“I don’t know if I’ll do this another year,” Pop says, and at first I think he’s talking about Ma, if he can go through another year with her.  Then I realize he’s staring at the Christmas tree, so I figure he’s talking about going out on the farm and cutting down a cedar, dragging it back to the house behind the 4×4, trimming it, propping it up in a bucket of wet sand, decorating it, all that, just like he’s done every year for the last, who knows, ever since my older sister Nancy was born probably.  Fifty-eight years ago.  He would have just turned twenty then.  A lot of work for him now, and old man with a farm and a wife who’s not much use anymore.

Ma can still dry dishes, though.  I offered to wash and dry, too, after dinner, but Pop wouldn’t hear of it.

“Company comes to my house for dinner, I don’t make them work for their grub.”

“I’m not company.  I’m your son.”

For a moment he has a look on his face like he’d almost forgotten that, and I think what would happen if they both had it:  Alzheimer’s.

I give him his way, and he washes and Ma dries and does a good job of it, just a little slow, carefully going over and over every plate, pan, and utensil as if she were polishing the crown jewels, each time she turns to a new side checking closely to see if she’s already dried it.

And now, the meal finished and the dishes done, we sit side by side by side on the sofa looking at the Christmas tree.

“Well, I’ve cut prettier ones before, better shapes, but this one smells real nice and Christmassy,” he says.

“It looks nice, Pop.”

“Nancy and I did the decorating, and Ma was the foreman,” he says, chuckling and giving Ma a little pat on the leg.  If she reacts, I can’t tell from my end of the sofa.

Nancy didn’t come to dinner.  Can’t blame her.  She needs a break.  Ever since Ma got to the stage where she couldn’t be left alone, Nancy spends part of every day here with her so that Pop can get his farmwork done.  That’s what she gets for living so close, my wife, Lynn, says.  She and my sister have never gotten along—country-girl city-girl thing, I guess. 

Nancy and Dave live only a quarter mile up the blacktop, the next farm after the Shott’s.  I thank my lucky stars we live in St. Joseph.  Nobody would expect us to drive all the way down here at the drop of a hat.  A friend of mine did ask me once, though, why I didn’t just bring them to St. Joe to live with us, and I said, sure, I could do that, but I’d lose a wife.

“Come on, Pop, admit it.  Nancy helped you cook that fine turkey dinner.”

“Like heck.  I cooked every blessed thing.  Of course, I did have a little help.  Had to check a few things online.”

I about rolled off the sofa in shock.

“Online?”

He pulled out, of all things, a cellphone.  I-phone, in fact.  Maybe a 15.  My Pop, who refused to buy a computer and until years after I left home still had a party line, with a cellphone!

“Well, Nancy talked me into getting one.  Might need some way to get ahold of me if I’m out on the farm somewhere, she said.  One of those little jobs would have been fine with me, but Nancy talked me into going whole hog on this big contraption.”

He says it disparagingly, but I catch him looking down at his I-phone with something like affection.

*

We used to talk a lot about sports when I’d come home, football and baseball especially, Pop never was big on basketball.  He doesn’t keep up with sports much these days, though—can’t stay awake long enough to watch anything on the tube, he says—so now we mostly talk about the farm.

“Glad to see it turn off cold today.  Too damn warm this year.  Muddy as hell feeding the cattle.  It’s way better when the ground’s frozen.  Time or two I thought I was going to sink down in that muck and never come out.  Might have been the best thing for me.”

“You don’t mean that, Pop.”

He slaps his thigh and laughs like he’d pulled a fast one on me.

“Naw, of course not,” he says.  “You know us farmers.  Ain’t happy if we don’t have something to bitch about.”

We stare at the Christmas tree.

Then he leans over and whispers to me, “Everything all right with Lynn, Jon?”  Lynn walked out right after lunch, didn’t even offer to help clean up.  She’ll get in a mood sometimes.  I tell Pop she was just anxious to go down and see our house.  He grunts doubtfully but goes back to talking about the farm.

“Got a few new calves and got most of the older calves weaned.”

“Good, good.”

He prods me on the knee with his index finger, bent and misshapen from arthritis but thicker than my thumb from farmwork that has to be done, arthritis or not.  

“Crops are better than I figured there’d be with so little rain this fall.”

“Why is it so muddy on the feed lot if you haven’t had much rain?”

He makes a tsst sound as if to indicate, what are you going to do with a fellow ignorant as this?  Not for the first time with Pop, I feel like a city slicker even though I grew up on the farm.

He thinks a minute.

“Wasn’t much hay this year but had some left over from last year, so we’ll make it.  Only put up 500 big round bales and 360 square ones.  Wasn’t sure I could do it, but I did it.  May be the last year for me, though.”

“Pop, you’ve been saying that same thing for ten years now.  Why don’t you just do it—make this year your last.  It’s not like you don’t have a good reason for sticking close to home.”

Close to Ma, I mean.  Could be he doesn’t want to stick close to home.  Maybe he dreads coming back into the house.  Back to Ma.

As if on cue, Ma says something which I don’t understand, but apparently Pop does because he stands up and takes her by the elbow and helps her to her feet.

“Come on, old girl.”

He leads her off toward the bathroom.

“Think I’ll go over to my place and see what Lynn’s up to,” I call after him.

2.

Through the window in what probably would have been the bedroom, back when people were still living here, I watch Jon coming down the blacktop toward our house.  Well, “ours.”  Not mine.  Never Jon’s, either, in any meaningful way.

God help me, I want to laugh watching him teeter side to side when he walks, like one of those Weeble Wobble figures our Buddy had when he was little.

He’s built like his dad, Jon is.  Short, broad shoulders, wide hips, long arms.  But Hank at seventy-eight is muscular, sinewy, and hardened from decades of farmwork while Jon is soft and pudgy from decades of, well, not much, really.  At the most, shuttling from one computer to another when there’s a problem somewhere in the network.  Hard work in its own right, to be sure, but the kind of hard work that erodes rather than strengthens.

I’m surprised Jon didn’t drive here even though it can’t be more than the equivalent of a half-dozen city blocks from Hank and Teresa’s.

It was Teresa who on our wedding day told me to call them by their first names.  I’m sure she meant it as a kindness, but I would have preferred Ma and Pop.  Too late now.  What is there left of my life that it’s not too late for?

He keeps coming on.  I can see his breath in the cold, shooting out like jets of steam from a broken machine.

I love him.  I do.  I love him, but how I wish he’d leave me alone for just a little while.

He comes up to the door.

Go away.

I prepare myself, try to banish the go away from my face.

Go away.

*

Jon runs his index finger across the linoleum countertop, then peers at the tip.

“Not a speck.  I wonder who cleans the old place now?  Not Nancy, I’ll bet,” he says, grinning over at me like it’s a good joke between us.  “Ma used to do it,” he adds as if I’m a stranger to the story.

“Nancy might, just to help out,” I say although I doubt it.  No, she’s not my favorite person, but I give her credit where credit is due, Nancy with her own home to take care of, plus helping out on their farm, then on top of it spending who knows how many hours a day staying with Teresa.  Not likely she’d add cleaning up our house to her chores.

Jon doesn’t respond, instead prods at the countertop.

“A crack.  That wasn’t here when we came in the summer.”

“No?”

“No.  Doesn’t surprise me, though.  A house will really go downhill with no one living in it.”

“We’ve had it twenty-five years.  Everything goes downhill in twenty-five years.”

He gives me an appraising look.  Wondering if I’m talking about him?  Maybe I am.

“Why—?” he begins tentatively but then pauses.  I know what he’s going to ask.  “Why did you leave right after dinner?  You didn’t even offer to help clean up.”

I knew it.

I shrug.  “I just needed some fresh air.  I never have liked eating a big meal in the middle of the day.  You know that.  I makes me feel bloated and sluggish.

He runs his finger along the crack in the linoleum.

“Are you sure it wasn’t because of what I said about the roof?”

I try to remember.

“I didn’t mean it, you know.  Come on.  You really think I’m going to pay to have a new roof put on this dump?” he says, lifting his palms and looking around him, and I swear all I can think of is Bette Davis saying, “What a dump.”  I’ve seen the clip a dozen times, but I never saw the movie, don’t even know what movie it’s from.

The roof, though.  I do remember.  There almost an argument over it at dinner.  Hank saying the roof needed work, and Jon saying, okay, he’d hire somebody to put on a new one, and Hank aghast, saying you’d pay more in labor than materials, saying he and Jon could do it themselves, a little house like this one, could get it done in a weekend, and I was getting a headache listening to them, and Please God give me fresh air, please God let me breathe.

So maybe that really was why I left right after dinner.  The roof.  What did it have to do with me, anyway?  No, this was about a father remembering when his son was a boy and helped out on the farm and thinking that the son would take over the farm someday, but the son was remembering stepping in cow shit and trying to heft bales of hay that weighed more than he did and hating it and wanting nothing to do with the farm, any farm.

Computers.  Jon wanted to work with computers, and he does.  Maybe he’s one of those rare persons who got just the life he wanted.  Why does that possibility bother me so much?

With his finger, Jon traces the crack across the countertop to the sink.  He glances out the window.

“Will you look at that.”

“What am I supposed to be looking at?

He leans over the sink and tries to push up the window.  Grunts.  Pushes.  I can’t help thinking that his dad would be able to do it, which is unkind.  That window hasn’t been opened for a quarter of a century.  It’d be hard for anyone.  Still, somebody not so pudgy . . .

Stop it!  What do I care whether my husband can open a window?  He’s a good man, considerate, kind.  A hard worker.  Could Hank sit at a computer all day?  

Jon moves a bit to the side, and now I see it.  A huge weed or vine, thick as a garden hose, has grown up over the windowpane.

“This whole place is going to pot,” he says.  “Did you notice the fields?  Nothing but weeds almost as tall as me.”

Don’t say it.  Don’t make a joke about his height, I command myself.  So I don’t.  I’m good at not saying things.

“If he’s not going to farm it anymore, why doesn’t the old boy just sell the place?” Jon says, and I say, “It’s not his to sell.”

“Ah,” Jon says as if the reminder isn’t altogether welcome.

Hank and Teresa gave us the farm, one of three he owned back then, as a wedding present.  We both were more than a little nonplussed.  What on earth would we do with a farm? “He just wants to tie me to the place,” Jon said. 

“He just can’t accept that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life shoveling shit.”

“Well, it’s love, though, isn’t it? A farmer must think there’s no better present he can give than a farm,” I said.  Back then I was still trying to be a peacemaker.  I wanted everything to be all right.  Everything and everybody.

“But what am I going to do with it?” he said, and I had no answer.

In the end, we did nothing.  Hank and Teresa would clean up the house for our infrequent visits, and Hank grew soybeans, alfalfa, and timothy on the land, only eleven acres.  More of a “hobby farm,” Hank called it.  Out of the proceeds, Hank paid the property taxes and gave us a check for anything left over, which Jon would promptly tear up.  It was a point of honor, he said, but honor apparently didn’t extend to doing anything on the farm himself.

What did I expect him to do?  I don’t know.  If Buddy had taken any pleasure from it on our visits—but he didn’t.  Once when he was little, Hank took him out into the pasture and called to the cattle gathered in the shade of the tree line at the far end, and when the cattle “charged” toward them, Buddy had been terrified.  After that, he refused to step outside when we visited our farm, certain every field harbored a gang of murderous cows on the lookout for little boys.  He hasn’t been back here once since he got married and moved to Lincoln.

“Maybe back then, you know, when we were first married, we should have done something with the place.  You know what I mean?” Jon says.  “I don’t mean farm it, of course.  Fix it up a little, though.  Make it like a vacation home, I don’t know.  Something.”

And I’m taken aback.  It’s almost like he could read my mind because I used to dream about that very thing.  But I shouldn’t be surprised.  He’s a sensitive man, I’ve always said that.  A sensitive man, a good man.  I keep reminding myself of that.

3.

From the window on the south, Hank watches Jon and Lynn come up the blacktop toward the house.  They are walking side by side.  That’s a good thing.  They left the house separately, Lynn first and then Jon, but they are coming back together.  You have to be on the lookout for good things.

He hears someone coming up behind him and tenses even though it can only be Teresa.  There’s no one else.

Teresa steps up beside him, almost pushes him out of the way in an effort to get close to the window.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watches her as she scans the landscape, a frown on her face.  Then he can tell as her expression changes that she’s spotted the couple walking right up the middle of the blacktop as if without a thought for some vehicle that might appear at any moment, although in truth there’s hardly any traffic Christmas day.

Teresa peers intently at the couple, and then suddenly her face is transformed by a look of wonder.

“Jimmy!” she says.  And Hank is shattered.

Jimmy was their third child.  First Nancy, then Jon, then Jimmy.  Or at least Hank thinks of them in that order.  Truthfully, he doesn’t know which of the twin boys popped out first.  Jimmy, though, was sickly from the beginning, with that low Apgar score.  (Hank remembers the word but doesn’t remember what it means.)  It was five days before the doc let him come home from the hospital—poor little Jimmy—and then Teresa had all that trouble breastfeeding him.  He just wouldn’t latch.  But Teresa insisted on keeping on trying, and by the time they went to the bottle, the little tyke was so weak.  On the morning that he died, Teresa pointed to Jon in his crib and said, “That little pig took it all!  He never left anything for his brother!”  That was the only time she ever said anything like that, though.  She was a good mother to Jon, who was as close to her as a son could be.  Too close, Hank sometimes thought.  Once, when he was irritated at Jon for being afraid to do some little thing on the farm, he had called him a mama’s boy, and, oh, the look on Jon’s face.  It still haunts Hank.

Hank pats his wife on the shoulder, then runs his hand lightly over her thinning hair.

“No, that’s our Jon, old girl.  Jon and his wife, Lynn.”

The news seems neither to surprise nor particularly interest Teresa, who merely turns and goes back to her place on the sofa.

He looks at her.  After all these years, to think of Jimmy, at this moment.  For an instant it occurs to him to wonder if she hasn’t erased her entire life between the death of Jimmy and this Christmas day.

He looks at her.  If she’d look back at him, he’d say something to her, some kind, loving thing.  But she only stares off into space.

Hank pats the right front pocket of the baggy cords Nancy gave him for his last birthday.  Yes, the I-phone is still there.  Who would have thought the damn thing would be such a comfort to him?  Of course, he almost never gets a call, but it’s a comfort to him when he’s out on the farm alone to think that the phone might ring, and it’d be somebody bringing him good news, or even just somebody wanting to talk.

He looks back out the window.  He would have thought that by now Jon and Lynn would have reached the driveway and be almost to the house, but they’re still some distance away, walking slowly, side by side.

Jon has a way of walking, sort of waddling along, that reminds Hank of a penguin.  Then Jon extends his left hand slightly toward Lynn as if he were going to take her hand.  Or is he just balancing himself like a penguin will, extending its little wings to its sides?

“Take her hand, take her hand,” Hank whispers almost fiercely.

Abruptly, he turns away from the window.  He’ll tell himself that Jon did indeed take Lynn’s hand.  And later, once their company has gone and they’re alone together once more, he’ll tell Teresa that very thing.  “Jon took Lynn’s hand,” he’ll say.  “They’re a happy couple.”  Of course, he won’t know if she’ll understand, or care, but she might.  Farmers are optimists at heart.  Otherwise, how could they go on year after year, waiting for the rain, and waiting for the rain to stop?

---

Dennis Vannatta is a Pushcart and Porter Prize winner, with essays and stories published in many magazines and anthologies, including River Styx, Chariton Review, Boulevard, and Antioch Review. His sixth collection of stories, The Only World You Get¸ was published by Et Alia Press.