Orion Magazine - January/February 2012

But Donnie couldn’t have known this. No, he probably came raising a roostertail of dust down the gravel because that’s what all my father’s old friends are always doing: stopping by sad-eyed and grim-mouthed, their feed-store ball caps twisted up in their hands, staring at their boots and saying if there’s anything, anything at all, they can do. Most of the time my mother thanks them and sends them away. Though they are strong, they cannot haul my father up and out of this dry ground. Though they are fine farmers and ranchers, a day on the tractor or a night in the lambing shed won’t mean much in the long run. Though they too loved my father, they are like us bewildered and brokenhearted. Though they ask if there’s anything they can ever do, they ask not for us but for themselves— they ask out of the selfishness of grief.

Which is fine. Which is probably as it should be. Donnie most likely stepped out of his rig that morning and saw the bent hoop and knew right then and there what he could do. He might have even thought for a moment, before he put his fist to the screen door, about the boy who did it and what it would mean to have such a mistake made over, erased. For I imagine shame and expiation are on his mind, what with his stink of liquor and tobacco spit and day-old clothes, and when my brother and I pull on our tennis shoes and go out to help, I see the pillow of greasy coats in the cab and the pile of beer cans in the back and think that Donnie has probably not been home for days, has not seen his wife and daughters — who go to our church and live up the road from us in a double-wide trailer near the river — in a long, long time.

Donnie has my brother and me take wire brushes to the scarred metal around the bend, while he readies the welder. Beyond my grandfather, I don’t often see grown men up close anymore, so I scrape and sneak looks over at Donnie. He’s quite tall, must be over six feet, and though his face is round and wide, his eyes and nose and mouth are close together, pinched in. His skin is umber from the sun, but when he takes o= his cap, there is a stark white line across his forehead. My grandfather is always telling me, stepping back and putting up his fists, that he’s right at fighting weight: one hundred and eighty pounds. But Donnie looks twice as big as my grandfather; he must be close to three hundred pounds. He is thick as shelves across the chest, his arms and legs muscled and enormous. And he wears a cotton shirt, dark blue, almost as black as a stormy sky, the very kind my father wears in the picture on the piano in the front room, which makes me wonder if this is just what you do when you are a man: get big and thick and wear a blue shirt to work.

Once Donnie has the welder in order, we put our shoulders to the pole and bend it straight again. Donnie gets out his level just to make sure. He breathes heavily and his untucked shirt waves over the full, hairy sack of his stomach. We put on welding masks and flip the visors down and the day goes dark—until Donnie

sparks the torch. He lays, like I thought he would, a thick bead directly in the metal scar, but then, opposite that, where the pole looks more or less straight and fine, he welds a long rectangle of tempered steel perpendicular to the pole, the width of it sticking six inches straight back. I think a fin, a wing, maybe Donnie’s signature or bit of artifice, but I am so happy to have the evidence of my wrongdoing made right that I don’t ask any questions— don’t discover that this steel wing is a kind of truss that carries the whole weight of the hoop, will basket after basket keep it from slowly folding over on itself.

I don’t understand the forces at work here, the mechanics of tension, moment, and node. How twice the strength is needed to come straight at something. How at times what is still is charged and what is hastened is dead. How bread becomes flesh, how flesh becomes dust, how the heart is bread and flesh and dust —the way Donnie cools the weld with a five-gallon bucket of water and picks up his clanking tools, and we thank him and shake his heavy, trembling hand, and though he will in a few years abandon his wife and daughters and dedicate himself to liquor and other oblivions, we think of him kindly and often.

Cedar-clean

For three days it has rained.

The little creek we’re camped on rushes straight down the valley, ditch-fast and muddy. The limbs we drag back to camp are so green with sap or rotten with rainwater they will not burn. We cannot light a fire. We have caught no trout. We huddle at the table, musty blankets draped over our shoulders.

We are here, a hundred miles from home and holed up in our tiny camper, because my father is dead. Or, rather, we are here because when my father was alive he took us every summer to the Beartooth Mountains. Some scorched July week, my father would park his tractor and pack the old forest green Coleman cooler and drive us all up to Mystic Lake, where we’d fish for cutthroat and hike switchback trails and look down over thousand-foot-high vistas of sheer rock and cedar-clean sky. Those good days the mountains were like the many stone hands of God, the sun always bright and the air crisp and just cool. Come evening, we sat on stumps and hunks of granite and stuck marshmallows on long willow sticks. My sister toasted them lightly over the coals, and I blackened them in the flames, and my brother sat far back from the fire and ate them raw, one after the other, and my mother and father too sat back from the flames and sipped their beer and laughed and told stories — the wavery dome of firelight illuminating all that mattered in the world.