The Farm My Uncle Almost Stole

We built a life anyway. My mother remarried, a widower named Isom from near Nora’s place, a decent man who never once made us feel like the four children he hadn’t asked for. He ran a small dairy operation of his own and let my mother keep her own accounts from the very first year, a small kindness that I understood only later as a quiet correction to everything Ulys had tried to do to her. I grew up, learned carpentry, married, raised my own family two counties from where I was born, and mostly made my peace with the fact that the home place, the house I was born in, the barn my father built with his own hands, belonged now to a man who had let a whole township believe the worst of his brother’s widow rather than tell one word of the truth.

Every so often, over the years, word would drift over from Bucklin through some cousin or a man my stepfather did business with. Ulys had put in a new hog barn. Ulys had sold the back forty along the creek to a timber buyer from Macon. Ulys had told the new bishop, a young man who’d never known my father at all, that the Lattimore woman had simply been too proud to accept the family’s help and had gone off to make her own way rather than swallow it. Each report landed in our kitchen like a small stone, and my mother took every one of them the same way, quiet, tight-lipped, and then back to her mending as though the words hadn’t cost her anything. I was grown before I understood how much they cost her.

I say mostly, because peace like that has a crack in it your whole life, and mine finally split wide open the spring I turned thirty-nine, the same age my father had been when he died.