
Heber by Kent Quaney
A narrow winding creek cuts through flat plains of sagebrush. Slender elms line the banks beneath granite cliffs still topped with snow in summer. The term “American Alps” gets thrown around about this place but never feels right, the western desert too near, sand and scrub too present to allow any real European sensibility to take hold. Still, Heber has silly homages to Switzerland here and there. A giant cuckoo clock fronts a pockmarked faux chalet advertising schnitzel and strudel. A mini Matterhorn, wire mesh pushing through torn plaster, tops a roadside motel.
The original architecture of the town is more solid: red sandstone churches and halls, brick and timber houses, two and three stories, some modest, some massive, the biggest and grandest built by my great-great grandfather Abram Hatch, his house now a bank, a stately main branch, where members of the family are given the courtesy of free access to the upstairs rooms still furnished with the original credenzas, cabinets and four poster beds of boxelder and mahogany.
A few blocks away, the city cemetery, dabbed with granite spires and crypts, sits directly under Mount Timpanogos, the second highest peak of the Wasatch range, shaded by Utah pine.
I park along the narrow drive just past the iron gates. I am here to complete an errand, a task I’ve been set by my sponsor. The ninth step in recovery is to make direct amends to those we have harmed, and here is where I will speak to my father.
It feels too conveniently dramatic to claim that my last words to my father were “I hate you,” but they almost were. I was nineteen and already a drunk, down for the weekend from college, and my dad had picked me up at the bus terminal. The old arguments had revved up moments after he started the car: my grades, my drinking, my rejection of the church. A cult, I said, a refuge for the stupid and cowardly. He had stopped arguing, driven on in silence. I stomped straight to my room from the garage. A month later, my mother found him sprawled on the floor in my sister’s bedroom, dead of a heart attack.
I hadn’t been able to process it then, had gotten right back to the business of drinking myself into academic suspension, followed quickly by expulsion, but I meant to do something about it now, meant it wholeheartedly. Address the past. Take responsibility. On advice, I had written a letter, and I walked between the headstones to where he lay buried near some second cousins I hadn’t known, his headstone flat because of new laws restricting structure height, this section treeless because of a new commitment to respecting the natural landscape.
I pulled the letter, quarter folded, from my back pocket. “I know I have harmed you,” I started, “that what I did was wrong,” or some semblance of those amends speeches I’d heard in television and movies, the gorgeous Hollywood actor or actress earnestly expressing the addict’s desire to change.
But instead of connecting to his spirit, the words fell to the ground, dull, thumping, like a mallet hitting wood. This was supposed to be transformative, but I felt nothing. Felt stupid, in fact.
I walked away from the grave, into the older part of the cemetery, toward massive pines and spires, the tombstones of another time: Janice and Kent Crosby, grandparents who I had loved so dearly, their shared monument at a tilt, tree roots beginning their work. Doc Hyde’s roughly chiseled tombstone next to all his thirteen children and their spouses. The towering granite obelisk of Abram Hatch, twelve feet tall, just wide enough to hold his body, as my sister was sure it did when we were younger. And I knew that the past was done. I knew that I belonged. That we both belonged here as a part of something bigger than either one of us. Bigger than the town. Bigger than these mountains. My family by blood, his by marriage, but ours. Together.
The only words I needed then, were “Thank you.”
Kent Quaney’s novel, One Breath from Drowning (University of Wisconsin Press), recently won the Brodie Award for fiction, and his short stories and essays have appeared in BULL, Literally Stories, Polari, RiversEdge, and other journals He studied creative writing at the University of Sydney and the University of Southern Mississippi Center for Writers, and is currently Coordinator of Creative Writing at Auburn University Montgomery.
9 January 2024
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