by James Brown
I can pound a nail straight and true.
I can throw a roll of ninety-pound roofing over one shoulder and climb a twenty-foot ladder with it. I can carry two sheets of half-inch drywall by myself and tack them up in record time. These are talents as real as any, and I’m no fool. I know I have to focus. I know I have to play to my strengths and that means recognizing my limitations. That means conceding and setting my sights accordingly. And the sooner I accept it, the sooner I can get on with the business of life.
In May, when the weather is clear and warm, I help my father pour a concrete driveway. The old one is nothing more than gravel and potholes, and because the owner is getting ready to sell, retire, and move out of state, he wants to improve the property so that he can get top dollar. Ordinarily, my father doesn’t do this sort of work, but the man is a friend, a mechanic by trade, and they’ve agreed to an even swap. We pour him a driveway, he rebuilds the engine of my father’s truck, a beat-up old Chevy with over 170,000 miles on it. Dollar for dollar, the friend is getting the better deal, but this is typical of my father. He always gives the customer a break. He always bids too low, and we end up working for little more than time and material. There are occasions when we barely break even.
“We’re lucky to have a job,” he says. “I’m getting up there, you know, and in this business people don’t want to hire an old man.”
I don’t like when he talks this way.
I don’t like to think about him growing older, slowing down, and I especially resent the occasional client who appears to pity him. Because I’m there, too, his right-hand man. If there’s heavy lifting, I can do it. He’s the brains. I’m the muscle.
We make a good team, and when it comes to concrete, he definitely needs help. He builds and secures the forms while I’m in school, but I have to take off the next day. It’s a tricky situation. Concrete is finicky, and we certainly wouldn’t pour it in the winter with the threat of rain. On the other hand, if it’s too hot out, it’ll dry too quickly and crack. Ideally we pour in moderate temperatures, and that’s what we do here. The cement truck arrives in the morning, dumps its load, and leaves us to the hard labor of spreading it out with shovels across the entire driveway. After that we use a tamper to sink the rocks. Then we have to smooth it all out with a spade, so there are no dips for water to collect. I could go on, but the point is this: it’s a back-breaking job, and we need to do it quickly and efficiently before the cement sets. If we don’t, the whole thing is ruined.
So we work hard.
So we work fast, and by mid-afternoon we’ve knocked it out. But the hurried pace comes at a cost. We both end up unusually drained. The muscles in my shoulders and arms ache, and the lime from the cement, where it seeped through my gloves, has burned the softer skin on the back of my hands.
In the truck now, heading home, I look over at my father. He’s beat too. I can tell by the red rings around his eyes and how his arms hang heavy on the steering wheel.
“How’s your back,” I say.
“A little sore,” he says. “But it’s okay.”
In a couple of days I’ll be fully recovered, even stronger for the experience, but it’ll be a week or better for my father.
I’ve seen it before. He’ll drink a little heavier. He’ll sleep a little longer. He’ll end the next few days a little earlier. But he knows what he can and cannot take, and it’s not the child’s place to admonish the parent. I’d like to think that if he had money enough, he wouldn’t be doing this anymore, only I know better. I know my father and, poor or not, he’ll be hanging drywall, patching roofs, and pounding nails until he can no longer hold a hammer.
In the high school I attend, on the poor side of San Jose, most of us do not go on to college. It’s largely a disadvantaged and minority population, and nearly half of us drop out before our junior year. Others stumble valiantly on to graduate, but few of us care to take our education further. I have classmates who boast that they’ve never read a book cover to cover.
Many of us go into the trades. Many of us start with lowpaying jobs and work our way up. In my circle of friends, I don’t personally know of anyone who made it through junior college, let alone earned a bachelor’s degree. Still others choose the dark path. I know of several former classmates who’ve done long stretches of hard time.
Blame it on the parents. Blame it on the environment, the system, the schools, or the teachers.
All I’m trying to say is that I’m not alone in my uncertainty. Like my friends and classmates, I have little faith in myself. Like my friends and classmates, I am troubled. I am confused, and in the days to come I look to my older brother for advice.
I write Barry a long letter confessing my dilemma, my ambivalence, and with it I enclose a short story I wrote in Mrs. Bettencourt’s class. It’s not the first time I’ve sent him my work. For years he’s encouraged me to read and write, and I like to please him. This one is about the last day in the life of an eighty-seven-year-old man whose only real contact with the outside world is a monthly visit from the county social worker. I have him sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of his run-down house. I have him drinking a glass of red wine. The whole story takes place in his head, and he dies quietly, as easily as closing his eyes, while he waits for the social worker to arrive.
My brother phones me about a week after I send the letter.
“College isn’t for everybody,” he says, “and there’s nothing wrong with being a carpenter like Dad. Either way, it’s a tough call, but whatever you do, I’d hate to see you quit writing. That story you sent me,” he says, “it’s really good.”
My father and I are clearing a blocked sewer line. Over the last week, temperatures have reached record highs, and today promises to be no different. By ten in the morning it’s already in the 80s, and I’m not halfway through the first part of the job. I’m sweating. Flies buzz around my head. Some even bite. This scene is set in the front yard of a house in Los Gatos, an upper middle class suburb of San Jose, and I am digging a hole in the lawn.
Typically, sewer lines are laid four feet beneath the ground. In older homes, this line is four inches in diameter and made of terra-cotta. It comes in six-foot lengths, each section joined at the flanged end and sealed with cement. But sometimes that seal cracks, it begins to leak, and if there are any trees in the near vicinity, their roots, in search of water, will grow into the line and plug it up. That’s the case here, and while my father is inside the house replacing the damaged floor in the bathroom, he puts me to work shoveling. We’ve already isolated the point of the blockage by running a plumber’s snake through the line, marking where it hangs up, then pulling it out and measuring the length. Give or take a foot or two, it’s a fair estimate. The ground, however, is full of rocks, and they make the digging hard, frustrating, and tedious. Every couple of minutes I’ll hit a big one and have to stop, throw down the shovel, and shimmy it loose with a tire iron. Then, as the hole grows deeper, I have less room to maneuver, and I scrape my elbows against the sides. I scrape my knuckles, too, and my left shoulder. Finally, bruised and exhausted and a little bloody for it all, I uncover the sewer line. It has to be two, maybe three in the afternoon. The temperature is in the low hundreds, and the humidity makes it even worse.
I look up from the hole.
My father is standing above me. He hands me down a cold chisel and a ball-peen hammer.
“See that flange there?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“An inch or so below it,” he says. “I want you to chip me out a hole about the size of a Kennedy half-dollar.”
I wipe the sweat from my brow with the back of my arm and set to work. Again it’s a tedious process, though of a different sort. Instead of pure muscle and stamina, this requires a certain skill. If I’m careless, if I hit the chisel too hard, I could easily crack the entire pipe. So I have to work slowly, literally chipping away at it, a sliver at a time. My father tells me these things, calmly guiding my every mo
ve. He is a good, patient teacher.
What he does not tell me, however, is what to expect when I chip out the last sliver. In a matter of seconds, through that opening only the size of a Kennedy half-dollar, I am suddenly knee-deep in foul-smelling shit and urine. Flecks of toilet paper float on the surface.
“Son of a bitch,” I say.
Naturally, I gag.
Naturally, I try to scramble out of the hole, but I don’t get far.
“Not so quick,” my father says. He hands me a keyhole saw with its long, narrow blade meant for use in tight places. “Now I want you to reach on down there and cut out that root clogging the line. You want to learn the trades, plumbing’s a part of it, and this is a part of plumbing. Let me know when you’re done,” he says. “I’m just about finished inside.”
Reaching down there, all the way up to my shoulder in lukewarm shit, my face only inches away from it as I work, I’m astonished I don’t lose my lunch. Afterwards, saturated from the neck down in sewage, my father has me stand in the middle of the lawn and sprays me off with the garden hose. A couple of teenagers watch from across the street. One is laughing.
On the ride home, I am angry. My back aches from the hard digging. I’m sopping wet. I literally stink like shit and all I want to do is get back to the house and take a long hot shower. Of course my father senses my anger and tries to make it good.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “I’m paying you double time today. How about we stop off somewhere and get a coke?”
But I don’t answer him. I don’t say a word, and when he reaches over to pat my shoulder, I pull away. Although I know it’s not plausible, I feel as if he’s set me up. The timing is just too perfect. Somehow he planned for this sewer to back up so that I could have the wonderful opportunity of unclogging it. At seventeen, I resent him for giving me the job, for tipping the scales toward college. At seventeen, I resent him for not warning me of what to expect, and it’s only later, years later, that I understand how little it had to do with sewer lines and ditches.
I see us now.
I see the father, worn-out from another hard day, his face slack with fatigue. I see the apprentice seated beside him in that old pickup truck with the windows rolled down because of the smell. Because of the heat. The boy is sullen. The boy is angry. But in time, when he has his own sons and the father has passed on, he’ll know the importance of believing in the child until the child learns to believe in himself.
THIS RIVER
This river is over 800 miles from my home in Southern California. This river is wide and passes through steep, deeply divided and lightly vegetated mountainous terrain. It is more than 55 miles long. At its mouth, this river is narrow and rocky, but further down it widens and the mountains give way to more densely forested hills. This river is pure and clean, and in it thrive steelhead, cutthroat and rainbow trout. But the Chinook salmon born to these same waters spend only a short part of their lives here. Then they migrate to the ocean where they will wander for years before attempting to return to their natal stream.
Some travel as far as 2,500 miles out to sea, and only a small percentage ever succeed in making the dangerous trip home. Many do not carry enough body fat and fail through starvation. More are caught in fishermen’s nets. Otters, eagles, and bears snatch others in the shallower waters. The stronger, fortunate females that survive the journey will lay eggs. The stronger, fortunate males spread the milt. Just days after spawning, giving life to the next generation, they all will then die.
I come here in the summer when the migration of the salmon is over and the rapids move more slowly. I come here with two of my sons, Logan and Nate, driving over ten hours to reach this place, this spot on the Chetco River in Oregon where, twelve years before, I spread the ashes of my father. In a few days, I will spread the ashes of my brother along these waters.
My little boy, Nate, only nine, finds the box of remains in the bed of my truck while we’re setting up our campsite. It’s wrapped in white paper with an envelope taped to one side.
“What’s this?” he says.
I look over my shoulder. He holds the box up to his ear. He shakes it.
“Something’s rattling.”
“Those are bones,” I say.
He makes a face.
“Yuck,” he says, putting the box down.
“That’s your Uncle Barry,” Logan tells him, “the one dad’s always talking about, the guy in the movies.”
“Oh,” he says. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. Just put the box up front under the seat.”
I’ve shown them videos of Bad Company and Daisy Miller, both films in which my brother starred. The boys know what he looks like as a young man, forever young in celluloid, but they never met. They know only the characters he played, not the real Barry, the one who would’ve liked to hold them. To have fun with them. To be the good uncle, had he sobered up.
This trip to the Chetco is not a simple sojourn for the dead. It is instead, as it should be, about the living. It is, among the less tangible, about teaching my sons what my father taught me. How to pitch a tent. How to shoot a .22 rifle straight and true. How to string tackle and bait a hook and where to throw your line for your best chances of catching a fish.
Typically they feed in the early morning, just after sunrise, and as the day grows warmer they escape the summer heat by swimming deeper. On full bellies, they remain there, circling lazily until the evening, when it cools off and they rise again to snap up the gnats and mosquitoes that linger too long, too close to the surface of the water. In my mind I can see my father. I can hear his voice:
“They’re in the deeper pockets,” he says. “In the white water where it curls over the rocks. You fish downstream, not up. Trout are shy and smart.” My father tosses the hook and sinker with ease and precision into a pocket of white water. The force of the current immediately draws the line taut.
“Remember, if you can see them, they can see you and won’t bite.” He squats on his haunches. I do the same and he hands me the pole. He is not smiling, at least not yet. For my father, fishing is something of an art born of necessity, an essential skill acquired to put food on the table, and he wants me to take this lesson seriously. “When you feel a nibble, give it a little tug. Tease it, and when it strikes hard, pull up fast. That’ll hook it.”
I am serious.
My attention is sharp and focused because I’m intent on catching a fish and showing my father that I am capable of doing so. Quickly, with beginner’s luck and good instruction, I snag what feels like a big one. The trout shoots out of the water.
“You got her,” he says. “Just stay calm. Reel her in slow.”
It’s a fighter, squirming and flapping and twisting, even when I’ve worked it from the river and onto the sandy bank.
It’s an easy nine or ten inches.
“A keeper,” my dad says.
He pats me on the back. The smile so far denied me is now present on his face, and for this first catch he does the honors of dislodging the hook from its mouth. He helps me with my line and casting and baiting several more times before he leaves, so he can fish himself. My father is not a bait-and-hook man, but I’m only around Nate’s age, nine or ten, and not yet ready for lessons in the higher art of fly fishing.
This is not your usual campground. There are no showers, no toilets, or bathrooms. There are no picnic benches or barbecue pits. No motor homes. No trailers. Out here there is no loud music. No beer-guzzling teenagers. Out here you are very much alone, and this, of course, is the way my sons and I like it. In the four nights we spend here, I think we see a total of three people. Maybe four.
During the day, the boys strip down to their swim trunks and play in the river. I watch them from a portable lounge chair, glancing up every now and then from the book I am reading. It’s about a boy and his very odd and unfortunate upbringing with a disturbed mother. My own mother was similarly afflic
ted, her temper unpredictable, one minute enraged and striking out, the next sad and remorseful. Once, while we were driving on the Hollywood Freeway, she said something to Barry and he said something back. I don’t remember what set her off, though it didn’t typically take much, but nothing justified her suddenly speeding up and swerving from lane to lane, throwing us back and forth in our seats, screaming, “I’m going to kill us, I’m going to kill us all.” Sometimes, after one of these episodes, she’d shower Barry, Marilyn, and me with gifts bought of guilt: a guitar, an aquarium, a new pair of shoes. I look at my boys, knowing they too have suffered. For them it is the sudden and unnecessary death of their mother at the hands of incompetent doctors. For them it is my own struggle with mental illness, alcohol, and drugs. I would like to tell them that there will be no more slips, no backsliding, because that other father, the sick one, is gone forever. I would like to promise them the security and stability that all children deserve. But there are no guarantees for people like me, and I fear I will let them down again. No gifts will relieve the guilt of relapse. No gifts will soothe their pain, and I offer none, learning from my mother that you can’t buy your way out of humiliation and shame.
Toward sunset, the boys and I gather the fishing gear and follow a narrow dirt road up and around the river, over a small bridge, and then down again to its banks. The evening is warm and the smell of the surrounding ferns and saplings is thick and sweet. Logan is old enough to rig his own line, but this is Nate’s first time and he needs my help. I show him how to put on the small beaded weights. I show him how to tie the proper knots. I show him how to bait, and seeing his squeamish face as I thread the nightcrawler through the hook reminds me of my own reaction the first time my father showed me the same. All that ooze and guts. The squirming, agonizing pain of the worm as you impale it. I no more wanted to kill the poor thing than dirty my hands in the process. Again I hear my father’s voice:
