Brad Felver - The Dogs of Detroit

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 even 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.

It was dark by the time everyone left. Mark stumbled into the back room and fell asleep on the couch there. Cassidey slipped out when I wasn’t looking, which made me wonder if all her flirting was just about getting a good letter out of me, and suddenly I felt more stupid than dirty. My mother was trying to clean up, and I told her to stop, that we could get it in the morning. I fell asleep on the couch trying to think about my father but mostly thinking about Cassidey.

I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of something scraping out by my father’s grave. My brother was right about the way sound carries around here. Christ, I thought, coyotes. They’re all over these parts, buzzards on land. I dressed quickly and grabbed the twelve-gauge and eased out the back door. I walked through the tracks we had all made, and I held the shotgun at a half-aim and shined a flashlight at the grave, ready to see the reflection from those yellow eyes dart away, but what I saw was my mother. She was half in the hole and seemed to be struggling to get out.

“What the hell are you doing out here, mom?”

“Come help me,” she said.

I walked over and dropped the shotgun in the snow and climbed down into the hole with her. I had to straddle the casket in a way that didn’t feel particularly dignified for my father or for me. “Mom. Jesus, what’s going on?”

“I thought I could do it on my own.”

“Do what?”

“Just help me,” she said. “Stop with all the questions.”

“Mom.”

“Look,” she said, and I could tell she was more embarrassed than frustrated. “You’re smart. We sent you to college. So do the math. I’m old. This will be me soon. I don’t even know how you managed to pay for this casket. How did you get this one?”

“Mom,” I said, “why are you doing this now? We’ll figure it out. We always do.”

“I’m figuring it out right now. We’re not paying for two caskets.”

“Jesus,” I said, though I’m not even sure the words came out. “Has it come to this?”

“Come to what?” she asked, and I realized that it had always been like this.

I stared down at my father for a minute. She had managed to pull him halfway out of the casket, but he just hung there on the edge, his back twisted awkwardly like a hose curled the wrong direction. Together we pulled him out and then hauled the casket inside the barn and set it up on the ply where my father’s body had been, and that’s where it would sit for a couple years until my mother died. Then we went back out to fill my father’s grave in, and I told my mother to go inside, that I would take care of it.

“Look,” she said, “we all still loved him.”

“I know it that, Mom.” I started shoveling dirt on top of my father, trying futilely to avoid his face.

She arched her back and looked up at the sky. It was overcast, no stars, brutal Ohio cold, but she looked up for a long time, probably just to avoid eye contact. “I’m so glad you came back to us after college,” she said. “Your father was convinced we’d never see you again, but I told him you knew where you belonged.” She didn’t wait for a response. She walked back to the house, and in the morning we both pretended nothing had happened.

For the next half hour I tossed dirt into my father’s grave. It almost felt good, just the two of us at the end. It made me think of the time he took me walleye fishing up in Michigan, which was a story I should have worked into his obituary. I was eleven and had never been out of Ohio. We drove up on a Saturday evening and slept in the truck bed. It was a warm, clear night, and I was on a real vacation with my father. In the morning, we stopped at a small station. “I forgot to dig for night crawlers,” he said. “What will we do?” I said, worried we would have to go home, and he said, “I’ll figure something out.” He went inside the station for a long time. Then he came out, muttering to himself, and dug his hands into the seat cracks and the glove compartment of the truck. When he didn’t find what he was looking for, he pulled his Case knife out of his pocket and looked at it longingly, and for a minute I worried he was going to do something crazy. It had been his father’s knife, and one day I hoped it would be my knife, but that would never happen. He stomped back into the station, and a few minutes later, he came out with a small tub of night crawlers. Had he robbed them? I wondered until we reached the shoreline, but the water of Lake Erie was so green and beautiful, so immense, that I soon stopped thinking about it.