The Gate My Brother Could Not Open

And I did not go anywhere. I stayed. When Brett graduated he was gone to Tulsa so fast it made your head spin, selling first cars, then insurance, then whatever Brett sells now, something with commissions and a lanyard. He got a house in a cul-de-sac with a brick front and a yard a boy he pays mows on Thursdays. He married a woman named Paige who has never once in twenty years set foot in my barn, though she will post a picture of a sunset with a Bible verse on it every single evening like clockwork.

I stayed on the farm. I stayed when Daddy’s heart quit and somebody had to run the place or lose it, and it was never once discussed that the somebody would be Brett. I stayed and I married Dana, who grew up two section lines over and who has stood beside me through droughts and dead calves and a hail storm in 2019 that took the roof off the machine shed and most of our wheat in about nine minutes. We raised two kids out here. Our boy Cole is sixteen now and already a better hand than I was at his age. Our girl Katie is off at Tech in Stillwater studying to be a vet tech, first Tiller to go to college, and I am prouder of that than anything I have ever done with my own two hands.

That is who I am. A farmer. A man who stayed. Now let me tell you what staying cost me, because it is the part my family never counted and never will unless somebody makes them count it.

When Daddy died, the funeral fell to me. Not because anybody said it should. It just landed, the way everything always landed, on the one who was there. I paid for the casket. I paid for the plot next to our grandparents in the Ardis cemetery, and the preacher, and the lunch in the church basement afterward, the ham and the funeral potatoes and the sweet tea in the big orange coolers. Brett drove down from Tulsa the morning of, in a black suit that cost more than I made that whole fall, and he stood at the front of the church and gave a eulogy that made three women cry, all about fishing trips with Daddy that I am fairly sure never happened, and then he drove back to Tulsa that same night because he had an early meeting. He did not offer a dime. He did not ask what it cost. At the graveside my mother held Brett’s arm and told my aunt Ruth, loud enough for me to hear, “Thank the Lord Brett came. I don’t know how I’d have gotten through today without him.”

I had dug the grave arrangements and signed the checks and picked out my own father’s casket alone in a fluorescent room with a man in a gray suit, and my mother thanked Brett for driving down.

That is the whole family in one sentence, if you want it. Brett shows up for the photograph. I pay for the funeral.