by Brad Felver
“Yeah.”
“How’s your mother doing?”
“You know how she is. Mostly mad about how expensive it is to die.”
“I hear that,” Charlie said, which was a stupid thing to say because the only people who’d ever died on him were his in-laws, and they left him four hundred acres and God knows how much cash under the mattress. “You know what you’re going to do yet?” he asked, meaning, could I buy your land out from under you?
“We’ll figure it out after the funeral.”
“I’ll run the backhoe over tonight,” Charlie said. “Then you can use it whenever works for you.”
“Thanks again,” I said, though what I really meant was fuck you and your stupid face. “It really means a lot to us.” Maybe flattery would make Charlie think he was letting us use his backhoe for free. I was going make him send me a goddamned bill if he wanted our money so goddamned bad. When I drove off, I made sure to gas it a little extra and kick up the gravel in his lane, which was a stupid little gesture that made me feel awfully good.
I made it to sixth bell a few minutes late and realized I didn’t have a lesson planned, so I just told them to use the time as study hall, and I sat there and planned something for American Government. Most of the kids sat there texting, which was against the rules, but I never enforced that one. Running a small farm teaches you never to punch back against technology because technology always wins.
Cassidey was the first one in for seventh bell. She seemed startled when she saw me. “I heard you were absent today.”
“I’m here now.”
“You look like hell, Ralph.”
She was wearing those low-cut Levis that showed her hip bones, also against schools rules, also not enforced by me. It used to be you never had to think about these sorts of things, but now I wouldn’t meet with a student, male or female, unless my door was wide open.
I started my lesson, which was supposed to be about the Wilmot Proviso and the Compromise of 1850, how they bled into the Civil War, but this led me backward to the Missouri Compromise and then all the way to the Treaty of Ghent and how those frameworks really encouraged the settlement of the Ohio River valley. It was enough material for ten lessons, and I was lecturing in a disorganized mess.
“During the Era of Good Feelings,” I found myself saying, “People were settling this region and carving out nice little farms. Some of you still live on those farms. When James Monroe became president, he wanted to raise the price of land in this area, but Congress thought settlement was more important than revenue, so they actually made it so you could buy as little as eighty acres at a time. Pretty soon, Ohio was the fourth biggest state.”
“Why are we talking about James Monroe?” Cassidey asked.
“This is important,” I said, immediately realizing how inadequate that was.
“Is this going to be on the AP test?” another student asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “No.”
So I stopped lecturing, and we took another practice AP test for the rest of the time, and I sat there wondering why I came in at all.
Cassidey lingered for a few minutes after the bell, and I tried to ignore her by packing up my bag like I was in a rush. “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked. She stretched up to wind her hair into a bun, which showed her hip bones again and a little chain dangling from her belly button.
“I’m fine,” I said. “One of those days, I guess.”
“I understand,” she said. “I have to work until close tonight. We get pretty busy at the bar on Fridays.” Cassidey worked over at the Applebee’s.
“They let you serve alcohol?”
“They aren’t supposed to,” she said, grinning mischievously. She sat next to me on the edge of my desk. “But who’s going to tell? Like, who really cares anyway? Everybody around here drinks.”
Right then Hal Owens came to the door, probably to check on the substitute teacher I’d sent home. “What are you doing here?”
“That’s what I said, Mr. Owens,” Cassidey said.
Hal looked at her, clearly making unflattering assumptions that he wouldn’t have made if she were ugly.
“Just wanted to get out of the house,” I said.
Hal stood there for a beat longer. “Okay. See you later.”
“Anyway,” Cassidey said immediately after he’d moved on, “like I said, we get kind of busy, but there’s usually room at the bar.”
“Well,” I said, “hang in there tonight.”
She walked toward the door and pulled her bag up over her shoulder. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Could you write me a letter for Ohio State?”
“Sure,” I said, thinking that she probably wouldn’t get in to Ohio State and that she was almost certainly applying for the wrong reasons. Columbus ate these small town kids alive. Ohio State? Yale? For a girl like Cassidey, the difference was negligible.
I went over to Khulman’s Funeral Parlor after that and tried to get a casket. Maxine Khulman, who ran the day-to-day, was someone I knew in the sense that we waved when we saw each other after Mass, but we never stopped to chat. The Khulmans were a family of long-lived people, most of them going past a hundred, which I’d always found funny in a way you couldn’t say out loud. The Khulmans had always lived in town, and we had always lived outside of town, and even now that meant a gulf hung between us.
“Look,” she said and pulled her reading glasses off. “I’m so sorry to hear about your father. A real tough old bird. But legally it can get messy if I sell you a casket and I know you’re going to use it on land that hasn’t gone through proper zoning.”
“Jesus, Maxine,” I said, “We’ve been using our plot for two-hundred years. The whole damn family is buried out there. We can’t be the only people around here who still use a family plot.”
“You put me in a tough position here, Ralph.”
“I know,” I said, trying to sound empathetic even though I was just annoyed. All the permission you need to die now. “What if I just left a check here on your desk and you happened to leave open your back door with some basic model. Plausible deniability. That’s what Allen Dulles called it during the Cold War.” Fifty years old, and even now when I talked to people in town, people who didn’t run plow, I still felt the need to remind them I was educated. I always felt crummy after I did it, but I also couldn’t stop myself.
So I wrote her a check for $1,200, knowing that the account didn’t have much more than $300 in it, but that was Maxine’s problem now. Her son helped me load the casket into the back of the truck, and I drove home. My brother Mark’s car was parked in my usual spot. It was a low-riding Mercedes or Audi something that looked more like a spaceship than a car. I pictured him easing it down our long lane, trying to keep the gravel from kicking up into the undercarriage.
I poured us each a rye, and we sat at the kitchen table looking out over the flat white fields. It was something I could do for hours if I had the time. The farm had never stopped being beautiful to me, beautiful in a stern, austere sort of way. Mark preferred hills and golf courses. He resented our childhood in Ohio so much he moved to Indiana, which was dumb enough it made me think I could be a banker too. Every year he flew down to Myrtle Beach with some young tart he was seeing. One year, when we were still in our thirties, he’d convinced me to go along, and it took about twenty minutes to realize I didn’t like golf, beaches, or Southerners.
“Well,” Mark said, “what now? You think Charlie might be interested?”
He was a banker, so this was predictable. The farm was just an asset to him. “We need food and booze for the wake,” I said, and he nodded.
I’d just managed to save a few hundred bucks. If I kept up like this, we might actually finance the old man’s death. We sat there for a while, each drinking our ryes, trying to not breathe too loudly into the silence. We both knew we couldn’t really talk anymore.
Later he said, “We could set up a lease-to-own deal with Charlie. That might make thin
gs easier.”
“Until mom dies, you mean.”
He poured himself another drink and set the bottle on his side of the table. “What are you going to do, live here alone? Farm alone and teach at the same time?”
“I’ll figure something out,” I said, already knowing that was a lie.
We had an early dinner of beef barley stew that my mother made, and then she turned in early. “I’m so glad to have you both back in this house,” she said, and kissed each of us on the forehead. That was as close to affection as my mother ever got.
Mark and I had one more drink each, which meant the bottle was about empty. “How the hell do you sleep here?” Mark asked. “It’s so quiet you can’t fart.”
I couldn’t figure out why he had to say things like that. It’s not like he lived in Manhattan. “I like the quiet,” I said.
“Let’s head into civilization and grab a drink.”
We took his car, which turned out to be a Saab, just as expensive but twice as crummy as an Audi. The leather seats were freezing. Why did people like leather? Cold in winter, sticky in summer, pretentious in whatever time was left over, which wasn’t much in Ohio.
We had two options, neither of them good. Friday was karaoke night at the Slow Pour, a low, concrete-blocked place that still let people smoke. The karaoke was still new. I went one time with a few other teachers. Watching a bent-over farmer in Carhartts trying to sing Hank Williams is enough to make you glad you’re surrounded by so much alcohol. I didn’t want to deal with any of that, so I told him the Slow Pour went out of business, and we headed over to the Applebee’s.
Cassidey was leaning over the bar talking to some old guy in a button-up shirt when we walked in. She smiled at me, and I waved awkwardly.
“You came,” she said and set down a couple of cocktail napkins in front of us. “And you brought your brother.”
Mark and I instinctively turned and looked at each other. I guess we did still look alike. I ordered a Pabst, and Mark ordered a Dewar’s and some dark beer that had chocolate and apricots in it.
“They let high school students tend bar now?” Mark asked.
I shrugged. Normally I wouldn’t be caught dead drinking in front of a student, but my father was dead, and my principal already knew it, and I figured this gave me some leeway.
Cassidey came back and set our drinks in front of us. “A PBR for Ralph and a whiskey and Apricot Bock for Ralph’s brother.” She leaned over the bar, and her cleavage poured out of her shirt, which was just a regular t-shirt, but she had cut a long slit vertically down the neckline. Every inch of cut probably represented several dollars in extra tips. “Do you live in town, Ralph’s brother?” she asked. “I don’t think I’ve seen you before.”
“I live in Fort Wayne. Just in town for the funeral.”
I glared at him but didn’t say anything.
“Who died?”
Mark realized he’d been an idiot then, and he looked away. For a few beats we didn’t say anything until I said, “Our dad. Last night.”
“Jesus,” Cassidey said. “Jesus, sorry, Ralph.” She turned away and poured us a couple whiskeys. “On the house,” she said.
She moved away for a while then to help her other customers. She was right that it got crowded on Friday nights. I wondered how many people here were avoiding the Slow Pour like us. That bar had been in town fifty years at least. I realized then that the karaoke machine was probably their sad attempt to get people to stop coming here.
“How long have you been dropping the hammer on her?” Mark asked.
I ignored that. “She wants to go to Ohio State.”
“Good for her. Get out of this place. You could learn from her.”
“I like it here.”
“Look,” he said. “Just let me talk to Charlie. Take his temperature. We play it right, we can squeeze from either side, good cop, bad cop.”
Mark shot both of his whiskeys and then sipped on his beer. We watched the commotion of the place, but mostly I think we both watched Cassidey. I should have been thinking about the farm, but when she squatted to haul up a case of beer, her thong showed, which stole my focus. After a while, as the bar started to thin out, she came back and stood by us.
“I guess that’s why you were absent today, huh?”
I nodded.
“But you came back in because you just had to teach our class. You missed us. Admit it.”
Normally, I would have been annoyed by the way she pivoted back to herself, which all teenagers know how to do, but there was something honest about it. She was the only person who didn’t say my father was a good one or a tough old bird. “I guess we should get going,” I said and fumbled for my wallet, hoping Mark would get to his faster. I don’t know why I thought that. Bankers are good at reaching for your wallet but not their own. Mark got up and went to the bathroom, and I paid with all the cash I had, twenty-four dollars. I handed it to Cassidey and told her to keep it, and our forefingers grazed.
“I’m real sorry about your dad,” she said and made this sad-looking smile. I believed her.
Mark and I didn’t talk on the drive home, but as we were driving down Cherry Street, he saw something that made him say “This town” in a sad voice.
Mark snored through the night. I was exhausted but couldn’t fall asleep. I thought about my father out there in the barn and about how what Mark said about selling was probably right but still felt wrong. That bled into thoughts about Cassidey’s letter and then about her thong and hip bones. Sometimes when we aren’t paying attention, grief and desire and shame mutate and become one big dirty puddle.
I got up at sunrise and went out into the cold and dug my father’s grave. As the blade buried into the frozen sod, I wondered how my ancestors dug graves in winter. Shovels don’t work in soil this frozen. Even a spud bar can’t do much against an Ohio winter. Did they leave the body in the barn until spring thaw? Did they work around it, sometimes for months at a time, until they hardly noticed it anymore?
When I’d finished, I drove the backhoe behind the barn and siphoned out a few gallons of diesel into our tank. To hell with Charlie Garcher, I thought.
We ate breakfast in silence, the three of us. Silence is best when it exists because people are already thinking the same things. The rest of the day would consist of small talk and sad smiles and enough alcohol to keep us polite but not so much that it turned us honest.
The sad thing about a wake, at least when the departed is as old as my father, is that most of his friends are already dead. Sons and daughters pay their respects out of politeness rather than grief, and it starts to feel like a piece of well-meaning theater. Most of the people who came were from my generation, teachers and other farmers and some of the folks who ran dying little businesses in town. It reminded me a lot of my high school reunion. It wasn’t long before Charlie Garcher and my brother were off in a corner, drinking and scheming. I couldn’t hear their words, but I knew what they were saying.
Cassidey showed up at 5:30, out of breath and still dressed in her Applebee’s getup. I was talking to Hal Owens and his wife when she walked in. Hal was telling me to take a few days’ personal time, tie things up around here, buy something nice for my mother, spend one night getting too drunk. I was trying to work Cassidey’s recommendation letter into the conversation in hopes of clarifying what he saw the other day. We both looked up and saw her, and Hal looked at me, probably waiting for me to make some bad explanation, but I didn’t say anything, and Hal didn’t push it. He would have to call me down next week and start asking uncomfortable questions, and I wasn’t even sure my answers mattered. When I looked over a little later, Cassidey was in a corner, talking to my brother, and I felt a twinge of jealousy and then embarrassment. This was somehow worse than his scheming with Charlie Garcher.
Later, when I was leaving the bathroom, Charlie himself cornered me. He told me how nice the wake was, how much everyone missed my father, and I said thanks and didn’t mean it eve
n a little bit. Then he pressed a scrap of paper into my palm and walked away, and even though I didn’t want to look at that offer and I hated Charlie even more for doing it right then, I couldn’t help myself, and when I did, my heart just about stopped because it was such a big number. Jesus, I thought. There’s no way to unsee that.
A little while later, I was walking through the barnyard to the grave, where we had a short service prepared. I was still fighting the reverie from Charlie’s offer on the farm. All those zeros. Cassidey walked up next to me. “I know why you were talking about James Monroe,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“The Era of Good Feelings. James Monroe. You were sad about your dad dying, but you were also being ironic the way you are sometimes. Most people don’t get your humor, but I do.”
“How was I being ironic?”
“You know,” she said, “like the way the Era of Good Feelings wasn’t always so nice. The way things always seem better when we look back. Nostalgia, I guess. Plus, like how we were settling here and making farms out of the land, but how it already belonged to the Indians.”
She was right about all of that. This was Shawnee territory. Whether it was my family or the Garchers running plow here, it wasn’t really our land. It made me wonder if maybe she would get into Ohio State. I’d have to take her letter more seriously than I sometimes did. “Well,” I said, “I’m glad you read about it.”
Cassidey turned and looked around to see if anyone was in earshot. “You should come visit me next year in Columbus.”
There was no ignoring that. “Well,” I said, but Christ if my pants didn’t tighten up, right there in the cold, walking out to bury my father. “Look. I need to go do this right now. Thanks for coming.” I sped up my pace and got to the grave, and a few minutes later we were lowering the casket into the ground, and all the while I was picturing myself with Cassidey, her on top, that dangly belly chain tickling my chest. I hated myself right then. We all threw a handful of dirt on the casket, and we went back inside to finish drinking the liquor. I could wait until the morning to backfill the hole.
