AUTHOR'S NOTE

I started to write this as a new framework for "Inside Out" but it became something else pretty quickly. I want you to consider it as a stand-alone short story (at least, the start of one), that is working sort of under the prompt: Where would the father/son characters of ("INSIDE OUT") be fifteen years later? I'll publish the full story once it's finished. ~JDF

FRAGMENT

MY FATHER KEEPS TOUCHING HIS HEART

My father keeps touching his heart. We are sitting in his church pickup at the Rigby Pioneer Cemetery. He lifts up his tie and undoes a button and runs his fingers into his white shirt, patting. I go to say something but he puts his left hand up, WAIT, WAIT, he motions I’M ALRIGHT with his free hand. So I wait, quietly. What’s the point? Finally, he snakes out the bluetooth dongle. It hangs on a lanyard around his neck, and controls the new hearing-aides he’s trying out.

“That stupid wind,” my father says, and means it. “Had to shut them off. Couldn’t hear a word of the prayer. ” He adjusts the aide, trying to lace the tube around the cauliflowered crest of his ear.

This is autumn 2015, a crop year disaster. The coldest summer in the last hundred years. But it wasn’t cold, not for Idaho, it was the moisture that ruined the crops. It rained three days on, two days off, the whole month of August, never got above eighty-two degrees, and it never really dried out. That first rainy day wasn’t so bad. It was joyous, actually. We were changing oil in the combines, polishing mirrors, greasing, whistling, etc. We were ready to cut that golden beer barley, chomping at the bit ... but rain clattered on the tin roof of the shop, and we all stopped what we were doing and opened the bay door and watched the rain come down. We had spent all summer irrigating--no small toil--and to see these natural puddles tinged with the rainbow of runoff motor oil was satisfying, to say the least. Rain? We could wait another day to start the two-month harvest. But then it rained three days straight, and the barley started laying down. We knew it wouldn’t--couldn’t--stand back up, but we prayed, carried a prayer in our hearts. After a week, the gold was sucked out of the stalks, and took on the tombstone gray of hornets nests. One day, it hailed pea-sized pellets, which knocked the kernels out of the heads. In the meantime, we were all out in the muck of the spud fields, digging diversion ditches so the cash crop wouldn’t get washed away. We did it all by brute human force--it was too muddy to get a back-hoe in or out--us, and everyone else. After two weeks of it, my father sent everyone home, including me. Ultimately, our efforts were lame, ineffective. 95% loss on barley & wheat; 60% on potatoes; the hay, black as tar. But we had to harvest all the crop, for insurance purposes, and all of the typical harvest enthusiasm was exasperated too. No one waved on the roads anymore. No lighthearted group-texts, morning jokes. It was all of the motion with none of the soul … and scowls, all of us, scowls. The guys from Corte Primero ganged up on the two from Talpan, and someone popped a tire on a truck, bent a rim. I covered for them, because my father was in a firing mood, and all of us were expendable, and we knew it, but that I could--and historically, been used--as some buffer zone. By November, more Idaho farms came on the market than had since 1982, the year of my birth. J.D.F.: b. Antelope, ID (camping trip) July 5, 1982.

This is 2015. My father, B.S.F.,--Rigby High School graduate year 1976 (important, he thinks, in regards to our nation’s history) turns 57 next week--and his entire livlihood is in flux. He has been in Burley, at emergency potato meetings. I--Rigby High School graduate year 2000 (interesting, I muse, all those zeroes, like a broken odometer)--I am 33. I know, or sense, rather, that at some point over that span of 365 days, I believe I will probably die. I tell my friends, the ones living and dead, and they shrug it off. But: This is my Jesus Year. If I die, I might resurrect, I figure, I hope. That’s what I have planned to do, me and my new lady, in the wilds of Boise, Idaho.

But this is 2015. I am not a dumb thirty-three. I have seen some shit. This is not my first trip to the cemetery. This is my place, my people: Look across the grassy flat quads, the short stout practical headstones, the pine trees, to the lone maple. There, my paternal grandfather D.C.F. is buried, alongside my grandmother Melba. There are the eight burial plots that await me, my mother, my father, my five sisters. Beyond our still-empty graves--through the chain-link fence--see the church softball fields. The greenest thing in the valley, what with all the rain, the white foul lines growing out. Those are called D.C.F. Fields, named such in memoriam for my grandfather’s service as a Mormon Stake President, Farmer, and Peacemaker, b. 1928, d. 1972.

The Mormon Chapel across the parking lot--it was once white but now so yellowed, like coffeed teeth, as I see it on this Windy November Saturday, 2015--was where my father baptized me when I was eight years old; where I received the Holy Ghost and the Priesthood by the laying on of his hands; where I delivered my missionary farewell speech and where I delivered my homecoming address. It’s where I learned, and was taught. Where I had my first and second wedding receptions. It is where my father served as first, my bishop, and later, my stake president. This meant he counseled and guided me spiritually, or at least listened when I had the courage to tell him my problems, and explained the repentance process to me once again. He was also my Scout Master, my boss, and my private wrestling coach. Sometimes, when I had to cut weight before a match, before I quit wrestling, we’d come over to the church in sweats and grocery bags and run up and down the stairs. It was the dead of winter, so we couldn’t run outside, and really, the chapel was the only two story building all around. It had a hardwood basketball floor too, good for windsprints, and a stage we would grapple on. Pinewood Derbies, Stake Dances, Scout Camp, Co-Ed Softball. I could go on and on about the church …

“Go ahead,” my father says. He touches his heart, under his tie, taps up the volume. “I should be able to hear now.”

“It was a nice service for Graig.”

Graig Briggs, b. 1982, d. 2015. Testicular Cancer. I lived with him, before I got married a second time, and in college before that, and for a few weeks once he came to live with me, in Oakland, but then, the last time I lived with him, in his upside-down shit-built condo on the sad side of town, he only let me pay my rent by mowing the lawn. He was that kind of guy. Then one day, swollen nut. No problem. He wasn’t married; hadn’t even really ever dated, after his mission, and he could freeze some for the future. After all, he was only thirty-three. So, snip, tuck. One round of chemo. After two months, all his markers disappeared. Last week, finally, we all release that sigh--the three surviving friends, his four brothers, his mother (widowed), his multitudinous cousins and in-laws--that communal sigh, where we all pull at our collars and say, phew, that cut close....

We all look away for one day--all the ruined crop harvested, all the machinery tucked away, all the Mexicans gone back to Mexico, Briggsy going back to work at the plumbing shop--and I get a phone call from his little brother saying they just found him dead on the lawn of Rigby’s only chiropractic office, Teton Adjustment. But that turned out to be just coincidence. Or where he landed. Cause of Death: brain aneurysm caused by some unmonitored side-effect of the treatment. I guess. He never signed anyone onto his hospital documents--no one, not even his mother, really knew what was going on.

Of course, I was five hours west, in Boise, with my new wife’s new family, doing new family things like barbecues and movie nights. I had to take this test over there anyway, and just ended up staying, for the fun. I was pretty sure there was no future for me in farming, what with the year we’d just had, and I had to have options, after all.

In fact, it wasn’t ten days ago that I told my father and mother, in the presence of my new lady, that I might never come back. Things were undecided. I was unsure. But I left and didn’t say goodbye then, but then once I got the phone call from Graig’s little brother, he asked that I relay it on to all the friends that really cared. So I went down the list, and that was tough sledding, let me tell you, because my friends are big starchy tough guys who try hard and lead clean lives and have families and see plenty to make them cry but they don’t that often, nor do I or my father really weep, except at times like these, when reality sets in.

After the phone calls, and making a plan with the lady and new family at a pumpkin patch near the airport, I caught a bus back home. That morning, Julius picked me up at Dynamo’s where we ate gas-station hotdogs and Red Bull, and Chubbs brought me his dead brother’s missionary suit, which was too long and big, and Huff spared me a black tie, and we went to Me & Stans and ate biscuits and gravy across the street from the funeral home and wrote out a eulogy for him--we were all pallbearers along with his brothers, and his mother had asked that we share some thoughts--and within five minutes I was writing everything that they’d say down, and we figured out how to put it all together. I was in shock too, while I phoned my friends, from Boise. I remember it all in a fog, and I kept embellishing the sequence of events. I didn’t realize that until we all met up at Me and Stans and the guys called bullshit. Then we walked across the street for the viewing, which lasted that night, and reconvened at the chapel this morning, for more viewing, and funeral, and burial. All of that blurred now.

Had I been up two days or three? Three days, or four? And now, and now here I was, here we were…

“I bet you all did a nice job.” My father nods solemnly, looking off across the steering wheel, out the windshield, to some unknown. Then he reaches for his heart and readjusts. “For Graig. I bet he was proud.”

What strikes me, then, and this may sound weird, is that, in the week that I’d been gone--and I should say I left, because I did, all my stuff was in storage, and my new lady and I were going to see what we could drum up in Boise over the winter and live with her people, this test being important, but also what the spring might hold--the ruts of my father’s sheen head had grown more pronounced. He had the gaunt eyes of a desert shephard. He loosened his tie, undid his top button, put on sunglasses.

The ruts are not weird; but their pronouncement is sharpened ten-fold. My father is either aging, stressed, or the pill I took a while ago was extended relief Adderall and is now, finally, kicking in. Great. When really, all I want to do is go back to the house my parents have always lived in, connected to the feedlot, and crash in my old room, on my old bed, facedown. Which is only two miles down the road.

My father’s overall hairlessness has made him glisten, even though it was cold and dry. Hair. No hair. It’s always been a thing my father and I have differed on. When D.C.F. passed away at 44 years old of acute kidney failure (he’d bounced himself to death, literally, on the tractor), my father lost all his hair. Catastrophic Alopecia, it’s called. It all fell out, and it never grew back. Fourteen years old, the year 1972, fatherless, and hairless for the revolution? Of course, my father was angry; he was jaded, and driven, and deeply reckless in ways stubborn men in my life seem to be. He’s never worn a seatbelt, for instance. He fakes it on airplanes. That’s what he blames on his father’s death--the seatbelt kept him from freely moving on the seat. This is the reason for his protuberant, cardboard-like ears, cauliflowered ears, all around the outer rims of both sides. He refused to wear headgear. He was a repeat Idaho State Champ in the 172 weight class, bald as a beet and ears beat stiff to hell.

That has nothing to do with his hearing. That’s just screwed. That comes from a lifetime of working all the jobs a farm has to offer--shop work, mechanic work, outside work, clangs, bats, falls, yells--and never wearing ear plugs. Every year, I see him do things he shouldn’t--shoveling, for instance, or hanging drywall, or changing tires--just to pace the guys faster. And the strange thing is, everyone loves him for it, and they trust him as a leader, mentor, friend. My father is one of those rare people, folks say, that leads by example, and he does.

I, on the other hand, am a hairy man who tends to avoid hard labor, anymore. My hair grows like weeds. And one time, back when I couldn’t wring more pounds down for a freestyle tournament, my father got out the electric shears, and readied to shave my head. I easily had three pounds of mop and bangs. I refused, flat out, and he twisted my arm. What was I willing to give up to compete? Would I give it everything, my all?

Clearly, I was not. I clutched my head in both hands.

Then you should quit, he said. If you’re not in it all the way, you shouldn’t be in it at all.

Fine, I said.

Say it, my father said. Tell me that you quit.

I wouldn’t say a word, and walked out of the garage. And that was that. I never stepped foot on the mat again.

But that’s not true. That’s what I planned to do. But around midnight, my stomach aching, I got a second wind, and I put my mother’s Jazzercise ankle weights around my legs, put on three layers of ski gear, and went out and shoveled the snow off both the driveways, and my aunt’s, who lived next door, and the Bakke’s, who were all deaf. At five am, I was a half-pound away. My father woke up and we drove to Pocatello for the tourney, me spitting into a Dynamo cup, and I made weight but lost both my matches in the first two rounds, as exhausted as I was. I quit wrestling after years of that pattern, once I developed cauliflower ear of my own.

My father mashes the control button of his remote with his flat thumb, and a soft blue light emanates from the white plastic, and my father nods his sheen head as he tucks the control back in, buttons his shirt, and smooths his tie over the glowing LED. Blue light through his white shirt, radiating from his chest, until it was stifled by his tie.

“So where we going now?” I ask.

“Hold on,” my father says, as we roll forward in the line leaving the cemetery. He’s steering with his knees, left foot on the brake, right foot on the gas, his phone now coming out. “First, before we get on the road, I better check my phone.”