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By Root 397 0

it was airplanes. “Oh!” he’d say at the first sound of an engine overhead. “Whassat?” And then he’d stand stock-still, watching until the engine faded and the plane was gone. He came by that innately, because he certainly wasn’t pointed to it by the ground-bound farmers who raised him. At one point John slips away, and I see him kneeling before the toys, carefully tipping the tractors over backward, one by one, until every single one is sitting nose in the air. Leanne remains at the casket, stroking Jakey’s hair and greeting the mourners one by one. How thin and pale she looks, and yet she will not sit or turn away. A tall man leaves the line, approaching her with tears in his eyes, and I recognize him as her fire instructor. Just over two years ago he marveled when Leanne completed her firefighter’s certification test in full turnout gear, Jake riding in her belly.

We stand there, brothers and sisters by blood and otherwise—Suzanne has come, and Don and Migena, and Kathleen. Donna and her husband Grant have come to care for Jane, allowing Anneliese to be by my side. I reach for her hand much of the day. And of course there are young ones everywhere, clambering in the pews, running in and out, hollering happily as they play tag beneath the churchyard swings.

That night Jed and I are on his lawn, talking quiet in a pair of canvas chairs, leaned way back to watch the sky all thick with stars. Now and then a big jet passes above us, so far up as to be silent. When Jed worked late in the shop across the yard, Jake would hang out with him, dragging big wrenches across the concrete, riding his plastic tractor in circles, and just generally getting grubby. He’d stay happy at it so long Jed says time would get away and when they walked to the house it was dark and Jake would want to stop and say good night to the stars. He’d pick out those blinking lights, Jed said as we watched another silent airliner slide across the sky. You can imagine the two of them then, faces to the heavens, the little boy with his finger extended, tracing a light seven miles high.

“I was wondering if you could rewrite this,” Jed says, digging a folded and refolded piece of paper from his jeans. “Kinda smooth it up.” It’s the eulogy. “I want to try to read it,” he says. “Prob’ly won’t make it, but I wanna try.” I pocket it, tell him I will do.

We talk past midnight. Jakey was a little roughneck, and not at all retiring. But whenever they looked at the stars, Jed says, the boy spoke in a whisper. He’d point to the moon, Jed said, look up at me, and whisper, cookie.

It is a short walk down the road to my father’s farm in the dark, and beneath the stars I think of Jed and Jake hushed there in the yard, and I wonder, what does a child sense, that he would address the universe in a whisper?

I let myself in quietly, but my parents are both in their recliners downstairs, Dad dozing fitfully and Mom reading her Bible. I power up Dad’s computer and unfold the eulogy. It is written in ballpoint, in a scraggly but readable hand, and the more I read, the more I realize there is little for me to do. I retype it anyway, stopping to bawl between lines, but in the end I alter maybe four words.

There is humor—the story about Roger teaching Jake that one end of the cigarette is hot!, and how Jake made chain-saw noises when he cut his food. The line about Jake and Jed spending their time either working, goofing off, or goofing off working. I recognize my brothers in that. There is more, but it is not mine to share. When I reach the part where he tells about Jakey whispering to the stars I bawl again, and knowing Jed will never make it through, print an extra copy for the minister. And finally I climb the stairs to bed, to one of my childhood bedrooms, and stare straight up in the dark. I am remembering that before Jane was born, I was talking to a friend about how it was when he went from one child to two. “Love expands,” he said, “to fit the need.” I am wondering if grief can do the same.

Jed reads the eulogy straight through. When he nears the part about the