The recording my father left contains no words at all

Dear Delyara, My father was a beekeeper. After he died, a repair shop called to say they still had an old voice recorder he left months earlier. I had not known he owned one. I drove there imagining messages. Perhaps he recorded instructions about hives, perhaps something for us, perhaps his voice saying my name. There was one file, eleven minutes long. I listened in the car. No speech. Wind. Bees. A gate creaking. Once, the recorder bumps against something. That is all. I was furious. I shouted, “Say something,” at a recording made by a dead man. Dad was not sentimental. He spoke when necessary and considered most family discussions unnecessarily long. Why would I expect death to change his personality retroactively? Tonight, I listened again with headphones. Around minute seven, I can hear him cough in the distance. One cough. Then bees. I replayed it until I knew exactly when it was coming. I do not have a final message from my father. I have eleven minutes of the world around him on some ordinary afternoon when he did not know anybody would later treat background noise as inheritance.