…pressing down a fifty pound sack of concrete mix onto his chest with both hands, grunting with effort, as if he were trying to flatten him into the mud. For one terrible second I thought I was watching something I would carry for the rest of my life. Then I saw the other sacks, a dozen of them, stacked in a row along the crawl space wall, and the wet ground that had been dug out under the floor beams, and the shovel. My stepbrother, Trent, was not hurting my father. He was loading him. “Dad, hold still,” Trent said. “It settles better if you stay flat.”
I crawled in on my elbows with my phone light in my teeth. “Trent, what are you doing?” I demanded. “We are leveling the floor,” he said, grinning. “The cabin has been sagging for ten years. Your dad volunteered to lie under there and hold the jack while I shim the beams.” Dad turned his head in the mud. He was pale, and there was gray muck up to his collar, and he gave me a thin, embarrassed smile. “Brandon, I am fine,” he whispered. “Do not make a fuss.” I looked at the flimsy jack, at the sack on his chest and at the three inches of clearance above his face, and my stomach turned over.
I got my father out of there by the ankles, an inch at a time, with Trent complaining the whole way. On the dock, in the sun, Dad sat up with his back against a piling and coughed until I thought he would be sick. Charlene came down the path in a pair of white capri pants and a floppy straw hat, carrying a pitcher of iced tea. “Brandon, you are early,” she said, as though I were a delivery. “Your father loves to help. It is how he stays young.” I looked at the seventy nine year old man trembling in the sun and said, “Charlene, he is not staying young. He is being used.”
A heavy sack left in a crawl space gave one son the weekend to bring his father back to the lake dock in Hot Springs.
I gave my terms on the dock, with the lake slapping gently at the boards. My father was going home with me that afternoon, and the work under the cabin would stop immediately. A licensed contractor would be hired to level the floor, and Charlene and her family would pay for it. Dad would receive eight hundred dollars a weekend for the nine months he had spent hauling and digging, which came to just over fourteen thousand dollars, in a check made out to him. And Trent would write him a note of apology, in his own hand, and sign it.
Trent laughed at first, a short, sharp bark. Then he saw the look on the face of his mother, and the laugh died in his throat. Charlene stood very straight, the pitcher trembling in her hand. “Wendell, tell him it is not true,” she said to my father, but her voice cracked. Dad looked at his hands, which were scored with old cuts. “Charlene, honey, I let you believe I enjoyed it,” he said softly. “I was afraid if I stopped, you would stop asking me to come. I am seventy nine, and I am lonely, and I did not want to be left in town by myself.” She sat down hard on the bench.
Charlene began to cry, and it was an ugly, honest kind of crying, not the kind she did for company. She told me that her first husband had never let her ask for help, and that she had learned to put a smile on every request so no one could say no. “I thought if I made it sound like a favor,” she said, “it would not be a burden.” I did not interrupt her. When she was done, I took the pitcher from her hand and set it down on the dock. “Charlene, you can ask Dad for company,” I said. “You cannot ask him for his spine.”
I drove Dad to the clinic in Hot Springs that evening, and a young doctor checked his ribs, his chest and his lungs. There was bruising, and a cough that would take a few weeks to clear, but nothing was broken. The doctor, a woman of thirty with a gentle voice, asked what had happened. Dad looked at her, then at me. “I fell asleep under a cabin,” he said, and then he smiled for real. “It turns out a man can be a fool at any age.” He drank the whole cup of water she handed him. I could see the color coming back into his cheeks.
The money consequences were prompt and fair. Charlene wrote a check for fourteen thousand, four hundred dollars and brought it to the house herself, with a lemon pound cake still warm in the pan. Trent hired a contractor from Hot Springs Village and paid him two thousand dollars to level the cabin the right way. The apology letter arrived the following week in an envelope with a lake stamp. It was a page and a half long and spelled three words wrong. Dad read it twice and tucked it in his Bible. “It is the best letter I have gotten from that boy,” he said.
In the name of my mother, Imogene, who passed eleven years ago and who made every child on our street feel like a favorite, I started the Imogene Lake Fund. It pays for contractors, tools and honest handymen for retired people in Garland County who have a cabin or a camp in need of repair and no strong back to do it. In the first year, we helped forty two households. A retired Navy man of eighty, sitting in a lawn chair beside his freshly leveled porch, said, “For fifty years I took care of everybody else. It is strange to be the one who is taken care of.”
In June, Dad and I went back to the lake together, just the two of us, with a thermos of coffee and a pair of folding chairs. We set them up at the end of the dock, side by side, facing the water. The sun was coming up pink over the pines, and the boat was gone, as it had been that terrible day, but this time I knew exactly where it was. Dad took a cinnamon roll out of a paper bag and tore it in two. He handed me the bigger half. “This,” he said, “is what I came up here for in the first place.”