Dad’s Rocker Comes Home to Elm Street

Dad watched from the kitchen doorway, leaning on his cane. “You don’t have to do that, son,” he said to Dobbs. “You’ll be late for something.”

“I’m not late for anything, Rudy,” Dobbs said.

We loaded Dad’s radio and his Bible and his reading glasses. We loaded his shaving things and his good church suit in a dry cleaner’s bag. Dad asked me to go into the bedroom and get Mom’s picture off the dresser, the one from their twenty fifth anniversary.

I went into the room I had backed out of on Wednesday. Dobbs had kept it neat. His jeans were folded now. Mom’s picture was still on the dresser, right where Dad had always kept it, turned toward the bed.

When I picked it up, I saw the bed itself. It was the oak double bed Dad built for Mom the winter before I was born, with a row of little wheat stalks carved in the headboard, because Mom grew up on a dairy farm outside Edgar.

I had not thought about the renter sleeping in that bed. Of course he would be. It was the bed in the room. I stood there with Mom’s picture in my hands and could not move for a minute.

Then I went back out. We would get the bed some other time. The bed was not what mattered that day. Getting Dad warm was what mattered.

Last of all, Dad pointed his cane at his rocker.

It sat in the corner of the living room by the front window, where it had sat for fifty two years. It is quarter sawn oak, with the arms worn pale and smooth where his hands have rested. Dad built it the year I was born, so Mom would have somewhere to rock me.

“That one comes,” he said.

“That one comes,” I said.

Dobbs carried it out to the truck himself and laid it on its back in the bed beside the twin frame, padded with a moving blanket, and tied it down with two ratchet straps like it was made of glass.

Then he shook Dad’s hand. “I’m sorry, Rudy,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

“Nothing to be sorry for, son,” Dad said. “You paid your rent.”

I helped Dad up into the cab. It took a minute. He has a bad hip and he does not like to be lifted, so I just stood behind him with one hand on his back, the way you stand behind a child on the monkey bars. He made it, and settled in with his cane between his knees.

We pulled out of the drive at a quarter to two.

Dad did not say anything as we drove through town. He looked out the window at the gas station and the feed store and the white church with the new roof he had helped price out, back when he still climbed ladders. He looked at the mill steam going straight up in the cold air.

He did not say a word until I turned onto Elm Street.

Elm Street does not have elms anymore. They all died of Dutch elm disease when I was a girl, and the town planted sugar maples in their place. The maples are big now, seventy feet tall, and in October the whole street goes red and orange.

“I walked your mother home down this street,” Dad said. “Right here. Every Sunday night for two years, after evening service.”

“I know, Dad.”

“She’d make me walk on the street side,” he said. “In case of puddles. She said a gentleman takes the puddles.”