The Paper My Father Kept in His Wallet

I was sitting on my father’s kitchen floor with my back against the oven door when I understood that I was not going to be able to stand up for a while.

The wallet was in my lap.

It was brown leather, rubbed pale along the fold, and it had taken the exact curve of my father’s right hip over the years until it would not lie flat on anything.

It was the third Saturday in April. Dad had been gone twenty-two days.

I had come out to the farm north of Celina that morning with a roll of contractor bags, a box of tape, and a plan.

My plan was to do the kitchen first, because the kitchen is where I could be useful.

My brother Dale was supposed to meet me at ten. He was running late, which is the one thing Dale has always been reliably.

So I started alone. I did the spice cabinet, which was mostly my mother’s spices from before she passed in 2009, the cinnamon gone to brown dust in the tin.

I did the drawer by the phone, with its rubber bands and its ballpoint pens from the co-op and its forty years of church bulletins folded into thirds.

Then I opened the little cabinet over the refrigerator, where Dale had put the things the funeral home handed back in a paper bag, and found the wallet sitting on top of his reading glasses and his pocketknife.

I knew it was the wallet before I touched it.

I had watched my father sit down to supper for fifty-eight years, and every night he took it out of his back pocket and laid it by his plate.

He did it so he would not sit on it. That was the reason he gave. I think now it was also so he could see it.

I should tell you who he was, because you will not understand what happened on that floor unless you understand the kind of man I am talking about.

Eugene Thobe was eighty-eight years old when he died, and in all that time I do not believe he used a hundred words in a row on anything that was not corn, beans, weather, or the Cleveland Guardians.

He farmed a hundred and twenty acres off a township road a few miles up from Route 703.

He raised corn, soybeans, and some wheat, and until 1987 he ran forty sows that my mother said kept the family humble.

He never said I love you. I want to be fair to him and say that no man in that part of Mercer County his age ever did.

They said it with a thermos of coffee brought out to the field. They said it by showing up with a truck.

My father said it by saying, “Well.”

Well, at my college graduation, a hand on my shoulder in the parking lot of the community college. Well, at my wedding, when he handed me over at the end of the aisle.

Well, the day I came out to the farm to tell him that Rick and I were expecting our first, and he looked at the ground for a while and then went and checked the hog waterers, which were fine.