Matthew Batt: Runner-Up, 2006 Utah Writers' Contest

Morning, Noon, Night

The hogs were rutting and fighting in their pen, taking turns on the runt, biting its already stumped tail for salt. The bald Indiana sun baked the mud on their backs, calicoed their pink skin with dark and light browns. I ran the tin pail through the barrel of feed, scooping as much corn as I could carry, and they abandoned the runt and muscled and screeched towards the bars of the trough like so many compact, grimy geldings, whinnying against the iron bars of the chute.
In my head, I was going over anatomy for my boards—the hand in particular, because it amazed me and because my soft student’s palms were blistering from real work. This was August of 1945 and the war was over. It seemed like nothing else was happening, but of course that’s never true. A week after FDR died I graduated from medical school and I had to get ready to leave Indiana for my internship in Rochester, Minnesota, and say good-bye to the only family I had left. The war, the bomb, the rest of the world . . . I didn’t know where it was. I was a medical student, technically already a physician, and I examined cadavers like textbooks, patients like tests; it didn’t make a difference if they were soldiers or civilians. To a physician, a patient is a problem.
I was living just outside Shelbyville, Indiana, trying to keep our father’s farm solvent, even though he wasn’t around to care. He probably wasn’t far, but which whore’s house was anybody’s guess. My brother, Charles, Jr.—who had been young enough to draft at war’s beginning but got a farm deferment—sat on a fencerow, his unlaced boots looped through the middle rung, going on about how Hank Greenberg wasn’t good enough to wipe Mel Ott’s ass, let alone beat him and the Giants for the pennant. He had his shirt off and was ostensibly working on his tan, though the wind was up and he was dark like the hogs, more with dust than sun.
I scooped another pail of corn and thought of the phalanges—mine—proximal, middle, distal—as they wrapped around the bucket handle.
I told him I had more to worry about than childish men chasing each other around a diamond. I told him I had work to do.
“Jumping Jesus Christ, Bobby,” Charlie said, hopping off the fence. He picked up a spade and rocked the handle towards his mouth like a microphone. “You’ve got to ac-cent-chu-ate the positive, e-lim-in-ate the, the . . .”
“Negative,” I said. And he stopped singing.
Charlie was six years older than I was and therefore the natural inheritor of the farm—or would have been when Dad died, but for the time being he was only the hand who ran it. I was the one who got to finish high school, go on to IU and med school as Charlie managed the land and the livestock. We were brothers, not friends, and so when I came back for that last summer, Charlie, though there, was essentially on vacation.
“Come on now, Bobby Lee,” he said. There was a measure of meanness in the way he smiled at me. He had a sharp, accusatory nose that seemed to indict me with just a look. “You got to loosen up some. How you going to survive life if you don’t learn to have some fun? War’s over, sugarbeet. War’s over.”
I said I guessed he was right.
I spread the feed in the trough, saving a little in the pail for the runt who was bitten and butted if he got near the corn. He was hovering around, trying to decide whether to eat a pile of another hog’s manure—he rarely got enough to eat to make any of his own—and I slung the last of the feed towards him over the fence. It landed in a line just past him and he snorted at it and went back to the shit.
I couldn’t have said exactly what it was, but something was suddenly different. Like the static electricity you feel right before lightning strikes. For the first time all day, Charlie had stopped yammering. His body still faced me but his head craned towards the twenty acres of soybeans in front of our house at the car shining towards us, a roostertail of dust kicking up behind it.
Nobody drove that fast on gravel except Dad. But not even Dad usually drove that fast, not even on the hard road.
I looked at Charlie as he wrung the handle of the spade like a baseball player might, working pine tar into hickory. He choked up on the wood and I thought, Tendons: Second, third, fourth dorsal and palmar interosseus. Bones: Small, ring, middle, index metacarpal. Just a bunch of bones and bailing wire.
“Shitbag,” he said. Dust and hay stuck to his chest and arm hair, and but for the fact that he wasn’t sweating, he looked dirty enough to have been working. He pulled out his Luckies and, with an over-gassed silver lighter, lit his cigarette in a small explosion.
The bucket swung in my hand with the wind.

When I was not yet one year of age, my mother died of the Spanish Flu that rent nearly every family in two in the Mississippi River Valley in 1919. We were living in St. Joseph, Missouri, because there was no money for seeds or feed back in Indiana. But once she was dead, Dad decided to move back to Shelby County. His own mother lived there, and she hung on long enough to see me reach schooling age, but after I turned six it was just the three of us, womanless, alone with each other for good.
A rangy man with crow-black hair and a too-bright set of dentures, Dad didn’t raise us as much as he let the farm teach us what it meant to be men. He eventually got some money up and after a few rough years, the farm grew. By yesterday’s standards, it was a large farm, better than two hundred acres, and it had some pastureland for the couple dozen Holsteins and Guernseys we kept for milk and sold for meat, and some for soybeans, milo, and corn. That meant, as long as I can remember, walking the crops, scanning the beans for periscoping weeds, and ripping their bristly, prickly roots out by hand. Charlie taught me how to tear them from their hold and then stomp their guts back into the soil. A stupid thing that only ensured our future work, but to us it was soldiering, and we ground those weeds right back into nothing with the worn heels of our boots.
Dad had inherited the farm from his father, but Dad was not nor ever would be a farmer. He was, he insisted, a businessman. “A venturing capitalist,” he’d tell the townsmen where they congregated at the old dry fountain in Shelbyville’s square. “A real estates magnet.” He always said that he was never going to let his lack of education stop him from being smart. Growing up as he did during the dry years at the hinge of the century, he also had no compunction about doing whatever it took to see that his boys had boots to wear. Never common—a word he disdained more than farmer—Dad was an entrepreneur. He tried and failed and tried again at various schemes and get-rich-quick ploys—selling stakes in nonexistent tropical islands to Indianapolis housewives, shares of thoroughbred studs that turned out to be ridgelings—and but for his greed and an affinity for other men’s women, he almost succeeded in one: insurance.
When Charlie and I were teenagers and thereby, in Dad’s opinion, able to run the whole farm by ourselves, he took a legitimate job and became an agent for Sun Insurance. He picked up the trade quickly and was soon dressing and talking the part morning, noon, and night, coming home from a day of driving and sales as dusty and spent as our neighbors were from farming.

“What you figure he’s been up to?” Charlie said. He put a boot up on the blade of the shovel as though he were going to dig in. “Or should I say who?”
“I don’t much care,” I said. “But if I had to I wouldn’t guess any good.”
The big black car took the last turn at what had to be fifty miles an hour—a pretty good trick on washed-out gravel. The turn was banked just a bit, but to get it right you had to start turning well ahead of the curve proper. It was foolishness, plain and simple.
“Good turn,” Charlie said. “This’ll be interesting.”

“The future,” Dad would say, pointing at us with a fork, “the future, boys, makes no promises, pledges no allegiance, accepts no notes.” He’d put his fork down and lean over his empty plate and look us in the eye, conspiratorially. “But. But, boys, Sun Insurance can, does, and will. Not to your own self, of course, but to your kitchen kin. And isn’t that what it’s all about? The future. Not about ourselves, but our loved ones, our young.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s ‘kith,’” I said.
Dad hit the table with his fist and the salt shaker jumped and fell on its side.
“For Chrissake, Bob, what the hell’s the matter with you? I’m practicing.”
By then Charlie was more interested in girls and therefore he usually left me and Dad at the table for the cracked mirror in our bedroom, working like a chemist through trial and error for the right amount of pomade to slick through his hair. Being six years Charlie’s junior, I was left with Dad’s pitches. It was at these dinner-table sales sessions that my Dad taught me to be, literally, a tough customer. He groomed me to mistrust him, to see beyond the sheen of his talk to the schemes between his temples, to argue with him so he’d be raring to go when he hit the road again, sure he’d faced his fiercest adversary. He’d get furious when I caught him in some illogical loop or lexical faux pas, but then he’d say that that was why he sent me to school.
“So how do I know my kids will see my investment?” I said one night before he was about to leave for new territory around Rensselaer. I frowned in what I thought to be mature skepticism. “How do I know you ain’t some crook?”
“Good one,” Dad said. He bristled and his eyebrows arched above the golden rims of his glasses and he shook a bony finger towards the bare bulb screwed into the ceiling.
“Behold, my friend, the sun. The sun above! What, I ask you, can you trust more than its rise and fall, but for the holy grace of God? No, sir,” he said quickly, cutting short any opportunity for interruption. “No sirree Bob. Nothing. No thing. Not a thing above the sun save God himself. Nothing can you trust in this dim world except God, the sun, and Sun Insurance. For we make our name upon those very selfsame principles of steadfastedness and stewardship.” He leaned forward then, wagging that long finger near my face like a Methodist preacher. “Sun Insurance, my hale fellow: strong as religion, sure as the sky, close as your neighbors. Whaddya say?” he said, leaning his chair back on two legs, giving me, ostensibly, room to think about it. “Our premium policy?”
“But I don’t have any kids.”
He laughed loud and slapped his hand on the table, rattling my crossed fork and knife on my plate. “Course you don’t,” he said. “Course you don’t.” He jumped from his chair, letting it fall back to the floor. “But what about your brother? What about him?”
My father quickly excelled at Sun, but as he did his territory expanded more and more until he had to travel clear from Terre Haute to Kokomo on any given day, all for the same commission. Sometimes Charlie and I saw him on weekends. Sometimes not. Then Dad quit Sun. He said he had a plan. The Plan. He also had his old client list, a ream of blank Sun policy forms and their gold lapel pin.

Down our drive, a black Cadillac Fleetwood plowed towards me and Charlie in front of a wake of dust that threatened the sun. It was a sight to behold in those days for more than one reason. Because of the wartime metal and manufacturing rations, cars were as rare as televisions or indoor plumbing. But it was a sight beyond that simply because it was a Cadillac: roomy enough to raise a family inside; a gleaming silver grille up front, big as a train’s cowcatcher.
We hadn’t heard from Dad in weeks. We speculated sometimes about the validity or likelihood of the rumors we’d happen upon at the feed store, and it was hard to think that he hadn’t taken up with some rich Bloomington widow.
Charlie picked a piece of tobacco from his lip and flicked his cigarette into the wind. He stared straight ahead, barechested, holding on to that spade, ready it seemed to kill or be killed. I stood to his left and just behind him, the pail swinging in my hand, as Dad—who else could it have been?—ground to a dusty halt a few yards before us.
There was, in fact, a woman with him. I couldn’t see well for the glare of chrome and metal and glass, but I could tell it was a woman all right. She wore her hair like a page-boy and had a cup-and-saucer-looking hat pinned at a sharp angle to her head. She worked at it with both hands as Dad put on his fedora. He must have said something to her because she abruptly stopped fussing and stared out the passenger window, her chin high and haughty.
I was afraid I recognized her as Nils Voorhees’ wife, Millicent. Millie was a garrulous, buxom woman who would parade around the dimestore soda fountain like some exotic bird stuck while her husband was buying tack for his horseteam. There was talk of her being more than friendly with a few fellows around town since Nils went back to serve in the Army as a sergeant, but what I heard still didn’t prepare me for seeing her all dolled up next to my father in a Fleetwood that must have cost as much as our whole farm.
It was one thing to think it, quite another to see it. My dad was having an affair with a married woman. The wind gusted up and it felt like it blew right through me. Somebody else’s wife, somebody else’s family. My father.
He threw the door open and jumped out over the running board with both feet. He doffed his hat and threw his arms wide and took a breath. “My proud boys!”
Neither Charlie nor I said anything. The wind rocked the empty pail in my hand and I traced the length of my arm: distal phalanges, metacarpals, scaphoid, ulna, radius, humerus, clavicle, scapula.
For the first time in my life I felt like I was nothing but bone.
“Them right there,” Dad said, dropping his hat on his head and tapping it once for security, “are some sourpusses.”
He looked hot and nervous despite the weather and his cheery show. Sweat rings radiated from his armpits and already wet through the felt of his hat. The wind whipped his wide, flashy tie behind him, and he couldn’t seem to decide whether he should put it back in his jacket or hold on to his hat.
“Who’s that?” Charlie said. He glanced down and ground something into nothing with the toe of his boot. “What are you doing with that skirt, Dad?”
“Now is that any way to talk to your dear old Dad?”
Charlie had spent most of his life blaming Dad for what was either his own or nobody’s fault. Everything from dropping out of school to getting dumped by a girl to losing a steer to thin ice to, most of all, losing Mom. More than likely it was partly true that Dad was responsible for a lack of direction and guidance, but Charlie tried to make amends for Dad by doing right by me. And by me, he succeeded, but by his own estimation, he failed, if only in smaller, less ornate ways than our father.
Dad looked around and took in the farm: the lone crow perched on the cupola of the weathered red barn; the head-high corn tassled out behind it; the hogs ramming and biting at the runt. Like a traveler might regard his mother or bride one last time before leaving, Dad dragged his gaze over bails of wire and barrels of feed, the broken-toothed harrow, the sawed-off cow horns piled near the barn door. It was clear—with the car, the woman, the suit—that that’s what this was. A departure.
“Doctor Bob,” Dad said to me. “What’s the good word? When you head for the Mayonnaise Clinic?”
“Couple weeks,” I said. I wanted to be smart and tough like Charlie, but I couldn’t. I looked straight at him, afraid I was seeing my future self. Afraid, despite the fact that I was a doctor and he had not gotten past the sixth grade, afraid despite my knowing how to birth a calf as well as a human baby, afraid despite not having any woman to lose or sons to disappoint, afraid despite me being the only IU student bound not for Muncie General or Shelby County but for the Mayo Clinic—I was afraid I would become him. A sweat-stained crook in a cheap polyester suit trying to overcompensate with a flashy tie, another man’s younger woman, a ludicrous car bought with stolen money.
“Done me proud, Bob,” Dad said. “Hardly believe you’re my boy.”
“Me neither,” I said.
“When’s Sergeant Voorhees due back?” Charlie said. He wrung the handle of the spade in his hands as if he were churning butter. “Or’d he up and get shot and leave you his wife in his will?”
Charlie leaned conspicuously towards Millie, squinting and shading his eyes like a tourist gawking at the Niagara Falls. She glanced our way and then turned sharply to look out the window, nearly upsetting her little tea-cup hat.
“Wish there were time for such pleasantries, boys,” he said. He had one hand on his belt and I could see him testing it, guessing how much time it would take to whip it off and give us one last lesson. But he didn’t. “We’ve got to talk here a minute about the future,” he said. “We’re obviously all busy men so I’ll be quick like a bunny.”
Dad pulled his tie from over his shoulder, took off his gold wire-rims and started polishing the lenses. It was something he used to do often and I told him once he ought to use it in his insurance routines. He never much liked advice—all he wanted was an audience—and so he’d only said, “Not a bad idea.” There was no way of knowing if he used it in his spiels or not, but I wondered.
He rubbed at a spot on his right lens as if there were some indelible stain marring his vision, an imperfection in the glass. He kept polishing, looked up and said: “Sell everything—the land, the house, the implements, the cows, the hogs—everything. I’m sorry, boys. Everything.”
I did not like my father, nor did I love him, but he was my father and it was clear that we were about to lose him for good. I couldn’t have known for sure right then, but in retrospect it seems fairly logical the way things ended. Federal agents would catch up with Dad six weeks later, just as I’d be settling into my radiation rotation in Rochester. He’d be wearing coveralls, pumping gas in Valparaiso, Florida; Mrs. Voorhees would be back in Shelby County with her war-hero husband; the Cadillac dumped; Charlie bound for St. Joe for reasons I never knew and he probably didn’t either. Dad would be indicted, prosecuted and found guilty on some six hundred counts of insurance fraud. He would die a year later of undiagnosed bone cancer in a federal prison in Wisconsin, not a woman or an ear of corn within miles.
That last day on the farm, Dad looked past us at the hogs, squinting, I guessed, to see who they were picking on but unable to do so without his glasses. The pen was unnaturally quiet and I couldn’t see the runt for the other hogs either—I reckoned it didn’t much matter anyway. There’s always another one.
Dad finished polishing his glasses, put them back on and let the wind whip his tie around his neck.
“It’s not that I don’t want you to know why,” he said, “it’s that you can’t. There’ll be questions sometime and I don’t want you to be able to answer them. So what I’m telling you—about the farm, about everything—well, you’re on your own.”
Charlie and I were still. The wind swirled dirt from the fields and dirt from the hog pen and dirt from the road. Dad’s glasses were already dusty again.
“Buck up, boys,” he said. “All for the best, you know. All for the best, I’m sure of it. Positive. Gar-un-tee you. Come on,” he said, holding out his long hand. “One last time. Put ’er there. To your brave new lives.”
Charlie spat at the dirt between Dad’s wingtips and went into the house. The screendoor slammed behind him.
I didn’t move.
I looked at his hand—the way he held it out, palm down, so if I took it I’d have to slide mine beneath his. I looked at his hand and saw the index, middle, and ring metacarpals tenting the thin skin of the back of his hand. I looked at his hand and tried to be a son. I tried to do what he wanted. I tried to bring myself to just let it all go—the farm, the bitterness, the bucket that I held, too, and to take his hand. I tried not to be so cold. Not to be the radiologist I was forever going to be. The one who sees bones. The one who works in the dark. The one who wears heavy leaden aprons to protect himself from his own tools. The one who studies fractures. The one who reads blue-black films, clouded with streaks and spots and lines of white; the one who tells patients simple or compound, splint or cast, screws or pins. The one who looks at a man and sees no tissue, no muscle, no organ, no heart. Only bone.
I was a radiologist. He was a salesman. He was a teacher too, and he’d taught me well. He’d taught me not to buy his insurance.
I never did.