad even if the dad’s a deadbeat.

He had a toy metal soldier from the Great War. He stood it at attention. He got down that copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories he’d bought years before.

Kasimir wrote on a card that showed a picture of an airplane: Hello, little son! This is your father. And I thought I would write just to say that I love you and to give you this toy soldier to remind you of your daddy, who loves you, who is away training to be a soldier like this one so that he can help protect this country of ours—America. In case any bad people want to make a war or do something bad to hurt us.

Like the fascists, maybe, Kasimir thought, but do I need to tell him that? He’ll find out for himself about fascists.

He wrote: But there are also good people in the world, like the people here in Denmark where I am visiting just now and where I found this story book. I’m sure you, too, will have the chance to travel someday and see the places you may read about in fine books such as this. I’ve been on a lot of airplanes in my work as a soldier, but I find that books fly higher, farther, faster. That’s the flying machine for you and me. So here, my boy, have a very Merry Christmas! From Your Loving Father.

He wrapped Andersen’s Fairy Tales and slipped it into a cardboard box. As it happened, Kasimir’s friend and adversary, Father McNenny, with whom he liked to quarrel about Marxism and the Inquisition, stopped by just then. He found Kasimir wrapping the soldier from the feet up, like a mummy.

Father McNenny said: “Kasimir—you’re giving Christmas presents?”

“Just one. For a little boy,” Kasimir said.

“But—I thought you didn’t celebrate Christmas?”

“I don’t—that nonsense? No. I’m just the middleman. The gift is from a young soldier I know. For the little son he left behind when he went off to serve. What could I do but agree?”

Father McNenny knit his brows. He said, “Isn’t that the toy soldier you got in that box of history books and postcards you bought at Leo Nelson’s auction? That you said would make a fine bookend?”

Kasimir didn’t reply. He slid the soldier into the box beside the book. Then he glued some canceled stamps and some new stamps from Denmark on the outside of the package, and scrawled over the top of the stamps, with wavy lines running through it, like a postal clerk’s stamp, København. 

Father McNenny’s eyes grew misty. He’d known Kasimir since he was a young priest on the Mesabi Iron Range in Minnesota when Kasimir was a miner who loved to argue the Reformation. Father McNenny said, “Just so you know, Kasimir, that’s true religion in the eyes of God—to care for widows and orphans in their distress.”

“Quit that stuff. You know I don’t believe in it,” Kasimir said. “Anyway, he’s not an orphan, he’s got a dad. Like I said, I’m only delivering the package.”

“Looks like you’re doing some wrapping, though,” Father McNenny said.

Yeah, well, our country’s finest didn’t have time for all that. He sent me the wrapping paper, too. “I’m okay with shepherds—they’re working-class. I doubt I would have got involved if I’d known the kid would also need paper with angels and Baby Jesus. More opium for the people, eh? I don’t know if I told you, but religion has been a terrible thing for me personally.”

“I think you told me.”

“Just terrible. Did you know my own father died of gangrene after falling off the roof of a church in Finland?”

“You mentioned it,” Father McNenny said.”Was that when you lived in Vaasa?”

“No, that was when we lived in a little place called Alahärmä. A few years before the church went up in flames.”

“Oh, Alahärmä,” Father McNenny said. “I think you said it was a famous church, too, wasn’t it? A shame that it burned down.

“A shame about my father, too. I blame the church for that. He was up there drawing a picture of the steeple, and I suppose God couldn’t resist the chance to give him a shove. Time’s up for one more free-thinker. I’ve never forgiven the Watchmaker for that little episode.”

Kasimir—you don’t even believe in the Watchmaker.

“Of course not. How could I? After such a trick as that.”

Kasimir bicycled to Emma Simmons’ address at the outskirts of town and put the package at the foot of the mailbox very early, about 5 a.m. He asked Margaret a few weeks later if Emma had received the package. Mr. Soldier-Boy-from-Philadelphia would want to know.

“Oh, the package arrived, all right,” Margaret said.

“And the gift—did it make an impression?”

“You could say so. The thing Emma said about it is that the father is even more of a rat than she figured because he’d forgotten his child is a daughter. The idiot sent a gift, but it was a toy soldier, like a boy would like, and he wrote a damn letter like he was talking to a boy. Well, I guess there was a storybook she can use, but it’s pretty clear he thought he was giving this stuff to a boy. How’s that for stupid? Stupid.”

“Amazing. Thought he’d . . . so he really didn’t know, hey?” Kasimir Lahti said. “Thought it was a boy?”

“Like most men want, I suppose.”

“Many do, yes,” Kasimir said, looking preoccupied. “But for myself—for myself, I can’t imagine any father wouldn’t want a girl first of all. A little copy of the mother, you know, the woman he loves. But that boy’s a little bit flighty—no attention to detail. I shouldn’t wonder if the military is just what he needs.”

“I can think of something else he needs,” Margaret said. “And I’d give it to him if I was a man. You never did say how you got to know that kid.” 

“I played chess with him a time or two,” Kasimir said. Already quite the military man, a tactician; you could see that from the way he played his knights. And then he asked me to keep half an eye on his little one while he was gone into the military. ‘Be there for my child while I’m away serving the country in peace or war,’ he said. But I can’t remember now if he said it was a little boy or little girl—you’d think he’d have kept track of that. The girl has beautiful brown eyes and curly black hair like her father, I suppose?”

“No, straight hair is what she’s got. A mousey kind of brown—dishwater blond, you could say. I can’t remember what color eyes. Not the kind you’d notice. Sort of a homely girl, in my opinion. Takes after her mother that way. Very plain.”

“Plain. A plain Jane,” Kasimir said sadly. “Only I suppose that’s not her name, is it?”

“No, her name’s Amanda. But the plain part, yeah—you got that exactly right.”

Kasimir Lahti packed another parcel some weeks later: a pink dress, a red dress, a much larger blue dress, a pair of white shoes and a frilly white hat. He’d bought the things at the St. Mary’s Church rummage sale. He packed them thinking: Here you go, my dear. Bernard, that flighty rascal, sends his love.

Then he got out his cigar boxes of stamps and poured them out on the table and thought, as though he were talking to the girl, Where to now, little sweetheart? Where’s a nice one for your collection? He sifted the stamps with his fingers and thought: Let’s try Panama.

Kasimir wrote a note that said, My dear Amanda, It is mighty hot here in Central America, where I am living the hard life of a soldier, on my way to somewhere that I’m not allowed to talk about, and the little girls here in Panama wear sun hats like this when they sit in the hot sun drinking cold lemonade and eating watermelon, vanilla ice cream and chocolate cake. These young girls have got to be some of the most stylish young ladies in the world. So I got to thinking you might look awfully good in these things, too. Although it is not really how a girl looks that is so important. What is a thousand times more important is what she’s got inside, for charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, as the Holy Writ says. You will learn a lot about true worth from your mother.

That was only the start. Kasimir Lahti delivered pencils, paper, crayons, toy tractors, and a doll to Amanda’s mailbox. Sending money with every letter. In 1941, that Christmas immediately after Pearl Harbor, he pasted stamps from New Zealand on a box and delivered a wooden train loaded with wooden blocks and books. Because trains and blocks and books are good toys for all girls and boys, he wrote. Not that I would ever forget you are a girl, I only might joke about it sometimes. But the fact is, trains and books are a part of civilization—what your dad is fighting for right now, and what boys and girls grow up to build together. And look here, you can collect these stamps, if you like, so that you will learn about the world. A soldier gets around; I can send you lots of stamps from far-off lands. And if you ever want to trade stamps, keep in mind that my old friend, Kasimir Lahti, with whom I worked years ago, is also a stamp collector. He’s always asking me to send him stamps from wherever I am. He’s a selfish old man, but I have given him strict orders to share stamps with you now and then. And I think I will be able to send you some soon from Australia and India.

At Goodman’s News, the bookshop at 122 S. Main Street in Aberdeen, South Dakota, where Kasimir Lahti used to buy books and tobacco, he now bought only books. He had done the math and calculated that if he saved sixty-six dollars and sixty-six cents every year for fifteen years, he’d have saved $1,000—enough to help put the child through college, perhaps, depending what school she chose.

Although it was hard to put money into savings because there were so many books a child would need. It was Kasimir who finally bought that overpriced volume of nursery rhymes, Ring O’ Roses, that Goodman’s hadn’t been able to sell since it was new in 1922; also one about a duck named Ping, and some absurd tale about an elephant who wore fine clothes, and one about a girl named Madeline in Paris, where it turned out that Amanda’s father had spent some time once.

For the odd thing was, Bernie the soldier began to have adventures that surprised even Kasimir, living a life that was exemplary, if a little tarnished by regret.

Take note of the picture of the cathedral in the rain, that old soldier wrote to Amanda in the inside cover of the book about Madeline. That’s a view I have been fortunate enough to see for myself when I have been on leave in Paris, and even though I am here in South Africa, it makes me glad to have seen great cathedrals. I will enclose a few postage stamps from France for your collection. Even if you do not grow up to be religious, and who am I, a poor lapsed communicant, to help you in that regard, I really think you might learn a lot from architecture. Because order and design and structure stand behind everything that exists, like the work of a great mind. That’s what I felt when I stood in this same cathedral that you see in this book. I’m not a very good guy, so I don’t aim very high when it comes to religion, but I think sometimes that’s enough for me and my house—a certain reverence for the wonderful clockwork design of all that’s been fashioned by that wise master builder, the Universe.

He thought: But she might stumble at that. That sounds so cold—the Universe. Like it’s a shoebox full of molecules and gas. Even if I am not a believer, does that mean Bernie is not a believer? That Amanda might not be?

He wrote: By which I mean God.

Bernie the soldier sent his young daughter several rhythmic, choreographed masterpieces by Virginia Lee Burton about steam shovels and snow plows and runaway trains and wonder horses. I have read that the woman who made these books is a dancer, and you can see that for yourself by the way these pictures move, Kasimir wrote. Probably there was nothing like them before. See what a smart woman with a good idea can do? She’s invented a new way of telling stories.

He told her that a weary soldier took comfort in thinking that while every adult in America was talking about soldiers fighting in places called Pearl Harbor, Midway Island, Guadalcanal, North Africa, Dunkirk, Amanda could more profitably spend her time thinking about the Wild West and a wonder horse named Calico and a villain named Stewy Stinker. It gives a person hope, don’t you think so, Amanda? Because even if entire countries can be bad, and we see that they can, maybe in the end, they’re like Stewy Stinker, not a total loss—capable of being decent again. A good father doesn’t throw out his bad children, and civilization can’t throw out bad countries. We just wait for them to come home. And here, enclosed, are some stamps from Japan and Germany, countries I had the good fortune to visit before the war. I hope to visit them again in better times. Did I mention that my good friend, Kasimir Lahti, knows German? And he could easily teach it to you if you want to learn a foreign language someday, just to see what is in it. Because a foreign language, just like your own language, is a very good place for hiding secrets about the way the world is, and those are things we can never learn without talking to one another.

He met Erland Makinen once more, oddly enough, in December 1943, just before the New Year. They met in the door of St. Mary’s Church in Aberdeen. Erland was coming out as Kasimir was going in.

Erland said, “Kasimir, is that you? Kasimir Lahti, from the WPA office?”

“In the flesh,” Kasimir said. “What’s left of it. And look what’s become of you: Erland A. Makinen in a soldier suit.”

“Yes—shipping out today,” Erland said.

“Duty calls, hah? East or west?”

“West.”

“I guess that means the Pacific. Been saying your prayers?”

“Prayers—nah,” Erland laughed. “I just thought a church is just as good a place to wait as any.” “Maybe you’re the one praying?”

“Ha! Would it even count when it’s an atheist praying? But the priest here serves chicken noodle soup in the basement to a few old guys and we play chess. That reminds me: Did you ever manage to keep track of that skinny Bernard from Philadelphia? Who was out here in the CCC and then did some work for the WPA? He was a chess pal of mine, too.”

Erland shrugged. “I think he shipped out to Italy. Were you close to that kid?”

“I wouldn’t say close. He owes me money, and I’ve thought about that from time to time. Although it’s no big deal, really. He’s treated other people worse.”

“People can seem so decent on the outside,” Erland said.

“Bad apples,” Kasimir said. “But also some good apples with bad spots. That’s what I hope for Bernie.”

“Yeah, well. Keep hoping. He owes me money, too.” Erland lit a cigarette. “What’s that you’re reading? A kids’ book?”

“A present for a little person I know.”

“Can I see?”

Kasimir handed him the book. Erland opened it, pausing at the front where Kasimir had written, in big letters, For Amanda Simmons.

“The Runaway Bunny,” Erland said. “Nice pictures. Where do you get money to buy nice books like that? Poor guy like you.”

“I stopped buying tobacco. Actually, I pretty much stopped buying liquor, too. I never thought I could.”

Erland said: “I never would have thought you could, either, to be honest. Seemed like you just about kept that moonshiner Anton Tilley in business. Miracles happen, hey?”

“I guess.”

Erland flipped through the picture book. “What’s it about?”

“You could say it’s about a mother who loves her child,” Kasimir said.

“Well. That’s what makes the whole thing work, doesn’t it?”

Erland took a couple twenties out of his billfold and handed them to Kasimir with the book, saying, “Listen, next time you buy books for that kid, spend some of my cash, too. I’d just blow it on booze and cigarettes anyway.”

Erland started to go and then paused in the church door. He said, “Why don’t you give me your address, Kasimir. Bernie left me his aunt’s address when he mooched a bus ticket off me. I’ll remind him he’s got obligations back here in the Plains.”

“Ah, don’t bother. What’s a dollar twenty-five?” Kasimir said. “But you could remind him about one of his obligations named Amanda.”

There was a party in the street of Bergstadius the day in May 1945 when they announced the war in Europe was over. The Big Store opened its coolers and gave away pop and ice cream and everyone danced in the streets.

Kasimir Lahti saw Emma Simmons there in the park with her thin, dull hair. Then he saw Amanda. The blue dress he’d sent her years ago now fitted her perfectly, apparently. She was quite pretty. Some might have said plain, but they would have been mistaken; it was the smallness of her nose and eyes and something about the distance between them that kept her somehow from that regularity of features that is so glibly associated with beauty: and a dull sort of beauty it is. But a small nose and eyes are certainly better than large ones; she was decidedly pretty. Maybe even beautiful.

Beautiful, Kasimir thought. There’s no other word.

It was dusk. On the bluff on the other side of that sluggish prairie river at the west edge of town, members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion were setting off fireworks they’d been saving for the Fourth of July.

Kasimir Lahti went over to the girl and said, “I believe your name’s Amanda.”

She looked at him gravely and said, “Yes.”

“And mine is Kasimir Lahti. A friend of your father’s.”

She looked him in the face and nodded.

“A very good friend of your father, I may say. We think quite alike, your old dad and I. And I have here some stamps for you from Belgium, Spain and Russia. They’re from your father. He said I was to share with you.”

She studied him.

“Go ahead, take them,” Kasimir stammered. “And also, your father has offered to hire me as a tutor for you—to help you with high school. If you wanted to learn German or something. Or Kant or Goethe or Karl Marx. Or science. It wouldn’t cost you anything. It might help you. For when you go away to college.”

The girl looked all around, and fixed her eyes on her mother some distance away.

“But only, you know, if your mom is around. If you want to study languages and foreign grammar and the like.”

“I’m no good in English even.”

“Oh.”

Kasimir put his hand into his pocket and found a $20 bill with which he’d been planning to buy groceries with until that moment. He said, “Your father told me to give this to you, too, next time I saw you—from his soldier’s pay.”

“I can’t take it.”

“He said that if you were going to argue, I must simply close your fist over this twenty-dollar bill, like so, and tell you to take it and give it to your mother. It’s for clothing and school supplies. Which your father feels a solemn duty to provide. I suppose you know what that means to a soldier? Duty?”

Kasimir reached into the other pocket of his jacket.

“And here is something else. This is not from your father, this is from me. But because it belongs to me, and because I am a selfish old chap, not like your mom and dad, I’ll only let you hold it, not have it, not right now. You know what a shooting star is? A meteor? Well, this is one that fell to earth: a meteorite. I call it a star-stone. Ah, but once it was a fiery star streaking across the sky; that’s a chunk of the heavens that fell right down here in South Dakota. Imagine, that’s the kind of commerce that is going on above our heads all the time. Women are better at taking note of it, some men say, because of their attention to detail. So even if you’re no good at grammar, if you were to study the sciences, and mathematics, the queen of the sciences, why, that is the kind of career that might get you—to sit with your eye to a mighty telescope, charting new suns and stars and planets. You’d hear the constellations roaring like beasts in a menagerie over your head. I suppose you’re interested in that sort of thing instead of grammar? The sciences?”

She shook her head.

“No? Really?”

She said: “I’m no good at any of that stuff—math and that.”

Kasimir blinked, twice, and wet his lips with his tongue.

“Oh. And when I heard a learned astronomer,” Kasimir said. “When I heard a learned astronomer go on and on about all that, then I realized that what’s important isn’t doing the calculations to chart the location or magnitude of this or that dab of light in the sky, but just looking up and seeing the stars—really seeing them. Because most people don’t. Even scientists don’t, they’ll sit all night glued to a telescope studying one star or one constellation and miss the whole big show. But I bet you don’t. I bet you see it.”

“Yes—yes.”

“Well, that’s what counts: To take in the whole big show. Since every star in the heavens is a different kind of fireworks than we have on earth—the slow kind. And you are a remarkable child, my girl, to fathom that.”

He sneaked a few volumes of Jane Austen into the mailbox in 1950 and 1951, along with Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jane Eyre. He put the books in packets pasted with canceled stamps that were old before the war from countries he wasn’t even sure were countries anymore—Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. His letters for the first time included vague references about choosing character, evaluating men as though they were fruit at the fruit stand and not choosing the ones with blemishes. Finally, in one note he wrote, anxiously, I suppose there is no easy way to say it and I hope it will not shock you but I think you must understand this: Men want many things from women, but the chance to play house and raise a family is not the chief thing they have in mind. The chief thing they have in mind is sex. But then he scribbled out what he had written. Good God, what am I saying? he thought. The child can’t be more than fifteen.

Then he remembered how it was when he was fifteen, with a girl named Helmi.

He scratched and erased some more. Then he wrote: To speak of these matters is quite painful to me, a failure in this regard, yet I must beg you to remember, my dearest, that a man who has the equipment to beget a child does not necessarily have the wisdom to be a father, nor to treat with respect a good woman whose only fault is an excess of pity for a bad man; for which my own unhappy example furnishes the proof. Choose wisely when you choose to love, my dear, because it concerns your happiness. And that is the last I will say on this topic.

“Why couldn’t it stay like those good old days? Like 1941?” he groaned. What a wonderful year. When I gave her that wooden train. 

A letter with a 1944 military postmark suddenly arrived in the mail, though here it was the start of 1952—as though it had been stuck in some mail pouch or mail-sorting device for all those years. And in the letter was $123 in cash, six twenties and three ones, along with an unsigned note that said, Goes to Amanda. Nothing else.

Kasimir had once had a note from Skinny Bernard: I, Bernie, owe Casimere 1 Dollar 25 Cents. Kasimir had thrown away the note after Bernie left town without paying. But he thought he recognized the handwriting.

He added the cash to the Ivory soap box on which he had written, For Amanda—College.

And suddenly he thought, like a revelation: Maybe he’s dead. Maybe he was dying in some hospital, wounded, and that’s why he finally sent the cash.

And he thought, proudly and a little sorrowfully, Bernie grows up at last.

There was an unfortunate incident in 1953: Some children hurled mushy red potatoes at Kasimir Lahti at the end of winter and called him Commie traitor and Spy and Red. It was after Kasimir had written a letter to the Aberdeen American News criticizing Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin as a danger to democracy. Kasimir slipped on one of those end-of-winter reds. He cut his leg open on a cement curb.

He thought about things while the wound healed. Then he looked through his stamp collection until he found some stamps from Hungary and glued them on a package and inked them to mock the canceled postage. Inside the parcel, he put copies of the Bible, the Koran, Capital, The Communist Manifesto, The Origin of Species, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and one slim volume that held both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He wrote, My dear Amanda, I am sorry for being so long out of touch. I will only tell you that since the war, I have had much to think about concerning this country of ours, especially when I have traveled in foreign places.

The wonderful problem we have is that America’s Founding Fathers set out in that fearful First Amendment their intent to make this the kind of place where people can speak and think what they like, and so all of the books I’m sending you here are to some degree welcome in the USA. It’s an unfortunate thing that some other countries now are not like that and don’t allow people to think and read and say anything they like. It’s an even sadder thing that many people in this country are also uncomfortable with that kind of freedom—they want you to be able to read some of the books in this parcel, but not all of them, or they want you to read them exactly the way they do, and they think they are standing up for patriotism when they try to keep some of these books out of your hands. But the Americans who wrote the Bill of Rights knew we would be better than that. I have always found that one of the best ways of keeping that difficult freedom alive is to lean close over a new text or an old book, like you’re breathing on a live coal. So take some of these forbidden books in your hands right now and hold them, crack them open, read what they say. If America still stands by the crazy vision of its Founding Fathers, well then, it’s still a remarkably fine place in which to live.

He sent her a copy of the Aeneid at Christmas time 1954—a dual-language Loeb edition that Goodman’s was only too glad to get rid of.

He heard she had been dating a soldier, back from Korea, and he felt like telling her, Beware of cheap soldier trash, like this Aeneas, who got what he wanted from Dido but gave nothing back. But that didn’t seem fair, and he had always loved Virgil’s epic. Also, she was now eighteen; a young woman already. He wrote a note that said, My dear Amanda, here is a great epic about founding a new colony. That is what we do, isn’t it, when we form families? I have always felt sad for Dido. But even that soldier, Aeneas, has some worth—probably a good family man when he settled down. I wish he had chosen Dido or she had chosen better. So much depends on choices. Choose well whom you choose to love.

In 1956, he learned that Amanda was going to get married. She was not even thinking about college, said Margaret from the old WPA office, who now worked in a grocery. She was going to marry Harlan Kinsella, an ex-infantryman who had been in Korea and who worked in the Farmer’s Union service station, changing oil and fixing tires and learning how to fix tractors.

Kasimir didn’t expect an invitation, but he was wrong about that. Because a blue sedan pulled up at Kasimir Lahti’s shack along the Jim River one evening in May. He saw it was Emma Simmons.

She got out of the car saying, “Well, if it isn’t the dear friend of the father of my child. If that’s the way that tale goes.”

Kasimir said, “If it isn’t Emma from the WPA office. What brings you way out here?”

“I was partly just curious whether I could get an honest word out of you after all these years. To see if you talk the same way you write in all those letters.”

Kasimir could not tell if there was a note of suppressed fury in her voice. He waved her to the chair across from him on the porch. He said, “And that makes me just about scared to open my mouth. Although I’m not sure I know which letters you’re referring to.”

“Oh, I think you do. I mean those letters with all those crazy yarns about your soldier’s life, Paris, the yellow Yangtze River in China, how a boatload of ducks reminds you of your happy cousins, how we could all learn from a kid who rides around the world on a goose. The letters full of stamps from places like Panama and Denmark and Paris and Rome and Budapest, and which my daughter has got tied up with a chunk of red yarn in her sock drawer. Yarn being entirely appropriate in this case.”

“Some yarns are well-meant.”

“That’s true. But a yarn’s got to come to an end someday. And some of it is not what you think.”

“Oh?”

“No. I felt so bad at first for Bernie from Philadelphia when I heard they’d bought him a bus ticket out of town—how convenient. Margaret told me you and the bunch down at the office had figured out my child’s paternity issues and hung it on him. Maybe I should have set her straight, but I didn’t—too damn loyal. Do you really not know who the father of my child is?”

“I thought I did. Maybe I don’t.”

“Erland.”

“Erland A. Makinen? Who made such a big deal out of that middle initial?”

“The same Erland A. Makinen who was always willing to give a girl a ride home, who would never say no to a cup of coffee. And was amazed to see that his hands could just about make a circle around my waist. I believe I had one attractive feature, Mr. Lahti, my girlish waist, and Erland found it with only a little fumbling under the clothes here and there. And there was something about it that was nice. Even though I knew I wasn’t good-looking, just available. And dumb-headed enough to believe that he really loved me and would marry me someday—only not right away because he had to get himself set up in business, and then not just yet because the war came along, but sometime later. Then Erland got himself shot over Leyte Island.”

“Yes. I heard.”

“A paratrooper, he never even reached the ground. They shot him to ribbons up there in the sky. But I’d figured out already there wasn’t going to be a later. A lot of men are not interested in growing up to play house with the girl down the street. Which I finally learned from reading your letters aloud to my little girl.”

Kasimir cleared his throat again. He said, “I believe Erland probably would have married you, Emma—after the war. In fact, it’s because of him I have a thousand dollars specifically for Amanda. For her college, if she was going to go to college. For her household if she wasn’t.”

She laughed.

“Kasimir, you’ve been lying for him so long you don’t even know how to stop, do you?”

“I’m serious, Emma. I could see Erland changing. War will do that.”

“He wouldn’t have changed enough to marry me. Not unless he got shot in the face and wasn’t so good-looking himself anymore. And I still would have been glad to have him. Sometimes I’d wish he’d come back wounded so I could show him how I’d love him. But he was just not as nice as the guy in the letters. I figured out pretty fast that wasn’t him. First I thought: What’s he trying to pull, the clown? And then I got to studying those damn little notes you sent, and I’d see your name here and there, and I thought: Erland’s not that smart and he doesn’t care about anyone but Erland anyway, it’s got to be Kasimir. Now what in hell is he trying to pull? Filling her head full of lies. And then I got to looking closer and realizing, My God, there’s true things mixed in with all the lies. And that was a real puzzler for me. I began to think you must have had a good father, Mr. Lahti.”

“Until I was ten,” Kasimir said. “He fell off a church roof in Alahärmä, Finland, and got gangrene. What a way to die—the smell of it.”

Emma said: “The first thing I had in mind all those years ago was to come out here and give you a piece of my mind. Then I got to thinking that a real father wouldn’t act much better, except maybe he’d come home at night. I decided to keep my mouth shut. Who had money for books those days? But my daughter had books—Babar, Jane Eyre, Jane Austen. And she was smart in geography class, her one good subject. Who else knew where Panama was, or the Yangtze River? She did. Those stories were like a gift from God. Did you ever think much about theology, Mr. Lahti?”

“I did quite a bit of pondering about The Fall. Other than that, no.”

“My aunt was a sister—a nun. And she was always good friends with Father McNenny. They were always spooning up parts of the catechism for me.”

“My father spooned up the names and dates of Antti Hakola’s churches: Evijärvi, 1758, Virrat, 1772, Kuortane, 1777. Maybe Purmo, 1772, who knows. Well, probably Dad knew. It looked like Antti Hakola’s handiwork to him. There’s a catechism for you. We believed in beautiful workmanship. I just never learned to believe in God.”

“My aunt said some men who say they don’t believe in God show they really do believe by the things they do. She said you’ll recognize that kind of person when you meet him, and she’s right, I do. It’s you, Mr. Lahti. Father McNenny says the same thing. Says you might be one of those people on his right hand when the Christ separates the sheep from the goats and says, Come, blessed of my Father, for I was hungry and you fed me, naked and you clothed me, a stranger and you took me in.”

“Ho. Christ and Father McNenny don’t know what a bad man I am. I tell lies, I cuss. Also, I’m selfish. I think people ought to stand on their own two legs. I haven’t done any of those good things for people.”

“You gave us books and clothes and toys. Spending money. Stamps for a little girl’s collection. And as I’ve read somewhere, a good father doesn’t throw out his bad children. He waits for them to come back.”

“Yes, well. You read all kinds of nonsense,” Kasimir said absently.

“Some true things, too,” Emma said.

“Maybe Antti Hakola designed another church by Antti Hakola, which one was that?” Kasimir muttered to himself.

“Amanda and I decided we owed you a thank-you. For the books and all the rest of it.”

“I think the other church was Nurmo, 1778. Antti Hakola died while they were building it—the crown of his life’s work, unfinished. But then his son, Kaapo, finished it for him. And that is some kind of a mystery right there.”

Emma said: “So I thought I would drive out here, all these years later, to say it: Thank you, Mr. Lahti. And to ask you to the wedding.”

“Which was the harder thing to build—the church at Nurmo, or a boy named Kaapo? You could argue he did finish his life’s work. A child is a thousand times more difficult to build and more holy, I think. Because there’s a transformation—one day the child vanishes, instead there’s a man or woman standing there. And that one changes the world. Only maybe not in the way you’d imagined.”

Emma said: “You’re not listening to me.”

“My father used to tell stories on Sunday morning. He would be warming the stove in winter. He told one about Antti Puuhaara—Andrew Treefork. Ah, he was a good dad. Even at the end. The way he’d take my hand and say, Does the smell bother you? Don’t let it bother you. Don’t cry now, no tears. These things happen. If there’s a God, it will be all right. He knows I love Antti Hakola’s churches. Promise me you won’t be bitter.”

Emma said: “I don’t believe you’ve heard a word I’ve been saying.”

“I’ve tried to obey him in most things. Not in that.”

Emma said: “And what I’m saying is, if you want to come, you’re invited.”

Kasimir turned to look at her a while in silence.

“Of course I’ll come. And what you are saying—does Amanda understand, then, that her father did not really write those letters?”

“She knows the person who planted the male seed that brought her into the world did not write those letters, if that’s what you mean, Emma said. But I don’t think it’s quite accurate to say she knows that her father didn’t really write those letters. I think it’s more accurate to say she knows what a father should be like just precisely because of those letters. And how she and you are going to sort things out in the future. Well, I suppose that’s for the two of you to decide. You can give her a thousand dollars if you want, but let her know it’s from you.”

“It’s not all from me, Emma. Someone helped, and I think it was Erland. That’s the kind of man he was becoming.”

“He had big shoes to fill, the deadbeat,” Emma said. “And you’ve got some explaining to do to that girl. Did you ever stop to listen to yourself talk, Mr. Lahti?”

“I’ve been kept pretty busy just making it up, actually.”

“I can tell. In a pinch you could just tell her the truth.”

“The truth,” Kasimir said gloomily. “Has it come to that?” 

“And you are invited to the wedding, in case you didn’t catch that part.”

“I did make note of that. Thank you.”

She turned to go but turned back toward him to ask: “I’m curious—did it really happen? That part about your father falling off the church roof? Or did you make that up, too?”

Kasimir laughed gently.

“Because I’ve asked around, and they do say, Kasimir, that you were born to a Finnish mining family in Ironwood, Michigan, and haven’t been out of the country.”

“They say that? Oh, my,” Kasimir said. “That is so laughable. Who knows what people say, or why?”

“Never mind,” she said. “I don’t want to know.”