The Sundays My Father Never Explained

What Dad carried

“Craig doesn’t remember,” I said. It wasn’t a question. I knew it was true as I said it.

“He was out cold by the time they got to him,” Irene said. “He woke up in the hospital in Iowa City three days later. Your folks told him he’d fallen in the bin and got pulled out. That was all they ever told him.”

“Why?”

She looked over at Dad, asleep in the chair, with his good hand resting on his cane.

“Because your dad left that auger running,” she said. “Because he went to the shed for his gloves, and his boy went down, and another man paid for it with his back.”

“Your dad has carried that every day for thirty-nine years. He didn’t want Craig to grow up thinking somebody else’s whole life went into the ground to save his.”

“He told Lyle that, the first year. And Lyle said, ‘Walt, I’d do it again tomorrow. Don’t you dare put that on that boy.’ So they shook on it. And neither one of them ever told.”

“When Lyle’s back finally went for good, nine years ago, we came in here together, because I couldn’t lift him anymore. Your dad found out from the co-op. He walked through that door the first Sunday after, and he never stopped.”

She smiled then, a little.

“Lyle passed five years ago this winter. Your dad was holding one hand and I was holding the other.”

“And the next Sunday your dad came back, and I said, ‘Walter, you don’t have to anymore.’ And he said, ‘Irene, I never had to.'”

I sat there by that window and cried like a little girl. Irene let me. She held my hand the way Bev said she had held Dad’s, and she didn’t make me talk.

After a while she said, “The state leaves me about fifty dollars a month, after the care home takes my check. That’s all I’ve got.”

“Fifty dollars won’t keep me in hearing-aid batteries and get my hair done and pay my phone so my sister can call me. Your father has done all that for nine years, and he would not let me say no.”

“Some of it was my money,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

Irene squeezed my hand. “Then I thank you for it,” she said. “I’m glad to know who to thank.”

Telling Craig

I drove home that night with Dad asleep against the window and that school picture going around and around in my head. The yard light was on at Craig’s place when I went by. I could see the light in the machine shed.

I dropped Dad off and got him settled, and then I drove back to Craig’s.

He was in the shed under the baler with a trouble light, swearing at a chain. Shelly had the kitchen light on in the house. I could hear the radio playing in the shed, the Hawkeyes game replay, low.

He rolled out on the creeper when he heard my car door and wiped his hands on a rag. “Is Dad all right?”

“Dad’s fine,” I said. “Craig, do you remember falling in the grain bin?”

He looked at me a long moment. He sat up on the creeper.

“I remember waking up in the hospital,” he said slowly. “I remember Mom crying. I remember Dad wouldn’t look at me for a week. Why?”

“Who got you out?”

“Dad did.”

“No,” I said. “He didn’t.”

I didn’t tell him the rest. It wasn’t mine to tell, any more than it was Dad’s. I stood in that machine shed and told my brother one thing only.

“The man who pulled you out of that bin had a wife. Her name is Irene. She’s eighty-four, and every Sunday for nine years she’s been waiting by the window in that dayroom for Dad.”

“And she has your third-grade school picture in her drawer.”

Craig didn’t say anything. He just sat there on the creeper with the rag in his hands. The radio said something about a fumble on the forty.

“I’m not asking you to drive him,” I said. “But I’m not going to be the one who does it next Sunday. If he goes, it’ll be because you take him.”

I went home. I didn’t sleep much.