The Night My Nephew Called Me
The kind of man I used to be
Let me tell you a little about my family, because you need to understand the shape of it to understand what happened.
I had one brother, Dale. He was three years younger than me and he was the good one, everybody said so, and they were right. Dale ran the family place, eighty acres out on Millbrook Road that our father left to the two of us. I signed my half over to Dale years ago, no fuss, because I was fire district and gone half the time and he was the one out there before dawn every day, and land should belong to the person who works it. Dale raised cattle, ran a hay operation, kept the old farmhouse standing where the three of us grew up. He married a woman named Sharon from over in the next county and they had one boy, Cody, late, when Sharon was near forty. That boy was the sun and the moon to Dale. You never saw a father so plainly gone over a kid.
Then four years ago Dale’s heart quit on him in the north field, quick, the way it takes strong men sometimes, and he was gone at fifty-one with a bale spike still hooked to the tractor behind him. Cody was eleven. He was the one who found him. Eleven years old and he came running down Millbrook Road to the neighbor’s because the truck was in the shop and he did not know what else to do.
I do not have children of my own. My wife Nadine passed six years back, cancer, and so it has been just me and the dog and the little house on the edge of town. After Dale died I tried to be around for Cody as much as a man can be around for another man’s son. I taught him to drive the tractor. I took him fishing at the reservoir. But a boy needs his mother most, and Sharon was grieving, and I did not want to crowd in. That was my first mistake, if you want to call it a mistake. I gave them room. I told myself room was a kindness.
Two years after Dale passed, Sharon married a man named Wayne Prewitt.
Wayne
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to tell you I saw it from the start. I did not. That is part of what I have to carry.
Wayne came from down south of the county line, said he had done a little of everything, some trucking, some heavy equipment, some land buying. He was smooth. He had that quality some men have where they make you feel like the two of you already agree about everything, like you are already on the same side. At the wedding he shook my hand with both of his and looked me right in the eye and said, “Dale’s boy is my boy now, Roy. I mean that.” And I wanted to believe it, because I wanted Sharon to have somebody, and I wanted Cody to have a man in the house. So I clapped him on the shoulder and I believed it.
The changes were small at first, so small you could explain each one away.
The farm truck got sold. The cattle went next, sold off in one lot, and Wayne said running cows was a fool’s way to lose money, and he was not wrong about that either. Then Wayne rented out the hay ground to a big operation from two counties over, and the tractor sat in the barn under a tarp, and one by one all the things that had made the place Dale’s place got quiet and folded up and put away.
I told myself that was grief. Sharon could not run the farm, and Wayne was not a farmer, and maybe it was healthier not to keep everything a shrine. I told myself a lot of things.
What I did not know, what I would not learn until that night at the hospital and the weeks after, was that the farm did not belong to Sharon. Dale, God bless his careful heart, had put the eighty acres and the house into a trust for Cody. Sharon had the right to live there and use it, but the land itself, the actual ownership, came to Cody when he turned twenty-one. Dale had done it through the lawyer in town, old Merle Hutchins, quietly, the year before he died, the way a careful man plans for the day he will not be there. I think some part of Dale, some deep animal part that a man does not put into words, had a feeling his time might be short. He made sure the ground would land in his son’s hands and nobody else’s.
Wayne found that out about a year into the marriage. And a man like Wayne does not like to farm ground he can never own.