It was 1968 in the land of 10,000 lakes during the thick of summer when the mosquitoes refuse to relent. I was sweating out my last coupla pounds from the winter beside my son as our blood thinned in the Midwest heat. I felt suffocated by the could have beens, the irretrievable past, and the thick pollen that coated my throat stubbornly like syrup.
My boy told me it was hard for him to fall asleep two summers prior—because the sun didn’t set til’ close to ten, and the cattle dogs barked, and the teenagers in the neighborhood made a ruckus, and mostly because his dad wasn’t home.
I was draining bottles of Budweiser, my son cherry cola—the both of us trying to forget that I abandoned him that summer he still spoke about. He was a small human. He didn’t understand that I did it for us, for him. He didn’t know how to let things go.
We sat in near silence in the wheat field atop a hay stack, watching the gas from silos fill the sky with heaps of fumes. If you didn’t track the trail, it could be easy to mistake them for brilliant tufts—swollen cumulus clouds leading us to a higher path—the one that all the billboards and lawn signs spoke of:
He has remembered His promise of mercy.
The field stretched on for miles, and I knew it was time to teach my boy about tilling soil and mild manners, but instead I wanted to sit here forever, listening to the faint sounds of porch bluegrass from the next door down. I usually hated that sound—not loud enough to pierce my heart, but too loud that it disturbed the quiet. But it wasn’t so bad that night. My son tapped his foot and I felt his love for life in a way I never felt myself. He saw things beautifully—and because he did, I did too.
I always thought I wanted a girl. I could protect her. I wouldn’t fuck her up the way I could a son. But it was different with him. I sweat out every sip of beer I drank—my chest hair soaking through my gray cotton shirt, revealing the patchiness of growth. My son was bare-chested and lanky, his bony shoulders slinking over his ribs, his spine revealed through his skin. I admired his innocence, his gentleness. The way he closed his eyes everytime he heard the sound of the harmonica, and smiled when a butterfly brushed his nose.
I watched my own parents through the rotting wooded-framed window into the kitchen. The curtain above the sink rippled with the welcomed wind, and it carried the smell of beef that my mother fixed. I slaughtered it just the morning before yesterday. My father stumbled around the house. They hadn’t spoken to each other since I was born in 1941, just before my father left to fight in the war.
When he came home victorious four years later, she was living in the bare bones of the house, which mirrored how thin she had become. Food shortages. Rationing.
She didn’t know how to drive, but gave her bike to a scrap drive for the war effort. She’d walk for miles to the grocery after that, truly thinking it would bring her husband home sooner. And maybe it did.
But he came home to a house with no silverware. Their closet doors were taken down for the hinges, the art on the wall for the nails. She even removed the plug from the vacuum, and our house became crumb-ridden and dust-filled.
How stupid could you be? He asked her when he returned.
But it was middle America. And the government begged through radio waves, and the neighborhood housewives guilted each other, and the pastors preached in the name of the Lord. Help Uncle Sam! Bring Our Men Home! They made posters and organized potlucks and sold their crochet and cow’s milk to raise money while my father watched people get bombed. Things would never be the same again. Didn’t they know?
It became so diferent. We watched the war in Vietnam on television—bodies bleeding out as we sat comfortably on the couch and ate our venison soup. Our leaders got shot, they announced it in our homes, riots on the streets, nothing ever ended.
“Do you ever feel like life is just passing by?” My son sighed as we basked in the sublime and the sun sunk lower into the horizon. The longest day of the year gone—just like that.
I thought about what to say as I looked at my fingernails that were painted with grease. It was hard to distinguish the muck from blood blisters.
“You’re not even awake yet, kid.”
My boy looked at me like we were speaking different languages.
“What do you mean?”
He has the same buck teeth that I did when I was a kid. It may be the only thing he has of mine. Everything else is his mother’s. At least how she looked when I last saw her, all those years ago. The same spidery eyelashes. The same wild curls and dainty toes. I wonder if she remembers it the same way I do—if it was the same for the both of us. There were plenty of explosions between us before our last encounter, but our parting happened with a sort of inexplicable ease.
She was sitting at the edge of my bed, the skin of her stomach still loose from growing a child, and I could see the folds in her body through her sheer night slip. The bags underneath her eyes had become purple. I have to go, she told me, handing me my child wrapped in a blanket. I just nodded. What else could I have done? We didn’t blame each other for things anymore. I’ll never forget the way she looked at me then, like a portrait of a woman. I could paint it now just from my memory if my hands were steady enough.
“What I mean is, say we live til 80. Every last one of us.” From the field, I could hear the air conditioning unit rattling in the window. Another thing broken. Another thing to fix. “Then for me, right now, it’d only be 8:06 in the morning—if my life were a day. It gives you perspective, don’t it? For you, it would only be…” I did the math in my mind. “Around 2:30. Middle of the night, but a brand new day. You wouldn’t even be awake for a couple hours—a couple years.”
He looked at me with wonder and skepticism, eyes as wide open as the prairies.
I didn’t know how to tell him that I didn’t even wake up until I found out Caroline had gotten pregnant with him. We were shitting bricks at the news of it all. She was a girl from the north country, like the Dylan song. Industrial town. Ship yards. Ore docks. Her own mother left her. Her dad was a sailor, entered the Naval Service during the world war. Never came home. Her grandparents passed one by one. Even her ol’ dog Scout ran away. Then she found me. I found her. We both didn’t have much. I understand that now.
“What was it like… in prison?” He had asked me that a hundred times before. And every time I shut it down. I didn’t know how to explain to him how free I felt. It was hard enough explaining it to myself.
“You could do whatever you want in this life,” I told him.
“I want to stay here.”
My mother came out onto our porch, which fell further into disrepair every day. She tugged on a rope, ringing the cowbell, the same way she had since I was a small boy.
“It’s dinner time.” I got up from the hay stack, brushing off the straws from my greased jeans.
“Would you want me to stay here?” My son begged for me to want him.
“That’d be just fine.” I nodded to him and drained another beer, hoping one day he’d change his mind.
I didn’t want to tell him that one day his grandparents wouldn’t be here anymore, and I’d become like my own father, and my son like me. And it wouldn’t be just fine.
I wanted him to go out west—the American dream—run into a girl named Caroline. He’d know who she was as soon as he laid eyes on her—a spitting image of himself, only a little older, maybe a couple wrinkles on her forehead. She’ll have lost her accent by then. Speaking proper. Walking all slow and honeyed in the gold light. She’d illuminate with a maternal glow she never knew she had. Maybe they’d call me then. Maybe I’d go out there too. Leave all of this behind. Maybe we’d be a family again by supper time.