Batteries in Our Times

Dwaine Rieves

“A really great deal on batteries, you hear?” my father yells to me, his voice full of its old energy and a half-chewed biscuit. We’re eating breakfast, his attention on the television, mine on a newspaper photograph that captured President Obama at the groundbreaking of a new factory in Michigan, a battery manufacturing plant, as it happens. “A rebound from desperate times,” the caption says. I listen as the television commercial closes, the announcer shouting, “Limited time only.” My father snorts, nods in agreement. I like seeing him invigorated and, between his newfound energy and the president’s reminder of our desperate times, the morning seems perfect, if not providential, for a trip to the snazzy strip-mall farm supply store so my father can buy new tractor batteries, six of them. 

These days, my father does his best, as he calls it, “to keep up the place”—the place being two hundred acres of needy pastures and teetering barns. Before my mother died a few years ago, my father farmed the place and even some rented land, bush hogged and baled hay largely by himself. Now, he’s alone on the farm and, as my trip home last month taught me, he’s starting to hold on to things. Good batteries matter more than ever. 

I admire my father’s need to “keep up the place,” even if the purchase of six new tractor batteries strikes me as odd. Aside from the bulk purchase aspect, there’s the fact that his two tractors are used only to cut, rake, and bale hay for his cows and last year he sold the herd. “My kids made me sell out,” he told the neighbors who came to visit after his heart surgery. He still tells them that. 

It’s a new month and I’m home on a hot Mississippi morning, here once more to try to help my father. He’s eager and his stomach’s growling; I pull his pick-up close to the back door so he can shuffle directly from the air-conditioned house to the air-conditioned cab. I turn the vents toward his face as he closes the truck door and adjusts his portable oxygen to one liter per minute. He uses two in the house but one liter will work, he says. I imagine his other make-do situations—duct tape on a leaky watering trough, a single electric wire before the gaping hole in the barbed wire fence.  

The farm was always a sore spot in our family, mainly because my father seemed to value hay balers and breeder bulls over looming grocery bills and leaking toilets. Back then, my mother’s suppertime reality-check seemed indisputable to everyone around the table except the man at the head. Invariably, a new drill press or tractor tire trumped a balanced bank account. Still, we got by. 

It was no surprise that when my father retired from his day job twenty years ago, the farm was there to accept him as that full-time farmer he’d long wanted to become, a man free to discharge his dreams with more energy than six new tractor batteries could ever contain. Last year, on the very day he had his heart attack, a herd of postcard-perfect Charolais grazed over his pastures. He still shows the pictures to the neighbors who visit, those scenes captured before the surgeon bypassed his coronary arteries and scraped what could be taken from his carotids. Then a collapsed lung, heart failure and the final conclusion, “My kids made me sell out.” 

Son, I hate to admit it, but I think I’m gonna have to go to the bathroom as soon as we get there. 

Experience ripples through his voice as if he’s eyeing a gauge where the needle is almost, but not quite, in the red zone. 

I park close to the entrance of the farm supply store, open my father’s door, and help him out. He straps the oxygen tank holster over his shoulder while I hand him his cane. I walk alongside him, steer him through the store’s quick-eyed sliding doors. I know the bathrooms are in the back and he’s working to keep up with me as I lead the way. His crookneck cane taps the path, every wooden peck the latch of some insistent cog pulling him forward, a great wheel reeling him past the check-out counter, round the corner horse-saddle display. Here he pauses. Like that, he plants himself, rests both hands on the cane’s bowed neck, squeezes it tight. He works to breathe. Lips pinched, he issues shallow, face-changing breaths. Far behind us, two store clerks are collecting a customer’s cash while a man three aisles away picks among the brilliant metal bolts in a wall of machine part bins. 

My father is ashen, some kind of bodily, back-up power short-circuited, out of his control. He’s entranced by pain, staring beyond it, looking past me when he says, and he says it as if he can’t bear to hear it but must—

Son, I can’t make it. 

He sees it behind me, the needle in the red zone. Here in the middle of the fancy farm supply store where the cream-colored tile is kept pristine so the farmer-wannabes are dazzled by reflections of the nickel-plated horsewear and chrome, heavy-engine parts. My father clutches his cane as if this is as far as he can go, whatever energy he had this morning now completely dissipated. He stands inanimate as thick brown liquid oozes below the cuff of his pants, seeps down his left leg. As I move to his side, he turns his head and—with a voice powered solely by regret—says he needs to go to the truck. He turns, starts to waddle back to the front of the store.

“I’ll take care of it,” I say as I try to tactfully maneuver about, ready to steady him in case he sways too much. The brown goo pools in the back of his slip-on shoe, squishes as he steps. Brown spots mark his trail. “I’ll take care of it,” I whisper as a dusky red wave of humiliation surges across his face, as he suddenly ignores me and in an oddly energetic turn, steps away from my path. 

He rounds a corner, moves not to the front door but to the check-out counter where the men stand. I raise my whisper as I tag behind him. “I’ll take care of it,” I insist. I motion toward the truck. I’m sure he hears me, even more sure he’s ignoring me. I’d envisioned a quick retreat, the kind that suggested we’d simply changed our minds, maybe forgotten something in the truck. Once he was in the cab, I could quickly return to clean the floor before anyone noticed. Some toilet paper from the bathroom, a wad of paper towels. No one would ever know.

My father stands before the check-out counter. A man looks at him; several do. 

Mister…Mister, I’ve had an accident. 

I cringe as my father speaks. I wish he’d let me handle it, kept it a family thing. I have sisters;, we can handle him. My father ignores me. He sniffs at the oxygen until he’s consumed what he needs. The sales clerk is a concrete-cheeked man, serious as any farmer. He stands expressionless as my father explains. 

Sometimes I just can’t control myself. Spasms, they shoot through me, can’t help it. 

He says it clearly as if God and time were working out their disagreements within him, as if he had to explain the mess they’d made with his body, their illogical and desperate ways. He points his cane to the brown dollops on the floor, just as he might point to the kids who made him sell out. 

I can’t look at the salesman but I hear him, I hear him say he understands how bowels go, that his own father had problems like that. My father tells him he appreciates a good deal on batteries. Both hands on his cane, he leans on it, inching about until he looks at me, me watching him. 

Then he slowly trudges to the front doors where I’ve been standing. Far behind him, a young man with a bucket and mop swabs up my father’s accident. The man uses the bucket’s mechanical hand to squeeze the mop, and swabs the floor methodically back and forth as if this sort of thing happens all the time. He turns a floor fan to the spot, a yellow caution sign placed just so. The place properly cleaned, people amply warned. 

Back in the truck, I rev the engine because, even more than before, we need the air conditioner. I’m about to engage the gear shift when my father interrupts. 

Son, I’ll wait here while you get the batteries.

I look at him. I smell him. I want to see overwhelming desperation on his face, a justification for my inability to tell him we need to go home so he can shower and I can wash his clothes. Batteries, now? We’ll come back tomorrow or maybe I can return this afternoon. His face refuses the possibility. He’s determined, defiant. The desperation is solely mine. 

Six batteries, six nub pole pairs each, we need them all. 

I am silent. I obey. I return to the store, buy six new batteries. 

I turn on the radio as we drive home. As I turn the dial to country music, he says we saved at least a hundred dollars over what he would have paid at the Co-op. When I look at the batteries through the rear-view mirror, my eyes catch my father leaning contentedly against the door, his shoes full of shit and me trying to figure out why he had to have six new batteries for the two tractors that he no longer needs on a farm that can’t possibly continue. I think back to my first instinct to sneak back into the store and hide his accident from the world, to conceal all I could of his failing body—was I trying to protect him or myself?

At this point, I realize any embarrassment I’d sheltered wasn’t from the accident. After all, shit happens all the time, as any farm-supply store clerk readily admits. Instead it was the fact that my father had, despite my best effort to thwart him, announced his place in this world in a way that seemed as natural and proper as a pasture full of cows, the ones we’d made him sell. My father seemed to know I might hide his body’s failings but I could never undo them. And if those failings needed to be hidden, then they were his to hide, not mine. His lesson was trampled across the front of the store. My father and I had stepped through our desperate times, yet we’d now bought new batteries and here behind us was the potential for transformation of one form of energy into another, despite what time has done to us, a special deal.

Driving home, I’m not sure the country music fully camouflages the pain of our misadventure, but my father seems satisfied to eye the horizon as the fields and farms display whatever he needs to see. When a particularly weed-choked pasture rises before us, he nods his head in that direction as if to motion to me and the whole world what can happen if we let our places run down. 

Son, we shouldn’t have to see such things. But these days, I guess everyone does. 

I look closely at the neglected place before my father and I pass it. Once we have, I avoid looking back. Given six new tractor batteries and the dream of a new herd, so does he.