“Let me show you somethin’.”
Dad dragged himself from his weatherworn rocker to the porch stairs. He refused to use the handrail we installed earlier that year when it was clear the stroke hadn’t taken all his mobility and teetered down the steps like a child learning to walk – ready, always, to fall.
“Jesus, dad, let me help you.”
He lifted a hand and waved me off, the motion nearly sending him off balance. As his feet reached the grass, he slipped off his loafers and walked barefoot.
I suppose dad had the reputation that most dads get in the summer months, when the grass grows faster than the number of flies on shit. But dad had another fascination with grass, one I wouldn’t ever really understand, but would get a window into after he died.
I followed until he stopped where the grass was unmown and grew long, looking out on the back acreage. “Grab me a blade of grass, sonny. A good, thick one.”
I watched him questioningly, worried another stroke was wiggling its way through his brain, then picked a bright green blade for him. It must have hurt, knowing he was at that point in life where he couldn’t bend down. I held it out and, taking it, he looked it over before pressing it between his crooked thumbs.
“Get yerself one too, and put ‘er like this,” he said with outstretched hands that shook so bad I thought he’d drop it.
I picked one for myself and matched him, tilting my thumbs to show him. Then, he put his thumbs to his face and blew. It took him a go or two – a couple wispy exhales where I worried he would pass out – before the high-pitched squeal of the whistling grass cried out around us.
He nodded to me, gasping for breath in heaped pulls, and I took my turn, feeling the buzzing blade against my lips. We stood there that afternoon, sweating and swatting flies in the back acre, whistling grass.
I was thirty-one when he showed me, though I had known how since Emmet Hendrickson had done it on the playground in grade school. Dad already knew I could, and I often wonder why else he wanted me out there that day.
That’s the last real memory I have of him outside of hospital beds. Couple weeks after that another stroke came, hit him harder this time, and he never really came back.
After mom passed some years later, I inherited the house and the land – so when the police came around, they looked for me. Of course, I had heard about the case, you don’t grow up in a small town without getting razzed in school about living in the local ‘murder house’. But a podcast, Midwest Murder Club, cast the case back into the spotlight, and national criticism over a messy investigation in ’72 brought the police knocking.
Midwest Murder Club claimed new witnesses swore my dad dated the girl, Trina, a month before her murder. Along with the record of him purchasing the property she was discovered on led the hosts to speculate my dad had somehow been involved.
The police returned with a warrant and searched the place. It took my wife and I days to clean up after them, longer to get over the strain put on our marriage. They didn’t find whatever it was they were looking for, and the case, for all I cared, went cold once more.
Then, when we were expecting baby number two and ready to sell the place for something a little bigger, I found the baby book. Childhood pictures of me taped on yellowed pages beside yearly trivia documenting things like how tall I was and what movie was popular.
And in the middle of the book, a small envelope the size of a key fell into my lap. I opened it, expecting it to contain something like an old hospital bracelet or a receipt for a baby blanket, but when I tapped it against my hand, a brittle, flattened piece of grass fluttered out, its tip stained brown.
I sat there with that desiccated blade of grass for I don’t know how long, thinking of dad. I pictured his heavy hands ripping it from the ground, smothering it between his thumbs, and blowing until he was red in the face and his lips were crimson with blood splatter and its scream pierced the air.
After some time, I took it in my hands, this terrible delicate trophy, and nestled it between my thumbs. And I blew; blew as hard as I could, letting every bit of air leak from me until my head pounded and my face twisted and I cried holding a silent blade of whistling grass.