Seventeen
BY NOW I know the drill, having worked with Charlie some when I was in high school, back when I’d use farmwork to help me get in shape for football season.
EJ owns two combine harvesters. With one of them in the shop, we focus our day on the grind of getting to the grain elevators and back.
Eventually Charlie and Les and me will be loading sixty-pound bags of seed into the back of our planter, laying down what will be the neatest rows of soybean plants ever seen in Watauga County.
I’ve had football coaches who didn’t attend to—or maybe obsess over—the smallest details the way Charlie Hall does.
One of the reasons we get along as well as we do.
He and I take our turns driving the combine.
He goes first, and I watch how precise he is setting his rows, almost like a surgeon.
The wheat stubble provides him with a road map, Charlie taking his time, never gunning the engine or speeding it up, his intense focus spitting off him like seeds, totally oblivious to the high heat of the day.
Like this is his playing field, and he’s the star of it and just get the hell out of his way.
When it’s my turn, when I’m the one up in the driver’s seat, getting back up behind the wheel of the combine he’d taught me to drive back in high school even before I had my driver’s license, I’m almost surprised at how good it feels, as if I’m at least in charge of something again.
I throw myself into the work today, but with every wrong move, my bad shoulder stabs with pain so powerful I just have to sit there until it passes, almost like a wave of nausea. If Charlie notices, he doesn’t say anything, at least not until we finally call it a day.
“You gonna be okay to load those seed bags when the time comes?” he asks. “You know how heavy those suckers are.”
I give him a good, long look then, like I’m still surveying the other team’s defense right before the ball is snapped.
“Uncle Charlie,” I finally say in a soft voice. “I ever come up on work I can’t do, you’ll be the first to know, I promise.”
He grins again, not singing Hank’s words but just reciting them to me. “‘That side’s yours and this side’s mine.’”
“Just so we understand each other,” I say.
He gives me a long look this time, still grinning, and says, “You sound just like your old man sometimes.”
“Thank you.”
He turns and spits.
“Don’t automatically assume I meant that as a compliment.”
I do something then I haven’t done much of lately.
I laugh.
Until it hurts.
After Charlie’s left for the day, I go inside the house to the basement gym my father had built for himself, for the jock he still had in him until the day he died, the gym he saw me using for myself when I got bigger and older.
Nothing fancy down here. An old treadmill that still works just fine. Squat rack. Couple of barbells. A fold-back wall-mount rack. Slant board for sit-ups. Dumbbells of different weights.
I’ve told EJ in advance that dinner might have to be a little later than usual tonight because I’m heading for the gym.
“Haven’t you been working out all day with Charlie?” she asks.
“Need to punish myself just a little more,” I say, kissing her on top of her head.
“Punishing yourself for what?”
“Figure of speech,” I tell her.
She looks up at me. “You sure about that?” she asks before adding, “Dinner at eight?”
“I won’t be late.”
“Don’t you overdo it down there, Silas Tucker,” she says. “The last thing you want to do is set yourself back.”
I smile at her and croon to her with one of my favorite lines from Ben Harper:
Hard not to feel like the odd one in my bones.
“Please don’t sing,” she says.
It’s my first time, since I left the rehab facility, in a gym without a trainer or physical therapist present.
But for the next hour I set about beating the holy hell out of myself, music from one of my many playlists blasting out of my iPhone.
Jason Isbell. Steve Earle. Kris and Willie and Waylon and Johnny Cash when they were the Highwaymen.
Even some Hank, not that I’d admit that to Charlie Hall, that snob.
Even my offensive linemen, those hogs, used to admire the fact that I was the first one in the weight room, even before they got there, and the last one out.
Today I pretend that I’m still that guy, even knowing that I’m not, knowing that EJ is upstairs and can’t hear me singing along now with Duffy:
I don’t know what this is, ’cause you got me good.
When I finally finish up, sweat coming off me in what feels like waves, the satisfaction of having made it through a hard workout like this, trying to cancel out the hurt I was feeling just everywhere, I do feel like a jock again for a few minutes.
First one in, last one out.
Hell yeah.