Black Chalk

Chad was smart as anything at school, I was so proud. But Frank wasn’t proud. I think it only made him jealous. Frank is a smart man, it’s true, he likes to watch the news and talk back, tell them what he thinks. He has all this knowledge, who knows where from, I certainly don’t. But once Chad was old enough he liked to talk back as well. But he talked back to his father talking back to the news. Anything Frank said was challenged. So that’s part of it maybe. And they didn’t just disagree on the news, they disagreed on everything. Even about facts, even about things as silly as the longest river in the world. So whenever they argued, Chad would bring back a book from school and point to the bit that, you know, said he was right all along. And Frank always said the book was wrong. Every time, the book’s wrong, the book’s wrong. The Webster’s Dictionary, the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Frank never thought Chad was tough enough, you know, that he wasn’t growing up to be a real man. Money’s always been tight around here, so Chad had to help out on the farm and he hated it. He’d rather be doing his homework instead, which to Frank was perverse, a kid who likes homework. So he gave Chad harder and harder jobs to toughen him up. But all Chad ever got better at was schoolwork. He didn’t even play sports except when he had to at school. Not that Frank was ever such a star but he did like to watch and offer his thoughts.

But this is just stuff, you know, and I’m not saying it makes the rest of it make any sense. But there has to be something to everything, doesn’t there?

Anyhow, you get the idea. They didn’t seem to like each other much and then Chad went to college. Well, with such a good scholarship it didn’t matter what his father thought. He didn’t need us for the money all of a sudden. And I don’t think Frank ever said well done. Probably not. But anyway, that was the two of them parted for a while and perhaps for the best.

When Frank heard Chad was to spend a year in England all he did was snort and say it figured. I didn’t even ask what that meant and if I guessed I’d rather not say.

One day Frank was clearing weeds and he thought he’d probably got rubbed by some poison ivy around the side of his forearm. Well, Frank never really suffered much from poison ivy and it didn’t really itch him much. I just rubbed on some calamine and thought nothing more about it. But then this blister wouldn’t go away. Even two weeks later it was still there. So I made him go see the doctor.

Well, long story short, it was skin cancer. Skin cancer on the same arm he always hung out the truck window, I won’t let him do that any more. I was terrified, you hear such frightening things. I mean, cancer. I think even Frank was scared, not that he would ever say anything. But he went and borrowed all these books from the library, that’s how I could tell. Every day another few. He must have been through hundreds. But Frank keeps it all in, you know. He’s just a guy like that, typical man. He wouldn’t even let me come with him to see the doctor.

But they’d caught it and so they arranged to remove it and that’s when Frank agreed we had to tell Chad. Because how was I supposed to cope with everything? A husband with cancer. This place hardly makes enough for the two of us, we couldn’t hire any more help. And Chad wanted to be here anyway, that’s what I think. He may never have loved his father, and maybe he had no reason to, but we taught Chad right from wrong.

So he came back and took over the running of this place. We thought maybe a year would be long enough, we told him, just for a year. And he may not have liked the work but he knew what to do. The two of them even talked more than before. And while Frank didn’t want to tell me anything, Chad would ask him questions, so at least I learned a little that way. I didn’t even know there were different types of skin cancer until I heard them talking, right here at this table over dinner, Chad’s first night back. It’s a melanoma, Frank says. Now we have to wait and see. Chad tells him not to worry and not to think about doing anything. Frank says he feels fine but Chad insists. Tells his father he’s long earned a rest and he should save his strength. And I was so proud of him, you could see it just the way he held himself, my little boy all grown up. It was like when our daddies returned from the war, came back men.