My father was wrong about many things. A World War 2 veteran, he supported the war in Vietnam. He didn't believe that all people deserved the same rights. And he thought that the Yankee Democrats should leave President Nixon alone to do whatever he wanted. That the communists owned the press in America. JL Jobe was a racist, a fascist, and he chased women throughout all five of his marriages. There was one thing he was right about.
The previous James Lee Jobe, known as JL, believed there were chemicals in our processed food; preservatives especially. There was too much sodium and sugar, too. All of this in an era when the food companies weren’t required to list ingredients on the packaging. This, JL would preach to anyone who would listen, is why America has so much cancer.
Fortunately, JL had enough room to grow a lot of produce, so much that he had to give a lot of it away, which he enjoyed doing. He was a generous fascist. There was a deep freezer large enough to easily hold a couple of bodies, something I thought about when watching him and my evil stepmother. That was for meat.
So we grew tomatoes, potatoes, okra, melons, green beans, and peas; just about everything that will grow in East Texas. Split beef with relatives or neighbors, maybe one or two of them hunt, and share deer, turkey, wild hog, and small game with us. We had chickens, and JL fished a lot, and he was quite good at it. Bass and catfish, mostly. We ate well, and it was very cost effective.
By the time my father died in 1980, America knew the food was messed up, and regulations were put in place. Old JL was right to eat the way he did. Of course, he was wrong about everything else, being a Jobe and all.
I am watching my own ghost till my father's garden. The tiller is very old, pre-World War II, and my ghost struggles to keep it running. And it isn't my living face I see on this ghost, it is my death face, and so I look more like my father than ever before. Our ghosts could easily be one ghost, as if we were sharing something that should not be shared, as if we were each becoming more like the other. In death I feel like my father, and somehow I do indeed become him. I am the both of us, and in death I struggle in the same goddamn field where we both have struggled in life, working and sweating under the hot Texas sun, only now the sun is also dead. And the field is dead. Death is everywhere, I see that now. Death is in the air we breathe, death is in the water we drink. We have indeed shared that which should not be shared. My ghost raises his hands from the tiller and we all start to fade and disappear. My father, our ghosts, and me.
It was another ordinary day, walking in my father's long shadow.
for William Lee-Jobe, my son
Crows were watching, they often do.
The sun was white-hot and rippled with fine torso muscles.
The world sprang upwards toward my sullen footsteps.
My heart beat as it should, my lungs breathed in and out, in and out.
We had hoed the weeds from the hard rows of tomatoes and beans
and okra like men of the earth.
I felt like a man of the earth, a man of the soil, even though I was still a boy.
My father did not like physical displays of affection between us,
and I often felt that he did not love me,
but on that day I reached up and took his hand anyway.
And that day, that rare day that I will always remember, he gave me his hand,
and then finally, his most private smile.
It was another ordinary day, over 60 years ago.
Crows were watching, they often do.
I was walking in my father's long shadow.
james lee jobe