Farm Road 581

“This is it,” he says, turning the steering wheel of his gleaming white sedan. We pull up to a dilapidated old ranch house twenty miles from the end of nowhere. This is where he lives, the house he moved into when everything went to hell, Mom filed for divorce after thirty-eight years of marriage, and he lost everything.

I step inside the house and I’m confronted with relics from the old house clumped in haphazard configurations, in unfamiliar rooms.

He lives amongst old dusty remnants, tattered and beaten pieces of furniture that are not even arranged in any particular order. Here and there are old family portraits sitting on the floor, propped against walls, and pictures of loved ones who’ve gone forever: his brother, his father. He sleeps on a rickety old twin bed that used to belong to someone else, and the only other objects in his bedroom are a TV and a rusty, rocking lawn chair from a house he used to live in.

This is the man I used to idolize as a boy. Sundays were spent barbecuing fajitas and tossing around the pigskin in the front yard, and every Saturday he’d wake up at the crack of dawn (as he did every day) and pick up a box of donuts for me to greedily consume while watching the cartoons.

Every once in awhile, his cousin—kindly known in family circles as “Crazy Cousin Gustavo”—will resurface from some godforsaken Mexican desert town and crash with him for a couple of months. Gustavo—once a brilliant engineer—lost his job and family about twenty years ago, went completely insane, and was never the same again, although now he is medicated and “doing better.” These two sad and broken old men sputter around south Texas like a modern day Don Quixote and his Sancho Panza, fighting windmills that don’t really exist.

These phantom enemies finally ripped apart his life a couple of years ago. He had alienated the entire family with his behavior after the death of my baby niece, and had later mounted a paranoid crusade against my brother’s wife. Fed up, my mom filed for divorce, and against his violent protestation and threats, sold the old house and bought a new one, hoping to start over.

So there my father was, a 65 year old pharmacist without a job and without a home. Without anything. He wound up moving into this old ranch house that belonged to a family friend and that was pretty much abandoned. It is a vast, lonely brick building surrounded by nothing but fields as far as the eye can see and an enormous empty sky overhead.

Dad notices me solemnly staring at our old furniture, but he just says:

“Sit down, I want to show you something.”

After turning on the stove, my father proudly pulls out the official documents that declare his reinstatement by the Texas Board of Pharmacy. He is working again, making a shitload of money, cranking out 60 hour weeks at age sixty-five.

I listened and nodded, like I always do, but thinking that he seemed happy and like he was finally back on his feet again after all the troubles: the divorce, being practically disowned by his children, losing his pharmacy, having his reputation tarnished by his enemies, the dark and shadowy figures on which he blames his downfall, too blind to see it was all his own doing.

I couldn’t help it: after all we had gone through and all he had done to us, I knew I had forgiven him without even trying. Almost despite myself. I sat there, listening to his stories, old and new, and eating the food he had cooked for me. He said that most men would have blown their brains out if they had to go through what he had gone through, and I couldn’t disagree. And I thought, if I have half the fight in me my father does, I am going to be all right, no matter what.