Babe, I’m Going to Leave You
by Jeremiah Tolbert

Led Zeppelin had a song called “Bron-Y-aur Stomp,” on Led Zeppelin III. Dad had it on 8-track when we were kids. He liked to drum on things; it didn’t matter what the thing was. But when that song came on the 8-track, he would bang on the steering wheel with the palms of his hands, and the whole car would shimmy a little to the rhythm. We all joined in. My sister would hit on the metal ashtray in the back of the seat with a pencil to get the spoon sound. I always made the jug sounds. My brother would just hoot like a wild animal. I never remember that the song has words. We made so much noise, we could never hear them. I looked them up a few days ago.

Well if the sunshine’s so bright,
Or on our way its darkest night
The road we choose is always right, so fine.
Ah can your love be so strong
When so many loves go wrong
Will our love go on and on and on and on and on and on?

If our family had a song, that was it. We listened to it on the way to the lake and back every summer. Which I guess is appropriate, knowing that the title means “golden hill.” There’s something very summer about that.

And Dad died at the beginning of the summer. That’s another aspect of the pattern I am beginning to see.

He had been dead for twelve hours. I sat at his desk, using his computer. I don’t remember why, now. I remember that it had finally stopped raining, though it had rained for the past three days straight, a heavy rain that flooded the country roads I had to take to get to his house. I remember bawling on the lawn the day before, and seeing two long-feathered black birds chase a coyote across the yard in broad daylight, something that I had never seen before in all of my 27 years of life in rural places.

I remember telling my step-father that I didn’t believe in God, and that while it was great that everyone else did, and it was a comfort to them, it didn’t matter for me, this was it, and my father was about to die and I would never see or speak to him again. I remember most everything about that time, except why I was sitting at the computer.

A stack of CD-ROM disks cluttered the space between myself and the monitor. One had no label, and from examining the burned side, had very little data on it. I put it in the machine.

A media player opened, connected to the internet, and labeled the single track.

It was Led Zeppelin’s “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You.” I let it play. At 1:43 seconds, you can hear Plant say, “I can hear it calling me” just before he sings the line “hears it calling him.”

There was a funeral the next day, or the day after. They made a video out of photos throughout his life and set it to music. I remember two of the songs: “Dust in the Wind,” by Kansas, and his favorite song, “Stairway to Heaven,” by Led Zeppelin.

My little brother came late. He went in the room with the video, while I sat next to my great grandfather, 92 years old, outliving all of us one day at a time. My brother hurried out with a look of misery and tears worse than any pain I had ever given him as an older brother. I had never seen anyone hurt like that, not even at my grandmother’s funeral the month before.

The video repeated over and over again while his ashes sat in an urn on a podium, next to a book of my stories, with a dedication encouraging him to beat the cancer, a fishing pole, a pool cue, and several photo albums.

I was driving somewhere in the rain, in the dark. My sister had called, but I couldn’t pay attention to her. I couldn’t see in the rain. I was focused on the road, but then she said something, and it dragged my attention back to her voice.

“What?” I asked.

“I saw him on the foot of my bed,” she said.

I didn’t say that I thought she was insane. Grief drives you mad, they always say. It’s one of the stages of grief that they always talk about. What they don’t say, what nobody ever told me, anyway, was that you don’t go through the stages just once. Sometimes, they repeat. Sometimes, stages come back for no reason at all. My sister sounded like she was in the denial stage again.

“He looked at me and smiled,” she said. “He said, ‘everything is going to be okay.’”

“Bullshit,” I said. “He’s dead.”

“Kara comes home and the lights are turned on,” she told me another time, talking about our step-mother. Before Dad died, I thought of my stepmother as a stern woman who came between my father and me more than she brought us together.

Now, all I think of is the woman I found crying in the closet, standing among my father’s blue work shirts, as bewildered and confused as the rest of us.

I was driving during this conversation too. I am always driving when I talk to my sister. It is only raining sometimes.

“She just doesn’t remember turning them on,” I said. I didn’t believe any of them. If it were true, and that could happen, then why not me? If not me, then not anyone. They’re all mad, I thought. Grief does that sometimes.

“I bought a new car,” Kara said. “I knew it was the right thing to do, sitting in the dealer’s office. Your dad told me.”

“How?” I asked.

“Stairway to Heaven came on the radio while the dealer gave me time to read the contract by myself,” she said.

I didn’t ask why my father told my stepmother that it’s okay to buy a car when I have been dreaming about seeing his back, and only his back, for the past three nights. I asked him questions, questions for which I needed his advice, dilemmas that only he had the experience with which to help, like should my wife and I try to have a baby this soon, or should we wait? How do I change the brakes on my car? Questions that I never asked because I had assumed he would always be there to answer them when I did finally need to ask them, even though I knew he had cancer. In my dreams, he never turned to face me, and I sobbed harder than I ever did while awake.

I didn’t ask why he spoke in the songs of a band from the 70s, even if it was his favorite band, and I didn’t ask if she was taking her anti-depression medication.

I said, “Oh.” And then I changed the subject to something else, and I don’t remember what that was.

“We’re engaged,” said my little brother Nick through the cell phone while I stood in the line at Wal-Mart, waiting to buy a computer game. I hadn’t written anything in months, and I needed something on which to spend my newfound spare time.

“I wanted to ask you,” he continued. “I don’t want to pick between my friends, see, and well, I was hoping you could be the best man.”

I wondered, for a moment, if he would have picked Dad. “Are you sure?” I asked him slowly. I didn’t want to be his best man. I didn’t want to be anyone’s best man. I didn’t want to be a stand-in for our father.

“Yeah, I’m sure. We haven’t set an exact date, but we’re thinking April next year. Can you make it back home for it?”

“Sure,” I said. “If you really want me to.”

Christmas. My wife and I sat on the couch in Kara’s new house. The old one was too big and too expensive for her to afford all on her own. She moved closer to my sister, to see the granddaughter more often.

I hated it there. Pictures of him hung everywhere. In my home, there were no pictures of my father. I still couldn’t look at them without seeing the frail body of an Auschwitz victim in that hospital bed in the middle of his living room, the 52 inch television towering behind him. Still couldn’t remember him there without thinking about the last words I ever heard him say, mumbled so badly that I couldn’t understand them. The words had to be translated by my sister, who worked with the physically disabled. “Keep the boat out of the rain and it’ll be okay,” he had said, she had said. He was talking to my stepfather, to whom he had given his boat a week before. I was jealous, but it was no good to me, living in Wyoming, practically a desert.

We tried not to talk about him at Christmas. Everyone was still bruised. But we couldn’t avoid the subject entirely without seeming disrespectful. “I want you to have this,” Kara said. She handed my father’s complete Led Zeppelin CD box set to me. Then, remembering, she opened it, and took out a yellow post-it note that was stuck to the inside of the cover. It said, “I love you!” in her handwriting.

“I’m keeping this,” she said.

“Sure,” I said.

She made a joke. I don’t remember what it was. We laughed politely, my wife and I.

We left an hour later, to stay with my sister and her husband and little Tarina. Like me, she had no photos of Dad hanging on the walls, and I could sleep there, at least for a little while each night. Especially if I took my Xanax.

Later still, I had a dream where I was hugging him, for hours and hours, and doing nothing else. He smelled like his old cologne, and he was wearing one of his flannel shirts, the red one that was burned into my memory along with the feel of his mustache against my cheek.

Somewhere in the distance, Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” was playing.

I woke up crying again. I changed my pillow case, so my wife didn’t see, and I went back to sleep. I was hollow in the morning. Not because of the dream, but because it didn’t start up again when I went back to sleep, like bad dreams sometimes do.

I was writing a novel when he called to tell me that he had cancer. Based on the stories of his childhood, growing up in the country in Kansas, it was about swimming in the creek with catfish and hunting crows with BB guns. I hadn’t told him yet; I wanted it to be a surprise.

“I have cancer,” he said, without saying hello.
“You’re joking,” I said. “You’re only 42.”

“I wouldn’t joke about something like this,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “But you quit smoking.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t say anything for a little bit. “But I’m going to beat it. I’ve got a lot more years left in me.”

This was the worst lie he ever told me, and I still can’t forgive him for it, even after I’ve forgiven him a lifetime of minor hurts.

Yet I’m grateful for the lie. I don’t know what I had know if he had told me the truth, that he knew it could not be stopped, that the cancer could not be cut out, could not be burned out, and could not be choked with chemicals. He knew already, then, that his chances were slim. He told none of us the truth, because that’s what he did, above everything else. He protected us from things that hurt us, even if that thing was him. That was why my stepmother looked so bewildered the day he died, standing there among his shirts. She didn’t know. Nobody knew how sick he was, until it was over, until hospice care was brought in and we all sat around him in a circle and begged him to die, told him our own lies, that it was okay, he could go, that we would be fine without him.

“Good,” I said. “I’m glad you’re going to beat it.”

He lived another year and six months. He beat it once, but it came back, as cancers inevitably do. He looked good, for a few months. His hair grew back. He wore new eyeglass frames for the first time in twenty years. They made him look young.

I try not to think of the boat as the last words my father said to me. I think of the conversation we had while he was in the hospital, a month before he died, when I had come back to Kansas because my grandmother had died suddenly, unexpectedly. I had to return to work. My bereavement leave had run out, the funeral was over, but he was still in the hospital. I thought about quitting my job and staying. I would lose our house, but I didn’t care.

“Go home,” he told me. “I’ll be fine.” We both knew he was lying, but this lie didn’t matter, I guess.

“I love you,” I told him. I don’t remember ever saying it before then.

“I love you too,” he said. “I’m proud of you.”

I was shocked. I don’t know why. “You are?”
“Yes!” he said, voice firm, surprised at my surprise. “I’ve always been proud of you.”

I didn’t speak directly to him while he was on his deathbed, in the hospital bed, in front of the 52 inch television. I could have. He might have wanted me to, but I didn’t know. I could have talked to him one more time, but I didn’t. I wanted the last words he ever said to me to be those words, there in the hospital.

But after he was gone, they weren’t enough any more.

I waited until my wife was visiting family before I built my machine. I bought a 24 disk CD changer and connected it to my surround sound system. I bought fine grade sand paper. I took each disk from the Led Zeppelin box set, and I ran the sandpaper across them until the reflective sheen turned dull.

I loaded the disks into the changer, and I turned on shuffle. I hit play. A scramble of words by Plant and Page spilled out of the speakers. The music skipped around wildly, chaotically.

“Dad?” I asked the stereo.

It answered with gibberish.

“Why don’t you talk to me like everyone else?”

“Uh, uh,” said Jimmy Page.

I held my breath. The words, the music—no sense formed from the chaos like I had hoped.

I had worried that my questions were too complex for any one song to answer them. I drove with the radio on the classic rock station, just in case he would finally speak to me. I heard Led Zeppelin a couple of times a day, but they were just songs, and they never played while I was thinking about him or when I needed comfort.

I sat in my living room, listening to the entire works of Led Zeppelin play like some horrible mash-up, a little piece at a time, sometimes repeating over and over again. None of it ever made sense.

I turned off the changer. I threw away the CDs. I tried to get on with my life.

I left work early recently to visit a small movie theatre that had opened down the block. They were hosting a movie trivia night, and I fancied myself a movie buff. Dad had recorded nearly every film in the 1980s off of cable, and we had spent a lot of time watching them over and over again. These are the things you do when you are poor. You make your entertainment where you can.

The front of the theater is a little café with corrugated metal ceilings. Light from the blue storm clouds outside reflected oddly from the ceiling, turning everything grey inside, like an old black and white movie.

Familiar music played from speakers overhead.

“That’s funny,” I said to the owner behind the counter, as I ordered some dinner.

“What’s that?”

“I was thinking about something on my way over here. My dad died two years ago. My family thinks that my dad talks to us through Led Zeppelin songs.”

“Yeah, that’s weird. I don’t normally play Zeppelin in here. I just put it in, right before you got here. I don’t know why.”

The song changed. It was “Babe, I’m Going to Leave You.”

I came in third in the trivia contest. I joked to myself that Dad was warning me that I wasn’t going to do very well, but felt bad for it.

I walked home, watching the sun set behind the mountains ahead of me. I put my headphones on and I listened to an album of British hip-hop I had bought a few weeks before. I don’t drive anymore, so I don’t listen to the radio anymore.

It occurred to me that I didn’t have any Led Zeppelin loaded on my iPod. The coincidences were getting harder to ignore. Tomorrow, I thought, I will buy another box set.

I bought the albums and listened to them alone on a Sunday morning without expectation or hope. I listened to the songs for the first time, really, since before he was diagnosed.

Each track opens up a doorway into memory. They remind me of summer drives, and air guitar in the living room. Building a campfire on the shore of Lake Perry. Playing bumper pool in the basement over a flea-infested shag carpet. Watching bad 80s films on HBO past bedtime. Playing Tetris head-to-head on the Nintendo in his bedroom.

I want that this is what he meant for me. That my father was some great genius, to play these albums over and over again when I was growing up. He made them into a soundtrack to my memories; each song recalling some event from my childhood. They’re overwhelmingly happy, I am surprised to find.

Listening to the words so hard for some message, I hadn’t paid attention.

I’ve let go of my questions. They’re not important anymore. He gave me everything I needed. I just needed to remember.

For Matthew Tolbert.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.