Buck’s Father and Persistent Memories From the Past

Robert “Buck” Jacobs stared Robert Henry Jacobs’ tombstone. Bucks parents were buried next to each other but his father’s site was still covered in dirt. The funeral was so recent that grass hadn’t the time to grow over it.

He stood looking down at stones in his blue jeans and a old t-shirt. It was an unusual attire for him and contrasted the three-piece business suit that he typically wore at work in New York. But he wasn’t in the city right now, he was upstate in his hometown and had been for a week. But if things went well for him today, then Buck would get out of this dump before three o’clock. He was looking forward to the drive. It meant escape, and getting taking his fast car on twisty back roads.

The boy shifted from third to fourth gear. He looked up and saw the sedan in front of him hit their brakes. He pressed in the clutch and shifted back down. The gears ground together in a disgusting CRIIISH sound. The car in front of him stopped braking and sped up. The boy depressed the clutch not waiting to engage third gear. He pulled the stick towards the back of the vehicle landing back into fourth where he had started. Buck pressed the gas, and the truck crept forward. It wasn’t going anywhere fast, but he would get up to speed eventually.

He saw the red flash of the letters GMC pass in and out of the driver side mirror. The large SUV passed him with a blaring horn and a haunting hum. “Don’t worry about him, Buck. Just keep going.” His dad said from the passenger seat.

“Why do I have to learn manual dad?” Buck whined.

“Why would you learn anything else?” His dad responded dismissively.

“Because literally, every other car is easier to drive.”

“Shift.” His dad said in a managerial tone. The man waited as Buck pressed the clutch in and pushed the stick from fourth to fifth gear. Once the gear was engaged, his father began to speak again. He spoke educationally, drawing out the points “You can’t go through life only doing what is easy. Once you learn this, every other car will be easy for you to drive. You’ll be able to drive circles around your friends, and when you eventually turn twenty and want to buy a sports car you’ll be driving it far better, and safer, than all your friends that buy theirs.” He dad paused for breath and prepared to start part two of his three-part speech.

“Never mind.” Buck interrupted, “I get it. Where am I supposed to turn?” He asked hoping his father would drop the lecture and save the both of them the inevitable fight.

“Take a right at the next intersection. Then you’re going to go a ways until the area gets residential. Why don’t you know how to get to grandma’s by now? She’s lived in the same place your whole life.”

“I don’t know.” The boy shrugged while slowing down for the turn, “I just don’t pay attention to these things.”

“You have to pay attention to these things Buck. You can’t just go through life ignoring facts you don’t deem important. It’s my job as a father to teach you the things you need to know while you’re still a boy. But, sometimes, I feel like you don’t even listen.” His father continued the lecture for the next ten minutes until they got to their destination. He occasionally picked the speech back up over the next twenty years of his life. At least the parts of the 20 years that Buck was involved in.

The tombstone was engraved with his father’s name and lifespan and the words, “Those we love don’t go away, they walk beside us every day.” There was nothing on the gravestone that said he was a good father, loving husband, caring son, or thoughtful friend. These were facts that Buck assumed people visiting his father would know. If they weren’t aware, then Buck figured a piece of rock wouldn’t convince them. He could have added something about being a gardener, an avid reader, and a lecturer but neither of those fact seemed important enough to catch in stone.

Buck hadn’t put much thought into the words either, someone else wrote them, along with 500 other gravestone acceptable phrases that he thumbed through less than a week ago. And as he had searched for the words he had wondered, Why didn’t dad prepare these kinds of things beforehand? As a boy the man had seemed prepared for everything. Robert Jacobs Sr. spent more time worrying about minimizing risk than he did actually living life. At least that was his son’s opinion.

Unlike his father the son had left his hometown, gone to the city, and become a successful investment banker. It was hard work, but Buck was excelled at it. He was eager to go back to work, and he would be returning home soon after settling the man’s accounts. Inevitably it would all go to him. His father didn’t have any siblings, and Buck’s mother passed away two years earlier. Buck figured he was an orphan now, but at 36 these kinds of things didn’t seem relevant.

Buck looked at his Rolex and saw that only five minutes had passed at the grave-site. Why did I even come here in the first place? He wondered. He remembered being bored at the house and thinking that sitting in front of the grave would be better than staying in the empty room. But he had assumed wrong. Buck pulled the keys to his black Nissan 370Z out of his pocket and walked away from his parent’s graves.

The car sat low to the ground and the door had to be opened carefully to make sure that it didn’t scrape the curb. Buck pushed in the clutch and started the car’s six-cylinder engine. The dials in front of him swept from one end of their spectrum to the other. His radio lit up and started playing hip-hop from his speakers. He shut it off after the first verse, speeding out of the graveyard’s parking lot, shifting smoothly from first to second. Once he was out on the road, he shifted up to sixth gear and weaved in and out of the daytime traffic.

“Here’s your allowance Buck,” his father said as he handed the boy ten crisp one dollar bills. The boy snatched them greedily. The man left his hand waiting in front of the ten-year-old. When the boy went to put the money into his pocket, the man added with a cough “You always have to save half of your income, in case of emergencies or to buy something important like a house or to go to college.”

The boy reluctantly placed five of the one dollar bills back into the man’s hand. “Why do you give me all the money if you’re just going to take half away?” The boy asked curious and annoyed.

“Because if I just gave you half, you wouldn’t practice putting half of it away. If you think it’s hard to save five dollars then what are you going to do with fifty or fifty thousand.”

“I might have fifty thousand dollars one day?” The boy asked.

“If you work hard and keep saving then yes, you might. But it won’t be from me.” The man said with a laugh.

His father’s lawyer, Mort Aronowitz, told Buck how much the man was worth. After the funeral expenses and such Buck wouldn’t have much left over, maybe enough for a short vacation, not that he took many vacations from work. All the dead man’s accounts were signed over to his son quickly and without question. Then a lockbox was brought in from the back of the bank.

“He wanted you to have access to this too,” Mort said through his nasal cavity. Buck opened up the box, there was another couple hundred dollars in small bills, some legal documents such as the old man’s passport, the deed to Buck’s childhood home, and the title to the old truck Buck learned to drive on.

In the back was a stack of papers and behind those were some rings and jewelry. Buck started to remove the valuables and examine them. Some of it he recognized as his mother’s jewelry. He had memories of her wearing it on special occasions. Some of the jewelry he had never seen her use. Who owns jewelry they’re not going to wear? Buck wondered to himself. “Do you know a good jeweler that I can take these to sell?” He asked the lawyer.

“No,” he said, “Besides, I don’t think anyone around here would afford them.”

Buck was disheartened, this meant that he would have to cart the junk back to New York with him and find a jeweler there. Inevitably he would be too busy with work to find one, and the jewels would sit in his house for the rest of his life. Maybe Buck could gift them to a girlfriend of his. Is it sacrilegious to give your mother’s jewelry to a woman you’re not married to? he thought. The jewels were placed in a velvet bag that the banker had brought with the box. Buck stashed the cash in his wallet and picked the stack of papers.

The sun beat down on the back of the boy’s neck. And the floppy had his father made him wear was making his long hair sweat. Buck pulled out another weed from the garden and threw it in his trash bag. “How much more do we have to do?” He asked his father.
The man got off his hands and kneeled facing the boy. “We have two more beds back here and then the front yard.” He answered with a grin.

“It’s Saturday dad,” the boy pointed out before he could continue the man interrupted.

“Exactly and Saturday is the day we spend time working on the things we care about.”

“But I don’t care about this, I want to be at Rodger’s playing video games.”

“Well, thanks for your honesty son. But, I care about these vegetables, and I care about you. That’s why we’re spending the day together pulling weeds.” The boy shrugged with a frown. “You know,” The man continued drawing out the syllable, “One day this might not be important to you, and then you won’t have to do it, and you will simply buy your fruits and vegetables at the store like everyone else. But until then you get to do this with me. And if I do my job right you’ll know how to do this and other things that are important but be successful enough to not have to do them unless you want to.”

Buck rolled his eyes and returned to work. The boy didn’t want to do the chore, but he knew it would end his father’s lecturing.

Buck thumbed through the thick stack of white pages and saw that it was a manuscript for a novel his father had written. He didn’t even know his dad had ever put together a manuscript. It dated before Buck was born. Reading the first page, Buck saw a title that fell flat in his mind. The dreaded of browsing the man’s long and raw prose filled his mind. It was more likely that he would take the time to sell the jewelry than read the unpublished book. He passed it to Mort, “Can you throw this away from me?” The stack of papers hung limply in the air between the men.

Mort looked surprised, but since he was a decent lawyer, the expression quickly faded. “Of course son that’s easy. But are you sure?”

The son looked across the table at the lawyer and then at the stack of papers in his hand. “You’re right, it is easy. I’ll do it.” He then gently slipped the manuscript into the velvet bag rolling the edges to get it to fit. Buck checked his Rolex, it was 2:59pm, his luggage was packed in his car, and the gas tank was full.

“Anything else I can help you with?” The man asked getting up from the table.

Buck followed the man’s lead and grabbed his own bag. “Nope,” Buck grinned then added, “Unless you know how to transfer a pepper plant out of a garden.”

“No, can’t say that I do,” The lawyer answered as the two men walked out of the bank and into the afternoon sun.

Buck didn’t know if the plant would survive on his city apartment. But, it was the only living plant he had seen in his father’s garden. “That’s fine,” he said to the lawyer, “I think I remember how to do it.” Then thanked the lawyer for his help and shook his hand. He unlocked his sports car and climbed in, prepared to make one last stop before going back to the city.

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Photo Credit: Visual Hunt, Visualhunt.com, David Villarreal Fernández, Visual Hunt, saidunsaids, VisualHunt