The Garage My Father Made Them Open

About five years before he died, my father put a padlock on that garage and stopped letting anybody in. Not me, not Roy, not the neighbor kids who used to come watch him work. When you asked him why, he would just say, “A man’s allowed one locked door,” and change the subject. We all decided it was an old man getting peculiar about his things. Even I decided that. I was living forty feet away and I decided that.

I have gone over it a thousand times since, all the small things I saw and explained away. The coffee can where Dad kept his cash, the one on the kitchen shelf that always used to have three or four hundred dollars in it, going light and staying light. Dad saying he must have miscounted. The month the Farmall was not in the parade and Dad said the magneto was acting up, when I had heard it running fine two weeks before. Roy’s truck in the driveway on evenings when Dad had already gone to bed, and Roy telling me the next morning that he had just stopped by to check on the old man and hadn’t wanted to wake me.

I believed all of it. Why would I not? He was my brother.

Here is the part that still turns my stomach, and I need to lay it out carefully, because it is the reason for everything that happened at the funeral.

Somewhere in those last two years, Roy started telling people that Dad wanted him to have the farm.

It was never said to my face. That was the craft of it. It moved the way things move in a small town, sideways, through other people’s mouths. Sheila, Roy’s wife, would mention to my aunt Faye that Roy had been “handling Dad’s affairs.” Roy would tell Glenn, over the fence, that he was worried about how much Dad was leaning on me, that he hoped I was not “getting ideas” about the property, that our poor father was not always clear-headed anymore and somebody had to look out for him. He was building a story, one careful sentence at a time, and the story had two parts. Part one was that Dad’s dying wish was for Roy, his capable son, to inherit the farm and the house and the tools. Part two, the quiet part, was that Marian, the daughter who had moved in and taken over, was a woman who had spent two years alone with a confused old man and could not be entirely trusted about what he did or did not want.