The Brisket I Smoked For Dads Hall

The last thing Dad taught me

I got a room at a motel off the highway and I did not sleep much, and that was all right, because a brisket does not let you sleep much anyway.

Roy Dyer taught me brisket the summer I was eleven. He had an offset smoker he built himself out of a hundred pound propane tank, and he treated it like a woodstove and a church both. He taught me to split hickory small so it did not choke the fire. He taught me the stall, where the meat sits at a hundred and sixty degrees for three hours and seems like it will never move, and he taught me not to panic at it.

“Everything worth having has a stall in the middle of it,” he said. “You just keep the fire steady and you wait it out.”

He was a quiet man. Army, two years, he never talked about it except to say he had been a cook, which he said like a joke on himself, a man who went to war and came home and all he wanted to do the rest of his life was feed people.

He adopted me when I was seven. I will not lay the whole story out here, it is my mother’s story more than mine and she is gone now, but the short of it is that I was a county kid with a caseworker and a trash bag of clothes, and Roy and his first wife took me in, and then she passed, and it was just Roy and Brett and me. Brett was his by blood. I was his by choice.

He never once, not one time in thirty-one years, made me feel the difference. He signed my report cards Dad. He walked me to my truck the day I moved out and put his hand on the back of my neck like he used to when I was small and said, “You turned out good. I had the easy job.”

Now he was seventy-nine and the doctors had a word for what was taking him, and some days he knew me and some days he called me by his brother’s name, a brother who died in 1961. The last few times I had visited he had been mostly quiet, looking out the window at the parking lot like he was waiting on somebody.