The Two More Kits We Mailed Back

My father was born the nineteenth of February, 1960.

He had heard that story his entire life and never once counted on his fingers.

“He came home in September,” Dad said. “For the corn.”

“Yes.”

“And I came in February.”

“Yes.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know,” Gil said. “I swear to you on her grave, I don’t. I never asked her. I never asked him. I didn’t want it, Frank. I had a brother. I didn’t want half of one.”

My father pushed his chair back. He stood up, a big man in a small kitchen, and walked to the sink and stood there with his back to us, looking out the window at the dark.

“He knew,” he said to the glass. “The whole time. He knew when he taught me to drive. He knew when he stood up with me at my wedding.”

“He knew,” Gil said.

“Thirty-eight years.”

“Every day of it.”

“And he never,” my father said, and could not finish.

Gil reached into the pocket of his chore coat, hanging on the back of the chair. He took something out and set it on the table. It made a small heavy sound on the oilcloth.

It was a pocket watch. I knew it. So did everyone in that room. Grandpa Walt’s Elgin, the one his own father carried, with the crystal worn cloudy and a nick in the case from a hay rake. It lives in the top drawer of my father’s dresser. Gil must have asked my mother to fetch it before I got there.

“You ever wonder why you got that?” Gil said. “I was the oldest. That watch comes down to the oldest. It did for three generations.”

My father turned around.

“I wondered,” Gil said. “I’ll be honest with you, I was sore about it. The summer before he died I asked him straight out. We were setting fence posts. I said, Dad, why does Frank get Grandpa’s watch?”

“What did he say?”

Gil’s chin was shaking. He is not a man whose chin shakes.

“He said, ‘You’ve got the farm and you’ve got the name and nobody on God’s earth will ever question either one. Frank may need something someday that says whose he is.'”

My father came back to the table and sat down. He picked up the watch. He held it in his palm and closed his fingers over it, and then this man, who did not cry when his own mother was lowered into the ground, put his fist against his forehead and wept.

Gil got up and went around the table and stood behind him with both hands on his shoulders.

“You’re my brother,” Gil said. “You hear me? I was four years old when they brought you home. I held you on a pillow. No spit test gets to tell me different.”

I went and stood by my mother. She took my hand and held it hard.

After a while Dad wiped his face with the heel of his hand and looked up. Not at Gil. At me.

“A year,” he said. “I looked at that baby for a year, hunting for what wasn’t mine in him.”

I did not say anything. There was nothing to add to it.

“My dad looked at me for thirty-eight,” he said. “Knowing. And never went hunting once.”