The mailbox said Carthage Rural Route 4, with no name. The gravel road ran between two cornfields gone brown with the autumn, and at the end of it stood a small gray shop with a roll up door, a tin roof, and a sign hand painted in black. Ranger Dog Grooming and Boarding. My hands were slippery on the wheel. I parked beside a battered pickup and sat for a full minute. A golden dog came loping out of the shop, wagging all over, with a tennis ball in its mouth. And behind it, wiping his hands on a towel, walked a tall man with a white beard and a limp.
He stopped about ten feet from my car. I could not move. I have seen my father in my dreams for twelve years, and in every one of them I wake before he speaks. I opened the door. I stood up. He took off his cap. His hair was thin, and white, and the same shape. He said in a voice I would have known in the dark, a little rough, a little low, “Hello, Katydid.” Nobody had called me that since I was nine. My knees went. I sat down hard on the running board of my own car, and the dog came and licked my face.
He sat beside me in the gravel. He did not touch me at first. He said, “I owe you an explanation, and it is a long one, and I do not deserve to have you listen.” I said, “Daddy, I buried you.” He closed his eyes. “I know. I stood on a hill with binoculars and watched every minute.” I could not speak. He said, “Your mother and I decided that you would hate me less if I were dead than if you knew the truth. Now I think we were wrong.”
He had worked as a foreman at the zinc smelter outside Joplin for twenty years. In the spring of 2014, he discovered that the owner was dumping waste into the creek that ran by the school where I taught, and falsifying the reports. He took the records to a federal agent. He agreed to testify. Then the threats came, a dead dog on our porch, a brick through a window, a phone call at night. The government said the man was dangerous. The only way to keep the family safe, they said, was for Walter Brandt to vanish.
A father can disappear for a good reason, and a daughter can still carry a hole in the shape of him for twelve years.
The closed casket was a part of it. Mama knew. She was told the day before. They staged a wreck on Route 66, a car in a ditch, a closed service, a few papers. She was not allowed to tell me, or my brother Peter, or anyone. He said she cried every night for a month, and then she got up and made the lunches. She saw him four times in twelve years, in motels, in parking lots, always with an escort. In March, the man who owned the smelter died in a federal prison in Texas. And with him went the last of the danger.
Daddy came back that spring, to a rented shop and a small farm, thirty miles from Mama, under his own name. He did not go to her house because she was already ill, and he did not want to explain himself to a neighbor. But he took her to appointments, in the car, parked in the back. The vet visit was for Ranger, in March, and Mama stayed in the car with a blanket, because she was too tired to walk. “She knew the whole time,” he said. “She told me every week, tell Katie. Tell her now. I kept saying next month.”
And then she was gone in September. He attended the service from the back of the church, in a hat and sunglasses, in the last pew. He thought of coming forward. He could not make his legs do it. I stared at him on the gravel. I told him I was furious. I told him I had been in grief for twelve years, and that he had stolen my right to say goodbye. I told him he had been a coward. He took it, all of it, with his hat in both hands. He said, “Every word is true.”
Then I put my head on his shoulder. I cannot explain it. It was the shoulder I knew, with the flannel smell of sawdust and soap. His arm came around me, an old thick arm, and I sobbed like I was nine years old. He said my name over and over. The dog sat by us, leaning his weight against my leg. We stayed that way for a long time, in the gravel, with the wind going through the corn. When I finally looked up, the sun was low, and the light was gold, and the whole field seemed to glow.
I took him home with me that night. My husband opened the door and went absolutely white, then absolutely pink, then laughed and cried at once. My kids, fifteen and eleven, stood on the stairs in their pajamas. My daughter said, “Is that Grandpa Walter? From the photo?” My father knelt on the doorstep and held out his arms. I will never forget watching them fall into him, two children who had heard about him all their lives and were seeing him for the first time.
We held a second service in November, a small one, in my backyard, with a card table and a pot of coffee. We buried nothing. We planted a pecan tree in the corner by the fence, where Mama liked to sit. Daddy dug the hole himself. He is seventy seven and still limps from the forklift of 1979, and he would not let anyone help. When he finished, he took off his gloves and stood back and said, “Katie, I would like to stay, if you will have me.” I said, “Daddy. You never left.”
