The Paper My Father Kept in His Wallet

He came into the kitchen in his barn coat and sat down and looked at me across the table, where I was doing my arithmetic with my head down.

“Your mother says you don’t like to read out loud,” he said.

I felt my face go hot. I said nothing. I could not have said anything even if I had wanted to.

My father looked at me for a while with those pale gray eyes. He took off his cap and set it on the table, which he never did at the table.

“I got a job tonight needs doing,” he said. “Grinding feed. It’s loud in there. Come out and keep me company.”

I did not want to go.

But you do not tell your father no when he has taken his cap off, so I put on my coat and my boots and followed him across the yard to the machine shed.

I should explain the grinder.

It was a hammer mill, a big steel drum that ate shelled corn and turned it into meal for the hogs, and it ran off the power shaft of the old Farmall, which he kept in the shed that winter with the door rolled halfway shut against the cold.

When that tractor was running and the mill was spinning, you could not hear yourself think. You could not hear a person standing right next to you.

My father said you had to shout your own name into the wind to find out if you still had one.

He lifted me up onto the fender of the Farmall, which I was not supposed to sit on, and he handed me my reader from school, the one with the blue cover and the stories about a boy and his horse.

He shouted over the roar, “Read me your page.”

I looked at him. I thought he was joking.

He pointed at the book, and then at his ear, and then he shook his head and pointed at the engine, and he grinned. My father almost never grinned.

I understood. He could not hear me. Nobody could hear me. I could say anything I wanted, as loudly as I wanted, and there was nobody on earth who would know if I stuck on a word.

So I read.

I read the first word and it caught, and I read it again, and I shouted it again, and it came loose. I read a whole sentence that way. Then another.

By the end of the page I was hoarse, and I looked over, and my father was leaning on the grinder with his arms crossed, nodding, like I had told him something important about the price of corn.

“Good,” he shouted. “Next one.”

We did that every evening that winter, when chores allowed. Sometimes I read three pages. Sometimes I read six.

Once I read an entire story about a boy and his horse and a thunderstorm, and when I finished my voice was gone and my throat felt scraped raw.

My father reached up and wrapped his big hand around my whole shoulder.

“Well,” he shouted.

It was the first time I ever heard that word and thought it was enough.