The Dock
Halfway through the Meeks family reunion, my mother-in-law pushed my sixty-eight-year-old father off the dock.
She said later it was a joke. She said it about a hundred times.
I was standing three feet away when it happened. I saw her hands go flat against his back. I saw her lean into it. I saw Dad’s arms go out, the way a man’s arms go out when the ground isn’t where he left it.
Then he was in the water.
Dad came up sputtering, waist-deep in the brown water beside the dock.
Uncle Wade’s farm pond is maybe an acre and a half, out past Buffalo, Missouri, in a dip between two hayfields. Cattle drink from it. It’s the color of chocolate milk in July, with a slick of green along the edges and a bottom of soft mud that swallows your feet to the ankle.
His light blue button-up shirt was wet up to the chest. The one he wore to church. He’d worn it because it was a family thing and he wanted to look nice. The water came up past his belt buckle.
He stood there blinking, with pond water running out of his gray hair and down his face.
His hand went to his left ear.
Then his right.
Nothing there.
Forty people at the reunion went quiet at once.
All the Meeks cousins and aunts and uncles and kids, spread out across Uncle Wade’s yard on lawn chairs and blankets and the tailgates of pickups. A few seconds earlier there’d been music playing on somebody’s Bluetooth speaker and kids shrieking on the slip-and-slide and the smell of brisket smoking on the hill.
Now there was nothing. Just the speaker playing Alan Jackson to nobody, and the cicadas, and my father standing in the pond with both hands pressed to his empty ears.
Cindy stood on the dock behind me, holding her paper plate.
Potato salad and a deviled egg and a slice of watermelon. She hadn’t even set it down to do it.
She was smiling.
“Oh, Leon, lighten up,” she said. Loud, so everybody could hear. “It’s July. You needed cooling off. You should’ve taken them out.”
Somebody on the bank laughed. One of the teenage cousins. Then stopped.
Dad looked up at her from the water. He saw her mouth moving. He couldn’t hear a word of it.
I didn’t think. I got down on my knees on that dock in my yellow sundress. The one I’d bought at Dillard’s for the reunion, because I wanted to look nice too. The boards were rough and wet and I felt them scrape my knees.
I reached down for his hand.
“Dad,” I said. “Dad, here. Take my hand.”
He looked at my face. He couldn’t hear me, but he could read my lips. He’s been reading my lips since I was a baby. He took my hand.
His hand was shaking. My father’s hands don’t shake.
He’s sixty-eight. His name is Leon Pruitt. He climbed poles for the Southwest Electric Cooperative for thirty-eight years. Through ice storms and tornadoes and summer heat that would cook you inside your rubber gloves. He’s been up a pole in a lightning storm with forty thousand volts three feet from his face, and he’s never once lost his footing.
He doesn’t fall in ponds.
He doesn’t stand in the water with his hands over his ears looking lost.
I pulled. He got one foot on the bottom rung of the old wooden ladder Uncle Wade nailed to the side of the dock. Then the other. Water poured off him. His good church shoes squelched.
I got him up onto the dock. He stood there dripping. He looked down at me, and then he looked at the water, at the spot where he went in.
“They’re gone, sis,” he said. Too loud. Way too loud. Everybody heard it. “They fell out. They’re gone.”
Chapter Two: Walking the Bottom
Josh was up the hill helping his uncle with the brisket when it happened.
He’d been up there for an hour, him and Uncle Wade and a big black offset smoker Wade built out of an old propane tank. Josh is good with a smoker. He was slicing the first brisket when he heard everybody go quiet, and he looked down the hill and saw my dad standing on the dock, soaking wet.
By the time he ran down, I already had Dad out of the water.
He came across the yard at a dead run, still holding the brisket knife. He stopped at the end of the dock, breathing hard.
“What happened?”
I didn’t answer. I looked at his mother.
Cindy was still standing there with her paper plate. Some of the cousins had come down to the dock. One of the aunts handed Dad a beach towel with a cartoon shark on it.
“It was a joke, Joshie,” Cindy said. “For heaven’s sake. Everybody’s acting like I shot him.”
Josh looked at his mother. Then at my dad, wrapped in a shark towel, with his hands still going up to his ears every few seconds. Like he couldn’t believe they were really empty.
“His hearing aids,” I said quietly. “They were in.”
Josh closed his eyes.
He knew what they meant. He’s known my dad almost as long as he’s known me.
Dad lost most of his hearing on the job. Thirty-eight years around transformers and bucket trucks and chainsaws and generators will do that. The co-op made them wear earplugs after about 1995. By then it was too late. By the time he retired, he couldn’t hear the phone ring. He couldn’t hear the TV unless it was so loud the neighbors complained.
For three years after he retired, he just quit hearing things. He quit going to church because he couldn’t hear the sermon. He quit going to the café in the morning because he couldn’t hear the other men at the table. He sat in his house in Buffalo by himself.
Then, three and a half years ago, I made him go to an audiologist. I drove him myself.
The day they fitted his first pair, he cried in the parking lot. He said he could hear his own footsteps. He hadn’t heard his own footsteps in fifteen years.
Josh and two cousins walked the pond bottom with their bare feet until dark.
Josh, and his cousins Travis and Cody. They stripped down to their swim trunks and waded out to where Dad went in. They walked in a grid, slow, side by side, feeling the bottom with their toes. The mud came up to their shins. The water came up to their chests.
They found a fishing lure. A green plastic worm on a hook, probably lost by Uncle Wade in about 1994.
They found a beer can. A flip-flop. A rock that Cody swore felt exactly like a hearing aid until he pulled it up.
Not the hearing aids.
I knew they wouldn’t find them. I knew it from the first minute.
I work in a dental office. Dr. Heller’s office, on Main Street in Bolivar. I’m the office manager. I handle the insurance, the billing, the scheduling, the patients’ complaints. Part of the job is knowing what equipment costs and what kills it.
I know what water does to anything with a battery. Even if they found them, they’d be done. Pond water, mud, bacteria. The little microphones and the circuits would be ruined in minutes.
Dad had paid four thousand, one hundred dollars for that pair. Three and a half years ago.
I knew that because I helped him write the check. He’d been saving for two years. Out of his co-op pension and his Social Security. Fifty dollars here, a hundred there, in a coffee can in his kitchen. He brought the coffee can with him to the audiologist and counted it out on the counter.
They came with a loss and damage warranty. Three years. If you lost them or broke them, the manufacturer would replace them for a deductible.
The warranty ran out at three.
Six months ago. 