Since I turned twenty or so, my mother and I’ve spent hours in conversation, but I do well to exchange more than a dozen consecutive words with my father. For years I imbued his silences with meaning, but somewhere around the seven hundredth time he broke into a song by Three Dog Night, Janis Joplin, or the Four Tops, while washing the car or walking down the hallway, I realized that his internal monologue is a soundtrack. Afterwards my mother and I referred to his silences as his doo wah diddy diddy.
For decades Dad was easy to buy for: I simply chose an album by favorite artists not already part of his CD collection. At one point I tried to upgrade him to MP3s, but the tractors he drove for hours in the field, making hay, were equipped with CD players, so my gifts remained consistent.
In his forties and fifties, he favored bands from his adolescence, which we listened to in the car on “Solid Gold Saturday Night.” In his sixties, he started to like the country music Mom had always favored, which opened a new library of options. By the time he turned seventy, though, his bright containers were overflowing. His closet and bureau were also stuffed with T-shirts bearing sayings I found to make him laugh, and socks that wouldn’t bind his circulation, compromised by the diabetes he contracted after exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. I had to get more creative.
More than anything I could buy, he needed help with odd jobs on the farm. My brother, and only sibling, had helped him for years — and planned to stay in the valley of the Blue Ridge where we were raised to work with Dad —except Jeremy died at twenty of osteosarcoma. My father still tends two Angus herds in separate pastures, as if keeping one for my brother.
Although my parents recently sold their insurance agency, after years of farming on the weekends and in the evenings, they still have to work hard to maintain it. When the grass ripens, Dad mows, rakes, bales, and wraps it alone, in rotations that last throughout the summer. Sometimes he manages to hire a cousin or neighbor, but help is hard to find in hay season. Mom fortifies him with salads and cobblers when he comes in from a long day’s work, but I am ill-equipped to fill the 400-horse-power role my brother left. Dad has taught me to drive a tractor, but when you aren’t practiced, it’s easy to ruin a bale with a poor wrap or to break the equipment with a rock hidden in high grass. While my brother and he drove circles around each other for weeks at a time, singing inside their separate cabs, I’ve only been a passenger, riding along with Dad, whose offkey renditions of “Joy to the World” remind me of Jeremy, with its opening line, “Jeremiah was a bullfrog.”
When Dad decided to replace the cattle’s head gate right before Father’s Day, I seized my opportunity. The hinge on the old gate was too rusted to catch the calves and hold them while we gave them ear tags and vaccinations. He had wanted to install a better one for years, but it was a three-person job, so I solicited my partner Don’s support and scheduled a visit. Together we unscrewed bolts that held each side to the frame in the barn and secured the defunct gate to a tractor chain so Dad could haul it away.
“Don’t strain yourself,” Dad warned Don, as he muscled the replacement gate into place. Dad got a pry bar from the barn and used leverage to fit it flush. Yet, after we attached the bolts, a gap still remained at the base wide enough to catch a calf’s hoof.
“I’ll fill that in with concrete,” Dad said.
I wanted to surprise him by finishing the job, but concrete pouring was out of my league. Instead, when Dad was free again, I helped him carry two bags of Quikrete to the barn, and then two buckets of water. As with most jobs, he took no measurements. The powder plumed a cloud of dust when he added water. As he stirred, he eyeballed its consistency until it was a clayey slush. Neither of us said anything as he smoothed the gap, the trowel leaving grit wings as he smoothed the mixture. I didn’t question that he had leveled the step. My father, who has built picnic tables, doll beds, playhouses, and decks, has an innate sense for spatial relationships. When I anticipate the exact amount of tea kettle water to fill a cup or freehand a straight edge with an X-Acto knife, I recognize our similarity.
I seek it, in lieu of longwinded, open-hearted conversations. When we finished the job side by side in silence, a song rose in me like a station coming into tune between us: If I were the king of the world, tell you what I’d do . . .