The Tower We Raised for Dad’s Sunday Net

Pouring the Base

Reinhold got home at three that Wednesday afternoon and walked around the back of our house with a tape measure and a can of orange marking paint.

He picked a spot about sixty feet behind the porch, past the picnic table, where nothing would hit the tower if it ever came down and nothing would be in the way when we mowed.

“Concrete needs a few days,” he said. “If we pour today, it’s ready Saturday. That’s tight, but it’ll hold a tower this size.”

He had already called the county zoning office that morning on his lunch break. Out where we live, past the edge of town, a tower that size for a ham radio needed nothing but a phone call and a description. The woman on the phone asked if it was for an old man’s radio. Reinhold said yes. She said, “Then good luck to him.”

We dug the hole together, the two of us, in the bright spring afternoon. Three feet down and three feet square. The Kansas dirt out here is heavy and black on top and turns to clay underneath, and by the time we hit depth my shoulders were on fire.

Reinhold set the base section plumb in the hole, checking it with a level on every side, three times. Then he mixed eight bags of concrete in the wheelbarrow and I poured while he worked the air out with a shovel handle.

When it was done, we sat on the edge of the picnic table, filthy, and looked at that one short stub of steel sticking up out of the wet concrete.

“Your dad’s going to cry,” Reinhold said.

“Dad doesn’t cry,” I said.

“He’s going to,” Reinhold said. “So am I, probably. Don’t tell the crew.”

Then he went out with a post-hole digger and dug the footing wider than the book called for, and poured it twice as deep.

What Florentine Said

Florentine called me Thursday at work. I almost did not answer. I was in the middle of the monthly retirement report, and I did not know what she would say, and I did not want to cry in front of the superintendent’s secretary.

“Hedwig,” she said. Her voice was very small. “I didn’t know he was going to do it. I swear to you on my mother.”

“I know you didn’t, Florentine.”

“Emmerich hasn’t said one word about it. He came home and saw it and went out to the garage and sat at his bench. He’s been out there every day since. He’s not even fixing anything. He’s just sitting.”

I closed my eyes.

“He told Tyler it was all right,” she went on. “He said, ‘It’s your mother’s house too, son.’ That’s all he said. And then he went in the garage.”

“That sounds like Dad.”

“I told Tyler he should be ashamed. He said he did it for me. He said I’d thank him when the house sold.” She stopped. “I don’t want to sell the house, Hedwig. I never said I wanted to. He just kept saying it until it sounded like I did.”

I told her then. I had not planned to, but she was crying, and she is my father’s wife, and she loves him.

I told her about Alois and the tower in Reinhold’s truck and the concrete setting up behind our house. She was quiet for a long time.

“Sunday?” she said.

“Sunday at two. Don’t tell him.”

“I won’t.” Then she laughed a little, through the crying. “Hedwig, do you know what Emmerich gave Tyler for his sixteenth birthday?”

“No.”

“A scanner. One of the good ones that picks up the shortwave, not just the sheriff. He saved for it from his repair money. And he put the Sunday frequency into it himself, sitting at my kitchen table. He told Tyler, ‘So you can hear us old boys sometime.'”

I did not say anything.

“Tyler’s had it in every truck he’s owned since,” she said. “Nineteen years. He moves it from truck to truck. He’s never taken that frequency out. I know because I asked him once, and he got embarrassed and changed the subject.”