The Debt My Brother Put On Our House

The Man Who Taught Me To Read Wheat Futures

I want you to understand my father before I tell you what was done behind his back, because I think it matters, and because for most of this story he is the person everyone else in my family claims to be protecting.

Bert farmed the same ground his own father farmed. He served two terms on the co-op board. He ushered at church on the Sundays his knees allowed it, and every August he manned the pancake griddle at the county fair, wearing the same faded blue apron, until his hands got too unsteady to flip them without help.

He was not a soft man. Eastern Colorado does not really produce soft men, not the ones who last. But he was fair, in the particular way that farmers are fair, which is to say he believed the ledger should balance and that a debt, once made, belonged to the person who made it and nobody else.

He used to tell me, back when I was young enough to still be deciding what kind of adult I wanted to be, that the worst thing you could do to another person was let them believe a lie about their own life. “A man ought to know what he owns and what he owes,” he’d say, “and so ought everybody who’s going to inherit either one.”

I have turned that sentence over more times in the last year than I can count, because it turns out somebody in my family decided my father did not get to live by his own rule, right at the end, when it mattered most.