Heat of Memory

It was the hottest day of the year.

Bart Horton shifted slightly from his perch on the end of his patio sofa. He could feel sweat pooling beneath the area of his thighs that weren’t covered by his shorts. His neck, back and the space between his chest and belly were also wet. This despite not moving from the sofa for the past couple of hours. It was just too hot not to sweat.

It was also too hot to do much of anything, Bart felt. He didn’t wake up that weekday morning with a plan of doing nothing, but it was working out that way. He wanted to pick up assorted items around his yard, including a lot of twigs removed from trees by a storm three days earlier. That remained his intention as he ate a bowl of cereal for a late-morning breakfast, but various inputs began to conspire against his agenda, even his will to carry it out.

The old home Bart had lived in for the past 14 years didn’t have air conditioning. “Never had it when we were growing up and we won’t need it now,” he had said to his wife Martha when stating his preference for this rural home.

It was the outcome of their search for a scaled down, retirement home after Bart’s 37 years at the TV manufacturing plant had come to an end. He and Martha had lived since the mid-70s in a typical, suburban cookie-cutter home with relatively small lots. They had raised their daughters in that neighborhood, alongside other middle-class families. The girls, and of course everyone else’s boys and girls, had grown up and moved away. Bart and Martha stayed well into the second generation of families making the Windspring subdivision home.

But with some decent investment returns and a growing unease at their increased unfamiliarity with the neighborhood, Bart and Martha began to want a new setting. The younger families in the area seemed to keep more to themselves. Bart could elicit a wave or obligatory greetings when he tried to engage his newer neighbors, but little else. The Hortons’ longtime friends from over the years had either moved to winter-free climates, died, or just drifted away.

Martha wanted a smaller house to keep, and Bart loved the idea of buying a country home as kind of a life’s achievement; a culmination of his labors. They had looked in smaller towns not too far from their old home, but when he saw the old one-story with a long and narrow yard, nestled between some farms and old houses on much bigger lots, he knew he wanted to live the rest of his days there.

Martha raised various objections as she always did, Bart remembered: They weren’t accustomed to drinking well water; the county snow removal service didn’t get rave reviews from local residents; and this house didn’t have air conditioning.

While Bart’s appeal to some nebulous early-tech nostalgia didn’t really persuade his then wife of 44 years, the boyish enthusiasm he had for wanting to buy the home did. She relented in fairly short order and the couple moved in two months later.

The heat on days like this, and they were seldom this hot, had a way of dominating Bart’s thinking. From the moment that morning when his favorite TV weather girl (“She has nice knees,” he would tell his daughter) had called for temperatures in the mid-90s with a heat index over 100, he started noticing the warmth and began thinking through a filter of an 83-year old man who was warned regularly, including the night before by one of his daughters, that heat could kill.

‘People are so dramatic,’ Bart would think. ‘We never had air conditioning, and we worked inside and out in the heat all the time and you didn’t hear about heat stroke.’ Bart had a theory he had never quite fleshed out that society had developed a dependence on air conditioning that had made people soft.

But on days like this, Bart showed the heat total respect.

He chose the sofa on the front porch as his sitting place on these days. There wasn’t really a breeze outside, but Bart felt the space allowed the air to move at least a little, while in the house it was mostly stagnant. He didn’t like fans running, even though there were three of them in the house. “Those were for Martha, but for me they just kick up a lot of dust – plus have you ever seen the wattage a fan burns through. Right through my billfold,” he finished with an oft-repeated punch line.

“Some things are worth paying for,” was his daughter Jessica’s comeback to him. Jess lived near Atlanta, and Bart would frequently ask how she “could stand it down there. It’s too hot and too expensive.”

And too far away from home was the added, received inference. Jess had moved away when her husband Wes took a lucrative job, but when the couple split up, she chose to stay in Georgia where her job was, where her children had their whole lives.

They squabbled over the phone, but only in the context of true affection. Bart had a true soft spot for Jess, and course was always eager to hear more about his grandchildren, Shea and Micah, who he felt didn’t really know him.

Bart and his younger daughter, Katelyn, had a much more placid interaction, but in truth were not as close. He didn’t like Katelyn’s husband Cade very well and try as they might, the two mostly failed to avoid flare-ups during the times they were visiting, either at Bart’s house in Indiana or Cade and Katelyn’s home near Denver.

Bart had brought three bottles of water out to the porch, and he was midway through his second when Craig pulled into the driveway from the county road. Bart grimaced a bit as he didn’t really feel like talking with anybody, but he’d grown to like Craig at least a little, do-gooder that he was.

Craig was in his early 50s and retired on a military pension after two tours of combat duty. He was part of an evangelical church in the city that had opened a recreational center or gathering place or whatever they called it, for senior citizens. “The Old Folks Home without bedpans,” one of the seniors who attended, called it. Bart laughed at that. But despite his wariness over what he expected were the proselytizing motives of Craig and the rest of the church in opening the center, Bart did still come into town from time to time to play cards and eat lunch with fellow retirees.

“How are you, Bart?” Craig called out as he climbed out of his Jeep Cherokee. “Are you beating the heat?”

Bart felt Craig had a habit of forcing himself to put on a happy face. He didn’t think he could really be all that cheerful spending his time around a bunch of old fogies. “Earning points with the Almighty,” is how Bart described Craig and the others from the church who would come and provide lunches and other things.

“It’s pretty hot,” Bart allowed. “I’m just being a good boy and taking it easy.”

“I called a couple of times to see how you were, but you didn’t pick up,” Craig said.

After a slight pause where Bart considered saying something snarky about Craig not being his keeper, he replied “Oh, right. I heard the phone buzzing, but it’s all the way in the house. I didn’t want to go in there, with my knees and all. Besides, it’s damned hot.”

Craig gave a somewhat blank expression in response. Bart really didn’t swear much at all, a product of sweet Martha’s disapproval of “potty-mouth language” she had called it. Bart did seem to make a point, however, to swear at least once whenever he was around Craig. He thought about this sometimes and decided it was a way to make sure Craig knew where he really stood when it came to church and that kind of stuff.

“Well, I’m glad you are OK. That’s what I drove out here to see. Are you staying hydrated?”

In reply, Bart held up his half-empty bottle. “Don’t worry, Brother Craig. My daughter is on me all the time about drinking a lot. I tell her I’m going to start drinking beer again and say it’s my new plan to avoid heat stroke, but she doesn’t think that’s funny.”

Craig gave a half-smile.

“Well, it’s good that your daughter cares about you,” he said. “God puts people in your life to help you out. We all need friends you know.”

“Oh, I know,” Bart replied. “I need people I can beat at cards. That’s why I come to the center.”

Craig laughed, probably out of obligation Bart thought. As he climbed back into the Jeep he encouraged Bart to call him if he needed anything. Bart gave a slight wave and smile.

The vehicle pulled away and Bart again remembered the extreme heat. He pulled his t-shirt off and cupped his hands to try and wipe some of the sweat off his torso. His thoughts immediately turned to Martha, who used to hate it when he did this.

“Bartholomew Horton! All you are doing is just smearing your sweat over your body and making your hand stink! Go inside and use a towel or take a shower.”

Bart grinned at the memory. He usually did this when Martha suggested it, but today was extra hot and he was actually a little tired, and besides, Martha wasn’t here anymore to scold him.

Martha Crandall was a sophomore in high school when Bart, then a junior, met her. She was friendly enough to him at first, but when kids gathered in front of the courthouse on Friday and Saturday nights, she seemed to keep her distance. This of course felt like a challenge to Bart, and he began inventing reasons to cross paths with her, at school, at the bakery where she worked, and even rerouting his bicycle route home from baseball practice, so as to go by her house on Third Street in their hometown. She wasn’t always outside but he always hoped she would be, and eventually they started having long talks in her yard. They became sweethearts, “Bart and Mart” their friends called them, and were married shortly after Bart got out of the Navy.

Martha wasn’t particularly outspoken, but she was no pushover in family matters. Jess had told Bart once that she would probably still be married if she had learned to fight without yelling, “The way Mom did.”

Bart looked out at mostly empty flower bed. Gardening was definitely Martha’s thing. Some of the perennials were still around, but he didn’t really know what to do, and she wasn’t here to enjoy it anyway.

At the height of Covid, Bart and Martha had remarked how lucky they were to have stayed healthy. Bart reckoned that not being overweight and having quit smoking 40 years earlier was a big help for them. He had a heavy cold or something at one point but was never tested and declared that it wasn’t Covid.

They thought that had emerged from the pandemic unscathed, but Martha started coughing one day in late 2021, and six days later died in the hospital.

Bart stared blankly at the garden, then lifted his eyes out toward the yard and up to the horizon. It was getting to be late afternoon, and he was starting to feel hungry. He had some leftover tuna salad in the refrigerator that he wanted to eat before it went bad. He thought for a second that he had been sitting on the sofa for nearly five hours without really moving.

His knees creaked as she stood but he struggled to stand and shuffled into the old, empty house, thinking maybe he should make an exception and turn on the fan.

It was, after all, the hottest day of the year.