The Sunday Drive That Settled Daddy’s Rent

But a phone call would only have given her a day to build a story, and Sherry was always good with a story. And more than that, it was not my money to fight over. It was not even my bill, not really. It was Daddy’s land, Daddy’s rent and Daddy’s life.

And my father, whatever else had happened to him, could still talk.

I went in and handed the folder to the preparer, a nice young woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain. I did not say a word about the form. Then I drove the forty miles home with the radio off.

Daddy is Clayton Akers. He is 84 years old. He raised burley tobacco and black cattle on the same rolling ground in south-central Kentucky that his own daddy raised them on, and he was still cutting tobacco by hand into his seventies.

Three years ago he fell in the barn lot and broke his hip. They pinned it, and he did the rehab, and he worked hard at it, but his legs never came back the way they were. He could not get from the bed to the bathroom by himself, and that is when he went into the nursing home in town.

His mind never left him for a single day. He reads the county paper front to back and can tell you what corn brought in 1974. The aides call him Mister Clayton and come to him to settle arguments about ball scores.

That is what made it so hard to understand. Sherry had not stolen from a man who would not know. She had taken it from a man who would know the minute anybody told him.

Nobody had told him.

That night I told Doug. I laid the form on our kitchen table and he read it twice, the way he reads anything that matters, with one finger under the line.

“Well,” he said finally. He set the paper down and pushed it back toward me. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to take Daddy for a drive,” I said.

Doug looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded. “You want me along?”

I thought about it. Doug is a good man and Daddy likes him. But I knew my father, and I knew this was going to be a hard day for him, and I knew he would not want an audience for it, not even a kind one.

“No,” I said. “I want it to be just him. Him and his land. He doesn’t need a crowd. He needs to stand on his own ground and ask his own question.”

“He can’t stand,” Doug said gently.

“Then he’ll sit on it,” I said. “It’s still his.”

On Sunday morning I drove to the nursing home before the church crowd came through. Daddy was sitting up in his recliner by the window in his room, already dressed, reading the paper with his glasses down on the end of his nose.

“You’re early,” he said. “Did the preacher die?”

“Not that I heard,” I said. I kissed him on the top of his head. His white hair was combed flat with water the way he has combed it every morning of his life. “I want to show you something, Daddy, and then I want to ask you something.”

I pulled the other chair close and sat down. I put the form in his hands. I did not explain it. Daddy filed farm taxes for sixty years, and he knew what that sheet of paper was better than I did.