Two days after my father died, I was cleaning his house when I came across something strange in the bottom drawer of his bathroom: An alligator skin purse with the carcass of a baby alligator stitched on to the front flap. The more I looked at it, the more convinced I became that it was real, down to the tiny teeth and claws and desiccated eyeballs loose in the sockets. Inside was a small, square black-and-white photo of my father on the day of his high school graduation, standing next to his mother. He looked like a baby, like a tadpole – a tiny version of the man I came to know, though never truly.
A small, dead version of himself.
A before.
The after had begun on a Sunday afternoon in March 1977.
I was 11 years old, one of six kids in a devout Mormon family living in the small town of Gooding, Idaho. My mother was pregnant. My father was the manager of a hardware store, a former chamber of commerce president and church leader, a glad-hander and scratch golfer and man about town. Everywhere you went with him, he knew people and people knew him, and they greeted each other happily. Everything about Harold Reed Vestal seemed admirable and dependable.
That Sunday afternoon. Dad called us all into the living room and told us that he had done something terrible. The sheriff’s deputies would be coming the next day to arrest him for a crime he did not specify. Because he couldn’t bear that, he said, he was going to get in his car and leave, and he wanted us to follow him. We packed and Mom drove us north through a snowy night, following Dad across the border and into Canada, where we spent a week hiding from the law.
Thus began a decades-long breakdown in my father’s life – a series of crimes and punishments, a marathon of apologies and humiliation, and eventually a near total estrangement between him and his children. He withdrew, hid from us, and we avoided him. When he died, there was something off in it: Wasn’t he already gone? I had spent perhaps eight hours with him in 30 years.
The jokes began flying around the family immediately after Dad died. Jokes about his unreliability, his criminality, his lifelong near abandonment of his family. Jokes about his fastidious taste in golfy leisurewear. Jokes about the way he sneaked cigarettes and claimed to have befriended the famous Idaho outlaw Claude Dallas in prison. Jokes, plinking against the edifice of the sadness he built in our lives. That’s how we do. Jokes instead of sadness. Farts during prayers. My three brothers, three sisters and I, always trying to amuse each other when the moment might call for something else.
At Dad’s memorial service, my brother stood up and said that if Dad owed anyone money, they should get it from our youngest brother. I thought that was hilarious, though it was also true that the small crowd was full of people carrying Dad’s debts – financial and emotional. In and of themselves, Dad’s unpaid obligations were not funny. They were embarrassing. Humiliating. A lifelong source of shame and wonder. As his children, we were powerless before them, and laughter was the way we found of pretending we were strong.
My father’s first crime – his most significant one – was carried out with such incompetence and lack of foresight that he was sure to be caught. Facing financial crises that I still don’t know anything about, he forged $60,000 worth of checks, routed the money through a fake bank account, and wrote checks on that account back to himself. Inspector Clouseau could have cracked the case in an hour.
But if Dad’s forgeries were mundane and inexpert, what he did next was simply incredible. The idea that he would not only run from the law, but take his whole family with him – I’ve never heard anything like it. It would make for a great story, if only I remembered more of it.
That time in Canada floats hazily in my memory. I remember almost nothing, really, with any detail. Dad drove ahead of us and the rest of us piled into the family station wagon and drove north to Lethbridge, a small Canadian city. My older sister says she remembers arguments and crying, a storm of stress, but I don’t. We stayed in a hotel and ate in restaurants. I remember wanting to order orange juice once and Mom refusing because it was too expensive. I remember that some of the products in stores had English and French labels. I remember, I think, sitting in a hotel room, shades drawn, a dusky light everywhere, and the unfamiliar nature of the television shows.
I cannot picture my father from those days. Not a single image. Nothing that tells me how he was acting, what he was saying. I can’t visualise my mother or siblings there at all. I’m sure this was a form of shock. No matter how much I think about them, no matter how much I talk about them with my family – and that is a lot – those days are hidden inside a thick cloak of forgetting.
I can’t remember driving home or returning to school, or those first days back in Gooding, where the news of our flight was everywhere. Two friends of my father’s had been in touch with Dad during this period, trying to talk sense into him. Seven days after we left, they met him in Great Falls, Montana, and brought him home, where he turned himself in.
When I found the alligator purse, I was alone in my father’s small home on the Salmon River in Riggins, Idaho.
His health had been failing and he’d lost his ability to care for himself. We would learn that people around town had noticed his fading faculties in recent months. Always a certain kind of spiffy dresser he had begun going out in pyjamas, in dirty clothes. He acted fuzzy-headed and forgetful.
None of us children had known this. We had almost no contact with him over the years, despite our efforts to reconnect. He simply withdrew, and for all of the lousy things he had done to us, this was the lousiest. I went more than 16 years without speaking to him, and was furious at him for much of that time. When we reconnected, at my instigation, it was shallow and pointless; he struck me as having an almost sociopathic lack of interest in the lives of his children. We invited him to a family reunion a few years back and it was painfully awkward; he overstayed his welcome, talking about himself and seemingly unaware of how uncomfortable he was making our mother. We were so glad when he finally left.
So when he keeled over at a gas pump and died in November, it was tempting to let the world treat him as a man with no next of kin. Indigent. But I was interested in what might remain to be knowable about his life. About what might be in his home, what clues to might be in there.
Who the hell was he?
There were no answers and few clues. Cigarette butts were mounded everywhere. His frightened pets were desperate for food. An old Polaroid camera spat out three garbled images. A copy of a book I had written sat sandwiched between coffee-table books on motorcycles, looking brand-new. Old, curled photos of us, his children, hung on the wall, remnants of some different life.
The alligator handbag – grotesque, fascinating, meaningless, ugly – seemed like an apt metaphor for the entire experience. I don’t know anything about the bag, not where it came from or where Dad got it. It sits now on a shelf in my home, propped up in front of some books.
My inheritance.
Not long ago, I was asked by someone if my parents were alive. It wasn’t until an hour or two later that I realised I had answered yes. I had forgotten Dad was dead.
It was a curious grief that followed his death. I felt as if I was mourning someone who had died years and years earlier – back before that Sunday afternoon in March 1977. Mourning the person I mistakenly thought he was. Mourning the child in that black and white photo, posing with his mother, a life of possibilities awaiting him.
And bound up in this grief was something else. Something better. In the weeks afterward, as we talked and remembered and – yes – made a lot of jokes, my brothers, sisters, mother and I reconnected in a powerful way. It was kind of beautiful, really. Kind of fun and great. It was a reminder of the strength and humour that we wove into our family after our father’s disasters. He gave us that, I guess, or we took it from what he offered, and we all turned out OK.
The night I arrived, a nice woman was waiting in her car to talk to me, and we stood outside while she said the polite, comforting things that people say at those times. She had worked with my dad at the local grocery store and seemed to know him pretty well. But I could tell something was nagging at her, and at the end, hesitantly, she told me that she believed Dad had some money hidden in the house. Maybe a lot of money. He played the lottery, she said, and people thought he’d won big.
She nearly whispered. I nearly laughed. In my experience, Dad never spent anything less than more than he had, and he always tried to give off a fake impression of wealth. He was a debtor and a thief and a great pretender, and I was sure there were no riches in my father’s home.
Still, the notion entertained my sister and me as we cleaned out that sad, filthy house. Every now and then, as we were working, my sister would call from the other room – “Found it!” or “Here it is!” – and once again we would laugh.
Daredevils by Shawn Vestal is published by ONE/Pushkin Press, £8.99. To order a copy for £6.99, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846
