The plan was that after meeting and greeting you and your bride, the man Walter Fletcher and I were going to take you aside and quietly explain ourselves.
Instead, the man Fletcher understood he was to meet you at International Airport and got himself into his own trouble, as you and I both know.
As you now must realize, the Kenyan government takes their official documents very seriously indeed. With the man Fletcher in jail, I suddenly saw him, and you and Barbara, as loose cannons careening around the deck. Forgive me, but I think you can understand I did not want my particular ship to sink, not at this point in my life.
The facts are these. I was in Kenya at the time English colonists had the choice of either going back to England or of turning their English passports in for Kenyan citizenship. I had flown planes in Chile, Australia, Colombia, then here. Even I had come to the point where I wanted to be a part of somewhere, of Kenya. While in Colombia, I had faked out heavy smuggler types, causing several to be shot, and they had proven slow to forgive. Occasionally, therefore, odd people would appear, looking for me, and I’d have to go hide in the bush until they went away. This was inconvenient. Always when they left they would leave the message that they would keep looking until they found me.
At the same time, Peter Carr had heavy debts he couldn’t pay, both in England and in France. I never inquired too deeply into the nature of his difficulties, but I believe they were severe.
Peter was English; I, American.
With only a little doctoring, during those days of official confusion, we switched passports, my American for his British, which I turned in for Kenyan. People who subsequently came looking for Walter Fletcher found Carr, and did not shoot him; people who came looking for Peter Carr found me, and left me similarly intact.
Thus we lived peacefully for years.
I realized I was taking a risk in inviting you and your bride here, but one, I thought, we could survive.
I was only half right.
I don’t deserve to be reported well to your mother, I suppose. We are grown-up people now. For each other, we can never be children again.
We were children when we married.
There was a storm the night in Montana I took off to fly home, just having had the news of your birth, but I never saw the storm. I landed at a small, closed airport just before dark. See in your mind’s eye, if you can, a boy, a teenager, sitting in the cockpit of his airplane at the end of a runway of a small, closed Montana airfield, a blizzard raging a few miles ahead of him, a very young husband who had just been told he was a very, very young father, shivering, feeling, thinking. More than my feet were cold. It was not Josie, my wife, I was rejecting. It was not you, Irwin Maurice, my son, I was rejecting (despite your moniker). I was rejecting myself that night, the idea of myself, as husband and father. That night I knew, as an absolute certainty, that I would be a terrible father, a terrible husband, a total disappointment, that I would cause more pain than we all could stand. There was no doubt in that boy’s mind, sitting in the dark, shivering in the cockpit, that you would be better off without me. I could have flown into the side of a mountain that night. I didn’t. For us all, I took the next option: disappear, get out of your lives, go have my own accidents without you as victims. Two days later, in British Columbia, I read of my probable demise. I left it at that.
Even so, I know I have caused you both much pain. Through the international brotherhood of flying buddies, I have had occasional reports, photographs of each of you. You’ve done okay without me; better I think, than you would have done with me. The history of my achieving my present maturity would gray the hair and crack the spine of even the most casual but consistent observer. I’ve barely survived it myself.
If you cannot report well of me to your mother, someday you might let her know I read her books as love letters I don’t deserve.
To you, my son, I offer a simple, sustaining thought: one mellows.
I appreciate your having enough mild curiosity to come see me.
