The Grave I Dug for My Father

What Floyd told me

When I came up out of the hole, Floyd poured coffee from his own thermos into the lid and handed it to me.

We stood together by the backhoe and drank it while the sun came up the rest of the way.

“Your brother came up here every Saturday for two years,” Floyd said, out of nowhere.

“After your dad’s knees went. Brought him up here in the pickup and sat him on the tailgate so he could watch me mow and tell me I was doing it wrong.”

I didn’t know that either.

“Lyle mowed the north side himself, so your dad would see it done right. Never once took a dime from the township for it.”

Floyd turned his cup in his hands. “I’m not telling you whose side to be on. I’m just telling you what I saw.”

“I know,” I said.

“Your dad wasn’t easy on him,” Floyd said. “I heard some of it. On the phone, at the elevator. Man couldn’t plant a row straight enough. Couldn’t do nothing quite right.”

He looked at me sideways. “Your dad bragged on you, you know. To everybody. The boy in Tulsa. Always the boy in Tulsa.”

I stood there with the coffee going cold in my hand and finally understood the card in my shirt pocket.

The tracks

The vault truck came up from Wellington at nine. Two young men set the concrete base in the grave with the boom on their truck and laid the lid beside it on boards.

They looked at the corners and one of them whistled through his teeth.

“Who dug this?” he said.

“His son,” Floyd said.

After they left, I drove the backhoe back across the grass to the windbreak.

The ground was soft from the October rain, and the big rear tires left two clear lines of lugged tracks behind me, running from the edge of the grave all the way to the cedars. I shut it down beside the shed instead of inside it.

I drove back to the motel and showered again and put on a clean white shirt Lisa had bought at the store in town that morning, because the first one had brown clay to the elbows.

I put my good jacket on over it, and we drove to the church.

The service

I’m not going to say much about the service. It was at the Methodist church where I was baptized and where Mom’s funeral was.

The pastor was young and did his best. They sang “In the Garden,” which was Mom’s song, and “I’ll Fly Away,” which was Dad’s.

Lyle sat in the front pew on the left with Karen and Matt and his daughter. Lisa and I sat on the right. That’s the way it had been arranged, and I didn’t fight it.

The six men came forward at the end, and they carried Dad out to the hearse. I walked behind with Lisa.

I watched my brother’s shoulders under the weight of our father and thought about all the Saturdays I hadn’t been there for.