The Brisket I Smoked For Dads Hall

The hall eats

I pulled them at a shade over two hundred and let them rest on the folding table under foil while Kim and Marcus set out plates, and then I sliced.

I sliced the point into burnt ends and the flat into pencil-thick slices against the grain, and the bark was black and the smoke ring was a half inch deep and red as a ribbon, and I made a plate for every soul in that building, forty-one of them, plus the staff, and we carried them out and in.

Dorothy, the one living in 1978, took one bite and started to cry, not sad, just overcome, and said it tasted like her husband’s cooking, and Marcus crouched by her chair and held her hand while she ate.

Mr. Pruitt ate his standing up at the wall like an inspector and then came and shook my hand with both of his and did not say anything because he did not need to.

A thin man in a veterans cap, who Marcus said never came to anything, had wheeled himself out partway through and parked in the sun. He ate two plates. When I came by to see did he want a third he caught my sleeve.

“I was a cook too,” he said. “Fort Riley. Nineteen fifty-nine.” He looked at my smoker a long time. “Nobody’s fed me like this since my wife. Thank you, son.” He used that word, son, the way old men do to any younger man, and still it went into me sideways, because it was the word I had come two hours to find.

I told him I would be back the second Saturday, and that he should save me a story about Fort Riley, and he said he would, and he patted my hand, and Marcus told me later the man talked about it for a week.

I fed Dad myself. Cut it small for him, no sauce, the way he always ate it, and he took the first bite and closed his eyes and chewed slow and was quiet a long time.

“There it is,” he said finally. “I know that. I know that smell from somewhere.”

“From home, Dad.”

“From home,” he said. He looked at me and for a second there was the whole man in his eyes, all seventy-nine years of him, the cook who came home from the war and fed people. “You did this,” he said. “You did this for everybody.”

“You taught me.”

“I taught you.” He patted my hand on the arm of his chair. “That’s my son,” he told me, as if I were a stranger too, as if he were introducing me to myself. “That’s my son.”