Crest of the Ilium

In the memory care unit, my father’s room smells like pee and he’s curled in his bed like a lab monkey. God stands at his bedside, strokes my father’s yellowed hair. God tells me when I’m my father’s age I won’t be able to express my bowels either.

Me, I see my dad swimming laps in the natatorium at the college, my sister and I with towels around our shoulders, shivering in the stands and drinking the orange sodas he bought us.

Me, I can still remember him flipping off a cop when the cop’s back was turned. Or when he caught a foul ball one-handed at old Busch Stadium, standing up, a scorer’s pencil in his mouth like a cigarette, his throwing hand on my chest to keep me safe. There was the time when I walked upstairs from our basement, half asleep, and found him in the kitchen putting glasses away. “Who are you?” I asked, disoriented.

“Who are you?” he asked back, strong and smiling and handsome.

*

“Crest of the ilium, brother,” God tells my dying father, who’s watching him out of one eye, passively, beyond the reach of worry. “Block him at the hip. Pancake the sorry son-of-a-gun.”

My jaw cracks and my tinnitus holds the world’s highest note. It’s late. The tv is on. I can hear the staff clearing tables in the dining room that smells like gravy.

Me, I’m trying to remember where the verses about heaven are in the Bible and wishing again I hadn’t lost my father’s self-winding watch, the Bulova Sea King, with the small black whale and the magnified number in the date box.

Soon enough my father will die in December. And I’ll have to decide to bury him in O-hi-o. But I’ll give the mortician his best blue suit and the maize tie I’ll buy at Macy’s. My cousin will bring a bag of dirt she dug from consecrated places in my dad’s hometown in Michigan. From his high school football field. From the lot where Sparta Baptist used to be. From the apple orchards where he and his two brothers hunted pheasants. From the house where he lived with those brothers and their six sisters, his mother who went blind, and his father, a welder.

All of us will reach into the bag to take a clod. Crumble it on top of the casket. I’ll be the last. His only son. An honor guard will play “Taps” but not “Hail to the Victors” because I lost the nerve to ask, and when we drive away, my father’s ghost will be standing in a shallow stream at the bottom of the hill, one foot on the bank and one bare foot in the water, his pant leg pulled up to the knee, his hands wringing a six iron, his eyes on the target: here’s to his greatest golf shot.

But before that happens, I have to get home. I leave my father for another night in that place. I roll the windows down. The summer night air is musky. A minute more. I hear screech owls in the woods and coyotes howling in the soybeans. The world is all ears. Can’t I smell the juniper bushes? The goldenrod? Those are tree frogs.

Crane your neck out the window and look up, God says. Behold! Japanese beetles flying into a lone mercury light over a basketball hoop. Behold! Swallows doing figure eights in the infinite sky. Every sparrow that falls! He says. Every hair on your daddy’s head! He says.

I check the car’s side mirror. The lights are still on in my father’s room.

I check again just to be sure.