It Goes without Saying

Cara, his oldest daughter, wiped Jim’s chin after he finished his soup. “It will do you good,” she said. Then she proceeded to do his laundry.

“I’m sorry to be so much trouble,” he said as he sat in his recliner. He looked out the window at robins gathered on the lawn and she worked without complaint. A tree grew at the edge of the yard.

“Don’t worry. That’s what families do.” She pulled a blanket up to his chin.

“You’re a good daughter,” he said, but she shrugged her shoulders.

Her family was a family of farmers, the ones who gave themselves to the land. They toiled long days in fields and came home to eat and rest for the next day. They were saving the land for their sons and daughters. It was understood. It was understood that they’d care for each other. But two years ago, he sold the farm and now lived at the edge of town.

If she was looking for a way to describe him, stoic would be the word. And proud. She wondered if he was proud of her. People on their farms didn’t talk that way.

Cara washed the dishes and rushed off to make supper at home for her husband and daughter.

The radio played a familiar rock song, one that she and her husband heard when they first met. She was studying education and the arts. Life to her was Act One: grow up, Act Two: marry, and Act Three: die. It’s what everyone in her hometown was bound to do. It was inescapable.

Yet she was interested in Act Two, to see what would happen between the time she would marry and the time she would die.

Cara had moved back to town after getting her Bachelor’s degree and now was teaching at the grade school. Her husband, Todd, was a child welfare worker in the city forty miles away. It was here in her childhood home where they were making their lives. Yet a voice said, You can’t forget your past.

She asked if there was anything else she could do, and he shook his head. “You know where you can reach me,” she said.

Rich black loam glistened after frost melted. Her father said that it was the richest in the world. A good crop could provide a good year for the family. A lean year and they would have to tighten their belts. She had seen both, but her father made sure to care for them. Now it was her turn. She looked toward the sky and saw her mother. “Don’t worry; I’m taking good care of him.”

When Cara got home, her husband said, “Sunday, we can take him for a drive.” He was standing in front of the stove, making dinner. She went into the living room and closed her eyes. He stepped into the room and said, “You’re burning yourself out.”

“But I’m helping my father. That’s what families do.”

On their Sunday drive, the landscape passed like a dream. Puffy clouds floated lazily in the sky while two streams of white smoke rose from a power station. She remembered days as a child when she could make clouds anything she wanted. Lambs, lions, she’d say and her father agreed.

She turned to look at him in the back seat, where he closed his eyes and smiled. How he loved something as simple as a Sunday drive, she thought, but she was unsure of how many more Sundays she’d have with him.

“Stop,” he said. They pulled to the side of the road, and they stood at the edge of a field. A tractor hummed as it pulled a disc and kicked up a cloud of dust. “It’s a new growing season,” he said.

Kara held his hand. “I know, Dad, I know.” She knew how much he missed working the land. “How, I wanted to give this all to you,” he said.

Her husband stepped next to her and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “We’re fine,” she said. Her mind’s eye saw a figure of her younger self running across a pasture, running free.

Two sets of jet contrails streaked across the sky. “Things are changing,” her father said.

When she was a child there was always talk about wars, but she always felt safe on the farm.

She remembered the summer nights when she sat with her uncle, and they watched hour-long television shows and The Beatles. She turned to her husband. “All was good back then.”

Her father gasped. She turned around to see his face was pale. Todd stepped on the accelerator and rushed to the nearest hospital. Two attendants with a gurney rushed him inside. Cara followed them and cried.

The hands on the clock in the waiting room stood still as the doctors worked on him behind closed doors. Thoughts flashed through her mind that there was so much to do with her father and say to him before he’d die. She paced the floor, although Todd reached out his hand while sitting next to the wall. “How can this be,” she said.

Behind a closed door, doctors and nurses she never met were working on her father.

“Please save him,” she cried out. “Things will be different.”

Todd stood up in front of her. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’ve done all you could for him.”

One moment, she cried out, “He’s my father.” In the next, she wondered if she knew him at all.

Todd went to a cooler and got her a glass of water. He pointed at a chair. “Sit,” he said.

Scenes of a police chase on city streets flashed on a television screen. They didn’t mean much to her now. All she could think of were the times she spent with her father on the farm.

Todd reached out and held her quivering hand.

After three hours a doctor came out and told them her father survived. She gasped.

“You can see him for a moment, but make it short,” he said. “Your father needs his rest.”

The orderly pushing the gurney stopped in the hallway, and her father turned to her. His face was drained of color as he looked at her. She noticed his pale, blue eyes. His mouth opened as if he was going to speak, and she knew there was so much to say, so much to tell. Yet the words caught in her throat.