The Tattoo My Daughter Hid From Us

“She came in with a bandage on her arm,” I said. “She wouldn’t say anything.”

I want to tell you about my husband before I tell you what happened at that table, because if I do not, he is going to sound like a hard man, and he was not a hard man. Glen Mercer was the softest man I ever knew for most of his life. He cried at our wedding and he cried when both kids were born and he cried at the end of a dog movie we watched with Ty one Sunday. He farmed the same ground his father farmed and his grandfather broke, out on the county road north of Neola, wheat and milo and a little bunch of black cattle, and he could spend twenty minutes in the driveway telling a neighbor how to fix a bearing because he did not want the man to feel bad about not knowing.

But his father had died in March.

Dale Mercer, everybody called him Pop. He had a stroke out in the machine shed on a Tuesday morning, alone, and Glen was the one who found him when he came over for coffee, and nothing in my husband had been soft since. He went hard the way a man does when something cracks him so deep he cannot look at it, so he builds a wall over the top and calls the wall himself. He did not cry at the funeral. He stood at the front of the Methodist church in his father’s old sport coat with his jaw set like a fence post and he shook two hundred hands and he did not cry, and I kept waiting for it to come out somewhere, and it never did. It came out sideways instead. In the short answers. In the slammed tailgate. In the way he had started talking to Casey that summer, like she was a hired hand who kept showing up late.

You have to understand what Pop was in this town to understand what his quiet did to Glen. Dale Mercer had farmed the Mercer ground since he was nineteen, and he had buried his wife and kept farming, and he knew every man at the co-op by his father’s name and most of them by their grandfather’s. He was the one who pulled people out of the ditch in a blizzard without being asked and never mentioned it. He ran the pancake griddle at the Methodist men’s breakfast for thirty years and would not let anybody else learn how because he said the griddle had a personality and it only trusted him. When the Tilson boy rolled his pickup out on Route 9 and the family had no money for the funeral, it was Pop who quietly paid the Hendricks funeral home and told them to say it came from the church fund. I only found that out at his own visitation, from the Tilson boy himself, who was a grown man by then with children of his own and who stood in the line with his hat in both hands and cried telling me.