The Life and Death of Maurice K. Goddard – Kenan Meral

September 20, 2024

Lake Nockamixon was empty on the Tuesday morning they drove out. After the couple parked, Holly and Sean walked down to the marina. They decided to rent a pontoon boat for two hours, so he scrounged his wallet for ten bucks to pay the dock attendant. Holly took the keys and two bright orange life vests. She walked down to the floating aluminum pier and boarded a vessel. Sean was skeptical about it.
        “You okay?” She asked.
        “Yeah. I’m just waking up. I didn’t sleep too good last night.”
        “Still wanna go?”
        He nodded his head at her.
        It was empty out on the water, so different from how he remembered it. Nothing but the flatness of the lake; green as a torless screen of grass. Hardly a cloud blew or a single draft. No troughs on the water’s edge, nor slough gasp.
        He had a memory of it.

***

And the memory washed over him.
        Doc Goddard overlooking a plunging valley.
        Down in the village below, cars and pickups were moving people and their likewise possessions in an exodus out of Tohickon. People uprooted from their homes. Sean looked on. The population of barely 40 evacuating beneath his view. The whole of Tohickon, Pennsylvania became public property under eminent domain. Ultimately, it will become the bottom of a lake. Sean took pity on them.
        “Are you gonna make it rain Pop?”
        “No… Uh I don’t believe that’ll generate enough water to fill up the lake.”
        “What are you gonna do?”
        “We’re gonna flood it Sean,” Doc said so in his own matter-of-fact way. “There’s a couple creeks up that hill. We’re gonna dam ‘em all.” He pointed toward the hill.
        “Is everybody in the town gonna be okay?”
        Doc Goddard got down on one knee to look his boy in the eye. He had severe face. Aquiline though somehow rodent-like. He thought his dad looked like a fruit bat.
        “Everyone’s gonna be fine Sean. Everyone’s going to be even better than before.”

***

Eventually the couple made it out to the middle of the lake. He wasn’t speaking much.
        “Sean?”
        “Yeah?”
        “When are you gonna be ready?”
        “For what?”
        She rolled her eyes.
        “For you know what.”
        “I don’t know. I wish you wouldn’t ask me that right now.”
        Sean opened up a cooler and popped the top off a Yuengling lager bottle. He looked out onto the strobic verdigris, then downwards at the brown lakewater. He imagined the town.
        “That was a cute line you wrote.” He said sarcastically. “I told you I don’t like it when you write about me.”
        “I wasn’t writing about you. I was writing generally.”
        “Sex is the ritual by which we bring others into cognizance, the way we say yes to the species.” He rehearsed the line from her latest work.
        “It’s an outlet. God knows I can’t talk to you about it.”
        “You know why I don’t wanna talk about it.”
        “Do you really?” She asked, then answered her own rhetorical. “It’s because you don’t want your love to cost you anything. All the things you say you care about. You can drop them at any time. You’ve never taken a risk with anyone or anything.”
        “Acting like you know. The woman who knows everything about everyone. You read everybody. Always searching for a flaw or an insecurity. You find skin zippers and you rip ‘em open and are disappointed when you find flesh and blood.”
        “You never made anything. You’re never gonna. What would your father say?”
        “At least I know that. At least I know I don’t need validation. That’s your fucking problem. Always with the ‘Is this good?,’ ‘Can you read this?,’ ‘What do you think of this?,’ and when I really tell you, you try to convince me otherwise. That’s the pathetic thing.”
        “I tried. You didn’t.”
        “And that’s all you’ll ever do. Try and try and try. And then you’re gonna die and no one’s gonna read shit because you’re boring and you wasted your entire life at a desk. Sorry honey, but that’s not how I want to be.”
        He took a swig from his beer bottle. She sat looking around, hoping nobody else was out on the water. All she saw were maples at the shoreline and the distant marina.
        “Can you just drive me home?”
        “Here. Drive yourself home.”
        Sean chucked the car keys at her. She reached out to grab them but they slipped passed her hands and flew into the water down to the town below.
        “Look what you did,” Sean said.
        “You’re an unbearable person.”
        “Go write about it.”
        When the pair made it back to shore they were stranded there. Holly called her mother who lives in the area. Holly’s mom, Cynthia, drove the pair home. She lied to her mother and said Sean accidentally dropped the keys.
Later on that night Holly was laid up in bed, staring at the ceiling. They weren’t asleep. She could tell he was awake by the syncopation of his breathing. She started crying.
        “You didn’t have to do that you know?”
        Sean’s sighed. He shuffled to face his girlfriend.
        “I’ll go for the car tomorrow.”
        They couldn’t even pretend they were going to sleep. She looked over at him and saw him cringing up with his fingers over his eyes.
        “Holly?”
        “Yes.”
        “I’m sorry.”
        “It’s okay.”
        “I love you.”
        “I love you too.”
        Some minutes passed. He started crying quietly to himself.
        “Holly are you awake?”
        “Yeah.”
        “I don’t know how else to say it, but I feel like I can’t escape my memory. These thoughts they just keep coming to me. My brain goes and goes and doesn’t stop. They come to me. Always about him.”
        “It’s not your fault. What could you have done?”
        “The whole thing is just one unpleasant memory after the next.”
        “Stop thinking like that.”
        “Okay.”
        Sean tried to go to sleep. As he tried to drift past sleep’s limbo, Sean wondered what he would eventually tell people about his dad at the eulogy.

***

My father, Maurice K. Goddard, was was a distinguished man. A lieutenant colonel who served under the direct command of Eisenhower. When people asked what he did in the war he’d always reply that he was a weatherman and a letterman. Colleagues would come to dinner and they would ask him why Eisenhower needed a weatherman. My dad would always say that bomber pilots needed to know the weather too. Then they’d ask why Eisenhower needed a letterman. He’d say because they needed to explain to families why airmen didn’t come home.
        Though Doc Goddard was a weatherman alright. The one haunt of his life was providing the optimal timing for the bombings. They needed to know the wind and the rain conditions so the RAF could drop a fire-flood on Saxony. Jokingly, Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris asked Goddard to forecast perdition to rally the demoralized Polish Squadrons for Operation Thunderclap. Doc wouldn’t do it. He was a Yale Man and the son of a minister. Doc was disgusted by a dim register of mankind’s nature, man’s inclination toward play-making as a black stage tragedian, to make Dresden glow throughout the comfort-killing night, to set the devil’s face upon a burning city, and see the reflected image of hell. Doc did not partake in issuing omens, only predictions in natural science and the writing of KIA letters. Writing death sentences were not his specialty.
        It is ironic that Goddard’s life mission in the post-war years was to construct a state park within 25 miles of every Pennsylvanian; so that working class families, and wealthy ones alike, could vacation to a body of water and enjoy a scenic day.
        My dad had two unambiguous quotes about his aspirations. Doc said, “You don’t have a park unless you have water.” The other one, “A state park without a place to swim is like apple pie without a slice of cheese.” That simile always captured his folksy origins. At least that’s how I remembered him. A Kansas Desert dust bowl boy. Before he went off to college his mother would plant trees around Goddard Farm in the attempt to make their homestead an oasis. Though there was never enough water.
        To save his family money Doc went East to Connecticut to study forestry. After Yale, he enlisted in the Army. After war, he took a directorship at Penn State where he taught forestry for nearly a decade.
        In 1954, George Leader, the then governor of Pennsylvania, appointed Doc Goddard to Secretary of the Department of Forests and Waters. Over the course of the following 24 years, Goddard molded his Department into a model meritocracy, hiring only fellow academics and professionals while ousting nepotism appointees from undeserved positions. By the conclusion of Goddard’s marathon of public service, Pennsylvania gained 45 state parks. Then in the late 70’s Doc retired to Camp Hill, PA.
        Last week, on September 14th, 1995, Doc died in a mysterious house fire. Thank God my mom made it out alive.
        Now everyday I’m left to wonder why he did that. He was a healthy 83. Healthy as healthy can be. Mobile and self-sufficient. He was still sharp. He had his wits about him. That’s what terrifies me.
        Today, I don’t think about his lifelong success. I don’t think about his efforts in nature conservation. I don’t think even about the man who lead the way in the defense of his state’s natural beauty. Yes, he veered us away from “the strip mine, the strip mall, and the parking lot,” but he personally plunged my soul’s colors into a matchstick blackness. In the end there was really no explanation for it. Maybe he thought he just got too old. Maybe not.
        There was foreshadowing. Morbid details. At the governor’s eulogy he read a poem from the French-American writer Roy Eaves. I don’t remember much of it, but I do recall the last three lines.
        “I can’t escape my memory.
        My memory eternal which cannot escape death.
        Not even over the horizon of time.”
        In the end, whatever was there went up in a houseshaped effulgence; whatever was there went up into the shades of dust.