Hope

I guess I’ve thought of hope as a positive, uplifting sort of thing. Like: “We can all hope for a better future,” or “All hope is not lost.” Well. Hope lies.

These were the last words my brother wrote in his journal before disappearing last Tuesday. He would probably turn his mouth sardonically if he heard my mom tell the neighbors, “We’re all hoping Charlie will turn up. We’re not worried. Not yet!” last night when they brought over a green bean casserole. 

Gross. Charlie was right. Hope lies. 

I could barely stand to listen to all the positivity surrounding the disappearance of my step-brother, Charlie Rhodes, and all the energy everyone put into finding him alive. Intact. Safe. I knew Charlie was dead the minute I read the journal entry. That’s why I hid it under my mattress. No one was going to see his sacred last thoughts. No one. They were for me only.

The Sunday before Charlie disappeared was like most Sundays in our house. We were awakened at about 6:00 a.m. to Johnny Cash’s voice blaring on the stereo. His full, rich tone, was always a little shaky and ever-so-slightly off-pitch. This morning, he was singing one of my step-dad’s favorites, “I Walk the Line,” so we woke up hearing:

I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.

I keep my eyes wide open all the time.

I keep the ends out for the tie that binds

Because you're mine, I walk the line.

Funny. He uses that phrase a lot as a warning to us, usually just before he menacingly removes his belt: “You’re walking a line, Zander, and you’re about to fall off!”

Yea. That whole “tie that binds” thing, him being my dad through marriage, means my mom lets him discipline me. Nice, huh?! He’s a keeper.

At any rate, Charlie and I share…shared a room. Bunk beds. And when Chuck, who always insisted I call him “dad” (even though he was not my real dad, not even close), would play Johnny Cash at 6:00 a.m., we knew the day’s tone was set. We were going to be miserable. Cutting wood in the forest, shoveling shit in the barns, plucking dripping wet chickens on the rickety bridge, weeding the one-acre garden. You name it. We did it. We did it when and how Chuck, Dad, told us to. From my list of “chores,” you might think we live on a farm. Nope. We are all just immersed (dunked, actually), in his fantasy. Chuck grew up poor, really poor. In fact, his only happy childhood memories were of spending time at his uncle’s farm in the summer. In his mind, that farm represented self-sufficiency, control over his environment, and complete freedom to do whatever he wanted. Now. years later, he made sure we had the same experiences. Whether we liked it or not. 

What a messed-up concept of freedom. 

On this particular Saturday, the work on our ten-acre hobby farm consisted of taking a hoe into the horse pasture and digging up the thistles sprinkled throughout the ankle-high grass. Luckily, Missouri in May isn’t super hot yet, but by 10:00 a.m., we would still have take off our shirts to get relief from heat. 

The thistles, though, were just Act One of Chuck’s sick play, which involved fully uprooting the thistle and placing it in a pile. We were to keep a count and were to make sure that the thistles’ roots were completely out of the ground. We wouldn’t want them to grow back so we would have to do it all again a few weeks. 

Why he didn’t use one of the many toxic chemicals he kept in the unlocked shed to eradicate the things, I’ll never know. I guess 

rdering us around, or barking orders, or feeling superior. Take your pick. He often says, “Always something to do on a farm! Idle hands. Devil’s work and all that.” 

He wasn’t really a farmer, though - just a wannabe. I mean, we were sort of “farm-ish.” We had three horses, two beef cattle, numerous chickens, and a large garden, all on ten acres of land in rural Missouri, but old Chuck traveled to the city every weekday to his big job at a chemical company. He had to make sure the herbicides and pesticides his company made were approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). He was good at his job. Very good. In another life, he might also have made a good lawyer or even a doctor, but that would have required being able to understand people, at least a little bit. He didn’t. He knew what he knew and was very smart, but he didn’t get people -- probably because he only cared about himself.

If you think I’m being harsh, you are right. Old “Charred Chuck” of the burned-up heart was a real pleasure to be around. 

After we had dug up around one hundred and thirteen thistles exactly, it was time for Act Two: shovel horseshit out of the barn onto a wagon. The temperature was already 80 degrees by the time we stopped piling up the sticky weeds, and we were already sweaty and shirtless. What’s more, our hands had little pokes and scratches all over them because Chuck didn’t give us time to grab gloves before he shoved a hoe in our hands at 7:00 a.m. 

We knew the small barn would be hotter than hell and smell like straw dust and dung, but what else could we do? We were 13 and 14 years old, lived 20 miles from anywhere, and Chuck knew how to make our lives utterly miserable if we stood up to him. 

So, at 10:00 a.m., after we’d gulped iced water out of the red and white Igloo cooler, dirty from sitting on the poop trailer, Chuck gave us each a shovel and told us to empty the disgusting contents of the barn into the trailer backed up into the opening. 

My shovel had a “bite” out of the end due to rust and corrosion. It must have been about 50 years old -- purchased at some farm auction last year. It didn’t work very well, and I kept forgetting about the missing piece on the left side, so every time I scooped up a load, half of it fell off before I could make it to the trailer. He had given me a piece of shit with which to scoop up shit. 

Charlie thought that was hilarious, and he kept saying it over and over again. He was entertaining that way - always making a joke about our situation to lessen the pain. This day, he made my misfortune into a song, singing: “The old piece of shit gave an old piece of shit to the little piece of shit who had to shovel the shit. Doo-doo-doo doo. The old piece of shit gave...” He held his shovel horizontally, kicked up his feet like he was at a country hoe down, and put the words to an old-timey country tune like Johnny Cash would sing. He laughed so hard and kicked up so much barn muck that some of it flipped into his mouth, causing him to spit and sputter, and fall back against the filthy barn wall to prevent himself from falling and covering himself in mud and shit and straw.

I was not initially amused. I was hot, frustrated, tired, and angry -- just another Sunday at the Rhode’s place. But then, I started singing the song, too, and laughing even harder than Charlie was laughing. His laugh was contagious in that way. So were his eyes when he was truly inspired, like now. They were lit up, despite turning even darker brown, as if to say, “Yea, I’m a sick weirdo, but you love me for it!”  Tears were making brown tracks down our dirty faces, and if it weren’t for the bird that fluttered quickly out of her nest and through the window to the outside, startling us, we’d probably have collapsed with joyous, awful exhaustion into the utter nastiness at our feet. 

After the hilarity died down, we realized we had wasted precious work time. When Chuck came back to check on us, he was ready to drive the trailer to the garden where he was going to dump it and spread it for fertilizer (again, didn’t he have chemicals for that?!), Unfortunately, we were only half done. He glared at both of us, shook his head, and said we had ten more minutes to finish up, or lunch wasn’t going to happen. Ten minutes! We worked our butts off. By the end, our arms were burning with the strain of picking up as much on our shovels in each scoop as we could and loading it into the trailer. My shovel still sucked, but I figured out how to make it work. No more laughing. No more singing. Fun time was over. 

Chuck was true to his word. He had returned after ten minutes, and amazingly, the barn was mostly shit-free. I guess that was good enough for him, so we threw in some fresh straw, hopped on the pile in the trailer (we were so filthy by then, it didn’t seem to matter that we were sitting on a big dung pile), shovels in hand, and rode to the garden, where we unloaded the same mess. 

Even though we had just completed a very un-appetizing activity, we were starving! It was finally lunch time, and we had 30 minutes before Act Three of Chuck’s little five-act play, which was a typical, full Sunday for us. We rinsed our hands in the garden hose because my mom didn’t want us tracking a mess into the house, and sat down in the grass to eat ham sandwiches. 

This may sound cheesy, but that day, while we were eating ham sandwiches and chips with our e-coli hands, was just about the most peaceful, 30 minutes Charlie and I had had in the past month. Things had been rough around the old “homestead,” and there hadn’t been many opportunities to take a breath and be ourselves.

After we inhaled our food, we lay back on the grass, and Charlie made up another song with the melody from our morning wake-up call, which he whisper-sang so Chuck couldn’t hear him.

I keep a close watch on his cold, charred heart.

I want to make a great big whopping fart. 

Right on his head so he won’t forget, 

because he’s mean, that’s what he gets…

Then, as if on cue, he farted so loud that the dog, who had been laying next to us, jumped up and ran away. I lost it! Gross, yes. Hilarious, absolutely! It was noon, and we were already exhausted with nothing to look forward to for the rest of the day except Chuck barking orders at us. Potty humor was Charlie’s “go-to” for alleviating stress, his specialty, you could say. He was so good at it, though, and so creative that you sort of didn’t mind. So, like always, it wasn’t hope that kept us going that day, but Charlie’s brilliant ability to make up disgusting songs and to produce (on demand) a great big smelly old fart.

The rest of the day went downhill from there, and now, Charlie was gone.