by Jay Varner
My mother called the nurse.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Get it all off of him.”
She walked into the hallway and held on to my grandmother, crying as my father died. Finally, the nurses came out of his room, nodded, and said that my mother could see him if she wished.
He looked peaceful, she told me. No more tubes, hoses, or monitors. The long, endless fight was over, and my dad’s body had simply lost. My parents had been married thirteen years. They had been each other’s first and only real loves. My mother bent down, kissed my father’s still warm forehead, and walked away.
Outside, the breaking dawn softened the mottled sky above Lewistown. It rained during their car ride home. Later that morning, my mother woke me — I had slept through all of it. She knelt on the floor next to my bed and held on to my hand.
“Your dad’s all better,” my mother said.
“Was it a miracle?”
Her lips tightened and tears welled in her eyes. “No, honey. God thought it was time to take your father to heaven. He’s there now. All the cancer is gone. He’s all better.”
In that instant, my body felt as if it had drifted into some kind of shock. I couldn’t move or speak. He wasn’t better, as my mother had said — he was gone. I would never hear his voice again, feel the touch of his hand, smell the shampoo he used, the smoke that clung to him. I would never again watch him run out the door to a fire. It seemed everything inside of me understood the awfulness of the world at that moment. Somehow, I hoped that I would shut down too — my heart, my stomach, my lungs. Then I would be lifted away from all of this. I wanted to be all better too.
Finally, I rolled away from my mother, buried my face in a pillow, and cried. Everything seemed so meaningless. No matter what, nothing would ever bring my father back.
Later that day, my mother asked Pap to take me away from the aftermath of death that permeated our house — she had to talk with the funeral director about services and an obituary. So my grandfather took me to the only motorcycle showroom in the county.
As he drove over winding backcountry roads, I saw a camouflaged hunter wade through knee-high alfalfa, a shotgun cradled in his arms. Pheasant season had started the weekend before, something my father never missed. I had watched him hunt in the fields near our house, his fluorescent orange hat a beacon among the rows of dead brown stalks of corn. He had talked about the year when I would turn twelve, when most fathers passed down rifles and shotguns to their sons. A boy’s first hunting license was the first step toward becoming a real man. Each year, on the last Monday in November when buck season started, the men faded into the woods for days at a time and it was every boy’s dream to follow them.
“Who’ll teach me to hunt now?” I asked my grandfather.
He stared out the windshield for a moment and then said, “I’ll do it.”
In his casket, my father wore a mesh hat, blue jeans, a flannel shirt, his steel-toed boots, and that Timex Ironman watch. These were the clothes my father loved, and I liked that he was dressed the way I would always remember him. Even before the cancer, he had said that he hated it that people wore suits and ties in their graves when they never wore them while alive.
Only family attended the viewing — Pap and Nena, Lucky and Helen, my father’s brothers Curt and Russ. I remember the tears and that I had begged to not look at my father inside the casket.
Nena kneeled in front of me. “You have to tell your father good-bye,” she said.
She held my hand and led me to the casket. I was reminded of the day we rode together in the parade — he’d said that he looked spiffy. I leaned over and kissed his cold cheek, and I told him that I loved him.
Afterward, in the parking lot, family members hugged my mother and me. My uncle Curt — the one who had celebrated when his bone marrow didn’t match his brother’s — told me what a great guy my father had been, how much good he had done for the community. His wife, Erica, patted my mother’s shoulder.
“Well, Teena, all I can say is good luck,” my aunt said. “Life goes on.”
My mother and I hated that saying — in a sense, sure, life went on, but we knew nothing would ever be the same.
Lucky dug his hand into my shoulder like a claw. He looked down at me and said, “You’re the man of the house now. It’s your job to get that firewood in and mow the grass. You better act like a man now.”
I thought of my father’s watch while I sat at the front of the church during the funeral. I stared at the flower-covered silver coffin and wondered how long the watch would keep ticking. It seemed unfair that time continued for any of us, that anything dare carry on without my father. At the end of the service, the pallbearers — my father’s firefighter friends — picked up the casket and walked down the aisle of the church. When my family stood to follow, Pap leaned down and said, “You lead the way.” I stepped into the aisle, looked down at the burgundy carpet, and then walked back through the center of the church. People stood at the back of church — the pews were full. Even though it was a workday, firefighters drove to McVeytown from across the state — they sat in their full dress uniforms. During the procession to the cemetery, I looked out the back window of my grandfather’s Subaru and saw the long stream of cars behind us, amazed that so many people had known my father.
I continued turning the pheasant eggs in the incubator like my father had instructed, though my mother declared it a waste of time. I explained that my father had put me in charge of the project — I wanted to carry it out. Each day, I waited for the chicks to hatch. Eventually, though, the eggs began to smell rotten, and my mother made me throw them away. I gathered the eggs in a plastic bag and carried them to that pile of debris excavated from the hole — it still sat in our yard, an eyesore, my mother called it. One by one, I threw an egg at the busted up cinder blocks and rocks, each time throwing harder. I cried as I watched their red and yellow gooey insides splatter. I had let my father down.
Part Four
Twenty-one
Fire trucks, ambulances, and state police cruisers sit in front of the farm. A few firemen and a trooper smoke cigarettes nearby. They look to be silent and all stare off in different directions. Tractors and wagons cluster near the red wooden barn. I know that I am too late — whatever has happened is over, though I don’t see any hints of a fire, or even smell the stinging smoke. If not for the emergency vehicles, this would be just another dairy farm outside McVeytown.
Elizabeth reached me while I was driving to the newsroom for my evening shift. Someone had heard a call come over the police and fire scanner that sat at my empty desk: there was a rescue operation under way on a farm. I was told to find out what I could and write about it.
And so I come to this farm. I park in front of a nearby church and walk on the gravel beside Ferguson Valley Road, toward two fire policemen standing at the end of the dirt lane that leads to the farm and those fire trucks. The cold January air bleeds under my collar and onto my neck. What were once mud puddles in the lane have since crusted over with ice. Old stone farmhouses like the one where the accident occurred nestle against the ridgelines here. Holstein cattle splotch the green pastures like ink blots. Forage silos stick like towers into the sky.
The fire policemen wear orange vests and camouflage mesh hats. They look like a pair of hunting buddies on the first day of buck season. Both need a shave. Their lower lips bulge from dips of chewing tobacco. I introduce myself, tell them I am a reporter with the Sentinel and ask what has happened.
“Probably don’t know anything more than you do, bud,” one of them says. His eyes are hidden behind a pair of yellow tinted sunglasses. “They don’t tell us shit.” He laughs and taps his buddy on the shoulder as if they are the only ones in on the joke.
“They been down there for a half hour now,” Sunglasses continues. “Probably be there for a while longer. Coroner ain’t even here yet.”
“The coroner?” I ask. My heart beats stronger. “Someone died? How?” I flip
open my yellow legal pad and click my pen, ready to take notes.
Sunglasses shrugs and says, “Farming accident. Could’ve been kicked in the head by a cow for all I know. Don’t even know his name.”
A breeze blows through the scattered oak saplings lining the road. Their branches make a noise that reminds me of knuckles cracking. I look back at the farm that snuggles against the gray ridge. Winter has stripped the trees of their foliage. Somehow, I think that there is a connection to be made between those bare trees and myself. Four months on this job, back in my hometown, have left me feeling just as empty. Soon spring’s warmth would draw out blossoms and green the land, yet my purpose of reporting things like this would remain unchanged. I force myself to focus.
“Is there a trooper down there I could talk to?” I ask. In any kind of death investigation all of the firemen are useless except for the chief. Subordinates aren’t allowed to talk with the media; I have to hunt out the man at the top, who, on this day, I assume is too busy to answer questions. The next place to go for answers is the Pennsylvania State Police.
Sunglasses walks to his beat-up Chevy Blazer, opens the door, and grabs the microphone on his radio unit. The other man, the silent partner, stares at me, half grinning as tobacco juice leaks out the side of his mouth and onto his beard. He spits a brown wad of juice and says, “They really don’t tell us shit. We just stand here like dummies.”
I look back at my car and at the church. The steep hill that rises behind the plain white building leads to the cemetery where my father is buried. If I stood at his grave I could spy down onto this whole scene, but I haven’t returned there since the day we buried him — and suddenly I don’t know why. Many of the firemen inside that barn probably served with my father when he was chief. If he were alive, I’d be asking him the questions.
“He says they don’t want no one down there,” Sunglasses yells from his truck. “They’re going to be cleaning up for a while.”
I think of pushing them for more information or asking to use the microphone and request a trooper myself, but I back off out of respect. “Cleaning up” tells me enough about whatever has happened. I think back to an accident I saw a few weeks before I got this job: an eighteen-wheeler broadsided a small sedan at an intersection near McVeytown. I saw Art Kenmore, now the McVeytown fire chief, sitting on the back of a pickup. He wore only a white T-shirt and his bunker boots. His helmet sat on the tailgate next to him. He stared down at the road as though praying, never looking up as other men walked past, as state troopers photographed the scene. A white sheet covered the wrecked car and, as I later read in the newspaper, the woman inside. The force of the accident was so strong that it ripped her head off.
I know that whatever happened on that farm had to be grisly. The firemen and state troopers would not be in the mood to talk.
Later, hours after I have finally come to the newsroom, the coroner phones in the report. All night I have silently wondered where the story would play on the front page. A flipped tractor, while horrible, won’t garner the same reaction as a mauling. And even if a cow had kicked someone in the head, that could be played up simply for its novelty. When the coroner tells me what happened, I know that tomorrow everyone will be talking about Allan Groff.
He was sixteen, a Mennonite, and allowed to drop out of school to help on his family’s farm. As Groff poured bags of corn into a grinder meant to mill the food for livestock to eat, a piece of his clothing snagged in the machine’s metal claws. No one heard his screams over the roar of the engine. The rotating claws first ate his arm, and then worked their way toward his shoulder and head. I imagine blood spewing from the mouth of the grinder and into the corn. Who cleans this up? What do they do with it? But you can’t ask these questions, only the who, what, where, when, and why. I try to fill in the blanks after work as I lie in bed, wonder how much of Allan Groff’s body was chewed up and spit out by that machine, if he was already dead when his father found him. Before I fall asleep that night, I wonder how his father could ever walk into that barn again and not think of his son’s body ripped apart by grinding metal.
The next night at work, I type Groff’s obituary. Sometimes the funeral home directors bring snapshots into the office if the family wants to include an image with the obituary, for an extra twenty-dollar charge. All but one of the funeral directors are men. Most followed their fathers into the mortuary business. The youngest is from McVeytown, the oldest from a town called Belleville about thirty minutes outside of Lewistown. They wear suits, are pissed as hell if we make a typo, and often try to get us to lower the price. My favorite is a man named Roger Barr. He has the finesse of a used-car salesman, the deep baritone voice of a showman, and in the summer, he drives a convertible. He makes death a style.
“Got a photo here,” Roger shouts.
I stand up from my desk and walk to the corner of the office near the printers and layout department. This is part of the advertising department, our hated nemesis. To them, the paper is just about money. To the newsroom, it is about reportage. The advertising people are behind the two dollars per line cost for obits — the rest of us feel they should be free.
“Roger, how’s business?” I ask.
“Good.” He smiles and hands me a photo. “This is for Mrs. Fultz.”
Tony, Elizabeth’s husband, sits at his desk, Googling golf courses. Since his wife works evenings, Tony often brings her dinner, or just stops in to talk. He is the newspaper’s tech guy — he changes the toner in the printers, networks our ancient computers, and designs the paper’s website. He stands and looks at the photo.
“That’s a good one,” Tony says. He is tall and thin and has the deep rasp of a lifelong smoker.
“Yeah, sometimes you never know what they’ll give you,” Roger says. “Sometimes they give you these photos that you’d swear were in wallets for twenty years.”
Tony sits back down at his computer to scan the photo.
“Hey, Roger, what would you measure Tony for?” I ask. It is a running joke between us.
He glances at Tony and says, “Six-two, about one hundred and eighty pounds.”
Tony turns away from the computer screen, looking both amused and horrified. “How’d you know that?”
“Experience,” Roger says matter-of-factly.
“That’s sick.” Tony turns back to his computer and shakes his head.
“Roger’s just joking,” I say. “He’s the type of guy who’d hand out matchbooks with ‘Thanks for Smoking!’ written on the cover.”
As Roger laughs, Elizabeth yells my name.
“Alarm codes,” she says. “Lots of them. You might want to hear this.”
I rush to my desk, turn up the scanner, and grab a pen to scribble down the address. The alarms keep coming, a bad sign — the more alarms, the more fire companies that are dispatched and, thus, the bigger the blaze.
This time, Lorrie drives. I hold on to the dashboard as her white Buick careens up and down the narrow streets in Lewistown. We cross the Juniata River and head toward a trailer fire in Granville.
“If we want a picture, we better get there fast,” she says. “With these trailers, they can burn up in a few minutes.”
“I know. Used to live in one when I was a kid.”
On a flat stretch of road, Lorrie guns the gas. I don’t care about any picture. On this cold night, I only want to feel the heat of the flames — I hope it’s so hot that I can feel it in my lungs. And I want to smell the smoke — let it soak into my clothes and hair.
The fire policemen stop us at the end of a lane.
“Can’t go down there,” one says. “Going to get in the way of the trucks.”
Lorrie whips the car in reverse and parks along the road. We walk down the icy lane. The cold wind stings my face and fingers. Over a mile later, we finally arrive at the trailer. A small section of the undercarriage is charred. The firemen are already rolling their hoses.
“We missed it,” I said. “We walked all the w
ay down here for nothing.”
I find the fire chief, a younger man who shivers in the cold — I notice ice has formed on his turn-out gear, spray-back from the hoses that has crystallized to ice. We talk quickly — a space heater inside the trailer caught fire and burned through the floor.
I turn to Lorrie. “Get any pictures?”
“Not much to get,” she says. “But I have some.”
We turn to walk the mile back to her car.
“Hey,” someone yells behind us. “You guys need a lift?”
It’s the fire chief I’ve just talked to.
“If you’re busy, don’t worry about it,” I say.
He waves us toward his beat-up Chevy Blazer. “You guys will get frostbite out here.”
We ride in the tiny bed of the vehicle — his fire gear takes up the entire backseat. He turns his head back toward us.
“What’d you say your name was again?”
“Me?” I ask. “Jay Varner.”
“Why’s that name sound so familiar?”
“My dad used to be the chief in McVeytown.”
He turns back toward the road and doesn’t say a word. After he drops us off at Lorrie’s car, he rolls down his window.
“I was pretty young when your dad died, just getting into the fire company,” he says. “But I remember going to the funeral. Shameful.”
