The Recorder My Son Brought To Court

The boy who listened

Here is the part I have gone over a thousand times, the part I did not see while it was happening because I was too busy drowning.

That spring and summer, while I was learning to look calm in front of lawyers, my son Cole was going quiet in a new way. Not sad quiet. Watchful quiet. He started carrying his backpack everywhere, even room to room, even to the supper table, and I told him to leave it by the door and he would say okay and not do it. He started asking me strange, specific questions. Mom, if you record somebody talking, is that allowed. Mom, does the farm belong to you or to us. Mom, if a judge hears something bad, does she have to do something about it. I answered them the way you answer a curious kid and I did not hear them for what they were, which was a boy building a case.

The custody arrangement while everything was pending had the boys with Grant three nights a week at the house on County Road 6. Cole hated going. Sam cried about it. I chalked it up to Crystal and the tension and the strangeness, and I told them what mothers tell children, that it was only for a while, that I was fighting for them, that everything would be all right. I did not know that on one of those nights, Cole had been sitting on the stairs in the dark, the way he did, watching, when his father took a phone call in the front room and did not know his son was ten feet away.

And I did not know that Cole, nine years old, had reached into his backpack, into the front pocket, and pressed record on the little voice recorder my father had given him.

That recorder is its own small heartbreak. My dad, Earl, in his last year, had gotten it into his head to record his own voice for the boys, old stories, how to set a fence post, the names of all the cows going back to when he was a kid. He gave Cole the recorder that Christmas, the last one, and showed him the buttons, and told him, “You keep this. You keep the things worth keeping.” Cole kept it. Cole kept it charged in the front pocket of his backpack. Cole had it with him on the stairs in the dark, because his grandfather had told him to keep the things worth keeping, and some part of that boy had decided that his father’s real voice was a thing worth keeping.

I found all of this out later. At the time, all I knew was that my son had gone somewhere behind his own eyes and I could not follow him there, and that he had started saying, whenever I broke down, a strange flat thing that scared me. “Don’t cry, Mom. It’s going to be okay. I fixed it.” A nine year old is not supposed to say I fixed it. I thought it was a coping thing. I held him and told him none of this was his to fix. He would look at me with my father’s steady eyes and say nothing.