Paternal Leave

Paternal Leave Caroline Gioiosa (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Giuseppe Penone, Maritime Alps. My height, the length of my arms, my width in a stream, 1968. © 2023 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. [End Page 76] On a purple evening, my father buried himself alive. He wasn't the first. It was a craze that swept the nation, a broom brushing dirt over the heads and bodies of dreamy Americans. But no one took the endeavor as seriously as my father. Earlier that year, an ex-boxer outside Inglewood, California, had interred himself for fifty-eight days and made national news. ABC aired the whole burial, down to the funerary rites, and then they spliced in a clip of the boxer doing push-ups in his cushioned coffin. My dad watched the sweat drip down the man's forehead on our TV, then called the radio station to inform them that he would bury himself alive for sixty days. The best camera crew my dad [End Page 77] could snag was from the local NBC affiliate. But if my father could beat out the boxer for time spent underground, his story would headline the news, I was sure, maybe even statewide. Now my dad ate his last supper—bacon, two hard-boiled eggs, a glass of raw milk—in front of spectating townies and the TV crew. At one point he sipped too audaciously, and the milk rode down his long, barren face. My mom frowned. "He looks like he needs a bib," she told me, her nose puckered. "It's unattractive." My dad went straight from the dining table to the casket. His racquet club friends carried his coffin from our dining room the whole six blocks to the Morrises' backyard, which was really an empty plot that stretched from the side of the road into the desert hills. Neighbors shoveled scoops of dry soil over his grave and around his two pipes, one for ventilation and one for viewing. I leaned over the ugly, half-buried thing to write down his last words, peering through the periscope. The scope framed his face, like a Victorian locket does a portrait miniature. Peter Carson, the youngest Carson brother, stopped digging and placed his hand on my dress sleeve. He said, "Hey, Jackie. I've got good money on your dad beating out the world record with this stunt." I put my ballpoint pen to my reporter's notebook, shaking his hand off me. I'd met Peter in fourth-period Journalism. He wasn't so talented; he managed to misplace his modifiers when announcing the start of football season. We went on a couple dates in the cafeteria. I taught him ledes and inverted pyramids. That weekend we made out in the backseat of his VW Bug. "Would you describe this burial as 'spirited' and 'sweat-inducing'?" I asked. "I think it's hard work and difficult," he said, nodding. "'Hard' and 'difficult' mean the same thing," I said, writing them both down anyway. "But at least we're burying him at the end of August. The night is temperate. The wind dries your sweat." I squatted in front of his shovel and rubbed the dirt between my fingers. "Do you think this dirt looks like cocoa powder?" [End Page 78] "It sure doesn't feel like cocoa powder," he said, leaning on his shovel so it tore deeper into the ground. "It's got roots. Why?" That morning, after class, I'd told Mrs. Redfield that the story of the year was buried right in my own backyard, or at least in the Morrises' backyard, or not a backyard but a slice of land. "I'm writing a feature. If Dad stays underground long enough, it might be my senior project," I said. "That sounds real smart. Your dad's about to be a star, I think." The sun dimmed, darkening Peter's cheeks into beetroot. In my notebook, I wrote down: ground espresso; hardened brown sugar; an ugly shitmound in the middle of a sweaty field. The rest of the grave was filled in the dark. ________ in fact, the nbc affiliate...