had a strange whistle, more like a breathy thing that came out between his teeth than that full pursed-lip sound my brother made, or used to make. My father usually whistled from the time he slid the barn door open until he slid it closed. On Saturdays, when I’d sleep in a little bit, I’d roll over in bed sometimes and hear it, faintly, unless it was raining hard and the rain was bigger than my father’s whistle. Then it would wind up drowned out completely by the thunk of the sump pump.
My father took a lot of pride in keeping a neat farm. He never said much but you could tell he had contempt for people who had messy knock-around farms, with broken hay wagons falling apart in the corner of the field and moldy straw to one side of the barn door. My father even dug a big trench down one edge of the barn and into the far fields so that when the groundwater was deep, which happened more and more the older I got, the cows wouldn’t get foot rot. There was an order to running a farm right, and my father appreciated it, and so did I. It was a little like math, one thing in front of another until it was solved. Sometimes I would pull on a pair of dungarees and a sweater and give my father a hand before I got the bus to school. Sometimes he’d drive me to school so I wouldn’t have to take the bus at all.
I was already halfway across the road one morning in March, stepping carefully because of the black ice slicks on the tar, my wool gloves frozen into hand shapes because I’d left them to dry outside by the door, when I heard my father stop whistling and say, “Lord give me strength.” I came up behind him and saw that where our big tractor always sat there was an empty place, and an empty forty-ounce bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. My father favored Iron City or, when he was feeling flush, Rolling Rock.
We were less than a mile along the road when we found the tractor overturned down the side of the shoulder. The engine was still running but it made a grinding noise, like it was butting up against something it had no business touching, and Tommy was lying half under it with blood on his face and all over the front of his shirt. I could hear the tractor but no sound of breathing but my own, and I made a fluttery motion with my hands in their old gloves, then put them under my armpits to make them stop. Tommy wasn’t even wearing a coat, and there were two other beer bottles near the tractor, although they could have been from anyone since there was a lot of racing down our road at night and throwing beer bottles from the window, which was probably why my father hadn’t noticed the sound of the tractor starting up in the first place.
“Don’t try to move him or you might make it worse,” I said.
“I couldn’t if I tried,” my father said.
We were a family that didn’t use the rescue squad, figuring we could handle most things ourselves with a first aid kit and iodine, but my father sent me back to the house and I called for an ambulance. I called the hospital, too, and told my mother we were coming in. “I’m going down to emergency,” she said in her nurse’s voice, calm and cool, which was noticeable because I was crying and my nose was running and I was having a hard time catching my breath.
“He can’t have lived through all that in Vietnam and then die drunk on a damn tractor,” I sobbed.
“Take a deep breath, honey,” said my mother, and I cried even harder because my mother only called me honey when things were really bad. Then I heard the sirens and got off the phone.
“Mary Margaret, what’s going on?” my aunt Ruth called from her living room window, and I realized it was getting light and that I was going to miss school.
“Tommy,” I called back, and ran onto the road.
When my brother had finally come home for good, people said he was a changed man. That wasn’t true. He looked a little like Tommy Miller, and sometimes he even talked a little like Tommy Miller. But the real Tommy Miller was gone. I don’t