The Two More Kits We Mailed Back

Nobody answered that.

“Mom looked it up,” Dad said to me. “A brother’s supposed to be fifty. Half of that is half.” He said it flatly, the way he would read a gauge. “It says the same thing on Gil’s page. We checked. We sat here and checked it like two old fools.”

I looked at my uncle.

Gil had his cap on the table in front of him and both hands around a coffee cup. He had not said one word since I walked in. He was looking at the cup the way he had looked at that paper plate on the Fourth of July.

My father saw me look. He turned his head.

“Say something, Gil.”

Gil did not.

“Gilbert. Tell me it’s wrong.”

“I can’t tell you that, Frank.”

“What do you know?” my father said.

“Not much. I never knew much.” Gil’s voice was rough. “I’ve half known since 1971. Half. I never had the other half and I never went looking.”

“Seventy-one.”

“You were eleven. You came home from school with your lip split.”

I watched my father’s face go somewhere far off.

“The Schmidt boy,” he said slowly.

“The Schmidt boy. He’d said something to you in the schoolyard. Something his mother said at home.”

“He said I wasn’t a real Brandt.” My father said it as if he were reading it off a wall. “I’d forgotten that. I hit him and he hit me back and old Mrs. Dolan sent us both home. I asked Mother what he meant.” He stopped. “She went white as that refrigerator. She said it was a wicked lie and I was never to repeat it.”

“That night I was up in my room,” Gil said. “You remember the register in the floor. The one over the kitchen.”

Every old farmhouse in the county has one, an iron grate in the upstairs floor to let the heat rise from the kitchen. You can hear a spoon drop through it.

“Mother was crying,” Gil said. “I’d never heard her cry. And Dad was talking, low, the way he did. I got down on the floor and put my ear to it. I was sixteen. I shouldn’t have.”

“What did he say?”

Gil closed his eyes. I understood then that he had carried the exact words for fifty-five years and never set them down.

“He said, ‘I was gone eight months, Lorraine, and I came home to a wife with a baby coming, and I have never once held it against you. I was the one who left. That’s on me.’ And then he said, ‘That boy is my son. He’s been my son since before he drew breath. I’ll hear no different in this house, and I’ll put any man who says different through a wall.'”

My mother had her hand over her mouth.

My father did not move at all.

“Eight months,” he said.

“The dam, Frank.”

And I saw it land. I saw the arithmetic go across his face like weather.

Because there is a story in our family that every one of us has heard at every reunion since we could sit up. The year Grandpa Walt poured concrete on the Oahe Dam. He had been drinking, bad, and he and Grandma had it out, and in January of 1959 he got in a truck with two other men and went up to Pierre, South Dakota, to work on the big dam on the Missouri. He was gone most of the year. He came home in September, sober, and never took another drink as long as he lived. It was told as the story of how Grandpa quit the bottle. It was a proud story. We told it at his funeral.