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Writer's pictureLinda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
Aug 260 min read

Excerpted Inspirations #142




[Lester Knapp is bedridden after a fall from a roof has left him paralyzed. His five-year-old son, Stephen, has long been a “problem child,” angry, defiant, and out of control. Lester, with leisure to observe and talk to the little boy for the first time in his life, follows up on a question Stephen had started to ask his father weeks before about his Teddy bear.] “Yes, I ’member what it was,” he said in a low tone, keeping his eyes fixed intently on the expression of his father’s face. “I wanted to ask you ... to ask you not to let Mother ...” his voice dropped to a quivering whisper, “not to let Mother wash Teddy.” Lester survived the entire and grotesque unexpectedness of this with no more sign of amazement than a flicker of his eyelids. He considered a dozen different ways of advancing into the undiscovered country and rejected them all in favor of the neutral question, “Was Mother going to wash Teddy?” At this it all came out in a storm, the visit to the lady, the horrible, misshapen, shrunken Teddy there, Mother’s stealing Teddy away at night, the devouring dread in Stephen’s mind, a dread so great that it now overcame even his fierce pride and anger, as he sobbed out at the last, “Don’t let him be washed, Father! Don’t let him!” He raised his streaming eyes agonizingly towards his father, his whole face quivering. Lester was so horrified that for a moment he could not speak. He was horrified to see Stephen reduced so low. He was more horrified at the position in which he found himself, absolute arbiter over another human being, a being who had no recourse, no appeal from his decisions. It was indecent, he thought; it sinned against human dignity, both his and the child’s. ... “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master!” he cried to himself, shamed to the core by Stephen’s helpless dependence on his whim, a dependence of which Stephen was so tragically aware, all his stern bulwarks of anger and resistance broken down by the extremity of his fear – fear for what he loved! Fear for himself would never have so transfigured Stephen, never! Lester understood this. More, he felt it himself, felt himself ready to fight for Stephen as Stephen had been ready to fight for Teddy; he, Lester, who had never felt that he had the right to fight for anything of his own. His gaze on the child had passion in it as he said firmly, weightily, “I’ll never have anything done to your Teddy that you don’t want, Stephen. He’s yours. You’ve got the right to have the say-so about him.” Stephen looked at his father blindly, as if he did not understand these strange words. But though they were unfamiliar, though they could not understand them, they gave him hope. “You won’t have him washed?” he asked, clinging to the one point he understood. “Not washed or anything else if you don’t want it,” said his father, reiterating his own point. It seemed to him he could not live another day if he did not succeed in making Stephen understand that. To his astonishment, again to his shame, Stephen burst out with a phrase which had never before passed his lips except under protest, “Oh, thank you, Father! Oh, thank you!” he cried loudly, his lips trembling. Lester found the child’s relief shocking. It made him sick to think what a dread must have preceded it, what a fathomless blackness of uncertainty it must represent. He spoke roughly, almost as he would to another man, “You don’t have to thank me, Stevie,” he said. “Great Scott, old boy, it’s none of my business what you do with your Teddy, is it?” Even as he spoke – like a lurid side-glimpse – was it possible that there were people who would enjoy thanks extorted on those infamous terms? Were they ever set over children? His insistence seemed to have penetrated a little way through Stephen’s life-long experience of the nature of things. The little boy stood looking at him, his face serious and receptive, as if a new idea were dawning on him. It was so new that he did not seem to know what to do with it, and in a moment sat down on the floor again. He reached for his Teddy and sat clasping him in his lap. The two were silent, father and son. Lester said to himself, shivering, “What a ghastly thing to have sensitive, helpless human beings absolutely in the power of other human beings! Absolute, unquestioned power! Nobody can stand that. It’s cold poison. How many wardens of prisons are driven sadistically mad with it!” He recoiled from it with terror. “You have to be a superman to be equal to it.” In the silent room it echoed solemnly, “That is what it is to be a parent.” He had been a parent for thirteen years before he had thought of it. He looked over the edge of the bed at Stephen and abased himself silently. Dorothy Canfield, The Home-Maker (1924), pp. 172-175 [Continued next week]

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