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By Root 417 0

Sienna, a beautiful three-year-old girl. It was good to see the new little family at popcorn Sunday nights, with Jed smiling again. In time, a baby came—Jake. Jakey, we called him, or sometimes Jaker. Jed will tell you that first year wasn’t easy. That he second-guessed the whole idea of babies. But by that second year Jake was toddling, and he became Jed’s constant companion and mimic. When he picked up even the lightest object he grunted comically, like Daddy did. When he took a swig off his bottle, he followed it with a breathy, overacted “Aaahhhh!” just the way Daddy taught him. In my favorite photo of the boy, he is in the back of Jed’s truck, surrounded by chain saws, hard hats, a plastic tub of bar oil, scattered wrenches, and Jed’s firefighting gear. His diaper is low-slung and dirt-scuffed, and his little hands are grease-lined as any mechanic’s. He is hatching a grin like he has come to know the whole wide world, and in the shadowed background Jed is standing with the driver’s door open, looking back at his boy, holding him steady in his gaze. I shot the photo on one of those cheapo disposable cameras. Somewhere along the line the camera wound up under the seat of my car, and it was a year or so before I found it again, covered in lint and fluorescent orange Cheetos crumbs. We shot up the rest of the roll and sent it in, and when the pictures came back, there was Jakey, only by that time Jakey was gone.

Jakey died, and there is no poetry in it. When Jed’s wife died, I asked his permission before writing about it. This time I can’t even bring myself to broach the subject. The night is scalded on our souls, and I am not going to tell much. Everyone tried so hard, beginning with Jed, who pulled Jakey from the farm pond just moments after the boy disappeared. There was still a heartbeat, and Jed and Leanne worked together to revive him. They are both members of the local fire department, and later they would say their training just kicked in. Soon they heard sirens, help coming the way it always has in rural settings—from friends and neighbors suddenly turned rescuers. Then the ambulance came, and then the chopper, and when it lifted away with Jakey inside, the fire chief put Jed and Leanne in his truck and drove them the forty-five miles to the hospital. I was waiting outside the emergency room when they arrived, and what I will remember forever is Leanne running to be with her little boy and the solid feel of my brother’s muscles even as he sagged in my arms.

Everyone worked so hard, and we were in the little room with Jake for a long, long time. We knew there was little chance, and at the end there was none. In the hallway I saw firefighters, paramedics, nurses, the emergency room physician—everyone in tears. Mom and Dad had been traveling toward the middle of the state when they got the call, so we all gathered in the open air of the parking lot until they arrived, and Jed and Leanne got in the back of their car and everyone went home.

While I was driving to the hospital, Anneliese had called our neighbor Ginny to come and sit with Amy and Jane. Both of our vehicles were running on empty, so coming home from the hospital we stopped for gas. While the pump ran I was standing beside the car feeling the absolute weariness grief brings, and when I looked up across the fuel island to Anneliese, our eyes met and I saw the very same weariness in her. There was something in that moment—on the concrete under the false light, the anonymous cars coming and going all around but our eyes wordlessly speaking—that reminded me why I love her and how. In her weariness I saw compassion.

When we got back home the children were asleep and Ginny was at the kitchen table. We told her Jake was gone, thanked her, and she left quietly. Her husband Ed, the man who tilled our pig patch, had recently been diagnosed with cancer. She knows grief of her own.

Upstairs, we looked in on Amy, wrapped in her sheets. And then I went to the crib and bent down, listening close in the dark until I heard the silken thread of breath, in and out,