55
I can’t sleep.
I keep falling in and out of dreams, wandering one massive factory of frantic thought and feeling.
My eyes close and I’m in the middle of a vast desert, explosive with light.
All colors of the sun paint the expanse from blood red to orange, purple, yellow and on.
I am lost and running through mountains of sand.
The dunes rise before me, but I must continue on.
Scaling these dunes, I move forward, all the while the setting sun is dying.
If I don’t make it to the horizon before darkness comes, I’ll be done.
Vultures circle ahead.
They cry out to one another in a language nearly decipherable but too distant to know for sure.
There are scores of bright green and red lizards sprinting through the sand all around me, followed closely by hordes of snakes and desert rodents.
Mongoose and rats and the like.
I push on at breakneck speed, exhausted and hyperventilating in the scorched air, beginning to panic.
My legs fight beneath me about to rupture but I am possessed to keep moving.
This never-ending race continues until, at last, the sun has set.
There is only the red fading horizon, too far away to light my path.
From the top of the highest dune, I fall to my knees and tumble forward, spinning down and down and down.
I awake.
Breath rushes to my lungs.
I rub my eyes.
My heart races.
Nightmares.
Never-ending nightmares.
Coffee in hand, the clock approaches eight, I’ve barely slept, and feel as if I’ve been strung out for ages.
I gather up my cup and pour another for my father.
I go to wait out on the front porch like I did every night five years ago.
I am drained of emotion, even my anticipation is numb this morning.
Perhaps I have passed through the trauma and have run straight into a prairie more serene.
When you’re twenty-nine and you’ve seen many things.
I light a cigarette.
It soothes me further.
What a brisk, frigid morning and I’ve found myself in.
It’s almost December, the snow will fall in a matter of weeks.
The smoke sails into me smoothly, through the throat and the lungs and the mind, satiating the frenzied synapses which cause me unrest.
I breathe the last of it down and press it to the ground.
Down, down to the Earth.
The hour is passing.
Maybe he won’t show after all.
I look to the sky, resigning myself to the possibility when the classic red Ford comes rolling from the road to the drive.
Behind the steering wheel and blinking, there he is.
My father.
The shape of the defeated.
A burly man in my memory, beer-gutted, and strong, now steps rigidly from the truck, withered and frail and sick.
He looks as if he’s been starved for years in jail or somewhere dark.
He was sometimes prone to slouching, but now he is fully bent to the ground.
Slow step after slow step.
He wears that same beaten and beige work jacket with suspenders and a gray shirt beneath.
He dons weathered jeans with rips and tears that cling to his hips a bit loosely, leading all the way down to the oldest work boots you’ve ever seen.
He is bearded and wears one of those old flat brimmed Minnesota Vikings hats with the logo stitched to the front.
His hair has long since forsaken him, but little tufts stick out the side.
The way he heads toward me seems ancient, a humble beggar.
Each stride is a decision, deliberate and focused.
He barely lifts his feet as he walks, every movement costs him.
I’ve imagined my father in the worst of conditions over the years.
Often, I would turn a TV on or read a newspaper in anticipation of coming across some sad brief story about a forgotten old man without a family who was found crumpled and rotting in a sewer somewhere.
I’ve imagined him decrepit, hopeless, dying.
I’ve imagined him broken and ravaged by guilt.
I’ve imagined him hurting in all ways, but I somehow never imagined this.
The way he grinds toward me is the sorriest thing I’ve ever seen.
How can I hate the weak and broken? By the time he makes the short distance to the bench where I sit, he has a husk to his breath.
He looks at me once, and then stares out to the yard and his truck, to the road that winds up and beyond.
Where have you been, old man? He leans to his right and picks up the cup of black coffee.
“This for me?” he asks quietly.
I nod. He raises it to his nose and smells it.
I can’t tell you how many times I saw my father drink his coffee over the morning paper in our kitchen growing up. Never once had I ever seen him smell it.
He closes his droopy eyes and takes a careful, thankful sip. What a sight.
I can’t watch his every movement, so I gaze back to the yard and notice a hawk circling high above the elm across the road.
Its black body shimmers as it hunts for mice. They’ll be tough to find now, friend. Winter is coming, don’t you know?
I look back to my father and he observes the heat in his veiny dry hands. If I had a brush, I could paint that just right.
The hands of a tired, shattered, solemn father, gripping his coffee in the morning as he stares into the brew for illusive, nondescript answers.
Well, we are all staring lost into something, I suppose. Finally, he gathers up a run of conviction and begins.
“I saw that farm out on UU on my way in.”
“Yeah?”
“The big one out a couple miles west.”
“Yeah the Hamards’s.”
“That right? He’s grown it.”
“Oh yeah. He’s got his sons workin it now, too. Doing well.”
“Seems like it.”
“Yeah.”
“So many farms.”
“Yeah.”
“You remember when your mother and I took you to that pumpkin patch as a boy? On that farm up north near the bay?”
“I remember.”
“Was thinkin ’bout that this mornin.”
“Yeah?”
“I was. I was thinkin back to that first time. You were young. Very young. There were all these other kids there. It was a petting zoo, right, at the same time. Llamas and other things around. Some donkeys. Horses. Dogs. And we thought you’d want to play with them kids. But you didn’t go and make friends. You were off by yourself. I remember you were climbing the fence by the horses and just starin at ’em, like. Nobody else around. And you didn’t care much about the pumpkins, but you helped pick one out at the end. But you remember the big thing from back then?”
“Jasmine?”
“You do remember.”
“Of course—”
And something of a small grin spreads across his face. So bizarre. Jasmine was a dog that I had, a chocolate lab, for no more than a year as a kid. I found her because she was part of this litter at the farm my father was speaking of. I hadn’t thought of her in forever. My parents sold her to some construction guy because she wasn’t training well, and Dad thought she was disobedient. He continues on with gravity, with phenomenal slowness.
“Well, you had it in your heart right when you saw the little thing that you loved her. And we stayed there an hour more just so you could play with her. I wanted to leave but your mother insisted we stay because you were so happy. Before I knew it you had convinced her to keep the thing.”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t want it.”
“Right.”
“But you and your mother did. So.”
“I remember that.”
“Well. I was drivin past that farm today and I thought of that.”
“Ah.”
“I hadn’t thought of that dog in twenty years.”
“Yeah. It’s been a while.”
“Got me thinkin ’bout the day when we told you we were sellin her. You remember that?”
“Not really.”
“Well, we sat you down in the kitchen and we tried to tell you ’bout the plan. And you didn’t understand. You kept saying but I love her . I thought that was silly. The way you kept sayin that. And you started to cry. And were beggin us, trying to change our minds. And your mother left the kitchen and it was just me and you.”
“Yeah.”
“You were lookin up to me, little, sitting in the chair. With your big blue eyes and you asked me, I ain’t lyin, how could you? You were five. And it was like I had done some grave injustice against you, and you knew it. I didn’t really care too much at the time. The dog was pissing on everything, and didn’t listen. And so I sold her. That was that.”
“Mhm.”
I don’t know if I’ve ever heard my father tell a story this long before.
“When Chuck came through to get her, and Chuck was a solid man, mind you. You came ’round the corner and you were huggin the dog for dear life. You were sayin all this crazy shit to the guy, and beggin your mother not to let him take her. Really freaked Chuck out. I remember that. I had to talk to him outside and remind him you were a kid and all. Well, somehow your mother got you to let the dog go and so she brought her outside and Chuck took her. And inside I could hear you wailing in there. Really screaming about the dog.”
“I remember.”
Everything he said was true, and though I hadn’t thought about this particular moment of my childhood in many years, I remember the details vividly as they are described to me now.
“And the whole night you locked yourself up in your room and you were cryin. All night. The whole rest of the evenin and later, long after you went to bed. And your mother would go up there to you and she’d try and calm you down some. And she would return to the room and look at me all serious and say you need to go talk to your son. But I had no interest. I told her you’d be over it in the morning. That you could cry yourself silly but at some point you’d stop. Thought you had to. Nobody can go on forever—”
“Yeah.”
“You know that night, middle of the night, your mother woke up and you were still cryin and makin noise? She shook me awake and I heard you too. I remember bein so damn mad that I stormed up the steps to your room. You were pounding your little fists into your bed. Face all swollen and hysteric, honest to God. I never saw nobody cry like that in my whole life. After I swung the door open, I yelled you shitless. Yelled so loud the neighbors half a mile down probably heard. Said that enough was enough, all that. You remember that part?”
“I do.”
“Your mother didn’t talk to me for a week. Maybe more. After that.”
“Yeah,” I say, and he’s still staring into his coffee, speaking slowly and delicately.
“Well, I thought about that, after I saw the farm on my way over.” And herein lies, to date, the most shocking moment of my life. The most stunning, most impossible to believe. Reality dives off the clifftop.
He finishes the story about Jasmine and begins to cry. Water comes brimming to his eyes and it silently falls to the ground. It rolls ethereal down his nose and then drops. I haven’t seen my father cry since his own father died on that rainy night long ago. In a moment I am transformed into a son all again.
I know something has deeply and fundamentally changed. Something is wrong. I don’t recognize the man who just told that story. I cannot fathom the delicate nature of his speech, nor the softness of his manner. His physical prowess is gone. This man, who I’ve hated, is bleeding from a foreign nature of grace and sorrow. And is it covered in shame? Regret? Everything about him is steeped in a sadness so palpable it’s almost too painful to look at or hear.
What’s happened to him? He is small, crushed. He is clinging to the edge of an intangible darkness, I sense it.
Through tears he says.
“I’m sorry I did that.”
He wipes at his nose, but the crying doesn’t stop, and I say nothing. I am frozen in the most unsuspected compassion and confusion. I sit like a statue as he cries quiet in the morning.
Of all the stories. Of all the moments. Of all the many, many days and harsh clashes between father and son. The beltings. The apathetic stretches. The ghost-like existence. The drunken, hopeless late evenings of which there were thousands, millions. A whole lifetime of seconds. The night he left me in the coldest Wisconsin winter, alone with my dead mother, where he had been witness. Complicit in her passing. He could have spoken about anything, but he talked about that. He talked about Jasmine.
As the tears roll down his wrinkled face and into his beard, I understand that it is an apology for everything. How had he done it? Before me is a man completely riddled by debt. He is the owner of an anguished soul utterly wrecked with havoc and regret. Here he sits, weeping quiet into his coffee and his hands. And what is it really in a son that loves his father like a God?
As I sit and watch, my blood runs with compassion and indescribable loss. I am filled with a yearning to help and to love. This man. This man above all others. I have no clear reconciliation. I have all grievances. And still, as I watch him cry, none of that matters to me anymore. All this time. What happened?
After some minutes, the tears subside and we sit together silently, still. He wipes his face off with his hands, takes his jacket to his beard, and lets out a gust of old, congested breath, clearing his throat. He hasn’t brought himself to look at me much. It’s okay.
At last, when the hawk has long since flown away, he says, near inaudible, to himself and to me.
“Cash, I’m dying. Don’t imagine I’ll make it past winter.”
And the words hang in the mid-morning air. They take root in the sky there to stay.