BY 2012 Dad had been occupying a large chair for several years, eating, sleeping, drinking, and writing there. Three days before Christmas my mother called my house in Mississippi, a rarity in itself. She spoke rapidly, her voice fraught with anxiety, an element of despair coursing beneath her words. I’d never heard this tone from her. She informed me that my father had fallen. Too small to help him up, Mom had called an ambulance service. The EMTs took Dad to the hospital, where the doctors decided to keep him. Mom wasn’t sure why.
“Would you please come home?” she said.
The nature of our family is that no one appeals for help of any kind—not financial, emotional, or moral support. Since Mom was asking, I knew it was serious. Uncertain of the circumstances, I packed clothes appropriate to a funeral, drove all day, and arrived on the winter solstice, gray and rainy, a sense of melancholy draping the hills. I went straight to the hospital. Dad was too bloated for diagnosis. The first order of business was draining forty pounds of fluid, which wasn’t going well.
I accompanied Mom to the house in which I’d grown up, her home of fifty years. My mother loved Dad with a tenacious loyalty and devotion. She accepted his quirks and admired his brilliance. The strength of their marriage was due solely to her. She ran every errand, shopped, cooked, cleaned, and drove her children places. She typed every final manuscript Dad wrote.
Mom was five feet, two inches tall, with red hair, green eyes, and a good figure. She stayed out of the sun to avoid freckling. For a year after high school she attended Transylvania University, left for economic reasons, and began working in a bank. She’d always regretted not furthering her education, and in 1980 she enrolled at Morehead State University, where I was a senior. For the next twelve years she took a few classes per year as one of the first continuing education students at MSU, receiving a BA in philosophy and a master’s in English. She taught freshman composition for three years on campus, then began teaching at the newly opened state prison in West Liberty, Kentucky.
From ages sixty-five to seventy-eight, she worked full-time as a secretary in Morehead to supplement their combined Social Security income. Mom was adamant that they didn’t need the money, but I understood the truth—my parents’ sense of pride forbade her from admitting financial need. I also know that the job was crucial in that it provided my mother with escape five days a week. Her children had left home and moved far away, but Mom could get only as far as the nearest town for work. She had her own life there—walking to the bank every day, chatting with the mailman and a woman who worked at the liquor store.
The morning after I arrived home, Mom rose early and went to the hospital. I walked through the house and discovered that two weeks of heavy rain had flooded the basement, which was not draining. Dad had always called his neighbor Jimmy to deal with plumbing problems. Jimmy was dead, so I called his son, who showed up promptly. Sonny and I were glad to see each other but stood awkwardly in the drizzling rain, unsure what to do. Men in the hills didn’t touch except to punch each other or accidentally brush arms while engaged in a shared chore. We grinned and looked away, scratched ourselves, and grinned some more. I asked how he was, and he said, “Straight as a stick, son.”
The water in the basement was six inches deep, more than Sonny or I had ever seen there. I’d brought shoes suitable for the woods but not wading and remained on the basement steps with a flashlight. Sonny moved slowly through the water, seeking the drain, wearing large rubber boots. He said they’d belonged to his dad. At the top of the steps I found my father’s old zip galoshes. The rubber was ripped at the stress marks across the toe. I wrapped two plastic bags around my feet and slid them into Dad’s boots.
Sonny was crouching over the drain. He dipped his hand into the murky water, felt around briefly, and said: “Phillips.” I went upstairs and fetched a Phillips-head screwdriver. Sonny removed the drain cap and fed the metal snake into the pipe. I remembered being a child and watching Jimmy snake out the drain while Dad stood idly by, holding a flashlight. Now Sonny and I repeated their behavior, wearing our fathers’ boots.
The walls of the basement were moldy, the rafters covered in cobwebs. Dark water moved beneath our feet. The motor rattled as the steel wire coiled and uncoiled within the drum. I recalled playing in the basement with Sonny and his brothers. As the youngest boy on the hill, he trailed behind us and never spoke. I mentioned the past to Sonny, but he had no interest in nostalgia. He was occupying the moment, running the snake by feel, staring into the middle distance, frowning and muttering exactly as his father had. Sonny believed the snake was getting diverted into another pipe. He retracted it and tried again.
“Still writing tales?” he said.
I told him yes and he nodded once, returning his attention to the snake. Very few of the boys I grew up with had finished high school, but they accepted that I was a writer. I was merely doing what other men did—following in my father’s footsteps. Sonny was a plumber. The son of a local drunk was the town drunk in two towns. Sons of soldiers joined the army. That I had become a writer was perfectly normal.
The water level lapped against the walls from our movement. One of Dad’s boots began to leak. Sonny shut off the machine. He told me to go down the hill twenty-five feet to the old sewage trench, now replaced by a septic tank. As a kid I’d spent hundreds of hours over the hill, finding snakeskins and rabbit dens, old bottles and animal bones, feathers and lucky rocks. I knew the gap in the brush and the best route down. In the forty years since my last venture, bushes had spread and grown, and I was much less agile. My boot skidded and I went to one knee but remained upright. Rooted in earth rich with human waste, the forsythia tendrils were higher than my head, bigger than my thumb, tangled and knotted together. Rain fell in waves. I had no hat or gloves.
Facing a row of briars, I knew instinctively to rotate my body into them, letting the thorns scrape but not grab hold. Now I had to find the old sewage trench. The rain increased. I crawled beneath the heavy overhang, moving slowly, joints stiff, the weight of my body hurting my hands pressed to the ground. Sonny yelled from the top of the hill. I couldn’t see him, but I waved my arms and shook a bush. He wanted to know if I heard anything.
“What am I supposed to hear?” I said.
“Anything, son. Listen at the ground. It’s not supposed to make no noise, so anything you hear is good.”
He went back in the house. The rain slackened momentarily. I bent forward and cupped my ears toward the earth. I heard cars on the blacktop at the foot of the hill and the gentle sound of thousands of raindrops striking thousands of leaves. I heard my own ragged breathing.
After a few minutes, Sonny yelled for me to come back to the house. The bushes were too intertwined for me to stand upright, and I had to scuttle backward. Limbs scratched my skin. Water ran into my pants. I emerged into a small clearing and tugged my clothes in place, shivering from the cold and sweating from exertion. I took two steps, slipped, and fell. Mud spattered my glasses. My cell phone rang and I ignored it. I fell twice more, scraping my hands. A branch tore along my cheek. I was breathing hard. It occurred to me that if I had a heart attack, Sonny would drag me up the hill and drive me to the hospital. Maybe I’d share a room with Dad.
I regained the safety of the yard. Sonny had packed up his snake machine and said he’d come back later and look for another drain. I was wet and muddy, irritated at the world and myself. Only a damn fool plunges down a steep hill, out of shape at age fifty-four, and attempts to hear the sound of dirt. I listened to the voicemail on my phone. The doctor thought my father might need a transfusion and my blood type matched his. I told Sonny, who looked away, then spoke quietly: “You need you a ride to the hospital?”
I shrugged and he said to get in. The sun was going down. We talked of our varied marriages, old buddies, and grade school teachers. Sonny dropped me at the hospital, but the medical emergency turned out be premature. Dad’s condition had stabilized. The catheter had begun draining.
Late that evening, the water was gone from the basement. I called Sonny, who said he’d found a better clean-out drain against the wall closest to the hill. He suggested I write its location on the wall in case someone else came next time. Sonny’s idea was practical and smart, but it shocked me. The notion of writing on the wall, even a dim basement corner, was unthinkable. It violated Dad’s rules. You wrote on pieces of paper, organized them into a manuscript, and produced a book. You didn’t write on a wall any more than you would spit on the floor. But Dad was sick and I was Sonny’s assistant. I had my instructions.
In the corner, I found the correct drain that led to the septic tank. I removed the cap of a black marker, its sharp scent momentarily overpowering the mold. In my life I’ve written over ten million words, but never before on a wall. If Dad found out, he wouldn’t like it, and I’d get in trouble. In large letters I wrote “Clean-Out Drain” with an arrow pointing down.
At the foot of the steps, I glanced around the muddy basement one more time. I’d spent a lot of time down here, especially during winter, when school was canceled from snow. Now it was full of old Tupperware, empty beer bottles, and rotting wood. A rusty metal shelf held canned food that had expanded, the paper labels chewed by mice. I remembered killing a snake in a corner, then setting mousetraps for months.
Sonny had done a good job. He’d emptied the basement with more efficiency than the doctors had drained fluid from my father. Briefly, I imagined Sonny as a doctor—his bedside manner was gentle, and he’d have a nurse to retrieve tools instead of me.
I went outside in the chilly darkness. The rain had quit. Water dripped from leaves. An owl moaned along the ridge. The storm had cleared the sky, revealing the same swath of stars I looked at as a child. I listened intently. It occurred to me that the silence I heard was the sound of dirt.