your job and the number in your checking account just gets smaller and smaller until it looks like it’s going to wink out like daylight on a January afternoon. This was my time. There were record rains, and the two sump pumps we had now because one just wasn’t enough went day and night, a chunk-a-chunk noise from the basement, and one morning I woke up because the sound had changed and I thought, Thank God, because it meant sunshine. But what it really meant was that one of the pumps had failed. You’d think that the saddest day would be the one when I found my father all folded up outside Ruth’s house, but instead it was the one when I had to hire a guy to come and fix that pump. “My father’s sick,” I said, “otherwise he would do it.”
“It’s an antique,” said the guy. “I’m not sure I can even get parts for something this old.” My father used to make the replacement parts for sump pumps himself, which was something I just took for granted until I figured out how remarkable it was in the basement that morning, tapping my foot because I was afraid I was going to be late for class.
“We need to buy a new sump pump,” I’d said to my mother, and she passed over the coffee can from the summer’s corn. It had a couple hundred dollars in it, in singles, mainly. The price had gone up since I’d been a kid selling corn with Donald and LaRhonda, but the same card table was there, with the coffee can on top of a sheet of loose-leaf that said 10¢ AN EAR. People pulled up, filled a bag, and left the money in the can. I imagined someday Clifton would sit there and sort out thirteen-ear dozens for people he’d known his whole life. I’d figured out a long time ago that it had been busywork for me as a kid, but busywork seemed like most of my life now.
The weeks went by, each day the same as the one before it, and my father didn’t get any better at all, although he seemed a little happier when Clifton came by. Ruth tolerated Clifton better now that my mother had stopped talking about moving Ruth out and moving her grandson in, now that my father was spending so much time at Ruth’s house. He sat in front of the television, and he ate soup and pudding and ice cream, and his nice flat stomach went all slack and soft. “Bell,” he said some days. “Wall,” he said on others. “Me!” he shouted when we were out in the truck. “Me!” It was like when Clifton was small: I couldn’t tell whether he was using what he could of my name, or trying to tell us that he was still there, that Buddy Miller was still inside there somewhere, lousy balance, no words, but still there.
The swearing was really bad some days. “Oh, put a sock in it, Mimi,” Ruth said one day when I made a face. “You’re just like your mother. Let the poor man say whatever he wants.”
“Shit shit shit!” my father yelled.
“That’s right, Buddy, you go right ahead,” Ruth said, taking his hand, but he pulled it away.
I liked to sit with him and pretend everything was just the same. “Pop, we’re reading about the Depression in this course, and I have to say, I had no idea how bad it was. You were, what, fourteen or fifteen or something? Maybe it wasn’t as bad for farmers. At least you could grow your own food. I guess that’s always been the advantage of having a farm, right? You might not have money but you’ve always got food.”
“Not in January you don’t,” Ruth said.
“I wasn’t talking to you,” I said.
“I know, honey,” Ruth said. “There’s a car pulled up on the drive.”
It was still pouring, but as soon as I saw the dark sedan through the window I went outside. My shirt soaked up the rain like a sponge, like it wanted to pull me down into the mud, like my foot and the boot had been just the beginning and the farm was going to eat me whole. I went over to the driver’s side window of the car, and Winston Bally rolled it down.
“Get off my property,” I said.
“I just wanted to check in on your father. I was sorry to hear about his illness.”