A Father Who Wrote What He Couldn’t Say

It is true - a story has no beginning or end, only the perspective of the person telling it and the time they choose to start. My grandfather Cady sold farm implements for a living and wrote letters to live life as the father he wanted to be to his family. He wrote every evening to his dear Elsie and their sons. He was on the road for days at a time throughout Vermont, New Hampshire, and eastern New York, and for weeks in the spring when farmers needed to buy new grain silos, tractors, balers, and combines. A tall man with broad shoulders, a strong back, and a heart as big as a Clydesdale’s, he was a Yankee. A Yankee family man who wrote what he couldn’t say face to face.

Cady was born in the fecund rush of life that was every New England farm late in the 19th century, where existence was creation manifest. Birth, life, death, always with purpose. Faith in the mystery of it. He was merely a current in the river, useful for a time, who would pass naturally into a higher flow. He didn’t talk much about his future; he focused on his sons’ and daughters’ futures and how it would be different for them.

One day before the second great war, he wrote to his fifth son - my father - from the Union Hotel in Victory Mills that he missed being home more. He wrote that doing right was not often easy, but always best; share what you can and then give a little more; and that he knew my father’s leg would recover. My father’s youngest sister, Marcia Frances, lay quarantined in the kitchen at that time with the fever and died before my grandfather came back from that trip. When he did, he carried her body cradled in his arms down Pearl Street to Pinecrest Funeral Home and handed over the 38 dollars he had made for his last three week’s work travels. The family ate turnips, soup, and days-old bread that month. The service at Holy Family was well attended, and Cady tucked little Marcia in one final time in that plot at Pine Hill.

During the war, granddad Cady continued to write to my father from inns in Bennington, Sudbury, and Poultney, and hotels in Glens Falls, Chatham, and Utica, carrying on a conversation as naturally as if they were face-to-face by the fire. He wrote about how he sold the first corrugated steel silo in the state to a dairy farmer in Graftsbury. His zeal for betterment - in this case, the practical advantages of steel over strapped wood - glowed on the page in his forceful handwriting. He mentioned that he would be there on silo raising day to support the dairy farmer’s radical decision and make sure it was done ‘plumb and proper.’

My father wrote back from an island in the Pacific that he worried about my mother taking care of Mike and Jimmy all alone and working the late shift at GE. My grandfather responded that he and Mother had visited last weekend, and the boys and Mary Jane were crackerjack.

That was February when it was cold and white in Chittenden County. My grandfather did not complain, but his curiosity about golden sand beaches, warm evening breezes, and yes, tropical women lingered just behind the words on the page. My father wrote back weeks later – it took the Army Air Corps censors weeks to read the mail and pass it along in mailbags that hopped from island to island by plodding, blunt-bowed supply ships. Letters arrived already opened and old, but that did not lessen their importance to fathers who believed in hard work, promises, and family. And sons so far from green mountains, sweet rains, white winters, and family.

Updated: 1 Aug 2020