The Toys My Brother Threw In The Fire

What the boys said

We sat on my front steps, side by side, facing the street. That was the only way he could do it. Mrs. Olson across the way came out for her paper in her robe and looked at us and went back in.

“After you went,” he said, “it got real quiet. Your aunt Brenda started stacking plates. Kyle was telling Mark how you’d always been dramatic. I was sitting there thinking how I’d get you to come back and make it right with him.”

He rubbed his face with his palm.

“That’s what I was thinking. I want you to know that. I was figuring how to get you to apologize.”

I did not say anything.

“Then Ben come over and stood by my chair. He didn’t climb up. He just stood there by the arm of it. And he says, real low, ‘Grandpa, is Noah going to be in trouble for crying?’ And I said nobody was in any trouble. And he says, ‘He did my blanket in the barrel behind the shop. The one with the trucks.'”

My father stopped. I watched a muscle work in his jaw.

“I said, who did. He said, ‘Dad.’ Then Tyler come over quick and told him to hush. He was scared, Jenna. An eleven-year-old boy looking over his shoulder to see where his father was. And Ben says, ‘He did Tyler’s wolf too. And the ship he built. It took him the whole winter.'”

“Oh, Dad.”

“I asked Tyler was that so. He wouldn’t look at me. He said, ‘It’s fine. Dad says we’ll thank him someday.'”

My father turned his cap around in his hands, twice, three times.

“That’s my father’s sentence,” he said. “Word for word. ‘You’ll thank me someday.'”

I knew the story he was about to tell. Everybody in my family knows it. I had just never heard it told the way he told it that morning.

When my father was seven, his mother sewed him a dog out of a flour sack and stuffed it with rags. He named it Pal. He slept with it in the upstairs room of the farmhouse near Lesterville, where the frost came through the nail heads in the winter.

One night in the fall of 1965 his father came up the stairs, took Pal out of his arms, carried it out to the burn barrel behind the hog house, and dropped it in. He made my father stand there in his nightshirt and watch. He said, “Boys don’t sleep with dolls. You’ll thank me someday.”

That is the story. My father has told it at every Thanksgiving and every Labor Day of my life. He told it with a grin. He told it as a joke on himself, and the last line was always the same: “And I never needed one again.”