The Locker I Filled for My Son

He has my wife’s gray eyes and my way of standing with his weight on one hip when he is hiding what he thinks.

When Cleavon turned ten I walked him back to locker thirty-one, which had been empty since a widow named Gertrude Sloat passed, and put a small brass padlock in his hand.

That door never needed one. I said, “A man ought to have his own drawer.”

The next week he put his first batch of sausage in it. It was a pound of breakfast links he had mixed himself, with sage and pepper and some nutmeg I had not told him to use.

They were good. They were better than mine, and I did not say so then.

That was the trouble from the start, though I could not have named it. The boy could taste a thing and know what was missing.

He would pull a spoonful of brine from the smokehouse barrel and say, “Dad, it wants a little brown sugar,” and he would be right.

I would say the Pisek brine had been the Pisek brine since my grandfather’s day, and a Pisek did not go putting sugar in it.

I was proud of him. I was proud in a locked room at the back of my own chest where nobody could get at it, including me.

The fall he turned twenty, Cleavon started cooking. I found out because Vespera told me.

He had made her a Sunday supper, a braised short rib with something sharp and green on top and a puddle of dark sauce on a white plate.

She said it was the best thing she had put in her mouth since our wedding. A week later he cooked for the two of us. I ate two helpings standing up.

My son watched me from across the table and said, “Well?” I put down my fork and said, “Needs salt.”

It did not need salt.

Something moved across his face, a little shutter coming down, and he said, “Okay, Dad.” I do not know how to explain that to anyone who was not raised by a man like my father, who loved his family exactly as much as he could say.

If you have never been in a meat locker the Saturday before firearm season opens in Indiana, it is the one day that pays for the other fifty-one.

The whole county comes in with the deer, in blaze orange and rubber boots, three deep at the counter with a Styrofoam cup, telling me where they shot it.

That year Cleavon was twenty-two. He had been working nights on the grill at a diner in Jasper, and I had not asked why.

He came in that Saturday with a folded piece of paper in his shirt pocket, and he took it out about nine times and put it back.

At two in the afternoon, when the room was as full as it ever gets, he walked to the end of the cutting table, wiped his knife, laid it down, and said in a voice that carried, “Dad, I need to tell you something.”